liar liar cross on fire

The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its depravity, it has made of every value as disvalue, of every truth a lie, of every kind of integrity a vileness of soul. People still dare to talk to me of its ‘humanitarian’ blessings! To abolish any state of distress whatever has been profoundly inexpedient to it: it has lived on states of distress, it has created states of distress in order to externalize itself…The worm of sin, for example […] ‘Humanitarian’ blessings of Christianity! To cultivate out of humanitas a self-contradiction, an art of self-violation, a will to falsehood at any price, an antipathy, a contempt for every good and honest instinct! These are the blessings of Christianity! - Parasitism as the sole practice of the Church; with its ideal of green-sickness, of ‘holiness’ draining away all blood, all love, all hope for life; the Beyond as the will to deny reality of every kind; the Cross as the badge of recognition for the most subterranean conspiracy there has ever been - a conspiracy against health, beauty, well-constitutedness, bravery, intellect, benevolence of soul, against life itself.

Anyone who knows freedom finds all the amusements tolerated by this society unbearable, and apart from his work, which admittedly includes what the bourgeois regulate to non-working hours as ‘culture’, has no taste for substitute pleasures. Work while you work, play while you play - this is the basic rule of repressive self-discipline. […] The doctrine inculcated since Aristotle that moderation is the virtue appropriate for reasonable people, is among other things an attempt to found so securely the socially necessary division of man into functions independent of each other, that it occurs to none of these functions to cross over to the others and remind each other of man. But one could no more imagine Nietzsche in an office, with a secretary minding the telephone in an anteroom , at his desk until five o’clock, than playing golf after the day’s work was done. Only a cunning intertwining of pleasure and work leaves real experience open, under the pressure of society. Such experience is less and less tolerated.

Generally speaking, the world of things is perceived as a fallen world. It entails the alienation of the one who created it. This is the basic principle: to subordinate is not only to alter the subordinated element but to be altered oneself. The tool changes nature and man at the same time: it subjugates nature to man, who makes and uses it, but it ties man to subjugated nature. Nature becomes man’s property but it ceases to be immanent to him. It is his own condition which is closed to him. If the places the world in his power, this is to the extent that he forgets that he is himself the world: he denies the world but it is himself that he denies.

For both Nietzsche’s and Adorno’s critiques, Wagner—representing the modern artist par excellence—and his music dramas provide a foil, substitute, and typology that enables them to formulate their theories of the aesthetic. Wagner exemplifies the condition of modern art and culture, and with his critique of Wagner as an actor and man of the theater, Nietzsche lays the groundwork for Adorno’s critique of the culture industry. Both see Wagner at the beginning of the commercialization of art and reproach him for bowing not only to the Christian cross but also the taste of his time. They find Wagner’s works to be totalitarian, calculated, and fatalistic commodities that embody the ideology of modernity; for Adorno, an analysis of Wagner functions additionally as an exploration of the roots of fascism.

Adorno’s interest in the smallest phenomena of a historical moment illustrates his struggle against all forms of domination and his attempt to expose the prevailing views of history, philosophy, and culture as ideological prejudices. As Nietzsche indicates in his critique of morality, values are set and perpetuated in an effort to maintain or overturn power relationships. During the power struggle, the questions of when, where, how, and why certain values are created and privileged over others become forgotten. Their origins are related to the principles of exchange rather than to the purpose for which they are later used, or to the meaning later attached to them. Adorno follows Nietzsche’s interest in reconsidering the functions and values of interpretations in search of that which is repressed in the struggle for meaning and power. Nietzsche and Adorno postulate that the perception of a definite purpose, value, meaning, identity, is misleading. For them, one way of looking beyond the immediate is to explore the multiple functions and exchange values of phenomena.

Adorno sharply questions the ontotheological foundationalism in the thought of Heidegger and contends that this motif is also present in Jasper’s work on Nietzsche. Adorno’s “Jargon of Authenticity” contains his most pointed critique of Heidegger and existentialist ontology. Nietzsche, Adorno contends, did not live long enough to experience the disgust with this jargon, which seeks to reconstruct an original meaning. As a ressentiment phenomenon par excellence, the jargon of authenticity gives, by Adorno’s account, a new meaning to Nietzsche’s “it does not smell good.

Nietzsche thus serves as Adorno’s predecessor for a critique of a concept of praxis turning into a form of domination. As Horkheimer explains it, Nietzsche withdrew from the call for actions, as conceptualized by many of his contemporaries, and instead expanded the established categories of praxis. Nietzsche realized that the term ‘praxis’ could not adequately delineate the actual difference between a barbaric and civilized world. The moment of truth in Nietzsche’s philosophy occurs precisely at the point at which he does not issue instructions, because the forms of domination tend to reproduce themselves when ‘praxis’ takes on a defining and comprehensive role.

The potential for criticism likes as much in what is said as in how it is presented. Method and style define the “relation between the ideas and the composition of texts”; they present seminal ideas and “are not devices imposed on material in order to organize and explain it” In other words, both Adorno and Nietzsche recognize the and emphasize the performative dimension of their critiques. They not only argumentatively advocate and expanded concept of rationality, but also demonstrate it in their writings, and their antisystematic impulses reach beyond the mere conceptual criticism of metaphysics. They enact their criticism by resorting to an aphoristic, essayistic, and ironic style of writing.

Nietzsche and Adorno’s radicalized critiques of modernity strives to lay bare the ideologies underlying human existence. They reject dogmas and absolutes and question moral values and categories and explanations, such as identity, origin, telos, substance, and appearance, as institutionalized narratives created to establish a ration order of things. Constructed to legitimize claims to power these concepts perpetuate notions of continuity, progress, and absolute truth. By acknowledging the limits of thought and the potential for error and both the repressive-regressive and progressive-emancipatory dimensions of values and norms, Nietzsche’s perspectivism turns, like Adorno’s negative-dialectical thought, to the undogmatic reevaluation of all values. Both contend that the traditional concept of rationality is bankrupt and has been reduced to forms of instrumental reason: a reason utilized for the purposes of self-preservation and the legitimation of claims to power. Modern rationality is dominated by logic and numbers, while the reductionist approaches of positivism operate in the name of science and technology. Nietzsche argues against theoretical men and Socratism, Adorno against commodification and instrumental reason.