Leppert (On Adorno)

"The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass": Adorno employs a visual metaphor. If the eye sees, it can see better with the aid of magnification. But he shatters the magnifying glass and a shard lands in the eye. The metaphoric painful result provides access to a specific form of knowledge: the knowledge of suffering. Adorno is concerned that we want to know, that we look rather than look away, that we face the pain that lies outside ourselves. Adorno is inviting a commitment to be willing to see the misery and the abiding injustice that infects the modern world. For him, the hope for a general social redemption arises from knowledge and from the uses to which knowledge is put. Above all, he once put it, "it is the sufferings of men that should be shared," ¹ a responsibility, not coincidentally, that constituted for him a principal function of art, as he later pointed out by way of a rhetorical query: "But then what would art be, as the writing of history, if it shook off the memory of accumulated suffering?"...For Adorno, art with any claim to truth estranged itself from the here and now, because merely to aestheticize (to make "pretty") present reality perpetuated a lie. Art worthy of the name vehemently opposes false clarity. "Art is able to aid enlightenment," Adorno writes, "only by relating the clarity of the world consciously to its own darkness." ⁴ It sees through that which is delivered to us merely as comfort food for the soul—a false comfort that he perceived as a disguise, a mask behind which hid inhumanity. 

Richard Leppert