Alex Karp's "Aggression in the Lebenswelt"

An English-Language Translation

“Alex Karp: Exploring Palantir” by Charis Tsevis (via)

Kristin’s Preface

I first came to Alex Karp by way of my years-long interest in Peter Thiel (whose influence on me I have written about in great detail here), as Dr. Karp co-founded the software company Palantir with him, alongside Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings, and Joe Lonsdale in 2003, with Dr. Karp becoming CEO upon the company’s founding, where he has served ever since. (Mr. Lonsdale himself wrote a response on Quora describing the hiring of Dr. Karp to Palantir.)

I knew extraordinarily little about Dr. Karp, and had one pressed me as recently as July for the full depth of my knowledge about him, I could not have answered with more than, “He’s the quirky left-of-center man who runs Palantir.” And I still maintain that this isn’t an incorrect assessment, but, as I have learned in the intervening months, it is far from one that does him any sort of justice.

What intrigued me most about Dr. Karp was how, exactly, he and Mr. Thiel were not only friends, but had managed a relationship fruitful enough to co-found together what is now a multi-billion dollar company so successful it may soon join the S&P 500. Mr. Thiel himself clearly cut his teeth as a young man on the daring free-marketeers of the Austrian School, supporting Ron Paul in 2012, going on to donate to the 2016 campaign of Donald Trump, and speaking at the Republican National Convention that year; he is currently “taking a break from democracy”, however, as The Atlantic titled its recent in-depth profile of him — a headline that set me to imagining Mr. Thiel in the role of Ross from Friends, forever saying to Mr. Trump-as-Rachel, “We were on a break!” In contrast, what I knew of Dr. Karp upon my entrée into his Weltanschauung was that he was vaguely on the anti-Trump American political left — not a particularly remarkable fact in and of itself, as Mr. Thiel seems to have many in his social circle who occupy such positions — but what was remarkable was that Dr. Karp was a man with serious intellectual grounding in the Frankfurt School, which I understood as being in dialogue with Karl Marx¹ and the mononymous Hegel.

A piece on Palantir published in the New York Times in 2020, “Does Palantir See Too Much?”, details some of the background on the relationship between Mr. Thiel and Dr. Karp when they first met at Stanford Law School:

“What made Stanford bearable was [Karp’s] unlikely friendship with Thiel, a classmate. They bonded over their shared disdain for law school and a love of political debate. Thiel had already achieved some prominence for his libertarian views — as a Stanford undergraduate, he had helped found the right-leaning Stanford Review — and he and Karp spent much of their free time interrogating each other’s positions. ‘We argued like feral animals,’ Karp recalled. According to Thiel, their conversations generally took place late at night in the law-school dorm. ‘It sounds too self-aggrandizing, but I think we were both genuinely interested in ideas,’ he says. ‘He was more the socialist, I was more the capitalist. He was always talking about Marxist theories of alienated labor and how this was true of all the people around us.’”

We argued like feral animals, indeed, and being more familiar with Dr. Karp now, I can only imagine how fascinating these conversations must have been between the unlikely friends, both whip-smart young men, born just nine days apart, full of conviction in the summer of their lives as they grappled with a post-Cold-War world in the early 1990s.

In July, not having heard Dr. Karp say so much as a single word before, I listened to my first interview of him, one with his Palantir co-founder Mr. Lonsdale on the latter’s podcast, “American Optimist”. (As a note, I have found this thus far my favorite interview with Dr. Karp.) My ears pricked up when he started talking about the West in a unique, positive, highly charismatic, almost extraordinary way, in what I would come to discover may be his most distinguishing feature: “The only way in which non-belonging people belong is in the context of a Western society, that protects the rule of law, that protects the right of free expression, that protects property rights, that de facto protects unpleasant people. Our societies, though they’re flawed, are still the best at protecting people who are unpopular, because of their views, because of their habits, because of who they are.” And, by the end of that interview, I was more than curious to try and unpack more of his perspective.

As I worked my way through his background and his interviews, he struck me as intelligent and well-read, neither of which were surprising traits to find in a CEO of his caliber, but what was surprising was his almost shocking level of sincerity. In a nihilistic culture dripping with jaded cynicism, forever trafficking in irony, Dr. Karp’s sincerity was like a rush of bracing ice-cold water against a sweltering summer’s day. I came across a clip of his “savage” moments (well worth watching the entirety of it) where he said, “You can’t explain why the country doesn’t work, but you can explain why you hate your neighbor,” which he said with such fervor he knocked the pillow off his chair — the kind of holy judgment one would not be surprised to hear inside a revival tent, but was certainly unusual to hear from the mouth of a CEO sitting on the clean lines of a modern conference stage. It is, in my view, very normal for intelligent, well-read, Stanford-bred people to become CEOs, but it is rather remarkable that someone so sincere, on top of all of that, would become a CEO. It does not seem to me that sincerity is a trait selected for often in this role. That this is so rarely encountered may attest to its veracity in an inverted world where up is down, left is right, yes is no, love is hate, and the truth often waits, unvisited, in the margins — a light from the shadows shall spring … and the crownless again shall be king…

It was a few weeks later down this road when I came across a German-language interview with him done by a German Palantir employee, Jan Hiesserich, in which he made a comment that absolutely floored me. Mr. Hiesserich puts to Dr. Karp a question about how Germany is lagging behind on digitization and the country is becoming more aware of this as an issue as a result of the pandemic and other factors, saying that many people feel like Heinrich Heine, quoting: “Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, / Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht” (“When I think of Germany at night / Then I am deprived of sleep”). Mr. Hiesserich asks Dr. Karp, “Why do you think we should be more confident [about digitization] and what contribution can Palantir make?”

Dr. Karp glances downward, paws at the floor with his foot, and a knowing, almost self-aware smile breaks out the corner of his mouth, as he answers: “Weil ‘Wir wollen hier auf Erden schon / Das Himmelreich errichten,’ welche ist auch von Heine aus dem gleichten Gedicht.” (“Because ‘we already want to build the Kingdom of Heaven while we are still on earth,’ which is also by Heine from the same poem.”) He then pivots to answering the question more directly.

I audibly gasped, stared at the screen in disbelief, paused and immediately played back the exchange to make sure I hadn’t been momentarily hallucinating. I had not been. The CEO of a highly successful tech company had just nonchalantly broken out a Heine line about the Kingdom of Heaven in a very oblique answer to a question about digitization. I was now totally committed to completely taking apart and understanding for myself Dr. Karp’s entire perspective and how he would come to have such an answer.

This led me to Dr. Karp’s German-language dissertation, written in 2002 to earn his doctoral degree in philosophy from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, where he headed after completing law school at Stanford. Goethe University was the home of the Institute for Social Research, the nesting grounds for the thinkers of the Frankfurt School. As I understand it, he went there with the intention of studying under the social theorist Jürgen Habermas, although they seem to have had some sort of parting of ways and the sociology professor Karola Brede ultimately supervised his dissertation.

His dissertation is titled “Aggression in der Lebenswelt: Die Erweiterung des Parsonsschen Konzepts der Aggression durch die Beschreibung des Zusammenhangs von Jargon, Aggression und Kultur”, and, as I read over it in the original German, I immediately knew I wanted to put it in dialogue with René Girard and Christianity more broadly, but also knew that to do this I would need an English-language version, as my ability to think across both languages about concepts these deep was certainly not up to the task.

Of course, Google Translate was available, but I did not find it up to the task of the depth of this work without human intervention. I looked around for a proper copy of an English-language translation, and found only a rumor about a rumor that there was one out there, somewhere. To be quite honest, there were more trees that I could have barked up in search of this copy, but chose not to. First, it was important to me to have a translation I could discuss and share publicly without compunction. Second, I selfishly wanted to pore over every single word of his dissertation for myself and make sure exactly the right word was being used in English to draw out the intended meaning and nuance of the original German. Writing this preface now, having completed the translation, I can say that, even if the longevity of this translation is even just one day before it is superseded by any other translation, I do not have a moment’s regret: this was the most personally rewarding and enjoyable intellectual project I have ever done and I’m extremely grateful I had an excuse to do it.

I am, in a thousand ways, the wrong person to translate this work. I cannot overstate to the reader the absolute presumptuousness of my translating a dissertation written by a serious intellectual who now runs a multi-billion dollar company. I am not a native German speaker. While I have a German-language background, it has still been some time since I was regularly reading in German, and even then only novels and newspapers as opposed to serious academic treaties. I am not a professional translator; I have been paid for German to English translation exactly once, and that was for a data entry project that involved a working vocabulary set of about 75 words. Furthermore, while I would like to imagine I have a high degree of fluency in writing in English, being a bibliophile native Anglophone, this has unfortunately come at the cost of my largely having gotten away with not learning the actual rules of punctuation and grammar in my English language education. By way of example, a literature professor once lauded in front of the class an essay I had written, saying, “This was the best freshman essay I’ve ever read in my 20 year career”, before pulling me aside afterward with a sidebar comment: “I have to tell you, Kristin, you sprinkle commas all over your writing like salt.” I can only sheepishly ask the reader’s forgiveness if such errors have slipped into the English-language translation here.

As if all of this were not enough, however, there is another glaring deficiency in my qualifications: I do not have much of any working familiarity with the German-language academic traditions from which Dr. Karp draws so deeply in this work. Even worse, I have absolutely no formal philosophy (or even sociology or anthropology, all of which would have been useful in translating this work) education or training whatsoever. Whatever philosophical perspectives inform my worldview have only been gotten in the same way a bird cobbles together trashed paper straw covers, bottle caps, and pine needles to fashion a nest. There is nothing formal about it, least of all anything elegant. Nothing about this was a professional endeavor: I worked on this translation largely at dark-thirty in the morning, on a cheap Chromebook with a missing down arrow key, a green shawl my mother-in-law crocheted wrapped around me, as I listened to music and nursed some High Brew coffee. With all of my flaws and all of my wrongness, and especially all of my presumption, I hope the reader will understand from what I have written in the preface above that I couldn’t not do it. I was too curious, as ever.

A translation is a tricky thing. In a way, it’s much less an exact copy than it is a kind of interpretation, the way a choreographer sets a dance to a piece of music, or a screenwriter adapts a novel. It is a mediated experience of the original and there is little overcoming that. At the outset, one feels faced with two extremes: either one takes the most literal path possible or one attempts to recreate a version that could pass for having originally been written in the target language. I am stubborn and difficult, so I chose neither of these. To translate this as literally as possible given the density of the material seemed it would provide little additional help to the English-speaking reader. On the other hand, to try and make the dissertation read as if Dr. Karp had originally written it English seemed an impossible task that was not even worth pursuing. First, I have not been able locate much of Dr. Karp’s English-language writing outside his recent guest essay for the New York Times, “Our Oppenheimer Moment”, and his “Letters from the CEO” for Palantir. The nature of these two types of writing I see as more context-specific such that I felt like I didn’t quite have an idea of his real writing voice in English such that I could re-present the dissertation with any degree of confidence in faithfulness to his voice. Second, I believe it is generally the case that even the same person can have different writing voices across different languages, depending on factors like the age at which they learned the language and the materials and context in which they learned the language. So I am not entirely sure that it is the case that Dr. Karp would have written on this very topic in the same way in English as he did in German.

Given those considerations, as well as, I must emphasize again, my complete lack of professional translating experience, I chose an idiosyncratic path of my own. First, I focused on finding the right tone of how the word is usually used in German and how it fit in the context of the sentence: for example, choosing more specific words like “produce”, “create”, “build”, “establish” as I thought appropriate for the sentence, over choosing something more abstracted and generalized like “make”, unless Dr. Karp specifically used the German word for “make” (“machen”). Second, as discussed above, I did not want to hide that this was a translation, but yet I wanted it to be readable in English. I wanted the reader to still have the flavor of how the sentence was constructed in the original German, while still conveying meaning without too much undue hardship on the part of the reader. This meant occasionally adding back “that’s” and “which’s” where I thought they might be helpful, or even repeating a noun to clarify the subject of the sentence. I must also note that German is much less precious than English about starting sentences with conjunctive adverbs or conjunctions. For the sake of variety, I have joined some such with the immediately preceding sentence and others I have left as originally written in separate sentences, but any such examples in separate sentences are not to be understood as a negative reflection on Dr. Karp’s writing skill because he makes no mistake in German and indeed, he is adopting a common, proper convention of German writing. With respect to pronoun usage, it is important to note that Dr. Karp’s dissertation was written in 2002, long before pronouns were more broadly discussed. Where he imagines specific scenarios involving a certain constructed, hypothetical “person” with male pronouns in German, I have taken the liberty of updating this in some cases to female pronouns (as opposed to “they/them” to reduce the chance of confusion on singular versus plural references when there is already a layer of translation on top of deep topics with which the reader must contend). I am only so bold because Dr. Karp has repeatedly identified himself as a “progressive” or as “on the left”, and I believe from what sense I have gathered of him that it is very likely he would use female pronouns were he to write this today in English. I would not have updated pronouns if I had understood Dr. Karp as any sort of traditionalist conservative who would still use male pronouns in the same cases today; my goal in writing this way is not to forcibly “modernize” his work against his will, but to try and stay in keeping with what I have reasonable evidence to believe might be his choices today. I do note that there is one instance in which this convention becomes especially helpful as Dr. Karp constructs a hypothetical situation involving two anonymous people in different roles and uses male pronouns for them both in German; here in English, I have made one role a female and one a male so that the story is a little easier to follow. Additionally, I have left some place names, such as Paulskirche (“St. Paul’s Church”) untranslated, simply because it is my preference to know place names in their original language where manageable and not too far out of convention — the Anglophone, after all, goes to tour Notre Dame in Paris, not Our Lady. As far as idioms are concerned, I have attempted to find comparable idioms in English to convey idiomatic usage in the statements, rather than translating directly if so doing would only cause confusion in English.

(All of these little unwritten rules of mine, however, go out the window when it comes to the large passages Dr. Karp quotes that are written by Theodor Adorno. Adorno writes the most difficult prose I have ever read in German and, until I came across his work here, I did not even know it was possible to write German in such a way. When it comes to other German authors quoted, and especially when it comes to Adorno, I have chosen to stay with much more straightforward and literal approaches.)

Now, the reader is sure to raise a questioning eyebrow in my direction because there is a glaring word in the title itself that has not been translated: Lebenswelt. I did not translate Lebenswelt either in the title or throughout the text of the dissertation. It directly translates as “life-world”, which, in my view, no ordinary native English speaker would have an immediate comprehension of absent direct familiarity with the concept of Lebenswelt. The German term was brought into fashion by the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl; he did not, of course, achieve the notoriety of his much more famous student who built out on this concept, Martin Heidegger, who actually dedicated his 1926 doorstopper Being and Time to Husserl. The concept of the Lebenswelt is further picked up by many other theorists, including Habermas, whose influence on Dr. Karp is well-established. I do not have strong confidence that the English phrase “life-world” or “world of lived experience” really communicates everything that is meant to be encompassed in the concept of Lebenswelt, so I did not want to unnecessarily dilute a concept that the interested reader could further explore. Stanford’s philosophy department has an introduction on Habermas that includes a description of Lebenswelt and systems that may be a useful background to the reader of this dissertation.

One might argue that my undertaking here has been useless if my goal is to understand Dr. Karp today, just over twenty years later, any better. One might argue that dissertations are little more than the flights of fancy of youth, or that dissertations seldom, if ever, achieve the initial lofty goals laid out for them. The last part at least, might well be true. Dr. Karp gave an interview in Zürich where he acknowledged as much: “I would say the first 30 pages [of my dissertation] are quite good, and then I realized I better get out, and I did the smartest thing you can do if you write your dissertation, which is finish.” Working the dissertation with this comment in mind, it does read as if he perhaps wanted for another 50 to 100 pages or so to really finish completing out the sketch of ideas he outlines at the beginning. But I would really push back against any claims that the dissertation belongs at some point in his past. On the contrary, I am very much of the impression that these themes he considered in his dissertation, and certainly his philosophical background, is still carried with him even today. Here, speaking direct-to-viewer in a snowy woods chat on software and society:

“There’s a very famous quote from Wittgenstein. ‘Und der Regel zu folgen glauben ist nicht: der Regel folgen.’ ‘To believe you’re following a rule isn’t to follow a rule.’ Which is typically used to explain an important trend in language philosophy, but you could also look at it like this: to use software, it doesn’t mean to actually to use software. If software is absolutely determinative of the current conditions, just like language was… In a philosophical sense, you could say, we’ve had a shift from the language imperative, where language is actually what determines the meaning, to the software context to where software is determining meaning, value, and legitimacy. Why do commercial and government institutions struggle with legitimacy? Because, in many cases, it’s very hard to understand what are the outputs, how did it happen, what are the contexts? What was paid for, what did we get? [...] Software is the language of our time. Mastery of software will determine what works, and what doesn’t.”

In an interview with CNBC, a reporter pressed him to “name and shame” (my words) companies in the Valley who perhaps are less than enthusiastic about working with the U.S. government or U.S. military more specifically. Dr. Karp insisted it wasn’t necessarily about individual companies, because it rotates among many of them, and further insisted that he wasn’t evading the question but that: “Silicon Valley, as a culture, is the great offender. I actually don’t think it’s an individual company […] It’s a cultural problem.” If the reader takes anything away from the dissertation, it should be that when Dr. Karp uses the word “culture” or describes something as a “cultural problem”, it is, indeed, far from any sort of hand-waving, dismissive response, but a word that he has thought very deeply about and considered greatly its implications. Additionally, as I have worked on translating this piece while listening to interviews of Dr. Karp, I’ve noticed how much his own everyday language is steeped in the very terms and concepts he investigated in this dissertation. In a talk with Stanley Druckenmiller, an early investor in Palantir, Dr. Karp commented, “The sales efforts of these alternative [companies] are so obviously fake. […] They get all the wrong people who are pretending they care, but just want the tendies — a jargon term for money nowadays,” he explains to Mr. Druckenmiller. In Zürich, he comments on Swiss culture: “My parents […] would have done much better in Switzerland […] because their personality structure is ideal for this culture.” And any Palantir investor will know about the ontology. Naturally, of course, this dissertation was written more than 20 years ago by a younger man who didn’t have all the experience and perspective that Dr. Karp has now, and so while I assert that the themes of the dissertation still have importance to him, I am making no assertion that he would still think the exact same way about all of those themes today. For example, with Mr. Hiesserich, he describes his barn in New Hampshire where the interview is conducted, and references his evolution in some of his thinking from his days as an academic: “And this is my barn, and here we welcome many colleagues from Palantir and we work together. And yes, to put it casually, it's a bit of a convergence between German inwardness and Karl May. So things that I would have rejected as an academic, that became important to me as I got older.”

In the Zürich interview, he briefly touched on the background of the dissertation:

“[The dissertation] was a kind of an attempt — in some ways relevant — a critique of Heidegger from a structuralist perspective, where I was interested in integrating Freud, but any case I think highly relevant. The underpinnings of some of the more interesting, but nefarious, elements of the West, I think, are Heidegger — both left and right — a technical treatment, someday, someone will do that, who is actually capable of doing that. […] But in the end, intellectually, I went to do this because of an intellectual attraction. […] American philosophy, British-American philosophy, is highly language analytic. French philosophy, as a caricature, is very focused on Descartes: pro-Descartes, anti-Descartes. You have what's called a subject-object problem, or the escape of subject-object problem. […] Classically, in German, you had an oblique relationship to subject-object, and so really no German philosopher of first rate is actually interested in that, whether it's Luhmann, Heidegger, Marx, Kant, and I was very attracted to those kind of philosophies and their shortcomings, and that's why I was interested in Freud, and more of the negative, kind of negative philosophers, including Heidegger, and to a lesser extent, Nietzsche. […] There's always this thing: why do you go and why do you stay? I think in every relationship, [there is the question of why do you go] but then, that's often, I think, not the right question. The question is, ‘Why did you stay?’ Like, ‘Why did you meet someone and go out with them?’, is different than, ‘Why did you stay with them for a long time?’ They're very different. People, especially inexperienced people, conflate those two. I stayed with the proximity, first to Frankfurt and then moved steadily south, because there clearly was some kind of cultural, Überlieferung auf alemannische Kultur [tradition in Germanic culture] that very much speaks to me, and where I feel very comfortable.”

I found this dissertation extremely fascinating, and it gave me many more threads to follow for my own devices — certainly Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons (who was the first person to translate Weber into English), and Helmuth Plessner. Additionally, I found many observations Dr. Karp made that are worthy of further engagement and consideration, and I look forward to pondering and dialoguing with the dissertation more in future posts. On a more personal note, in the process of working out this dissertation and considering at first blush some of the ideas raised in here, I found a fresh new way of thinking about certain political problems that have long escaped easy resolution for me. However, I still am left with many more questions about Dr. Karp’s Weltanschauung: In the heated debates he and Mr. Thiel had together as young law students, did the mimetic theory in which Mr. Thiel was so well versed come up at all? (Interestingly, in the dissertation, Dr. Karp does quote a 1968 work by Parsons that discusses scapegoating.) Did he ever meet Dr. Girard while he was at Stanford? His own dissertation focuses on the use of jargon; how does he distinguish, if at all, jargon from Straussianism? What does he make of Carl Schmitt? And more. There are pieces of Dr. Karp’s biography that I am still missing that would help me better understand: how did he come by a rather sophisticated and nuanced view of Christianity? What is his religious background? His own father is Jewish; did Dr. Karp ever read a Torah portion for a bar mitzvah? And still I have not answered my original question of why, exactly, that Heinrich Heine line was so immediately at the tip of his tongue….

With all that said, I hope the reader will enjoy this dissertation as much as I have.

Any mistakes or confusion should, of course, be first assumed to be my error and not Dr. Karp’s.

Of note: The album “Dear Wormwood” by The Oh Hellos was a faithful companion that accompanied me through much of the lengthy work in wending my way through this dissertation, particularly the song “Pale White Horse”, which I listened to on repeat at least several hundred times while translating this. The haunting, ethereal, and apocalyptic message of the song ended up being an extremely appropriate soundtrack to Dr. Karp’s own working through the problems of human aggression, of human violence. “Down they fell like the children of Eden…”

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Aggression in the Lebenswelt: Expanding Parsons’ Concepts of Aggression Through a Description of the Interrelationships between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture

Submitted by Alexander C. Karp (2002)

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Karola Brede and Priv.-Doz. Dr. Hans-Joachim Busch

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Concept of Aggression in the Sociology of Talcott Parsons
2.1. Sociological Background: Aggression as Transgressive Behavior
2.2 Parsons: Culture as the Place of Integration
2.3 Parsons’ Reconceptualization of the Freudian Model
2.4 Personality in Social Action
2.4.1 Example
2.5 The Self-Evident in Culture
2.6 Parsons’ Concept of Aggression: Imperfection as an Epistemological Advantage
2.7 Summary
3. Adorno’s Jargon Concept: The Cultural Legitimization of Aggression
3.1 “The Jargon of Authenticity”: Its Cultural Content
3.2 Satisfaction and Sanction
3.3. The Mediation Between Drive and Culture
3.4 The Social Function of Ontological Thought
3.5 Consequences of Adorno’s Epistemological Refusal
3.6 The Social Function of Jargon
3.7 Simmel: Jargon from the Perspective of the Stranger and the Perpetrator
3.8 The Philosophical Background against which Jargon Takes Place
3.9 The Meaning of Religion in Germany’s Lebenswelt
4. Walser: The Integration Achievements of Aggression
4.1 Walser
4.2 Walser’s Cultural Background
Bibliography

1. Introduction

This work began with the observation that some statements have a drive-relieving² effect, and not despite, but because of their obvious irrationality. Statements that are obviously self-contradictory offer to a person the opportunity to formally commit to the normative order of their cultural environment, and, at the same time, to express taboo desires³ that violate the rules of this order. As a result, neither cultural nor social sanctions are triggered. On the contrary: such statements solidify an integration process by making the cost of integration psychologically bearable. Borrowing from Adorno, I name such statements “jargon”. Jargon is not just a deception, but a deception of a very particular kind. It not only relieves the speaker, it also integrates her into a circle of belonging. Jargon whitewashes over the present moment and is made future-oriented and therefore tolerable.

But Adorno’s descriptions make it very difficult to conceptualize the aggressive action expressed in jargon. It escapes the gaze of the logically working researcher, because converting such an impression into a tenable conceptual model runs up against the boundaries of various social science traditions, and one quickly runs into difficulties. For as obvious as are the advantages of transferring Adorno’s criticism into a different conceptual framework, any relinquishment of Adorno’s premises is accompanied by the risk of vanishing its critical rigor along with it. Additionally, series of questions also arise, which must be answered: for example, how the complexity of modern society can be taken into account without papering over the driving elements of social action; and what an aggressive act expressed in jargon might actually look like, and what cultural significance it might have that is preserved through jargon.

Adorno’s concept of jargon can start off this discussion. Although it leaves some problems unanswered which must be sorted out from my point of view. Adorno completely ignores an answer to such questions. He can freely forgo answering these questions, because he takes as a claim in his premises an acceptance of the de-differentiation of the social world. He also never discusses the specific cultural frames in which the aggressive action expressed in jargon acquires any such importance at all. In the perspective of this work, a little imagination is needed in order to conceptualize how jargon can play a role in the integration of aggressive impulses in a coherent culture. The culture-specific reshaping of aggression must also be a component of such a treatment.

Adorno takes the cultural frame that this aggression, expressed in jargon, acquires any meaning at all only in a limited or otherwise subliminal form of knowledge. Yet it is clear that Adorno bases his approach for his statements on aggression on exactly such culture-specific elements.

I have long sought after an adequate example of modern jargon. First, I wrote a long essay about Fassbinder’s film “Martha”. To take his film as an example seemed sensible to me, but the discussion of my interpretation of the film showed that it only made it more difficult to convey my argument. Martha, a bourgeois virgin, marries a sadistic man who then tortures her throughout the second half of the film. Fassbinder shows, I believe, a complicated picture of human subjugation: and the brutality of Martha’s marriage makes it impossible to even concentrate on the manipulation of language and gestures which bind Martha and her social milieu to even countenance such brutality through their silence. Although I am still of the view that such a reception of the film is not only entirely possible, but also helps us progress, I had to recognize that an empirical example that causes confusion is not conducive to the clarification of theoretical questions. A further deliberation was examining a patient’s analysis. But in the context of an analysis, cultural actions are primarily relevant in their relationship to the patient’s personality structure. The cultural significance of such actions are therefore secondary. The central questions of this work would be superfluous.

Then began the so-called “Walser Debate”. As a text alone, the Paulskirche speech by Martin Walser would not have been suitable for analysis in this frame: taken word for word, it becomes difficult to craft a serious argument with this speech: Walser’s claim that he has been forced to constantly bear the gruesome events of mass slaughter is simply false. But with the background of Adorno’s narrative of the functional role of jargon, Walser’s speech now comes to merit a completely different standing. For the arguments are no longer examined alone on whether they are true and therefore valid, but rather whether they have an effect and how this effect can be set in relationship to the truthfulness of the argumentation. Walser’s impression that he is to be haunted by the Holocaust and by the representatives of a “gruesome remembrance service” is devoid of any basis, but the cultural significance of his speech is not. It was enormous. For what reason, Adorno can help us understand.

From today’s perspective, Adorno remains imprisoned to his own time. He overlooks much which has since become self-evident. But perhaps it is because of this very reason that he was able to see that particular forms of irrationality could have a purgative quality. Integration can be carried out at the expense of the marginalized without violation of cultural or social rules. Here I would like to note some limitations of this work. For example, I must forgo some of what Adorno characterizes. Admittedly, I cannot take on the underlying source of Adorno’s unease. From my perspective, I can only try to comprehend in translation the brokenness of a subject detached from enjoying a real intersubjective experience with her fellow human beings. This translation changes the sense of the unease and hence, its effect. Furthermore, from my point of view, this unease is only able to be brought to the fore at all if I first develop a concept of drive. In other words, I cannot introduce a concept of intersubjectivity that is immanently philosophical. Frictions that prompt actors to action cannot, so I believe, be derived from any existential condition. These arise out of a mutual tension: on one hand, from the cultural demands that are accepted and internalized and, on the other hand, from the desires that remain taboo.

Coming to any meaningful statements about this interaction necessitates a relatively complex approach; Adorno does not supply the needed equipment. I draw upon Parsons to carry out the necessary expansion of this social theory. The decision to build on Parsons may not seem obvious to some readers. It is true that Parsons has a concept of the subject to which he assigns a drive-dynamic backing, but the drives that Parsons believes he sees in subjects serve social integration. A potential area of friction between culture and personality never even emerges. The conceptual consideration of this dynamic is therefore unnecessary. Parsons offers me the opportunity to show how social models of drive-dynamic processes shed their horizon of explanation, and at the same time, to show how such elements play a role in social action. I introduce, therefore, an early work by Parsons, which were written before he was able to expose them to his own thoughts about aggression in the conclusion of his later works. Consequently, residual elements of the Freudian drives remain present in his description of social action in modern societies. It is particularly opportune that Parsons has written this work with an eye to Germany and the Holocaust.

Only then do I introduce the reader to Adorno’s argument developed in “The Jargon of Authenticity”. On one hand, I hope to show on what grounds Adorno’s work can be further explored, but I also do not want to give the impression that his approach can simply be accepted on its face. First, I must highlight the cultural specificity that Adorno neglects. With this background of my treatment on Parsons’ integration model, it becomes clear in what way Adorno’s inadequate treatment of the cultural circumstances under which his impressions first became meaningful, is able to be tracked back to a deficiency in his approach. At this juncture, an introduction to Plessner’s argumentation is especially beneficial. Plessner’s “Belated Nation” explores the cultural conditions that enable a descent into barbarism. In so doing, Plessner’s analysis presupposes a consideration of current social conditions. He merely concludes that it would be too simplistic to derive the Holocaust from the defeat in the First World War. Plessner’s work shows the necessity of seriously engaging with the logical qualities of cultural action.

The final section seeks to apply the theoretical means already developed to an example. As noted above, I consider the text of the speech given by Martin Walser after he received the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, an apt piece with which to verify the thesis of my argument.

Below, I have sought to outline a theoretical model that makes it possible to better understand the nature and function of aggression in everyday life.

The gaps in Parsons’ model, which is one of the bases of this work, mean that his description of social interactions in a specific cultural environment still omit important questions. In particular, Parsons views “drives” in scientific terms and is therefore unable to perceive its role in the Lebenswelt. Resolving this dilemma is far more difficult than it would first appear. In order to understand the role of aggression in human development and culture, we must first refer back to his previously laid out conceptual framework, as this will form the foundational basis of understanding the meaning and the function of culture both in the process of human development and also in the Lebenswelt. To dismiss this conceptual framework, which stresses the growing, integrative function of culture in all three spheres of society — that is, personality, culture, and systems — would be to reduce these highly differentiated societies to the crudely drawn cliché images of the Hobbesian tradition. Adorno’s work is not entirely free from this same bias. His essay “The Jargon of Authenticity”, however, contains within it a subtle subtext that I will attempt to piece together.

I selected this essay because it opens up the possibility of a more practical definition of aggression. However, in order to reconstruct Adorno’s extremely sparse description of the specific cultural framework, I must undertake a second expansion. To this end, I avail myself of Plessner’s work “The Belated Nation”.⁴ In this work, Plessner explores the cultural conditions that enable a descent into barbarism. He merely concludes that it would be too simplistic to derive the Holocaust from the defeat in the First World War. Plessner’s work shows the necessity of seriously engaging with the logical qualities of cultural action.⁵

A definition of aggression that is to successfully navigate through the troubled waters that lie between Adorno and Parsons must continually take both as a frame of reference. Said differently, the definition of aggression in the Lebenswelt does not resolve this inherent contradiction, but instead becomes developed on the foundation of this contradiction. In this way, it becomes a productive as a mirror to social friction, just as does the jargon that perverts it.

The conceptual framework developed below illuminates aggression’s mode of action in a culturally specific situation. Jargon is language. It presupposes a common culture, shared and internalized by all, and so the culture imprints itself not only on the individual, but also on their interactions. Jargon communicates the forbidden by playing off against the inauthentic; in this way it establishes space for actions that deviate beyond the boundaries of what is ordinarily permitted. The interrelationship between jargon and culture, and culture and jargon, exists in the empirical world of cultural interactions. Only there —and not in the inner world of conceptual categories — can we observe this interplay between jargon and culture. The acceptance speech given in Germany in October 1998 by Martin Walser for the award of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche was the starting point of a public controversy which circulated widely over the course of months and which offered ample material to trace the ways in which cultural influences and aggressive content find expression in jargon. Jargon and our question about the role of aggression in culture are the result of the interplay between Martin Walser and his wider audience in culture.

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2. The Concept of Aggression in the Sociology of Talcott Parsons

In the following text, I start from the assumption that the range of social actions in the Lebenswelt of a culture can only be understood by drawing from the classics of sociology. I cite the relevant work of Parsons as an exemplar of this tradition. Parsons’ approach is framed in a way that conceptually apprehends the three layers of society (personality, culture, and social system). Moreover, Parsons’ work distinguishes itself with its high level of rigor. It is owing to Parsons’ rigor that we are able to recognize the consequences of selecting different premises in the scope of a social sciences approach. Against this background, it can be shown that Parson’s premises, which here represent those of the classical tradition, lead to a watering down of the concept of “drive”.

This problem gave rise to the following work. The questions at the outset are: can the benefits of the classical structure of social theory be retained without whitewashing the magnitude and intensity of aggression in the Lebenswelt in the social sciences? In other words, a sound social sciences approach would force me to turn a blind eye to the ways in which conflicts of social action bring their actors an opportunity to satisfy taboo desires. In that case, how could I still operate in this approach without running the risk of giving up the concept of aggression altogether?

Parsons’ approach will help provide insight into the juxtaposition of those mutually uncomfortable areas of social life, namely in the relationship of culture and personality. It serves as an example of an apodictic construction of sociological premises. An analysis of this watering down of the Freudian drive concept, which I observe in Parsons, should enable me to make general statements about the consequences of certain premises on the perception of aggression in sociology. A consistent structure of the model is a prerequisite for this. Otherwise, one would have to constantly distinguish between arbitrary statements and the coherent outcomes of a model.

Furthermore, as part of the treatment of my premises I will show that a sociological reconceptualization of the drive concept is a great advantage for the solution of certain problems. However, this presents us with a problem, because the very same paradigms that are of significant help to accounting for the cohesion of sophisticated societies also lead to the abandonment of the classical conception of drive. In any case, neither the structures of culture nor of the social world can be understood as built upon the structure of personality alone.

It is exactly because culture and society cannot simply be reduced to the cumulative consciousness of all the individuals within it that sociological models which are based on a philosophy-of-consciousness approach fail. For this reason, my analysis of the drive-dynamic processes in culture refrains from using from any such approaches that draw upon the tradition of the philosophy of consciousness.

That drives go against the cultural order must be taken into consideration conceptually. Hidden within drives lies a potential of becoming hostile to the normative order of a society. I believe that this potentiality must be done justice, conceptually, in a social science model. Otherwise, the social world shrinks to the sum of its individual subjects. In other words, a concept of social action borrowed from the study of personality can be applied to gather knowledge only about particular parts of the social life to gain knowledge. The social fabric, which a subject ipso facto cannot leave, the fabric in which meaning is created, would be insufficiently considered in a derivation of social and cultural structures from the personality structure of an individual.

In accordance with the tradition of classical sociology, I work “from top to bottom” of society: in this frame, that is from culture on down to personality. Sections 2.1 — 2.4 are dedicated to 1. the sociological background of my approach; 2. Parsons’ concept of culture; 3. his reconceptualization of the Freudian model and 4. personality in social action. Only then will I be equipped with the resources needed to treat, in Sections 2.5 and 2.6, the self-evident in the Lebenswelt and Parsons’ concept of aggression. Here, I would like to show how a bridge can be built from personality to culture, and in such a way that neither the diversity nor the urge⁶ for social action needs to be neglected.

2.1. Sociological Background: Aggression as Transgressive Behavior

Traditional sociology assumes a concept of social action that instinctive urges are transformed in the socialization process into culturally understandable motivational foundations. And so these drives are left by the wayside in the framework of social action in everyday life. Libidinal needs are treated as culturally determined motivations. Nevertheless, this understanding acknowledges that instinctive urges are already socially bound to play an important role in social action. This category of aggression, however, results in an especially difficult problem for positive sociology.

I distinguish between that “positive” tradition of sociology, which, in contrast to Hobbes, attribute the cohesion of modern societies to the internalization of norms and values of a culture, and that “negative” tradition which — building on the argumentation of Hobbes — sees the selfishness of man as the groundswell of social order. I count Freud, Durkheim, Simmel, Marx, Mead, Parsons, and Weber in the “positive” tradition, Hobbes, Nietzsche, and partially Horkheimer and Adorno, in the “negative” tradition.

The positive tradition of sociology provides the resources one needs to conceptually manage the differentiation of inherently cohesive societies, especially in the coordination of social action in the Lebenswelt of a society. To the extent one is interested in such characteristics of social life, it is a clear choice to refer to the positive tradition of sociology. This can only be ignored if one is prepared to accept a radical degradation in the conceptualization of the social world.⁷ The analytical separation of the three spheres of the social world (personality, culture, and society) underlie structures of application which cannot be formally enforced. But the de-differentiation of the social world, which follows out of the utilization of an approach based on the assumption of coercion, contains in it an important advantage for me⁸, namely: forms of aggression find a place in the terminology – although, of course, only within the framework of structures that can scarcely be explained by means of such approaches.

Positive sociology tends to translate aggression into forms of deviant actions. Aggressive components of human action are thereby stripped of their instinctual qualities. Actions through which actors inveigle themselves some gratification become actions that the actors can orient themselves toward; that is to say, actions that are based on goals that are understandable and conformable in terms of culture (or of subculture). The goals can undoubtedly change at any time, and furthermore, their justification cannot be derived through criteria external to the culture. In this respect, a concept of rational action is not plainly assumed, which can only exist if certain ways of acting are equated with social action.⁹ A universal concept of rational action is based on premises which the classics of sociology intentionally avoid.¹⁰

Transgressive¹¹ behaviors that originate from the inability to do justice to goals or norms or values can be broached separately. On this basis, the ability of actors to separate themselves from the values or norms or goals of a culture through strategic action can be grasped with particular clarity. The comparison between Victor Hugo’s Jean Valjean, who stole bread to allay his child’s hunger, and Martin Luther King, who countered racist laws with Judeo-Christian ethics, are each paradigmatic examples for strain at the level of goals and strain at the level of values.¹² It is to Parsons’ credit that he introduces categories that enable us to distinguish between these divergent, but legally similar, behaviors according to their social significance. With this background, we can show an example of the tension between social norms and values. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement violated the normative rules of American society at the time, but they were successful because they laid bare the contradiction between racist laws and the egalitarian values of the American Constitution.

2.2 Parsons: Culture as the Place of Integration

Social action becomes accessible to the researcher by virtue of an applied theoretical model. Building on Whitehead, Parsons emphatically argues in “The Structure of Social Action” (1937), that researchers can outwit that hermeneutic circle, which can never be completely abrogated, by establishing access to the empirical world through a justification of the question. Questions applied to each empirical approach can only then be answered and presumed as knowledge because they have already been transferred into the model and it has been determined that the answers are consistent with the implications with pre-existing knowledge. Otherwise, a new question must be formulated that is more suited to clearing up any confusion. So hermeneutic restrictions can be conceptually accounted for in such a way that averts the danger of either objectifying science or being paralyzed by subjective Cartesianism.

In his approach, Parsons conceptualizes personality as a category to explain social cohesion. The manifold and binding qualities of every form of social action which mark modern societies in particular ways should be explained. Parsons gains access to Freud through those writings in which Freud concedes a conceptual weight to the role of sociological categories.¹³ In Freud’s handling of sociological concepts, Parsons sees a convergence with Durkheim’s classical studies of society. On one hand, one cannot extract individuals out of the norms of their society; so to say, their own actions cannot be irrepressibly determined. On the other hand, decisions made by actors are not exclusively limited to (at the least not as a rule) those directions that are only carried out under duress. Actors must rather find their way with the limitations that arise from a culturally shared orientation:

“the formulation most dramatically convergent with Freud’s theory of the superego was that of the social role of moral norms made by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim – a theory which has constituted one of the cornerstones of the subsequent development of sociological theory. Durkheim’s insights into this subject slightly antedated those of Freud. Durkheim started from the insight that the individual, as a member of society, is not wholly free to make his own moral decisions but in some sense ‘constrained’ to accept the orientations common to the society of which he is a member.”¹⁴

According to Parsons, this convergence serves as evidence in the scientific justification of his reformulation of Freud and Durkheim. Therefore, the obvious logical fallacies in Freud’s and Durkheim’s arguments do not detract from their respective projects. The enormous scientific benefits of their knowledge can finally be seized in this convergence, because with it, the direction of the reformulation of social theory is determinable. Building on Durkheim’s approach, a social science model can be applied that can make progress with respect to our knowledge about “Social Structure and Personality”. Against this background, the writings of Freud should be freshly interpreted and in such a way that they are integrated with sociological conceptions of social action. The place where Freud and Durkheim should be jointed together, is, in Parson’s conceit, a system.

A system evolves through the interaction of people. In this respect, the interactions of even two people can be understood as a system. A system is embedded in a culture, but, at the same time, distinguishes itself from it analytically, because only certain parts of the culture have relevance within the frame of the particular encounter. Of course, the issues that are current can change at any time. With it, the boundaries of the system shift.¹⁵

In this context, I turn to the consequences of my choice in the variety of integration for this theory development. An account of the interaction of actors as an system must adequately define the content which can (and should) be brought into this system. The cultural content of the system has already been mentioned above and we will engage with it further on.

In emphasizing the “place” of integration, Parsons wants to make two points: on one hand, that an approach that concentrates solely on the individual cannot grasp the cultural meaning of human interaction; on the other hand, to derive the motivational basis of actions directly from the system of social action and attribute to actors the applicable social functions, the motivations of the actors must be simplified.¹⁶ Models that emerge solely from either the question of psychoanalysis or of classical sociology are a contributing factor to the issue of important parts of the social world falling through the cracks of these approaches and therefore cannot be captured in the framework of this model:

“On the one hand, Freud and his followers, by concentrating on the single personality, have failed to consider adequately the implications of the individual’s interaction with other personalities to form a system. On the other hand, Durkheim and the other sociologists have failed, in their concentration on the social system as system to consider systematically the implications of the fact that it is the interaction of the personalities which constitutes the social system with which they have been dealing, and that, therefore, adequate analysis of the motivational process in such a system must reckon with the problems of personality.¹⁷

In the framework of Parsons’ system, actors develop relationships which can be differentiated in terms of their meaning as follows:

“(1) cognitive perception and conceptualization, the answer to the question of what the object is and (2) cathexis – attachment or aversion – the answer to the question of what the object means in an emotional sense. The third mode by which a person orients himself to an object is by evaluation – the integration of cognitive and cathectic meanings of the object to form a system, including the stability of such a system over time. It may be maintained that no stable relation between two or more objects is possible without all three of these modes of orientation being present for both parties to the relationship.¹⁸

That which faces the actor is judged by its cognitive and emotional meaning, on the basis of these two questions: “What is the object?” and “What does it mean to me?” The response to the questions and their integration into the cognitive and emotional perception facilitate an assessment of the object, which then becomes a touchstone of meaning for the system of action and its stability.

2.3 Parsons’ Reconceptualization of the Freudian Model

If one proceeds from the assumptions of Parsons’ approach, Freud’s structural model must also be somewhat extended. The conceptualization of both the cultural environment of actors as well as their psychic apparatus must be modified. Both can be designed as Systems of social action and therefore differ from Freud’s model.¹⁹ The system of social action, in which actors meet a culture, builds itself on the structures of this culture. This grants stability. Through this, actors can trust the validity of their statements. Actors know the meaning of shared language and naturally anticipate that their statements will be understood as they are intended to be.

All three of the modes of perception and evaluation discussed above have been carried out against the background of a culture in which meaning is established. The ability of actors to take part in social actions presumes a culture in order to enable the coordination of action. A reformulation of Freud’s description of the psychic apparatus is therefore inescapable. If it is the case that cognitive and emotional perception underlie cultural symbols, or if they are component parts of a common shared culture, “Ego” and “Superego” must be so located in a culture in such a way that their function in the making of meaning can be stated. Owing to their shared common cultural symbols can actors — “for the time being”²⁰ — proceed from the assumption that their perception of a situation conforms to that of the other participants.

Internalized cultural symbols form the background in which communication takes place; in this respect, they also form the background against which the system of communication can be sustained. Parsons’ described modes of assessing objects takes place in this context. For example, the cognitive significance of a person to an actor changes their emotional significance. Therefore, according to Parsons, there is a causal relationship between the factual significance of an object (the question, what an object is) and the normative meaning of an object (the question, what an object is supposed to be). With the naming of persons as father, mother, sister, domestic partner, lover (or the newfangled Lebensabschnittspartner²¹), comes also an expectation which just as much the role that is taken on as from the relationship itself.

In sum, what an object should be, and what an object is, cannot actually be so clearly distinguished so that any one instance can be attributed exclusively to a normative function and another exclusively to a cognitive function:

“What persons are can only be understood in terms of a set of beliefs and sentiments which define what they ought to be.”²²

Simmel is the classic sociologist who has most clearly detailed the influence of social roles on the meaning of actors.²³ Here Parsons leans on Simmel²⁴, of course without making reference to him, to gain access to the personality, or, to put it more precisely, to establish the personality in everyday life.

Parsons wants to conceptually capture Simmel’s epistemological consideration of the coordination of actions through the internalization of many different social roles, without taking on the approach itself. Parsons is concerned with drawing boundaries between culture and personality²⁵ that take place in socialization, and explains both the motivation of children’s actions during their adolescence and as well as those of adults. The objects to which a child develops a relationship introduce the child to the social world. The caregiver assumes this maternal role.²⁶

With Freud, on the other hand, objects are not understood as roles beyond mediation of cultural meaning. As long as objects are carriers of cultural meaning, then they are understood against the background of certain patterns. Freud’s concept of identification must be somewhat further expanded, as the aim is to describe a process through which objects are appropriated from which instances are formed.²⁷ With identification two processes are described: firstly, the assumption of a concretely exemplified role and secondly, the associated internalization of cultural patterns of meaning, on the basis of which a social role gains a generally plainly understandable meaning. These roles, which determine the goals of action, are only understood in their wider cultural meaning after the child has successfully traversed the first step of socialization: “The child may be likened to a pebble ‘thrown’ by the fact of birth into the social ‘pond.’ The effect of this event is at first concentrated at the particular point of entrance, but as it grows up, his changing place in the society resembles the successively widening waves which radiate from his initial position in his family of orientation.”²⁸ In sum, with every new step that the child climbs, she extends the horizons of her world. Consequently, the sociological scope of those roles become increasingly clear and understandable for the child:

“... this establishment of an organized ego in the personality through a pattern of sanctions designates essentially what Freud meant by identification. Several of Freud’s own formulations of the concept stress the striving to be like the objekt. This emphasis requires elucidation and some qualification. Only in a very qualified sense can one say that an infant learns to be like his mother. (...) his behavior – hence his motivation – is organized according to a generalized pattern of norms which define shared and internalized meanings of the acts occurring on both sides.”²⁹

The satisfaction of instinctual needs forms the motivational background of the socialization process and respectively justifies the willingness to actively participate in it. First, this process is the transformation of the pleasure principle into the love principle. According to parsons this transformation serves the development of a mature ego. The ego only emerges as the child begins to orient herself from the instinctual satisfaction toward love. Thus the child bids farewell to the desire to immediately gratify these needs:

“More generally, a primary – indeed the primary – goal of the developing personality comes to be to secure the favorable attitude of the mother or, as it is often called, her love. Specific gratifications on lower levels, then, have become part of an organization on a wider level, and their primary meaning derives from their relation to the paramount goal of securing or maximizing love. Indeed, I think it a legitimate interpretation of Freud to say that only when the need for love has been established as the paramount goal of the personality can a genuine ego be present. The need, then, in an important sense come to control the ontogenetically older goal-needs of the organism, including, eventually, that for pleasure.”³⁰

Love is a metaphor, in so far as it describes the role of cathaxis in the process of internalizing cultural patterns of meaning. Cathaxis is generally translated as “occupation”.³¹ This translation is insufficient in so far as it applies to Parsons. In Freud, the term is used widely in many different contexts, to assign psychic energies to ideas, groups, zones of the body, etc.³² Parsons’ concept of cathaxis was intended to bear an account of the enormous significance of drive-dynamic processes in socialization. Roles that children first learn from their mothers, then their fathers, and later from their environment, are not acquired simply by virtue of cognitive effort. The motivation to penetrate deeper into culture, Parsons traces back to the libidinal bond in the object relationship through which a role and its meaning are internalized. Therefore, cathaxis also encompasses object choice.

The internalization of such roles charged with such positive (or libidinal, binding) energy is cathaxis. It is built up on the interactions between mother and child.³³ The child is steered by the satisfaction or otherwise the refusal of her needs. The learning process, cultivated by the interaction between mother and child, encourages the child to orient herself toward the meaning of satisfaction. As a result, the child increasingly pulls a way from a “direct” tie to the pleasure principle. The leaving behind of the immediacy of the pleasure principle in favor of the love principle does not in anyway mean an abolition of desire in the construct of Parsons’ psychic apparatus. Rather, Parsons means to show the enormous importance of desire at every stage of socialization, which he merges up with traditional patterns of meaning that are first gathered from the mother. Of course, with each higher stage of socialization, the relationship between the actions of desire and the satisfaction of desire become further removed from each other. Therefore, even in a regression in development, the drive-impulse cannot any longer be traced back to its biological source, but only back to that stage at which further development broke down. According to Parsons, inducing desire remains a component of the motivation for socializational action. The needs that are satisfied are, of course, only understood to the actors in terms of their social transformation.

If we are prepared to follow the logic of Parsons’ argumentation, we will simultaneously execute, as long as we proceed apodictically, a new conceptualization of the psychic apparatus. With this background, Freud’s account of the role of the patterns of meaning in the psychic apparatus seems insufficient. The superego cannot be exclusively apprehended as an authority that is directed against unwanted needs in the service of culture. Such a conception of culture and drive is rooted in a strict demarcation between the two. It presupposes that parts of the psychic apparatus essentially shape themselves. Following Parsons’ argumentation, the psychic apparatus must be positioned in culture, so that its particular contacts with the culture truly accounts for the various different functions of id, ego, and superego, and certainly also their dependency on the structures of a culture from which they arise.

The superego that mediates between culture and personality does not somehow spring out of culture, in which actors act, against which they brace themselves with all their power. Rather, the mediating force of the superego can be understood as communication between personality and culture. The content that it mediates is meaningful due to the respective structures of meaning from which it is constructed. The superego, in this respect, erects no boundary against the murky world of personal subjectivity, where those needs hostile to culture are nursed:

“If the approach taken above is correct, the place of the superego as part of the structure of the personality must be understood in terms of the relation between personality and the total common culture, by virtue of which a stable system of social interaction on the human level becomes possible. Freud’s insight was profoundly correct when he focused on the element of moral standards. This is, indeed, central and crucial, but it does seem that Freud’s view was too narrow. The inescapable conclusion is not only that moral standards, but all components of the common culture are internalized as part of the personality structure. Moral standards cannot, indeed, in this respect be dissociated from the content of the orientation patterns which they regulate; ...”³⁴

With recourse to the cultural level can an insight into those parts of the personality be gained, the content of which can be generally understood. Situations of action can therefore be coordinated, because the actions of other actors can be understood “for the time being” as if it conforms to the norms of a culture. With this background, the assumption “for the time being” gains a far-reaching meaning in the context of conceptualization of social action. Its consistent application implies an overcoming of the problems that come out of the philosophy of consciousness, of that subject already cognitively isolated. Action is predicated on cultural patterns of meaning, which, precisely because it is internalized, cannot be reduced to a single instance inherent in humans, on the basis of which actors could only orient themselves on their own images of themselves. As humans are simply so different, the coordination of action becomes an unsolvable problem for sociological approaches. Social action is therefore characterized as fragmented and random, and its success is doubted.

An approach that is build on the internalization of cultural symbols (in whatever form those may be) raises up communication to the level of intersubjectively valid statements. The motivational basis of each of the individual actors can be understood against this background. Divergent actions can also be encompassed within the cognitive horizons of the actors. It is all the more striking because it diverges from the expectations of others. Actors recognize taboo, improper, or illogical actions as such because they apply to them their own internalized norms and patterns of meaning. Out of this they build a meaningful conception of action, although certainly reduced to those parts of culture which have relevance to the particular situation at hand. The general rule is the success of a communicative exchange and not the improbability of its coming about. Actors can therefore proceed from the assumption that their statements will be understood by other actors as they have intended them to be understood.

2.4 Personality in Social Action

Parts of the personality of an actor nevertheless remain shut to other members of the culture. In as much as another person appears to act in conformance to the norms, the reconstruction of her actions is based on two assumptions: first, her membership in the same culture, and second, her mental competency. If it is the case that one of these assumptions is proven to be false, then the failure of this confirmation must be problematized so that a meaningful conception of the systems of action can again be restored. Precisely because actors effectively cannot exit the culture in which they live is this repair service³⁵ possible at any time.³⁶

I would like to discuss in more detail the two presuppositions that have already been mentioned (membership in the culture and mental sanity) that frame the communicative situation. My epistemological interest suggests introducing the analytical differences between Lebenswelt (culture), personality, and society. First, we can highlight the overlapping of personality, culture, and society in the Lebenswelt. A case study is shown, in how two sane members of a shared culture encounter each other in order to reach agreement about something banal.

2.4.1 Example

On the basis of their shared membership in a culture can actors trace back the actions of others on motives that are common to them both. The example: X gives Y money, Y gives X a cigar. Participants and observers assume that the sale of a cigar has taken place. Some observers may know more than others: they may conclude from the brand that the buyer has no idea, or they may laugh because only people who work in advertising want such cigars, etc. In any case, one can make sufficient sense of the situation. The explanation that the sale of a cigar was observed to have occurred is correct. The motives of the involved actors are the acquisition of a prestigious, unhealthy product, as well as the revenue received through sales or the fulfillment of work-related responsibilities.

But it is also possible that the seller is a connoisseur and the buyer is a nouveau riche³⁷ who the seller views with scorn. When asked the question “Which ones are the best?” she points out the cigars that are considered terrible and overpriced. For her, it is not about the sale, but instead about the humiliation of a vain person. She advises him to buy an awful cigar, not because she earns more from it — as she receives a fixed salary regardless whether she is honest or dishonest — but instead because she starts from the assumption that most people in any case do not notice the difference between a good or bad cigar. To the buyer, it doesn’t actually matter whether the cigar is good. He doesn’t really like smoking, but he wants to show off to his new girlfriend that he is a man of the world. He has it in mind to light up the cigar at a dinner with acquaintances, hold it up in the air, and gush about the pleasure of smoking a cigar. He quickly pays for it, as a soccer game is about to start, and leaves the store, satisfied.

At this (cultural) level, where the motives of the actors deviate from expectations, their motives need not stay shuttered away from us, but they are also not immediately accessible to us either. The salesperson will never explain to her boss, the buyer, or any other people she assess similarly, that she loves her job because she can “pull one over” on a nouveau riche. And no more will the buyer explain to his girlfriend, his acquaintances, his coworkers, that he only smokes because it’s fashionable and because he thinks that stuck in the mouth of a man of importance (like him) there should be an expensive cigar.

The actions of the seller can be inferred correspondingly, if someone were to observe the scene and ask questions that reveal knowledge about cigars. Then it would become clear that the seller is either incompetent or she knowingly wants to cheat her customer. Of course, it is also most likely that the sociologist looking on the scene with a trained eye would notice nothing about the perfidy of the seller, because staying true to the renunciation doctrine of Luther, he is repelled by any concern with cigars. However, that need not be the case. It is also possible that the researcher also finds the buyer unsympathetic, and, based on this antipathy, sees through the real motives of the seller.

On the surface, these somewhat hidden motives of the involved actors are not particularly important. The motivation to action is overshadowed by the meaning of the action, which is defined in the context of the situation. As long as both actors orient themselves to the same cultural norms, the system still functions, even if their real motives deviate outside of the frame of the expected motives for each person in the particular situation. This deviating motives that lie outside the context of the situation do not detract from the success of the social action. To the buyer, the attitude of the seller makes no difference, especially since he enjoys smoking a good cigar just as much as a bad one. As long as the buyer takes a cigar and it does not become obvious to him that he is being led around by the nose, the seller’s attitude toward the putative huckster is without meaning in the context of the thematic purpose of this action: namely, the buying and selling of an article.

At this level of interaction, the goings-on with which psychoanalysts concern themselves in therapy are not immediately clear to us. Moreover: they are not all that relevant for the meaning of social actions in the framework of the system. The (Parsonian) “Ego” of both actors is oriented toward the attitudes that follow from the traceability of the action. The “nouveau riche” assumes the validity of the statements of the seller, because he can interpret these in her role as a seller. He understands the statement, “This cigar follows the Davidoff tradition, is somewhat mild, burns well, and is preferred by connoisseurs” as it is meant, that is, as a recommendation to purchase it. He also understands that the seller would rather “upsell” him to a more expensive cigar as opposed to a less expensive one. This knowledge in no way diminishes the beautiful feeling of being seen as an expert connoisseur at a party. The advertising man takes no notice that the seller’s motives deviate from expected norms in that she is amusing herself with the buyer. He is and may be indifferent to the fact that the seller orients herself toward a private satisfaction rather than toward the wishes of her customer.

Regardless, attitudes to which one may be indifferent should not be confused with those attitudes that we are unable to understand in the context of a “normal” situation. If, in the situation described, one person incorrectly assesses the other, the motives that lie underneath the surface can be detected, for example if the “nouveau riche” isn’t one at all. Suddenly, a situation develops in which the previously unsuspected attitude toward the other can be broached. The advertising man can smile knowingly at the seller and reach for a good cigar instead, or he can leave the store indignant.

2.5 The Self-Evident in Culture

In one way or another, an unspoken theme of action has been brought up into the scope of the situation and certainly, so to say, “from the bottom up”. Actors always bring new information into their conversations as needed. The information that they give has already been culturally interpreted. In this way, actors can take a stand on newly emerging topics without falling outside the framework of a common culture.³⁸ These are all mostly self-evident facts which do not require a new interpretation. The information that is brought into the conversation can, however, become problematic at any time in the context of the situation. Because this situation constitutes a stable system of action, actors then presuppose that what is self-evident in cultural communication is shared by all who take part in the conversation situation. As long as there are no signs that the system is breaking down, there is no reason to thematize motives or attitudes that deviate from the norms of a culture.

It is imperative in any case that the information which is brought into a conversation has a cultural meaning. Otherwise, they could not become a component of communication. Information from the areas of system and personality can be brought into the scope of a situation of conversation. Naturally, this information then forfeits the specificity that goes with that particular area of the social world.

In this respect, most information is brought into a conversation in a form that is already pre-interpreted and self-evident on the same level, that is, out of a culture into a situation in the culture. At this juncture, I would like to provisionally introduce the concept of the self-evident Lebenswelt. In this context, it is important to remember that all these distinctions are analytical in nature. In effect, one does not find a pure Lebenswelt or pure Lebenswelt structures, as the borders between Lebenswelt, personality, and society are fluid.

Actors can nevertheless reach understanding about the Lebenswelt and society. Meanwhile, translation services take place that certainly change the meaning of the events for the person or the system, but do not corrupt them. The changes that occur during the transfer of information from one area of social life to another need not, strictly speaking, dismantle the “real” meaning. This meaning, provided that it applies to culture, is decided in the culture. Therefore, the “real” meaning, that is the meaning specific to an area of the social world, and the general cultural meaning do not preclude each other.³⁹

Normally, actors do not have at their disposal the necessary knowledge to inquire about area-specific processes of the personality or the system, let alone to reach agreement about them. For this reason alone, the inputs from both areas must be presented in a simplified manner. The distortion of area-specific meanings in the Lebenswelt, which follows from their transfer in the scope of a “normal” conversation, is not, in the strictest sense, a distortion of factual content, but rather a kind of reciprocal translation. This translation not only takes on the content of its original “text” but also converts it into another, an accessible language for the reader. System and personality themselves have a meaning in the Lebenswelt. Inputs from both areas are brought into a situation against the background of a general knowledge, in that they become relevant. This knowledge is already interpreted and belongs to the “pool of knowledge” of actors in a culture:

“This pool of knowledge furnishes the members (of a culture) with an unproblematic background of core beliefs which are jointly assumed as guaranteed; and out of this form a particular context of the communicative process, in which the participants utilize proven definitions of a situation or renegotiate them. The participants in a communicative exchange find the connection between the objective, social, and subjective world which they confront, already interpreted in terms of its substance.”⁴⁰

The metaphor of a translation only covers one side of the problem. The meaning of inputs from other parts of the social world is negotiated in the culture. In the event that the general meaning of a statement diverges from its area-specific locus of meaning, it is not a distortion of the “true” meaning in the normal sense, but instead a sign that those circumstances have not yet come to the fore which would necessitate a revision of either the area-specific or the generally applicable meaning. A statement can be valid in the culture and wrong in the system, without being false in an absolute sense. In other words: the premises of an approach based on the concept of culture or Lebenswelt does not mandate that the area-specific meaning must always accord with the claims to validity of the culture and the system. Systems and people must, however, be understandable in the culture, their action legitimate. In this respect, other parts of the social world, namely personality and system, must relate their action to those claims of validity that are present in the culture. In any case, both the areas of personality and of systems all offer examples of actions, in which their interpretation in culture entails a change in their area-specific meaning.⁴¹

It must be emphasized again that, for constitutive reasons actors, are not able to problematize culture along the lines of “facts, norms, or experiences”.⁴² This is not visible to them in a similar fashion. Therefore, actors can address information out of the three areas of the social world, and even ask questions, but nevertheless still not touch the foundation upon which the validity of statements about personality, culture, or system rests:

“The structures of the Lebenswelt establish the forms of intersubjectivity of possible communication. The participants in the communication owe their extramundane role to the inner world about which they can communicate. The Lebenswelt is, as it were, a transcendental place, at which the listener and speaker encounter each other; how they can gather the assumptions that their statements to the world fit together; and how these claims of validity can be criticized. In one sentence: the participants cannot in actuality maintain the same distance from language and culture as they can from the totality of facts, norms, or experiences, through which communication is possible.”⁴³

At this juncture, I would like to summarize the findings which are of import to our broader work. In particular, I would like to show what inferences follow out of these findings for the description of aggressive actions in the Lebenswelt. Parsons innocuously assumes that socialization serves to introduce children to culture. From a sociological perspective, the meaning of a child who has not yet been socialized is like that of an object. Both attain their meaning through perception, which presupposes a culture in which they can be perceived. The perception certainly does not create it. It exists in the murky obscurity of indiscernible objects, i.e., those objects we cannot see through our cultural premises, but which can be at any time perceived by virtue of new assumptions. The same is true for science and the Lebenswelt, though the conditions under which such a change takes place differs radically from each other.

“The structure of the conceptual scheme itself inevitably focuses interest on a limited range of (...) empirical facts. These may be thought of as a ‘spot’ in the vast encircling darkness, brightly illuminated as by a searchlight. The point is, what lies outside the spot is not really ‘seen’ until the searchlight moves, and then only what lies within the area into which it beams is newly cast. Even though any number of facts may be ‘known’ outside the center, they are not scientifically important to relation with a theoretical system.”⁴⁴

In the context of scientific work, Parsons terms this dark obscurity a residual category.⁴⁵ The experience of a newborn can be comparable to a Residual category, the meaning of which is not in the culture. Socialization transforms the experience that belongs to those fields of the pre-social world which are not accessible to us, into content we can make sense of, that makes culture understandable. Said differently, children are born into a cultural role that they learn to understand as they internalize the culture. According to Parsons, newborn children are endowed with instincts. These instincts, and the ability to learn a culture, distinguish newborns from objects.

The person is a carrier of meaning. When she is alone in the woods, her thoughts are filled with meaning. Drives contribute to the socialization process as they equip children with desires, the satisfaction of which requires active participation as they grow up. Drives, as described in Freud, Parsons views as part of the biological makeup of humans. The influence these inborn drives have on the actions of actors are continually reduced as they are brought up in favor of orientation toward internalized goals, norms, and values that are culturally determined. Therefore, it is important to emphasize that Parsons proceeds from just one drive. In Parsons, this drive is a bundle of instincts of a libidinal nature. Its satisfaction composes the basis of motivation in children. The social reshaping of such drive-instincts begins at birth. It transforms instinct into love for the primary caregiver, to whom the child orients himself in the oral phase. So immediate satisfaction of drives becomes supplanted by a social relationship with cultural meaning. The broader education serves as an introduction into the culture. During the exchange between mother and child, in which a mature “Ego” emerges, children gain their first impressions of the role of family in culture.

2.6 Parsons’ Concept of Aggression: Imperfection as an Epistemological Advantage

Parsons engages directly with aggression in his essay “Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”⁴⁶ . Written in 1947, the essay is presumably a theoretical examination of the Nazi movement. Parsons wants to describe how aggression enters into culture and what consequences it has for modern societies. To that end, Parsons must introduce an analytical division between personality, culture, and society.

In this essay, Parsons cannot, of course, give sufficient explanation of the differences between these three parts of the social world. At the time, his approach was not developed enough to be capable of fleshing out his premises with respect to a consistent exegesis of the three areas of the social world. Parsons therefore felt forced to leave behind contradictions in the interpretation of the social world, which he did encounter directly in his later writings and resolve. For reasons I have already discussed, a known contradiction is already factored into the demarcation between the area of personality and the area of culture in the social world. Precisely because Parsons is not yet capable of resolving those very contradictions with which he occupied himself with his whole life long, we find some evidence of the drive-dynamic processes in the Lebenswelt, that, for conceptual reasons, do not appear later. In this context, I refrain from an interpretation of Parsons as would occur against the background of his later work. Instead, I would like to highlight and, in some cases, even expand on the contrast to his later insights. With that, I show some part of the consequences of the assumptions of the drive-dynamic processes for sociological theory building.

Parsons certainly already very well understood at this point that a destructive potential among people (in culture) or within people (in personality) cannot be set on the same level as that social action from which, for example, social crises follow. Modern societies have at their disposal institutions which can channel, mediate, and quell aggression. Additionally, the internalization of the norms and values of a modern society acts as inhibiting effect on actors, so immediate aggressive desires are controlled.

At the outset, Parsons wants to avoid the category errors that lead to confusion between the levels of the social world:

“If it were possible to employ a statistically reliable estimate of the average intensity of aggressive tendencies of a country’s populace, it would be, on its own, worthless as a basis for making a statement of probability as to whether that country would undertake an offensive war. The particular goals and objects that are tied to these aggressive dispositions, the manner in which they can be inhibited, redirected, or projected through a channeling or counteracting force, or can be brought to a direct expression, further the structure of the situation in which they enter – all this is just as important for making a determination of the actual, concrete behavior as the overall aggressive potential as such.”⁴⁷

In sum, the aggressive potential of individual actors in a society and the aggressive “action” of this society cannot be captured with the same term, especially since they each inflict different harms. A society can, respectively, possess a high destructive potential or generate such a high potential, without this potential translating into action.

Parsons therefore utilizes the term “aggressiveness” instead of “aggression”. It is intended to capture aggression in the culture — in contrast to aggression in the personality; the former is aggressiveness; the latter is aggression.

“ ‘Aggressiveness’ is here defined as the disposition of an individual or a collective, to align their actions on goals which contain either the conscious or unconscious intention, to unlawfully violate the interests of other individual or collective who also belong to the same system. The expression “unlawful” (or “illegitimate”) implies that the individual or collectives in question are integrated into a moral order, albeit still imperfect, which defines their mutual rights and duties. The universality of a moral order in this sense represents one of the main theses of modern social science. It by no means suggests that the world-society forms an integrated, moral order in this sense; quite the opposite, it is the heterogeneity of these orders that constitutes the primary problem of integration. But certainly this heterogeneity as such is not the problem of aggressiveness.”⁴⁸

Let us look at this definition in more detail. Aggressiveness is 1. a “disposition”, 2. of an “individual” or 3. of a “collective”.

“Disposition” is an ambitious term. It could, depending on the frame of reference, mean something like a tendency, attitude, or stance. I will therefore assign the terms “disposition”, “attitude” and “stance” to a part of the social world and treat them as representative of the impulse (or, respectively, inputs), which come out of the three parts of the social world and can be understood in culture: dispositions are those motivations, which originate in personality; attitudes are those rational or legitimate convictions which originate in personality; stances are those rational or legitimate views which originate out of a subsystem of society. In culture, of course, dispositions, attitudes, and stances take on a generally universal meaning.

The term “disposition” is intended to describe processes in the personality that develop in the culture. If there is also a disposition of a collective, then it must imply that actors have oriented themselves on aims of action, the selection of which is determined by considerations that, one hand, cannot be easily problematized, but on the other hand, neither are those considerations, strictly speaking, entirely unconscious. In sum, the motivation Parsons calls “disposition” is one of an attitude colored by unconscious elements, which under normal conditions is only broached to a certain degree. Parsons therefore almost exclusively relies on the level of personality when he examines the source of aggression in modern societies.

Such a motivation can address both the actions of actors, as well as the influence of action in a collective. Collective means nothing more than one system of action. This system of action can be structured and therefore includes both associations as well as subsystems of society. As already discussed, Parsons had developed this approach before he had fully mapped out his sociological model. Hence, it contains conceptual ambiguities that allows me some leeway for their interpretation. In accordance with Parsons, I use in the following the term “aggression” when I speak of the processes in the personality, and the term “aggressiveness”, when I speak of actions in the culture. “Collectives” are structured systems of action, their degree of structure is undetermined. The term “systems of action” includes conversational situations, families, associations, and (related to the level of action) institutions.

Central to the definition of aggressiveness is the “unlawful” violation of the interests of individuals who are members of a culture. “Unlawful” means more illegitimate than illegal. It is a violation, through actions, of cultural norms, which do not in any way need be codified in the form of a law. Parsons stresses the violation of norms, not because he wants to set aggressiveness as equal to criminal action, but because, through this emphasis of this particular violation, he sees an opportunity to differentiate aggressiveness from other forms of social action. The concepts of power and aggressiveness (and force) describe various distinct ways of action. The outlines of Parsons’ classic work, “On the Concept of Political Power”, are already present in this essay.⁴⁹

According to Parsons, coercion exists when goals are achieved through violence or the threat of violence.⁵⁰ With that, other forms of persuasion are dispensed with, that is: “simply the generalized capacity to attain ends or goals in social relations, independently of the media employed or of the status of ‘authorization’ to make decisions or impose obligations”.⁵¹

Power is similarly distinct from influence. Like influence, power is not built off violence, although it does presuppose the the possibility of applying negative sanctions. In this respect, power means the ability to non-violently persuade people to enter into binding commitments for which (negative) sanctions will be applied, in the event these commitments are not upheld:

“Power then is generalized capacity to secure the performance of binding obligations by units in a system of collective organization when the obligations are legitimized with reference to their bearing on collective goals and where in the case of the recalcitrance there is a presumption of enforcement by negative situational sanctions – whatever the actual agency of that enforcement.”⁵²

With this background, the fault lines between power, coercion, and aggressiveness become clearer. Aggression is the desire to fulfill one’s own satisfactions even at the expense of harming the interests of others. It makes the use of violence conceivable, even if no material advantages are achieved through that.

Parsons speaks of a norm-violating disposition. Implied therein is the assertion that all members of a culture (can) perceive this (norm-violating) action as an actual violation. Perception of action takes place in culture. It is based on the cultural patterns of meaning and content. The norms on which actors orient themselves are also a component of the culture. Of course, perception and norm-deviating actions differ in very many ways. One commonality is in the perception and evaluation of particular actions in the culture. As already discussed, actors assume that their own actions will be assessed by others as culturally “intended”.

In other words, the assumptions that underlie the basis of perception and norms are commonly shared by all members of a culture. The evaluation of action is oriented on the patterns of meaning which build on these assumptions. The criteria by which actors make judgments remain, in a sociological sense, largely latent, as they only become present if actors come into contact with statements. Such criteria are known.⁵³ Therefore, they need not succumb to any repression. Nevertheless, actors exceedingly seldom reflect on the criteria of which they take hold in the context of a situation of actors in order to judge the actions of others. Hence, such criteria are not to be equated with those fundamental structures out of which the problematic parts of the Lebenswelt are constructed.

Now we can turn toward that difference which interests us in this context: namely, the difference between norm-deviating perception and norm-deviating action. Actions that deviate from the norm are understood by members of a culture as wrong, illogical, strange, weird, novel, etc. Norm-deviating action is treated as deviance and elicits a reaction from the others involved. People who are regarded as illogical, strange, or completely insane, experience firsthand that the division between illogical and norm-deviating actions can only be made analytically. For all purposes, it cannot be maintained. But as an example, an illogical statement is somewhat different from a taboo action. The former invites the other participants in a conversation situation to so interpret inconsistencies, so that they can be made intelligible in terms of the culture. It requires repair work, as we mentioned above. The latter provokes reactions, at least if it is to remain taboo, that restore the normative order of the situation.⁵⁴

In Parsons’ definition of aggression, the violation of norms serves as a gauge against which the deviation from the normative rules of culture can be measured. However, it leaves undefined whether the acting person is either conscious of the violation of the norm or to what degree she can repress the meaning of her actions. This inaccuracy is, however, in a certain way intentional. The motivational source of aggressive action (from aggressiveness) Parsons finds in the experiences of socialization, and the meaning of the same in culture. So, Parsons evades the question of how one speaks of aggression in a society where it is elevated to a norm.

In this essay, Parsons assumes multiple concepts which he does not undertake to elaborate in precise detail. In the course of developing his theory, he arrived at a monological concept of drives.⁵⁵ According to Parsons, in their original form, drives are composed of libidinal impulses, that only take on their shape and “direction” during the process of socialization. Aggression is not so much an instinct, but instead a consequence of failed object relationships. Children are not from birth outfitted with a drive to aggression, which must be reshaped in the course of socialization in order to facilitate integration into the social world of adults. In so much as one can speak of an aggression drive in Parsons, it is secondary, that is, a drive that develops during socialization and stirs children toward an active participation in their own upbringing by partially satisfying their libidinal drives. Children are not born with an aggression drive. It neither resides inside children at birth nor does it contribute anything to their will to master the cohesive meanings of their environment through action. Aggression is generated through the renunciation of already socialized drives. Children have come to terms with this renunciation from the very beginning of their upbringing. Moreover, the functional role of the family in modern society has a favorable effect on the development of aggressiveness.

Though, with Parsons, aggression cannot be named a drive, aggression can be more easily compared to a drive than to an irritation or sentiments that are generally associated with (conscious) renunciation of desire. Parsons attributes to aggression the functions that evoke the familiar (Freudian) concept of drive concept. Aggression is repressed, sublimated, transferred, and even projected. People are no longer even conscious of its origin. The object of irritation that ostensibly provokes aggression, the object upon which aggressiveness crystallizes itself, which can so become a form of social action, is usually located in the wider environment of the actors. Aggression can therefore be more easily turned against the wider environment of actors as against the family, in which it largely arises, precisely because it is not forbidden to the same extent outside the family as within it. ⁵⁶ Aggression thrives in the relationship children have to their most important object-relationship, namely to the person who takes on the “mother role”. In the event that the relationship between the mother (and later the parents) and her child is disturbed, these disturbances culminate in diffuse destructive emotions, which Parsons calls aggression. Interestingly, these disturbances often emerge as forms of violations of norms, when the child perceives the actions of her parents as unreasonable, certainly with respect to the care of love.

According to Parsons, feelings of insecurity and unfairness are the root causes of aggression. Aggression is produced through the unequal distribution of love among siblings. We have already examined the role of love in Parsons’ (later) model. The transformation of the satisfaction of impulses to the satisfaction of the need to be loved is indicative of the emergence of a self (Ego). The first configuration out of which aggression emerges builds on instinctual drives that have already been socialized through the relationship between mother and child. Aggression is the (negative) flipside of the socialization process that manages the transformation from lust principle to love principle. What is important in this context is that Parsons sees a reciprocal relationship between drives and love, in which drives gradually disappear in favor of love. The emergence of aggression takes place in the framework of this process. Therefore, it can be ascertained when aggression forms in this process. If aggression can only be developed against the background of an ego that has largely already emerged, it acquires a different meaning than if it is thought of as something that already simply exists. Unfortunately, Parsons neglects to thoroughly clarify these questions. All things considered, his description of functions of aggression in social action give reason to the assumption that aggression accompanies the socialization process from the beginning on. This is the only way to explain how it can, for the most part, be attributed to primary processes.

Feelings of insecurity and “unfairness” in the course of upbringing are the drivers of aggression. Even though aggression arises within the family, it cannot be expressed owing to the commandment of love, which applies to a special degree to the members of one’s own family:

“Therefore (aggressive impulses) are generally dissociated and ‘repressed’ from the positive, socially accepted mindset-system. This repressed attitude-system even continues to exist as such and seeks an indirect expression, above all in symbolic form. This may take place purely in fantasies, but yet a phenomenon appears here, which is in our context of significant importance, namely, the displacement of aggressive impulses onto a scapegoat. If it is not permissible to openly hate the father, mother, or siblings, an object outside of that circle of people who one must love is chosen in their place, and the satisfaction of aggressive impulses, in an indirect way, are ensured. And precisely because these impulses are repressed, the individual is not conscious of this displacement and arrives through rationalization to the conviction that her behavior is a reasonable reaction to something that the scapegoat has done or otherwise would do, if he ever had the opportunity.” (Parsons, 1968: 228)

It would go beyond the scope of this essay to turn at this point to the displacement of aggressive impulses onto scapegoats. The genesis and accommodation of aggressive impulses is more relevant. Per Parsons, aggression is a epiphenomenon of the object-relationship between mother and child, where the driver is insecurity or unequal distribution of love. Children learn at the same time that aggressive impulses are frowned upon and within the family are regarded as a breach against their foundational principles. In this way, such impulses are transferred onto other objects.

2.7 Summary

The aim of this section was to analyze Parsons’ concept of drive in such a way that its conceptual limitations, but also its utility, would become evident. Above all, I wanted to describe the conceptual advantages and disadvantages of Parson’s concept of drive in relationship to each other. Both, I believe, stem from the same premises. Parsons’ work is therefore ideal for this study, because his statements can easily be traced back to their theoretical origin due to their logical structure. So it became possible to ascertain the disappearance of the drive concept in Parsons and at the same time note a fundamental problem of sociology. I deliberately selected a work from Parsons that is, in his view, unfinished. In so doing, I wanted to advance the integration of the Freudian drive theory and a positive broader sociological model. The sketch laid out here can serve as a basis for further studies. In such a framework, the linguistic constitution of aggressive impulses must be analyzed. Parsons himself warns that such impulses can taken on a symbolic form, but does not further elaborate, however, on their cultural meaning. The third part of this work is dedicated to this inquiry. There, Adorno’s criticism in “The Jargon of Authenticity” should help us inquire after verbal expressions that are designed to meet taboo needs, without thereby violating the normative order of the specific cultural situation.

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3. Adorno’s Jargon Concept: The Cultural Legitimization of Aggression

Adorno’s text is aimed against a particular — time-bound — admixture of apologetic social theory and fascistic ideology. Needs that come to light in due course of social conditions are addressed and satisfied through the utilization of jargon. This jargon, which Adorno traces back to social origins, can however only serve as a starting point, for it describes a phenomenon connected to post-war Germany. Even more, Adorno’s concept of jargon can be removed from its context in a piecemeal fashion. Additionally, jargon is not an analytical concept, but rather a reservoir of Adorno’s poetry. Therefore, it cannot be readily employed to explain social action in modern societies.

However, if we inquire after the functional role of jargon in modern societies, we can identify the analytical and thus generalizable features of the concept used by Adorno. For Adorno, jargon is communication that takes into account particular needs that arise through seemingly unsolvable conflicts in the culture. Instead of exposing the origins of the cultural misery as a law and demanding real change, they are portrayed as a constant of human existence. Socially coercive circumstances look like forces of nature which threaten to crush people if they ever “get in the way”. The cultural power of jargon consists of its double function. In one function, it enables, at the level of action, the consideration of those constraints that have become objective, which are applied on the people, and so serves as an adaptation strategy. In the other function, it simultaneously expands the sphere of action in which actors can operate without regard to the generally accepted normative rules. So, these needs can be satisfied that would otherwise be sublimated or acted out.

It could be shown that, behind Adorno’s “official” approach, another approach remains hidden, one that moves away from premises that are exclusively based on coercion: namely, an explanation for the positive attitudes of the perpetrators toward their culpability. This is the only way Adorno can navigate through a criticism of the falsity of the post-war German society, which obscured its own guilt through jargon.⁵⁷ In the context of this work, my intention is to extract from Adorno’s work a concept of the cultural and psychological meaning of jargon, that has analytical features and so can also be consulted for analyzing social relationships.

Nonetheless, Adorno’s essays feature difficulties inherent to the text that make conventional methods of interpretation fail. The conventional practice of following the lines of argumentation of an approach, reproducing it, and then making a criticism, simply does not work by itself, because Adorno styles his essays poetically. Causal relationships can only be tracked in a text if they are available. Honneth⁵⁸ therefore chooses another method to interpret Adorno’s texts. This method consists of listing Adorno’s premises, and then reading the texts by those means. Starting from the premises, a common thread that is the foundational basis of Adorno’s writings should be revealed, to make up for the lack of cogency.⁵⁹ The question remains whether their spiritual essence has also been brought.

I also assume that Adorno’s argument must be fleshed out in order to finally evaluate it. However, I do not build this argumentation on the statements which Adorno proffers in “The Jargon of Authenticity”, but rather I seek to work out the assumptions, against the background of which a concept of jargon makes sense. Notwithstanding the question as to whether I interpret Adorno in an acceptable fashion, this method has the advantage of allowing me to develop my own concept of jargon, which is certainly based on Adorno’s impressions, although it has already been transposed into another framework.

3.1 “The Jargon of Authenticity”: Its Cultural Content

I assert that Adorno wants to bring forward the ramifications of drive-dynamic processes on a “Lebenswelt” that has already been colonized by rule⁶⁰. Some questions follow from this, which must be answered for logical reasons alone. My reconstruction initially refers to these questions. To avoid any ambiguity, I reiterate at this point once more that the goal of my interpretation is not to reproduce Adorno’s text, but rather to lay a foundation for an analytical concept of jargon.

I begin with 1. the relationship between drive and jargon. Out of this arises 2. the question as to which instance can be ascribed the mediation between drive and social environment, and 3. the question of the supposedly social function of “actuality” and of its use as an instrument of the satisfaction of drives. Only against this background can we 4. understand Adorno’s handling of the concept of jargon. Because jargon comes to light in conjunction with the marginalization of undesirable people, in this framework we must separately treat marginalization as a component of integration. Therefore I ask 5. the question, how Adorno’s indirect description of the stranger in modern societies differs from Simmel’s. The comparison helps me to gain clarity on: 6. the motivation of those who persecute the stranger. Finally, I will 7. ask about the role of religion in German culture.

In the introduction to his essay “The Jargon of Authenticity”, Adorno writes:

“In Germany is spoken a jargon of authenticity, and even more so written, a marker of a chosen society, noble and homely in one, lower language as higher language. It stretches out from philosophy and theology, not just to Protestant academies, but to pedagogy, adult education centers, youth leagues, and to the sophisticated manner of speaking of the deputies of business and management. Even as it bubbles over with the pretense of deep human touch, it is meanwhile so standardized as the world that it officially denies; partially because of its mass success, partially because of its message through which it automatically places its pure nature and thereby shuts off the experience that it is supposed to inspire it. It offers a modest quantity of signal-like, snap-in words. Authenticity itself is not the most pressing; rather, it illuminates the ether in which jargon thrives, and the ethos which latently feeds it.” (Adorno, 1973, 416–417)

This outlines the phenomenon of jargon. It indicates a particular handling of the German language, which brings about for some the feeling of being chosen. This language, and more importantly, its effect, lets a world of horrors thrive, a world, in which the unreal is made real, a world, in which the “authenticity” is adopted by society, in order to serve the destructive tendencies in a society. It is this “ethos, which latently feeds (jargon).”

3.2 Satisfaction and Sanction

There exists a reciprocal relationship between jargon and the norms and values of German culture which makes taboo action compatible with Christian morality. With the help of jargon, action can finally be taken, even though this action violates the dignity of others. Because this action is not compatible with the morality that jargon itself again and again extols, it clothes itself in a form of folklore, which of course everyone should orient themselves toward.⁶¹ The active satisfaction of these aggressive needs therefore takes place in a form that is viewed as culturally legitimate. As already discussed, Adorno extracts his concept of sanctions from the negative tradition of sociology. He therefore emphasizes threats of punishment from the outside. On the cultural level, action is driven by the threats of punishment from a system. On the level of personality, the internalization of domination encourages norm-conforming action. Internalized domination deters people from an unrestrained fulfillment of their desires, unless no external sanctions threaten them.

Although the emphasis on external coercion is accompanied by the propensity to simplify the motivational sources of social action, it certainly cannot be concluded that Adorno was disinterested in this regard. The motivation of people interested Adorno very much, although of course not with an eye to the processes that recondition children to later (as adults) move smoothly through the culture. As Adorno famously rejects the positive tradition of sociology on epistemological grounds⁶², he cannot subscribe to its approach of motivational theory. Nonetheless, Adorno deals with similar questions, for he wants to conceptually apprehend the motivational basis of people in modern societies. It is this with which “The Jargon of Authenticity” concerns itself. Adorno’s concept of social order shapes his description of the motives of human action. Jargon serves the goal that has become the highest priority of human action: self-preservation, a massive task considering the misanthropy of modern societies:

“The miserable hair-splitting is cultivating the public welfare. Depending on whether a hanger-on, for whom it counts little which thing or another he attaches himself exactly, and who also prides himself on his enthusiasm, classifies fetishism as low brow, middle brow or high brow, can he imagine himself healing the spiritual welfare or the right life, or social enclaves not yet mastered by industrialization, or simply places where Nietzsche and the Enlightenment have not yet come around, or standards of modesty in which maidens hold on to their flowers until marriage. It would certainly not be possible to play the motto of security against the equally shredded motto of the dangerous life; who would not want to live without fear in the world of horror.” (Adorno, 1973: 429–430)

Public welfare pacifies the hunger for material change, jargon satiates in that it ensures the inclusion of the initiated and the exclusion of all others. Jargon entails, for one, a life amid rule, and, for another, a life of social extinction. Therefore, aggression is, ipso facto, the flipside of the bond that jargon brings about. One is never to voice this knowledge about the flipside of security, for to speak the known out loud violates bourgeois, Christian morality.

The satisfaction of aggression, that must rise through these circumstances, reconditions people to meet the challenges of a Lebenswelt that has been colonized by domination, naturally by shifting the cost of their survival onto others, who then have no more recourse. This satisfaction abrogates — even if temporarily — the displeasure that people rightly feel.

Converting his insights into his own terminology caused Adorno difficulties. For to confer linguistic expression of such processes would mean going beyond the frame of his approach. Adorno describes a gamut of social roles which his approach takes into account. An explanation of the function of these roles in differentiated societies can be conceptually explicated with reference to the terminology he introduced. Adorno, however, refrains from a consistent application of his approach and builds his argument on the phenomenon that he puts under the microscope in “The Jargon of Authenticity”. This allows Adorno to write past the weight of his own premises. His text can be described as a reservoir. On its surface, impressions are gathered, by virtue of which the pathologies of the present can be meaningfully apprehended. Adorno seizes these in order to hold our world up before us. Naturally, he does not explain to us how we may retrace his steps.

3.3 The Mediation Between Drive and Culture

My reconstruction of Adorno’s text follows from the assumption that Adorno uses a philosophical-anthropological concept of aggression. The aggressive drive is, for the present, simply taken as a given. The treatment of a concept of aggression as a component of social relations causes conceptual difficulties that are not easily cleared up. Fundamentally, the problem lies in the fact that drive-dynamic processes, in so far as ontological qualities are imputed to them, cannot readily be transposed into the world of social circumstances. On conceptual grounds alone, ontological and sociological premises are not to be blended in together. We must therefore attempt to free Adorno’s concept of drive from its encumbrances, all without forsaking its illuminating elements.

A possibility for resolving this dilemma is to postulate an instance in the human psychic apparatus that assumes the role of mediator. It mediates between the inner world of psychological processes and the outer world, a “world of horror”, without allowing itself to be wholly defined in terms of one of these worlds. The tremendous role of self-preservation in Adorno’s world can then be understood. The satisfaction of drives makes possible the self-preservation, but at the same time, is only possible as social action. That is why Adorno need forgo neither drives nor the structures of the Lebenswelt. Self-preservation presumes both, but strictly speaking, it is neither one, because self-preservation and the pacification of drives belong to different aspects of the social world.

Adorno consigns this mediating function to a particular application of language, which he names “jargon”:

“Jargon, however, surgically removes authenticity, or its opposite, out of any such insightful context. Certainly, no company would be adding up the word order, where one had been issued to them. But such possibilities remain narrow and abstract. Who overstretches these heads toward a bare nominalistic theory of language, in which words are mutually interchangeable casino chips, undisturbed by history. This emigrates, however, into every word and deprives each of the recreation of its supposedly original meaning that jargon chases after. What jargon is, and what it is not, so decides whether the word is written in the tone in which it perches itself as transcendent past its own meaning; whether the individual words are charged at the expense of sentence, judgement, thought. Accordingly, the character of jargon would be excessively formal: it ensures that what it wants, without regard to the content of the words, is experienced and accepted in great part through its rhetoric. It takes control of the pre-conceptual, mimetic element of language in favor of directing its desired inter-dependencies.” (Adorno, 1973: 418)

Adorno’s concept of jargon goes beyond the common definition. It indicates more than simply a distortion of language that indicates a belonging to a class, association, or a circle. It rids itself of the dictionary definition⁶³ and thus lays bare the narrow horizon of the commonplace definition as completely inadequate. Further, his concept of jargon allows for a criticism of the modus operandi of traditional sociology. It is underpinned by a rationalistic approach that closes off the actual social function of jargon.⁶⁴ As a result, jargon and its function in culture are reduced to a milieu-specific attributes and idioms. Culturally and normatively mediated rationality is addressed and, in this process, the logic behind irrational actions is only roughly grasped. The meaning of functional roles of jargon in culture find their expression in the murky hues of reified categories. It is flattened out on the whims of the presumptions of an already conformed science. The imperative out of which jargon seizes its social role, that is, the imperative to constantly take a breath in order to put off one’s own demise, is made cheerful through the translation of all that is irrational into categories that have rid themselves of the burden of internal and external domination.

3.4 The Social Function of Ontological Thought

Superficial explanations stand at the service of those philosophers who fumble with ontology as if it had a socially critical approach hidden away within it. Adorno therefore objects to the confounding of ontology with social criticism. He is occupied with ontology as a societal phenomenon with social functions, as an authenticity that is actualized through social action. Per Adorno, authenticity has already acquired a form in the culture. In this respect, it is already so far removed from its original roots that one can apprehend it in the culture. Speaking with the terminology I have already introduced, authenticity exists in referential context with those things which are self-evident in the Lebenswelt. These are not normally discussed. They make up the common background in a culture. ⁶⁵ Adorno’s concept of authenticity is, however, much more than a culturally understandable content that can be brought into a conversation at any time as needed.

Authenticity is a carrier of political ideology. Its political meaning is not so much the effect of its construction, which traces back to a certain philosophical tradition (Heidegger in particular). Authenticity refers to thought that is allegedly turned way from society. It is employed because political consequences are implicated with it, that, at the same time, it disavows. In no way does does authenticity owe its societal function to a circle of bizarre philosophers. They only captured an idea conceptually. The “becoming real” of this idea can only be carried out in society. It therefore had to accord with needs that arise either out of societal conditions or out of the interaction of individual needs and societal conditions. These societal conditions form the background before which authenticity can fraternize with jargon. The force of authenticity is fed by the tension that emerges from such societal circumstances. The underlying assumption is that this tension, which it incidentally also encourages, cannot be lifted through a change of societal circumstances. Their societal origin must therefore be denied. Through this denial, that which is horrifying about society is legitimately supported.⁶⁶

Adorno’s description of the social function of authenticity retraces the contours of structures that are simply predetermined. Authenticity, however, is no less dangerous just because it has become “real” owing to current circumstances. Its illusory nature contributes to its danger. Through this, authenticity is made flexible so that it can be accessed in a form that is already changed. In this way, authenticity can meet those claims that are placed on it by the areas of personality and society (in the culture), that is to say, by people and by the system. It changes as needed.

3.5 Consequences of Adorno’s Epistemological Refusal

An explanation for how an illusion (authenticity) can become a structure of the Lebenswelt is not found in Adorno. An apodictic working out of the composition of structures of the Lebenswelt would have necessitated an introduction of sociological concepts. This would have raised questions that would have required an expansion of his epistemological premises and especially concerning the cohesiveness of modern cultures and the creativity of social action. On this basis, Adorno should have asked the question about how a conceptualization of the rampant authenticity he perceived could have been managed in a sociological model. Adorno presupposes that ontological structures were once capable of assuming real forms in order to acquire a meaning. In this way they can serve as background knowledge for the ever new unfolding horizons of the present. This background knowledge is the bearer of historical content. Fascist past and present rule intertwine with each other. In particular, though, the following remains unclear: how once ontological, now become real structures are linguistically grasped. Traditional sociological approaches lean toward stripping language of its historical meaning. Adorno notes this problem: “Certainly, no company would be adding up the word order, where one had been issued to them. But such possibilities remain narrow and abstract. Who overstretches these heads toward a bare nominalistic theory of language, in which words are mutually interchangeable casino chips, undisturbed by history…” (Adorno, 1973: 418).

With that is a striking flaw of the framed positive sociology: its premises are not designed to attribute to history in itself a function in the making of meaning. Of course, history is taken into account conceptually as a background before which statements about the present gain a meaning. It receives, however, a relatively insignificant role in the making of meaning. In other words, historical content is certainly granted a role in the processes of understanding; to treat this content, however, as constitutive, is untenable from this perspective.⁶⁷ A full treatment of the reasons for this would go beyond the frame of this work. I would only like to briefly suggest that the transmission of a context of meaning from one generation to the next presents a very difficult task for social science models, in particular those models that view the constitutive elements of a society using remnants of philosophical traditions that have already been called into question.⁶⁸

Summing up, one can determine that the recovery of the historical concept consists of conceiving the structures of the Lebenswelt as simply predetermined (see Habermas’ criticisms on Schütz and Luckmann). Subsequently, actors already encounter their Lebenswelt along with their history. The notion of a simply predetermined world is at its core ontological, unless it is explained by what action it gains meaning. Habermas clears up these inconsistencies, by transferring the concept of the Lebenswelt (from Schütz und Luckmann) in a communication theory approach.⁶⁹ Adorno does not strike down this path. Instead, he utilizes a concept of language that is very similar to the phenomenological one. It should make clear for us how the promise of phenomenology can be fulfilled without having to call back to its tradition that has become questionable.

3.6 The Social Function of Jargon

“Like a junkman, jargon seizes the last rebellious stirrings of the subject, thrown back on itself in decay, in order to hock them.” (Adorno, 1973: 460)

Performatively, Adorno’s argument comes down to the fact that one can only speak reasonably about the identity-forming function of jargon provided that those constraints that originate from all three areas of the social life (personality, culture, society), are taken into account. Meanwhile, he ascribes a central role to self-preservation. Self-preservation means ensuring necessary satisfaction in a world which there is no longer real satisfaction. The “the last rebellious stirrings of the subject, thrown back on itself in decay” (Adorno, 1973: 460) are, as a rule, less libidinal than aggressive. They are also not expressed through physical actions, but instead through the violence of speech and its real implications for those who are no longer addressed. Adorno describes a world in which people satisfy themselves with the instruments of communication in the Lebenswelt.⁷⁰ How drive should tie itself to a warped language is not easy to imagine – on the other hand, the core problem of those who bathe themselves in the dew of a warped language: namely how should a place in social action be created for an artificially-made interiority that has become real, in which the unbearable tension of life can be lifted. If jargon can take over the instinctual impulses and be exchanged as products, how then should the authority that mediates these drives be conceptualized? For the mediation between inside and outside must veil the sham existence⁷¹ that underlies an inner life which is not socially constructed. As long as the illusion itself is not rattled, the relief from instinctual drives ensures security.

To be safe is no passive behavior. It is an active attempt, admittedly already doomed to fail, to shape the social surroundings in such a way that the difference between self and other disappears. The social provenance of structures, through which the desired is perceived, are disavowed. Desires should stem out of one’s own soul, as refreshment is only attained when access to the social is no longer necessary.⁷² The boundaries between inside and outside are blurred not because the intersubjectivity of human life is recognized, but rather because its misestimation promises security. The perversity lies in that a fact (i.e.: the intersubjectivity of social life) becomes a delusion (i.e.: putative intersubjectivity). So Adorno’s perpetrators refuse to take note of the difference between interiority and exteriority. Real circumstances are to be tuned out. Instead of questioning the domination itself, all that is expanded is the wild game trail, where hunting is permitted, and to wit, for everyone — yes, a right to rule for everyone is claimed, as long as they can and may babble jargon. Jargon labels as strangers those whose claim to belonging can be rattled. It creates a circle of insiders:

The jargon knows no more primary and secondary communities; also no parties. This development has its real basis. What Kracauer diagnosed in 1930 as corporate culture, the institutional and psychological superstructure, which at the time made white-collar workers, who were in immediate danger of collapse, believe that they were something better, and in so doing kept them in line with the bourgeois, is meanwhile, in the long-lasting economic boom, become a universal ideology of a society, that misjudges itself as a single people of the middle-class and allows this to be affirmed by a lingua franca in which the jargon of authenticity is most welcome for the purposes of collective narcissism; not only to those who talk it, but to the objective mind. The jargon signals credibility for the commons through an individuation of bourgeois origin that is stamped by the commons: the properly choosy sound seems like itself. The most important advantage is of its testimony of good repute⁷³. Regardless of what she says, the voice that resonates so signs a social contract.” (Adorno, 1973: 425f.)

Membership is acquired via jargonisms. The jargon vouches for origin and reputation. Or more aptly said, origin and reputation no longer invoke the recommendation of organizations, that once endowed people with a testimony of good repute, but instead invokes the language that replaces them. Giddy, they succumb to the simple tones of jargon. This is supposed to “re”-establish the connection to the missing real. Material changes, in contrast, are represented as delusions, in order to make space for solutions that are seemingly in greater depth.

“Awe for that which exists, that is more than it is, strikes down all that is insubordinate. It is given to understand that what is taking place is too deep than that the language profaned what has been said, by saying it. The pure hands spurn it to change anything in the existing property- and power-relationships; the sound makes that contemptible, like Heidegger the merely ontic.” (Adorno, 1973: 426)

Adorno’s picture of human action could be understood as a kind of drive-related, instrumental rationality. The purpose of the action is relief, strategic action is the means to the end.⁷⁴ This form of action presupposes a knowledge of existing norms and their gaps, it nevertheless may not be equated to instrumentative-rational action. The latter refers to a unquestionably internal system of logic that is nevertheless generally understandable with recourse to its context of meaning. Adorno’s view of rationality balks at a generally applicable understanding. The motives of destructive people cannot always be thematized in the context of “normal” social action. The goals of their actions envisage the violation of those rules that are the basis of their success. Normally, the motives of people who through their action violate a normative rule, are generally understood. By contrast, goals that orient themselves on drive-dynamic processes are not necessarily culturally comprehensible, especially not if such goals are to be attained through a norm-conforming “jargon of authenticity”.

It is clear that an action that is driven by the needs of an individual is differentiated from the action of another individual. Certainly for this reason such an action cannot be the basis for a societal project. Integration processes, out of which societal projects should emerge, can only take place with the background of the cultural comprehensibility of consensus. The access to the personality of a person remains, in the “normal” encounter between actors, to a large degree denied. Therefore, it can hardly serve as a basis for the production of a societal consensus.⁷⁵ In this respect, the demand for a society of security acts as a consummation of an illusion.

An illusion is, per Adorno, mediated with reality. Adorno’s people are conscious of their place, and for two reasons. The first are the real coercions that narrow the possibilities of action. To perceive these is therefore rational. One can only bear this knowledge if one surrenders oneself to an illusion. The second are the drive-bound processes which are largely conscious. People are looking to be relieved. Adorno depicts the psychological process of modern people as if the evolutionary process through which they reached the unconscious had no effect. The repression of desire and aggression dangerous for society has failed.

Freud, on the other hand, believed that such desires, which people once expressed through their dreadful deeds, were repressed in the course of historical developments. Culture is therefore the subjection of human needs to the principle of moral action.⁷⁶ Culture cannot, however, totally disappear the tracks of what was once conscious. By means of warped (conscious) perception, expressions from yesteryear arrive in the cultural world of the present. In this manner, according to Freud, the transmission of history is constituted. Historical events are stored in the unconscious. Their statements mark the world of the consciousness. Adorno flattens out the multitude of frictions between repression and culture. In so much as culture demands repression, it does not succeed. Rather, people lie in wait for the opportunity to lend expression to their desires. As they know that, through this, they will bring about only a partial satisfaction, they rush themselves to annihilate every memory of their actual situation.

3.7 Simmel: Jargon from the Perspective of the Stranger and the Perpetrator

The stranger is therefore to be marginalized, because he reminds us of the situation. In Adorno’s “The Jargon of Authenticity”, we come to know the object of scorn only insufficiently. With help of Simmel’s essay “Der Fremde” [“The Stranger”], I give him flesh and blood. Moreover, the comparison of Simmel and Adorno helps to elaborate on the assumptions in “The Jargon of Authenticity”.

Simmel ascribes to the stranger a special objectivity and traces this back to his role in society.

“Because (the stranger) is not fixed at the roots for the singular components or the one-sided propensity of the group, he faces all these with a special attitude of ‘objectivity’, which does not mean some mere distance and sense of detachment, but rather a special construct of far and near, indifference and involvement.” (Simmel, 1908: 766f.)

Due to the displacement of the relationship of people to their social environment, that the mere presence of the stranger provokes, the stranger stands in a peculiar relationship to those societal roles that people adopt in the context of social interactions. This relationship of “far and near, indifference and involvement” to societal roles, and consequently to oneself and others, distinguishes the stranger. Therefore, he is given the ability to treat cultural norms as laws.

Per Simmel’s well-known formula, the stranger is he who comes today and stays tomorrow. Of course, what is interesting about this declaration is indeed not that the stranger comes, but rather that he stays. With this background, Simmel can ask the question that he would like to pursue, namely, which characteristics actually comprise the stranger. For if the stranger stays long enough, at some time is the environment neither a stranger to him nor he a stranger to the environment. Then is the stranger no longer strange, but instead he is known as a stranger. He is rather a member of a society, which designates him an outsider owing to his role, than a foreigner in the ordinary sense of the word. The stranger wears the role intended for him, and this wears him. He can therefore utilize it in service of his interests.

The irritation that the stranger calls forth in others cannot exclusively be traced back to his presence, but rather it must be to those actions and viewpoints that make possible his role in the society to begin with. In the society the stranger creates strange things out of all that he touches. He imports ideas that apparently did not exist before and did not need to exist. For his contribution to society, the stranger cannot hope for recognition and reward. The contempt for the stranger, according to Baumann, stems from two reasons: because the stranger came without invitation, and second, because he has even come at all:

“The stranger comes into Lebenswelt and settles down here, and consequently it is — as opposed to simply unfamiliar — relevant, where he is a friend or an enemy. He has made his way into the Lebenswelt uninvited, by which he places me on the receiving side of his initiative, has made me an object of his action of which he is the subject: All this — a notorious trait of the enemy … Although not only for this reason. There are others. For example, the unforgettable and therefore unforgivable original sin of the later arrival: the fact that he has entered into the area of the Lebenswelt at a precisely determinable point in time. He does not belong ‘from the beginning on’, ‘originally’, ‘since forever’, always’, since an inoffensive time in this Lebenswelt and hence asks the question as to the extemporality of the Lebenswelt, bringing the mere ‘historicity’ of existence to light.” (Baumann, 1992: 80–81)

The stranger can be no owner of the land. He comes from a distance. The stranger is uninvited, provided he did not follow accept an invitation. Baumann means ‘uninvited’ literally, but not Simmel. Whether the stranger settles down with or without an invitation, into the Lebenswelt of a culture, it changes his status little; for the invitation in no way automatically transforms the distant relationship between strangers and locals. The argument, that the presence of the stranger reminds others of the temporality of the present, is accurate. This interpretation of Simmel’s, however, requires a means Simmel does not avail himself of: namely, a phenomenological concept of history.

The stranger therefore evokes irritation not exclusively because he does not belong to the respective community, but because he seems to know more exactly about the constitution of the belonging, and because he can benefit from such knowledge. In the eyes of the locals, the stranger occupies places that he creates for himself in the consciousness of the locals and, without him, would remain empty. Only if he instead asserts himself in this world and so becomes a stranger in Simmel’s sense, does he take part in the societal processes. Locals are often not able to perceive these processes. Their righteous indignation against the stranger characterizes a confusion of the stranger with economic conditions, that require from them disquieting changes. Of course, Simmel falls short in considering to those “objective conditions” which the stranger faces and allows him to respond earlier to societal requirements. In general, Simmel neglects the areas of society and personality. The concept of culture utilized by Simmel should suffice for the justification of social action. For him, it is based on the assumption that the inputs of a system and the unconscious elements of personality require no separate treatment. This handling of system and personality in the Lebenswelt is only acceptable if explicit reference is made as to the limitations of the epistemological horizon or otherwise to the cultural meaning of system and unconscious. Evidence of such inputs can only be analytically eliminated, however; in fact, we cannot separate them from the Lebenswelt.

If we can therefore say that Simmel turns to the experience of the stranger and interprets this world as a constituent part of the social life in a culture, it could be further said that Adorno turns to his world from the perspective of those who persecute strangers. A threat, that is societal constituted, is perceived by Simmel as well as Adorno. Irritations that are ascribed to the stranger do not, however, escape that social context from whence they come. They take place against the background of those social roles that the stranger occupies. These roles are namely a constituent part of modern societies. They make possible the maintenance of the manifold forms of human interaction and presuppose a normative attitude to the general arrangement of a society. Diversity and unity are comprehended in their mutual relationship to one another.

At this point, Simmel and Adorno part ways. Adorno is, needless to say, more skeptically tuned than Simmel. His criticism on the society extends also to an examination of the Enlightenment. The project of the Enlightenment, according to Adorno, has subjected people to a “dispositional thinking” and committed people to a “self-preservation through adaptation”. It is therefore ludicrous to associate the Enlightenment with progress. Such a picture of the Enlightenment misjudges the reality of human history, for the “fully enlightened earth radiates under the banner of triumphant calamity”.⁷⁷ With this background, it is not surprising that Simmel and Adorno take different views on the impact of society on the subject. System and personality are treated in Simmel in their cultural form. Adorno’s Lebenswelt (in “The Jargon of Authenticity”) is managed from above and driven from below. It arises through irresolvable conflicts that necessitate a kind of pseudo-understanding. For Adorno, humans crash into each other. They fear for their survival. Irritation of Simmel’s kind they note no more. Rather, they come into an uncontrollable, life-threatening panic. The stranger is moved less into a role that he is capable of shaping within known boundaries, but rather he has been assigned a role that gives him little leeway. In Adorno, the stranger is undoubtedly also a source of unwanted friction. Above of all, he is certainly the one who allows many to feel the shaking of the world.

3.8 The Philosophical Background against which Jargon Takes Place

The philosophical background, before which the role of the stranger in the social world is perceived, is based on different philosophical traditions that leave behind clear traces even after their transfer into a sociological conceptual framework. Simmel carries out his approach through an examination of Kant. Society and nature stand in different relationship to those structures that lend them meaning. The guiding principle does not even apply to society, the meaning of which, ipso facto, cannot lie in within itself. It produces its own meaning, and in this respect, the meaning of the society actually lies in its “things”, without any ontological qualities having to be imputed to these “things”:

“The crucial difference between the unity of a society and the unity of nature is rather this: that the latter - for the Kantian position is assumed here - exclusively comes into being in the observing subject, is exclusively generated by him, and out of those unrelated sensory elements; whereas the societal unity of those elements, since they are known and synthetically active, is readily realized and requires no observer. That sentence of Kant’s: Connection could never lie in the things, since it is only brought about by the subject, does not apply to the societal connection, which rather does actually take place, unmediated, in the ‘things’ - which here are individual souls - unmediated.” (Simmel, 1992: 43)

According to Adorno, the step from nature to society must be carried out differently. With the help of his reversal of the Kantian approach, Simmel can realize the societal production of meaning. However, he neglects the domination of the system.

Adorno avails himself of the approach of the young Hegel in order to address the Lebenswelt. In “The Jargon of Authenticity”, he assumes a simply predetermined disturbance in shared subjectivity that people attempt to abrogate for the sake of their survival. That requires the connection of jargon and authenticity, society and ontology, sense and nonsense. Jargon is the connecting link between world and need in a culture in which a bond to the real is no longer possible. Such a world forces people to orient themselves of forms of substitute satisfaction. The underlying thought is relatively simple, its consequences however, are a headache: for a false answer to a real demand must correspond to the reality of the falseness. Falseness must recognize the truthfulness of this demand in order to be able to occupy the place that the real demand has claimed. The false only becomes effective when it sets out on the terrain of the real. Only then can the real demand be covered up by a surrogate. A feeling of security grows where a need for intersubjectivity was once felt. This happens not despite, but because of the contradiction in such a transformation from the real into unreal. This is why Adorno speaks of the “late-bourgeois form of real distress” which is “in the feeling of absurdity … processed by the consciousness”. The feeling of absurdity, which he relates to real circumstances and so can be comprehended, he connects with self-deception:

“The free time of the subject withholds from him the freedom for which he secretly hopes and chains him to the unchanging, to the production apparatus, there to, where this should be suspended. (...) At the same time the feeling of absurdity of the late-bourgeois form of real distress, the permanent threat of doom, is consciously being processed. It turns that which he dreads such as if it were innate to him, and so attenuates what about the threat is no longer humanly appropriate. That sense, whatever it is, seems everywhere impotent against the calamity; that nought is gained from him and that his protestation possibly promotes it further, is registered as a defect in metaphysical content, chiefly of religious-social commitment.” (Adorno, 1963–64: 436f.)

Adorno’s Lebenswelt draws its validity out of the internal contradiction of false intersubjectivity. It intensifies the need for interpersonal connections, hinders, however, the construction of new commitments that accommodate these needs. With the help of a kind of mutual satisfaction, the old circumstances are simply sustained. Adorno’s depiction of the coherent qualities of false relationships does not, of course, contain a sufficient explanation of the Lebenswelt.

In any case, these needs, which must be satisfied to uphold the present order, are not exclusively of an existential sort. In Adorno, the longing for intersubjective bonds is fused with the longing for relief from the drive-instincts. Out of this arises the motivation to utilize jargon. The manner in which this motivation is to be understood, Adorno takes from the writings of the young Hegel. Nevertheless, the influence of Hegel on the “The Jargon of Authenticity” is quite significant, as a quote from Habermas makes clear:

“The dynamic of fate results much more out of the disorder of the symmetrical terms and of the reciprocal relationships of recognizing an intersubjectively constituted context of life, from which one part isolates itself and thus alienates all other parts of themselves and their common life. This act of breaking away from an intersubjectively shared Lebenswelt first generates a subject-object relationship. This is introduced as a foreign element, in any case only subsequently, into relationships, that inherently follow from the structure of an understanding between subjects — and not out of the logic of reification by the subject. The ‘positive’ thereby also takes on a different meaning. The absolutization of the conditional to unconditional is no longer traced back to a sprawled-out subjectivity, that overextends its claims, but instead to an alienated subjectivity which has renounced itself from the common life. And the repression, that results out of that, is owing to to the disturbance of an intersubjective equilibrium instead of the subjugation of an objectified subject.” (Habermas, 1988: 41)

We can only understand the parts from “The Jargon of Authenticity”, in which the social functions of jargon are described, when we know that a search for the lost intersubjectivity forms the background before which jargon unfolds its power. It is the disturbance of an “intersubjectively constituted context of life” (Habermas) which lends to jargon power.

The yearning after a once existing, but long lost “intersubjectively shared Lebenswelt” is perverted and is so reinforced. The perversion of such longings presupposes, however, an analytical distinction between form and content, even if the distinction has actually disappeared. The form that such longings take on result in a perversion of the desires of humans for a shared intersubjectivity. The content is the desire for a real intersubjectivity, which is just as real as the constraints that are exercised by the society. The compromise that makes possible a partial satisfaction occurs in light of the perversion of this longing. Which form these perverted longings take on, is once again marked by societal circumstances.

Against this background, the desire for security gains its psychological and cultural meaning. It abandons its frame of the area of personality and acts henceforth in the culture. There, security can rely on impulse from the other areas of the social world or otherwise take possession of them. Security is a regressive attitude with cultural meaning and political consequences. The system encourages the regression to which people are tempted, to transform the real stranger in themselves in an illusory stranger outside themselves. Reflexive relationships, in which the “foreign” elements are incorporated, should be destroyed once and for all. The external object is objectified in the hope that through this, the imperative to change the societal circumstances is settled. This step follows at the expense of the stranger. His societal role is consequently carried out past him.⁷⁸

The other, who has become an object, makes possible the participation, for those who belong to it, in a shared false intersubjectivity. This deception occurs independently of those to whom it grants an acquittal on probation. The provisional nature of a freedom, which is based on a deception and can be revoked at any time on the basis of a change in the policy of exclusion, does no harm to its effectiveness. The riskiness lends the absurdity an aura of an adventurous, revolutionary project. The effectiveness therefore does not only refer exclusively to the negativity of this regression, but also that it averts the acknowledgement of a need that could only be met by a society free of domination.

The emergence of a subject-object-relationship through the “breaking away of an intersubjectively shared Lebenswelt” is the consequence of an alienated subjectivity that prohibits a restoration of the moment. According to Habermas, “the ‘positive’” takes on “another meaning” (Habermas, 1988, 41). In the Lebenswelt of Adorno, the effects of these moments are something like impulses that are already perverted when they are consciously registered. At the level of personality, Adorno transposes primary and secondary processes for each other, after having defined both differently than Freud. The need for security bases itself on a non-conscious, primary desire for intersubjectivity, that Adorno believes he discovers in a differentiated form with such desires at the level of action, that Freud assigns to the unconscious. Secondarily, reflections build on this that are doomed to failure, because they orient themselves on the negative demands of culture and so close themselves off from the outset the possibility of finding satisfaction. One could somewhat generously refer to this moment as dialectical, although it really refers to a compounding interaction of negativity. Then, at this juncture, drives appear on the scene, which, per Adorno, must accordingly contain conscious components. People consciously want to find satisfaction in a Lebenswelt wherein their real needs are already repressed into the unconscious. The Lebenswelt itself is a place where this conflict is played out. The system is set up on the limits of “freedom”, within which people can operate without external constraints. The personality provides the energy at the disposal of making the actions possible. The result is a yearning (or longing)⁷⁹ after something that is not graspable, a longing, that already adheres to the existing destructive structures of the Lebenswelt. (The promise is not only made from the top down. People covet “freedom” in order to assault the ones not chosen.)

With this background, it is not difficult to form an impression of the political consequences of jargon. Security, as an internally experienced feeling, should be transferred to the external reality. The internalization that is supposed to infiltrate the culture produces, owing to its content, an intensified uneasiness. The needs that push this process forward are already social in their origin. While Freud’s drives certainly includes objects and could so be conceived in part as socially structured, they may not at all be conflated with social structures. Culture therefore demands repression. In Adorno, content that is repressed according to Freud, gains the upper hand over the social, because the culture absorbs it. This sets in motion a process similar to Freud’s, but inflicts different damage: namely damages that are social and can only be remedied with social instruments.

Jargon feeds on this described disturbance, that demands from them different adaptations according to their horizon of interests. The motivation of actors to be subjugated to the domination that de facto prevails, in order to be considered as “adapted”, does not allow itself to be reduced to fear of an omnipotent organ of power. Jargon says “yes”, to borrow a word from Foucault.⁸⁰ Through jargon, desires can be introduced in the scheme of relationships in the Lebenswelt, desires that the norms of this world oppose, and in such a way that the sanctions bound with the disregarding of norms do not need to be imposed. Jargon is a kind of license that allows, under particular terms, perversity to be brought into the “normality” of relationships in the Lebenswelt. At the top, the person acts in conformity with the instructions announced by the system. In the Lebenswelt, the reciprocity of interpersonal exchange seems untouched. The validity of statements seems to be confirmed by these changes in the Lebenswelt that jargon accomplishes, in so far as it is carried out on outsiders of all kinds. The acknowledgment of the success won by one’s own actions simultaneously provides those actions a psychological relief, which temporarily takes away fear. The contradiction is the fulcrum between these moments. For it lets the unrealizable appear in a kind of real way that satisfies the demands of all three areas of the social world. In the Lebenswelt itself, that is, the place where such demands must be negotiated, the importance of religious thought rises.

It is obvious that a form of irrationality fraternizes with another form. Adorno sees, however, in the function of religion as more than only a side effect of an already similar phenomenon. Above all, Adorno emphasizes the functionality of religion. Religion gives jargon a sacred halo that provides motivational “aid”. It involves the power of the contradiction, and not about a simple alloy of phenomena that are interchangeable in terms of genre. The contemporary person is forced to trace back to the reservoir of an irrational tradition in order not to be ashamed of the origin of his thought. He disowns the religion that serves him. For this reason, he utilizes a seemingly secular speech in order to meaningful articulate himself in an already demythologized Lebenswelt. For in modernity, the use of religious imagery can only make meaningful sense on the condition that people disavow their religious origin. This bit of “rationality” remains all the more in the service of the “irrational”: “With the tongues of angels, he registers the word human, which he draws from the doctrine of the imago Dei. It sounds the more irrefutable and the sweeter, the more thoroughly it seals itself against its theological origin” (Adorno, 1973, 455). Even assiduous rhetoric must not regress below the level of a world disenchanted by the Enlightenment.

Here, one perceives the shimmer of differentiating processes that take place, in modernity, against the background of a secularizing Lebenswelt. However, not in the sense of recognizing Enlightenment values. Adorno sees in the pseudo-sacral imagery the vestiges of a framed value-system already in question, which served people to lend to their statements an appearance of validity. This is intended ton enable the persistence of such magical thought that still stirs people as ever. The latter is the language, that “with primal pleasure forces the hearts of all hearers” (Goethe: Faust). One seals oneself off against religious arguments, because, strictly speaking, one recognizes their absurdity, and still one uses them, because they achieve something.⁸¹ The contradiction of a language constructed with the help of religious imagery, that simultaneously obscures its sacred origin, paves the way for the marginalization introduced by jargon to follow. The contradiction poses no barriers; because it can take place against the contradictory demands of society, Lebenswelt, and personality. Due to this contradiction, claims of validity can be raised that are measured on their effectiveness instead of their authority, so that no negative sanctions need be feared.

In this context, Adorno makes use of the Marxist and Freudian critiques of religion and also accepts their de-differentiation. Adorno would like to epistemologically take into account the excesses of the religious formation of meaning. Thus he refers to developments that one can certainly refer to as religious, although to the contours that first feature in their particular historical context, he attributes universal validity. So Adorno introduces us into the Lebenswelt of Germany, its landscape he traces, and its peculiarity he certainly underestimates, although, at the same time, it never leaves his sight. The historical origin of authenticity is self-evident to people.

Before we go further, we must comprehend, from a social science perspective, several findings that lie hidden in this self-evidence. Therefore, I would like at this point to introduce Plessner’s book, “The Belated Nation”, in order to ask about the culturally specific components of Adorno’s description of the “cult of authenticity”.

3.9 The Meaning of Religion in Germany’s Lebenswelt

Like “The Jargon of Authenticity”, the “The Belated Nation” is an attempt to lay bare the social background upon which the Nazis relied. Adorno and Plessner proceed from the assumption that the prevailing economic and political circumstances of the time certainly prepared the ground for National Socialists, but that those alone are not sufficient explanations for the success of the Nazi movement:

“The resonance capability for the National Socialist politics and ideology can only be understood in a limited way as out of the direct conditions of Versailles, inflation …, the partisan political structure and from the mismatch of the lower middle class between ‘18 and ‘33 to the established parties, as well as from the radicalizing effect of the significant unemployment since ‘29.” (Plessner, 1994: 12)

In comparison to Goldhagen’s⁸² argument, according to which an eliminatory antisemitism was the basis for the National Socialists, the approach of Plessner is rather more narrowly tailored on the presuppositions that underlie such thought. The starting point is surprisingly similar, however: to explain the National Socialists only with an eye to the economic and political landscape of Germany is to disregard the cultural specificity of the reaction to it. Plessner is nevertheless eager to circumscribe the blind spot in German thought, that, because it knows its emptiness, longs for its filling. Plessner would like to understand the origin and the nature of those structures of meaning that assign a culture-specific attitude to a society. Antisemitism as a motivational background is not consequently out of the question, but he did not explicitly subject it to an analysis.⁸³

Beginning with the belief “that there are not two Germanys”,⁸⁴ one of brilliant writers, artists, and scientists, and one of barbarians, Plessner reconstructs the historical background, out of which these both parts of Germany emerge. The retardation of political developments is his theme: his field is that Lebenswelt, that refused democratic institutions even the validity they had required for their continuance.

In his description of the political circumstances, Plessner is not concerned with a superficial description of those political forces that supported the Nazis, but rather with the interactions of political institutions with an entrenched interiority in the Lebenswelt. Therefore, Plessner begins with an analysis of the significance of the German defeat in the First World War. Defeats alone are no carrier of particular cultural or political meaning. They can trigger a regeneration process, or, in German-speaking areas (from here on: Germany), excite a societal regression, a movement also, that singles out the defeats in a specific manner. It only then has success if it manages to relate the already pre-interpreted attitudes to society back to itself, so that a message emerges out of it that can be culturally understood. Therefore, the disappointment of a lost World War cannot alone explain the emergence and institutionalization of the National Socialist movement.

“There are defeats that even a proud people can accept. It only needs to feel as if, through it, it has awakened and been reminded of its true purpose. For Germany the defeat was intolerable, because it was senseless like the war and because it remained senseless.” (Plessner, 1994: 36)

Plessner writes further:

“(Germany’s) protest against the peace of 1919 is not simply the expression of its defeat, also not the mere response to the ideas of democracies and middle-class freedom with which the adversary won against them. It is the protest against the historical calamity, that refuses one of the central European states a path to national unity much more on the basis of its ambiguous tradition than over simple violence.” (Plessner, 1994: 37)

Plessner describes the interaction between undemocratic political attitudes and interiority. It makes a catastrophe out of a defeat. The theoretical presuppositions of the analysis that Plessner utilizes to describe this interaction are of interest to us. interest us. Plessner’s systems have become admittedly autarkic, although not autopoietic. They grow out of the Lebenswelt of a culture. Culture and system therefore overlap. Even if the system can appoint itself, it remains eventually dependent on the legitimization of the culture. The authoritarian state does not hold sway only over the heads of its subjects, but also simultaneously roots itself deep in their thought. On the basis of this preliminary decision, Plessner can emphasize the decay of democratic institutions without either overlooking or over-evaluating structural difficulties (for example, the defeat).

What is striking is the short distance between Lebenswelt and politics that lies behind his description of the political development in Germany. Plessner argues namely, that Germany in its radical, inward-facing rejection of the Catholic tradition coming from Rome, missed the opportunity to partake in those civilizing processes out of which (also in its educated rejection) the concept of the nation arises, which makes redundant the idea of “das Volk”.⁸⁵ The concept of a nation not only safeguards against fascism because it is reflected in a form of a constitution, but also because the nation acts as identity-building for the citizens of a country. To be French, English, or American makes sense in the only context of a particular political culture. It requires an equality of the members of a society before those criteria that determine the belonging to a society. So nation and identity are, for Plessner, interwoven in the Lebenswelt:⁸⁶

“For the Anglo-Saxon states, Calvin became essential. For France, the Enlightenment. Both powers have, in their development, a core decisive interest in the transmutation of the state out of the spirit of personal freedom. Both powers work in the direction of the interior way of life, which in France the separation of church and state guarantees. The secularization does not touch the state in its pure expediency, in its parliamentary formality. It would only come into conflict with it if it wanted to make claims on the individual person, and certainly in the metaphysical sense.” (Plessner, 1994: 62)

To be proud of membership in a country with a nation-state tradition means, ultimately, to be a constitutional patriot. On German soil, however, this statement implies a recourse to an existing original right in a time before the founding of the state, which is either inherent or may never be completely bestowed:

“It is not the real provenance of a people from a prehistoric time that determines the historic picture of the state, but rather, the idea of law, freeing and reconciling, consciously retained with conceptual dignity, blotting out the burden of past existence.” (Plessner, 1994: 63)

The primary problem is cultural, because it is related to the structures that people repair in order to “understand” something: “There the original sense (of a democratic) apparatus is no more understood. (In such countries) they lack … the corresponding preconditions that date back to religion” (Plessner, 1944: 62). Understanding is the key word. It suggests faulty structures that lend statements their meaning. Such structures are produced in the Lebenswelt. Therefore, in Plessner, both the place that supplies validity as well as the position of this place in the maintaining of political institutions can be located. The motivation of the involved actors is hence brought to the foreground. Then, insofar as political bodies are reliant on their ability to make actions in the Lebenswelt understandable, the maintenance of such institutions is only possible against the background of the communicability in the culture. Plessner knows, of course, that no equating of the Lebenswelt and system follows out of this insight. He therefore describes the structural constraints that have influenced the actions of the decision-makers. It is also clear to him that not every decision made by a political body is problematized in the Lebenswelt.

That is also not the aim. For Plessner is asking the question, in what relationship do the underlying political structures of a society stand with respect to their culture. His answer reads that such structures must be created in the Lebenswelt of a society, because the Lebenswelt ultimately gives those structures their interpersonal meaning, that members of a society find, until further notice, unquestionable. In other words, that denoted characteristic of democracy which is described by Plessner as metaphysical pretentiousness is a self-understanding of the Lebenswelt, which need not be questioned because it “easily” counts as a shared assumption of social action in the Lebenswelt. The question can be asked; under normal circumstances, though, this does not happen. With the background of this interpretation, the interaction between system and Lebenswelt is clear. It brings with it further the advantage that it grants the motivation of actors an adequate role in the context of theory-building. With this, a confounding of personality with the level of system is ruled out from the start. At the same time, the Lebenswelt becomes that component of the social world out of which systems are constructed. To summarize, it can be said that because Plessner takes the meaning of the Lebenswelt for politics seriously, he must explain why the Germans have willingly supported a disturbed movement.

In the historical development of German Protestantism, Plessner sees the most important source of those patterns of meaning that make possible comprehensibility (also about oneself) and so explain the motivations of people’s actions. The animated new orientation toward the interior from Luther changed the imprint of structures of Lebenswelt. It consequently influenced those who either refused religion or belonged to other confessions:

“Because … Protestantism becomes the leading power of life, it imprints new people, even too where they still adhere to the old beliefs.” (Plessner, 1994: 56)

And elsewhere:

“So the existence of a Lutheran-style state church in a confessionally divided milieu not only generally impacted the direction of secularization, but also summoned into life a specific Lutheran-religious worldliness and worldly piety, that gained form in the ideology of German politics and worldviews.” (Plessner, 1994: 66f.)

Luther’s theology provided German culture with meanings that, as assumptions, became self-evident in everyday communication and, for that reason, are not exposed to any problematization under normal circumstances:

“On Luther’s side, on the other hand, in the relationship between piety and professional work that creativity had to arise, because it draws on creativity itself and establishes that bond between the temporal and the eternal an identity-giving intimacy, which sanctifies the profane through the spirit of action. Inherent within this is the change of function of religion from ecclesiastical to worldly life. Therefore its consummation in existence and in concept of the culture is a Lutheran category and a German fate.” (Plessner, 1994: 75)

These structures challenge an attitude to the world that first, follow the general Protestant movement in strongly emphasizing the world here below and second, in different forms of Protestantism (principally Calvinism) diverge, insamuch as evangelism is supposed to be the most important confirmation of human moral behavior. The phenomenon of a Christian thought turned inwards, that is at the same time relating to the world (worldly) and is ultimately turned away from it (piety), Plessner names “worldly piety”.

Luther’s doctrine implies that the moral content of action is not to be measured on its results, but instead on its efficacy with which one can follow the teaching of God. In the world of action, also the world in which the truth of God should be proven, action becomes measured on its “interior” criteria. An action that is purely “worldly” experiences contempt, because it profanes the place of a holier work. The divide between Calvinism and evangelical theology is further expanded through its different attitudes toward society; owing to its propensity to interiority, the children of Luther stand relatively indifferent to political engagement, if not even skeptical to it. They prefer to concern themselves with “the essentials”, namely, family and work⁸⁷:

“Through the fact of an authoritative church and the inner-minded anchoring of the idea of vocational calling, a dualism is developed between an areligious state life and a religious, extra-ecclesiastical vocational and private life. Calvin’s doctrine put a stop to this privatization of faith. Through its sharp hold on the principle of supremacy of the church above the state, through the claim of God’s dominion, a different relationship between right belief and civil-societal life was created from the beginning.” (Plessner, 1994: 74)

For reasons that have already been discussed above, Plessner can analyze the constituent role of religion in quite a productive manner. As a result of the shift of the system in the Lebenswelt, both spheres of the social world move closer together. Therefore, the formation of a system against the background of particular religious disturbances of a culture otherwise can be conceptualized differently (than, for example, by Weber). Systems can be comprehended as autarkic, without that “metaphysical unpretentiousness” of parliamentary democracy, to which it must relate itself again and again, which can be ignored.⁸⁸

Following Plessner’s approach spares the negative effects of a positive position. The function of religion in the production of meaning in the Lebenswelt and in the legitimization of political bodies is namely established, in Germany, out of the doctrine of Luther. Worldly piety flourishes next to secularization. Worldly piety disenchants the culture without losing its religious power.

Plessner also argues that the structures of the Lebenswelt were strongly influenced by the theology of Luther and that, on this basis, the particularity of the German interiority can be comprehended. Proceeding from the interaction between Lebenswelt and system and the assumption that the Lebenswelt furnishes the system with value, Plessner concludes that the German Lebenswelt cannot furnish political institutions with their necessary value, because their democratic disposition was not understood. With this background, Plessner can take into account the factors that impeded the construction of a democratic societal order.

Plessner’s work suggests that democracy in Germany failed not simply as a result of an economic crisis and a lost war, but instead because the value structures out of which the democracy was constructed, was not sufficiently internalized. The relationship was “play-acted” and not “lived”. I suspect that this is no longer the case, although an abuse of our contemporary normative order in terms of our common democratic values must be plausibly explainable. If this supposition is correct, then there would be an increase in the value of jargon under today’s circumstances, in which non-democratic endeavors would be forced to demonstrate their democratic creed, in order to achieve their antidemocratic ends.

The initial consideration is that Plessner’s arguments about the historical and religious underpinnings of modern society are as valid as ever. Although the social structures that support a democracy and its institutions have moved away from their religious and traditional origins, their effects are still felt. My work starts from the assumption that democratic structures in Germany have taken root and that these structures demand from actors to conceptualize their positions into terms with which they could be justified in the framework of these structures and be understood in the framework of these structures. Nevertheless, Plessner reminds us, that our convictions, even if they take on the form of rational ties to institutions, are still in connection with our past. This connection is marked in a culture-specific way. The historical and cultural traditions of the United States are radically distinct from those of Europe. It is partly owing to these differences that a stable democracy in Germany emerged later than as in the United States.

Nonetheless, democratic institutions in Germany are stable, and their success has led both to rational commitments to them and, at the same time, grounded understanding of their underlying values inside a German cultural and historical context. Obviously, both at the level of understanding (the cultural level) as well as the level of ties (the individual and cultural level), these bonds are different than in other cultural contexts. Nevertheless, they are no less important.

A change occurs once democratic structures have been institutionalized, and the bonds to them are stable and enforceable. If this process is successful, past cultural and historical traditions will be regarded in terms of their relevance (and comprehensibility) for these democratic institutions.

Plessner’s work helps us to understand the German cultural tradition, as it is interpreted from the perspective of democrats and their institutions. That is the positive side of what we can learn from Plessner. The negative side is also related to these traditions. Actors can bring in non-democratic traditions and their historical context into the horizons of the Lebenswelt in any discussions either for positive or for negative purposes. Jargon gives actors the opportunity to refer to historical events in a way that is antithetical to democracy, without violating a taboo and without being forced to justify these references in terms acceptable to today. In German contexts this has far-reaching implications. We can well recognize how such references function when we turn to Martin Walser. It will become clear that religious thought structure and anti-democratic traditions can be made relevant without too much bringing into question the democratic context in which they are articulated. Walser, who gave a speech before other elected representatives, is a paradigmatic example. The meaning of his speech is owing to the fact that it was framed in understandable democratic concepts, while it simultaneously excluded a particular group or chosen individuals from the rights that this tradition provides. Plessner illuminates the cultural context that feeds on the logic of marginalization.

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4. Walser: The Integration Achievements of Aggression

If one recalls the cultural background to which Martin Walser was referring in his speech for the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade award, its effect becomes understandable. In order to explore this background and its psychological meaning, I would like to reach back to Adorno and Plessner, who I have already introduced, because both — albeit in very different ways — have addressed the role of German interiority both in everyday life as in political development of Germany before and after the war. As already made clear above, Adorno’s criticism on post-war Germany with his gripping “Jargon of Authenticity” was ultimately thought of as a final reckoning with Heidegger. But his essay reads at many points almost like an interpretative handbook for Walser’s speech. On its basis, the reciprocal relationship between the philosophical tradition which Walser emphatically introduces to explain his position, and the satisfaction of taboo needs can be traced. Plessner, in turn, illustrates the religious-sociological background of this philosophical tradition. He presents a picture of social action, that, on one hand, is continually referring to cultural contexts of meaning, and on the other hand, has not disposed itself of its drive-related motives. In other words, the cultural knowledge with which Walser avails himself is produced in a meaningful culture, although it is one in which men love and hate, without being permitted to lend these feelings any expression.

At the level of the psychological effects of language, according to Adorno, there is a causal relationship between illogical arguments and drive-relief, that the argumentation is carried out at the expense of outsiders. As long as Adorno’s thesis is valid, accusing Walser’s speech of inconsistency little changes its real meaning. It retains its factuality because it is relieving. It is so designed; it is so related to its cultural meaning.

Drive-related needs that cannot be satisfied on the grounds of social and cultural sanctions are given shelter through jargon. So they are given expression. According to Adorno, however, such needs are not directly drive-dynamic, but rather social. In other words, they are culturally transformed and so have a meaning the social world that is shared by actors in a cultural sphere. The aggressive desires to which such people want to give free rein are directed against objects that are selected in each respective cultural sphere as worthy of hate. This role abrogates the normative obligations to treat the neighbor as oneself. At their expense, the acquittal of the psychological distress of the modern way of life is to be gained.

Jargon requires legitimacy. Without it, it would simply be a stringing together of aggressive statements. Following Adorno, there is a reciprocal relationship between a particular philosophical tradition (Heidegger), the societal circumstances, and a cultural-specific ethical posture (German interiority). Walser picks up this philosophical tradition in order to lay the moralistic standard with which he condemns the already uncomfortable intellectuals and their remembrance service. German interiority is the background against which his assertions gain a certain logical authority.

4.1 Walser⁸⁹

Walser believes he is speaking for das Volk when he says he can no longer stand the constant mention of the Holocaust. He is appropriating the voice of das Volk and makes out of it his own, no more separable from him. Where Walser ends and das Volk begin is not clear.⁹⁰ This lack of clarity I would like to emphasize only for a moment. For this reason, I turn to the appellations like “we” or “them”, appellations too that are bound up with the designation of one of a particular group, or a part of a group, in a general statement about the group as a whole. Such generalizations should reproduce the premises of Walser’s argument. This includes, for example, the claim, that das Volk suffer from the ongoing presence of intellectuals and their narratives about the omnipotence of mass murder. Not one suppertime in the country is holy! There too, Auschwitz lurks. Suffering is a decisive moment in the making of modern jargon. In its function, this suffering is interchangeable with Adorno’s coercion. It legitimizes the retaliation that then follows.

Martin Walser’s speech gives the impression that he has little interest in influencing the opinions of the listeners through persuasion. He forgoes the usual demonstration of new points of view.⁹¹ It would be superfluous in any case. Instead, he preaches to the choir. His speech is to help the listener stand by his opinion. It is intended to give new strength to those who were not prepared to speak out about “the truth” because of their fear, or, as Walser likes to put it, because of their audacity. The meaning of Walser’s speech therefore not that it provides new “audacious” arguments — who has never heard a derogatory opinion about the forced employment at Auschwitz? — but rather that it rolls up old ones in a way such that they gain topicality. Walser’s project is therefore effective because his interpretation of reality corresponds to the perception of most of his listeners. In this respect, the function of Walser’s speech involves encouraging his listeners to reconcile their official position on the historical burden of Germany with their actual thoughts. Not only would they be right, they would also additionally be true. The media, the intellectuals, and the political preachers⁹² want to change sides. They want to make it clear that they are better than us. They even want to harm us. To fight back is therefore only self-defense⁹³:

“Mine is not the trivial reaction to such painful sentences: hopefully it’s not true, what’s been so crassly said to us. . . . It exceeds my moral-political imagination, so to speak, to hold what is said as true. I have an unprovable hunch: that those who appear with such statements mean to harm us because they find that we have deserved it. Probably they even want to harm themselves. But also us too. All of us. The limit: all Germans. For that is certainly clear. In no other language can a “Volk”, a community, a society, be so spoken of in the last quarter of the 20th century. That you can only say of Germans. At most, as far as I see, of Austrians. Everyone knows our historical burden, the everlasting shame, there is no day that we cannot hold this before us. Could it be, that the intellectuals who accuse us, in so doing, want to hold before us our shame, have done so because they have fallen for a second into the illusion that, having worked again to bring together a gruesome remembrance service, they have apologized a little, and for a moment they were even closer to the victims than to the perpetrators.”

I ask myself, against what background does such a description of reality make sense? Does anyone believe that intellectuals and others in the remembrance service want to hurt us Germans — all.

Walser was better able than his literary colleagues to linguistically grasp reality, Schirrmacher asserted in his laudatory speech. Walser’s tone shows, therefore, the direction to those who hunger for the “true” and “real”. The meaning of the term “reality”, for Schirrmacher, means something like “conservative”: someone who deals with reality, who engages with reality as it really is, and not as it could be dreamed of. Conclusion: Walser is not a socially critical dreamer. Therefore “we”, the listeners, should be particularly interested in what Walser, in his soap-box speech, considers change-worthy. It will surely be something tangible: “What will Walser’s own impulses be, since he, as few poets before, has been proven right by reality?” Schirrmacher asks, knowing full well the answer.

Walser’s speech is designed to disappear the borders between him, the presenting writers, and the listeners, above all Germany’s political and cultural elite. Walser does not begin his speech in the first person. Walser speaks of himself as “the one chosen” from whom a sermon is expected. He is unsure, indecisive, presumably like the listener would be in his place, as to what he should say. His uncertainly should be acceptable to the listeners. It relieves that historical burden that apparently is taken along with into Paulskirche: namely, the burden of the expectation to be confronted again with the history, once again go through with the gruesomeness and the eternal reproachment for it, for which they no longer want to be liable. Instead, Walser seizes on surprise. In his place — he goes on — the audience would have considered whether they should not say something nice, “that is to say, something pleasant, invigorating, temperate like the Peace Price.” Maybe even about trees, “(for) to talk about trees is no longer a crime, because many among them are sick now”. The allusion to Brecht is surely appreciated by one or the other in the public who noticed it. But almost all have understood the subtext without having studied Brecht. Only old, pitiful men or dying forests, things that really make for a guilty conscience, may be the theme of a Sunday stump speech in Paulskirche:

“A Sunday pulpit, Paulskirche, public publicity, media presence, and then something beautiful! No, the one chosen for the prize had already wised up, without any help from the outside, to the fact that that would not be allowed. But then he was told clearly, that it would be expected from him to give a critical Sunday speech, the freedom-thirsty soul resisted once more. That I would have needed to justify my potpourri of beautiful things was very clear to me.”

The main message from Walser’s Sunday speech is already contained in this statement in nuce. First, a change of perspective takes place in these sentences. He is joined by those who would like to take part with others in the sincere joy over the real value of beautiful things in this world. He and I know, however, about the expectations of the Sunday speech. Both know, that by default, they must torment themselves with a guilty conscience that they do not really feel. He refrains from criticism on this unspoken rule and remains silent. I rebel against it and speak aloud what both are already thinking.

The change from he to I is, however, only illusory or “apparent”, to reach back to one of Walser’s preferred terms. Neither he nor I is congruent with Walser. He and I are really more like terms that are at any time interchangeable, “at any time usable”. They register the equality of Walser’s emotions and those of the public. In this way, the boundaries between he and I disappear.

The Walser who speaks in the first person, only steps in after the statement cited above. Only then can he take possession of his own person. However the message that Walser conveys has, surprisingly, quickly taken on a life of its own. Walser speaks literally right out of his soul to his listener. It is also their ire that Walser to which Walser gives an outlet when he talks about the wishes of the “chosen one” when he was still him. The fear of the “moral cudgel” of Auschwitz unifies. For this is just what is expected from a Sunday speech in Paulskirche. The fear is, however, lifted little by little, beginning with the pointed remark, “And immediately the justification (if one is speaking about trees): to talk about trees is no longer a crime, because many among them are sick now”. Walser’s goal is less to speak for himself as to tell the audience: I am on your side, I know you, I, the writer, who in his role as an intellectual enjoys the freedom of the court jester and therefore may say, … I understand you all. I know that you, “das Volk”, are forced daily to expiate the iniquity held against “us”. I, who now dares with my own voice to speak, will stand against the pressure from outside on your behalf. I refuse to ensure these unreasonable demands any longer. Nonetheless, I would like to start my little resistance humbly. Because, like you, I am simply humble. I begin, “(at) best with such confessions: I close myself off to evils to which I can contribute no remedy. I had to learn to look the other way.”

It is interesting on which grounds Walser holds a broader study with the past as morally reprehensible. That “I” with which Walser avails himself finds a broader examination of the Holocaust uncomfortable. He is no anti-Semite who thinks like that, as much as a man who feels unjustly diverted from his beautiful thoughts. The standard which ultimately determines the moral authority of an examination into Germany’s past, puts security in lieu of justice. If the security of the inner room of thought is disturbed, the person responsible must be brought to account. But it need not come to that. For jargon becomes used as a preventative measure too. It “shelters him from the uncomfortableness of seriously speaking to that thing that he does not understand, and indeed possibly permits him to feign an objective relationship to it. For this, jargon is so well-suited because it always merges the illusion of an absent concrete entity with a refined finish.” (Adorno,1973: 467) The aggression against the stranger who disturbs security through his presence, is no different than the other side of the person who appreciates only the inner attitude and disdains worldly action, particularly if they are successful. Plessner named such an attitude “worldly piety” and observed it as a precondition of the German fascism.

I suspect it was the message — surely more than the arguments — that Walser also felt irritation in the presence of victims, that made the hearts of his listeners flutter: “The gesture of speech here is that of eye to eye. Anyone who looks at one deep in the eye, would like to hypnotize them, gain power over them, always on about the threat: Are you true to me? No traitor?, no Judas? … ”(Adorno,197[3]⁹⁴: 465)

Walser does not threaten. He reacts to a threat. The democratization of jargon has more evenly distributed its practice. In other words, one does not threaten, one hits back with words. Under these conditions can the enlightened democrat demand his rights and knock the trouble-makers — like Bubis — back to their deserved place. In this frame, it concerns the position of the victim in the present; whether one can stand it as a constituent part of contemporary life, or whether the irritation of the shame that he represents is too much. With this background, the intervention of Bubis was a component of the message. Bubis only confirms that statement that Walser wants to communicate. His outrage should really make it clear to everyone: we do not want to see Bubis any more.

Because Bubis, yes, his person, is the ultimate reminder of the shame. The good, truly efficient, that is, the “worldly pious” person, who cares little about the world and all the more about the truthfulness of his own actions, feels especially angry when he realizes that his sincere feelings are not recognized.

“But security as existential, out of something longed-for and denied, becomes something in the here-and-now of the present, regardless of what prevents it. The feeling of security is aimed at feeling at home with oneself, so foisting the summer freshness for life. How the landscape becomes uglier before the one who marvels, with those words: how beautiful! It disturbs, this is what happens those needs, habits, institutions, that pawn themselves off, underscoring their own naivete instead of opposing it. Kogon’s report, the worst atrocities of the concentration camps were perpetrated by those young sons of peasants, directs all talk on security.” (Adorno,1973: 430)

Walser cites a quote from Hegel: “The conscience, this deep interior solitude with it, where all external and all narrow-mindedness is vanished, this continuous seclusion is in itself.” Walser interprets this quote in this way:

“The result of philosophical assistance: a good conscience is not one. Everyone is alone with his conscience. Public acts of conscience are therefore in danger of becoming symbolic. And nothing is more alien⁹⁵ to the conscience as symbolism, no matter how well intended. This continuous seclusion into oneself is not able to be represented. It must remain interior solitude. No one can demand from others what they would like, but who does not want to give.”

Walser’s interiority brings a sacred halo to statements that were previously frowned upon. The step from interior solitude to revolt is not far. He takes possession of those taboo desires of his public seemingly in order to dispose these people from their external constraints. The coercion, however, exerted by Germany’s historical burden, which allegedly is carried out on the backs of “das Volk”, is no longer in the narrower sense societal, but instead cultural. I simply utilize one of the contemporaneous jargonisms. In the place of a threat through an omnipotent power steps in the threat of cunning and illicit propagators of a bad conscience.

The power that “das Volk” are supposed to fear may be an illusion. It is however tailored to modern circumstances. Therefore, this power can influence the actions of actors, as all parties accept that a violation of the rules to which it relates triggers legitimate sanctions. For this reason, I have above differentiated between power, force, and influence, where power includes the legitimate application of force in the event that the agreed-upon conditions of a legitimate arrangement are not fulfilled. Influence cannot reach back to any such sanctions. Coercion is then applied when a consensus cannot be achieved under culturally acceptable conditions.⁹⁶

Walser’s “soldiers of opinion”, who hold a “moral gun” to the heads of das Volk have at the most, power and largely only influence. The power of these soldiers is supposedly based on reminding Germans of a historical burden. A burden that is recognized but should cease to make its presence felt every day through reference:

“Everyone knows our historical burden, the everlasting shame, there is no day that we cannot hold this before us. Could it be, that the intellectuals who accuse us, in so doing, want to hold before us our shame, have done so because they have fallen for a second into the illusion that, having worked again to bring together a gruesome remembrance service, they have apologized a little, and for a moment they were even closer to the victims than to the perpetrators.”

“The intellectuals” are the torturers who have demanded from “us” (Germans) an insincere attitude. From there, they hope to rid themselves of the very burden that they exalt by dealing exclusively with it. To read Germans the riot act that they already know, has, according to Walser, has the sole function of absolving those intellectuals who strive to assign guilt to others and so want be integrated into the ranks of victims.

Many critics of Walser’s speech have raised the question of who could be meant by this broad-brush appellation of “intellectual”. Walser quotes two such intellectuals without naming them, although it seems as if he wishes to reference an entire subculture: it is composed of those who have devoted themselves to working out history. Walser says nothing of who he means by that. He speaks of his personal impression, in knowledge that it is shared by most of the listeners. Critics who respond to Walser’s claims with reference to the fact that they are patently false misunderstand the message of his speech. As a result, they do not succeed in interpreting the purpose of his speech, because it does not require the refutation of obviously false statements, but rather the exploration of its psychological effects and cultural functions.

According to Adorno, the deception of jargon is effective because, in the best possible way, it provides a “false” answer to a “real” problem. Therefore, jargon can, as I have formulated above in borrowing from Foucault, say “yes”. Jargon is only then effective if the distortion of the social “reality” that it promotes happens in places where real changes could occur. The term “real” refers to those material bases of society. Instead of speaking about the economic inequality that results in many people having to resign themselves to an existence without shelter, one speaks about “essential services”. The distress that jargon counters with cunning means, is not devoid of any basis. Rather, jargon perverts the source of those needs.

Therefore, jargon remains an answer to a human challenge that, in its original form, was no mere deception. Jargon sets itself in places where human needs could be given expression in order to take away the impact of the urge of these needs in a now-distorted form. If Adorno’s concept of jargon is to be taken seriously, then it must be asked which “needs” Walser is recognizing and placing in a distorted form to commission a misleading critique on Germany’s historical burden. In other words, Walser’s criticism can only be responded to if one goes a step further than his critics and asks the following question: What did Walser correctly recognize from the perspective of almost all his listeners and distorted? Presumably it was a distortion of a real need that appealed to his listeners.

In order to come to the level at which this question can be answered, we must take a step back to first analyze the term “needs”. For the term acquires (in the strictest sense) a peculiar meaning in Adorno’s “The Jargon of Authenticity”. A need is first — as ordinarily — something like a feeling that urges one to select a goal of action that will bring about a relief. What is peculiar is that in Adorno’s “The Jargon of Authenticity” these urging feelings are largely conscious and at the most pre-conscious. In other words, Adorno’s needs are instinctual drives, although not drives in the Freudian sense. They are not repressed. In fact, they cannot be spoken of as an unconscious process.

So its source is “social”.⁹⁷ It originates out of the perversion of the intersubjective moment, out of which a satisfaction of anthropological-philosophical needs of people could have followed. Adorno’s willingness to capture such with help from anthropological-philosophical categories carries with it the danger of an insufficient consideration of their cultural specificity. Plainly assuming the perversion of human needs as such replaces the concept of cultural action with an ontological concept of human needs. Therefore, I have translated Adorno’s description of such needs into the conceptual terms of this approach in order to be able to capture the sociological content of his statements in the terms of my own approach.

4.2 Walser’s Cultural Background

Meanwhile, the question as to whether Walser’s speech is fashioned to provide an outlet for an aggressive attitude and posture of the public remains unanswered. In an exploration of the ever-changing meaning of taboo statements, a consideration of the fervor of the action is relevant both from the psychological as well as the cultural perspective. The attempt to do conceptual justice to fervent action must be pursued meticulously. Walser appeals to a religious tradition that Plessner summarized under the name “worldly piety”. The religious-sociological background of Walser’s critique is self-evident to the listeners. It is exactly this self-evidentness that permits Walser to present his approach as universal. His premises therefore need neither be substantiated nor critically examined. They need only mere reference.⁹⁸

Walser’s critique is of course, no antisemitic rabble-rousing. It is an appeal to the conscience. Borrowing from Levy’s pointed remarks, the idea suggests itself of Walser’s speech being nailed to a door as a call. But a call against what? — Against the intellectuals, presumably, against the “Holocaust sermonizers”.

With this background, the origin of Walser’s assessment of the role, function, and form of remembrance is able to be classified. Walser mobilizes –- of course, unconsciously — a medley of classical criticism of Jewry and places it in the service of his objections to “the remembrance service workers”. Walser becomes a Protestant. The doctrine: Rid yourself as much as possible of your cultural environment and its historical background. Be an individual, no simple member of a whole. The transference of the conscience to them is not possible in any case. The ritual experiences the most contempt. They are simply an expression of the remembrance service: : “Auschwitz is not suitable for this threatening routine, always a means of intimidation or moral cudgel or even a chore. What comes out of it has the quality of lip service.” The echo of the interpretation of Jewish practices, which for example, can be found in Hegel, resonates in these statements. Laws that rouse the past awake have always encountered the disdain of protesting Christians. The charge reads that such laws remove the subject of his moral judgment, additionally, leads to mere subservience, and indeed hinders the self-evident interior revelation. Belief can only take place within. Rituals are therefore then the equivalent of the reprehensible idea that the morality of a person prospers in a whole, that is, in coexistence with practices that are borne by a whole. Seen this way, the equivalence of rituals with “lip service” is only logical.

All things considered, Walser’s determination should not tempt one to the conclusion that he is conscious of the meaning of his statements in historical context. Quite the opposite. I suspect Walser only senses an antipathy, that seems to him familiar in the context of his general criticism from “the” intellectuals, memory service workers, media, and journalists. Walser considers it unreasonable in that respect, that the autonomous conscience be hijacked, its inviolate enclosure stripped and handed over to an alien authority. Each person is justified in protesting against it. Said differently, against the background of the putatitvely self-evident moral-ethical attitude, the regard for taboos in a society and the ritualization of cultural messages equally represent an insult to a person’s inherent calling to judge right and wrong according to her conscience.

The culturally legitimate background of Walser’s statements is of enormous significance, not only because it alone empowers Walser to condemn the current engagement with the Holocaust in such a way, but also because claims taken as self-evident are examined for their validity against this background. It is the interplay of cultural legitimacy with taboo statements, but which would be perceived by most as self-evident and therefore correct, that ensures the cultural effectiveness of these claims. Walser’s criticism can be traced and understood by everyone according to its primary norms and values of “worldly piety”, as described by Plessner. Should taboos fall with it, Martin Walser wants to say to us, then they should never been permitted to emerge.

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1. I feel it necessary, out of an abundance of caution, to encourage a proper context around Marx, the very mention of whom can stir up some responses among those on political right that I am not always of the belief are necessarily as well-grounded as they could be. For one, Marxism, Leninism, and the “cultural neo-Marxism” that is more in discourse with contemporary issues surrounding identity politics all need to be differentiated from each other, as well as differentiated from political philosophies surrounding the use of state power more broadly. One might assert that I am somehow excusing mass starvation and scapegoating “kulaks” and communism in encouraging any thoughtfulness around Marx; I am well aware of all these issues, but I would respond that if one fails to differentiate the Marx of Das Kapital from all that comes after, and if one fails to understand the varying shades of Marxist thought in terms of their own self-understanding, one will fail to properly diagnose the issue. (By way of example, Herbert Marcuse, who was in the Frankfurt School, wrote a book in 1958 arguing against the expression of Marxism as it took place in Soviet Russia: Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis.)

2. KdM: Throughout the dissertation, my use of the words like “drives”, “instincts”, “impulses” or ‘urges” are attempts to translate and contextualize what I understand is a Freudian discussion about “der Trieb” or “the drive”. As I dug into the etymology of this word, I discovered may have its origins related to “driving cattle”, so it seems to have a root regarding stimulus-response. All of that being said, the experienced translator of Freud into English would surely wince to see me casually bandy about these terms together, as my very cursory dive into Freud for this piece showed me that there is great distinction made amongst the Freudians between all of these words. To my Freudians, I know well the pain of some newcomer who fell off the apple cart yesterday inexpertly handling a topic delicate and precious to you, and I am sorry.

3. KdM: As I understand it, this phrase “verpönte Wünsche”, translated here as “taboo desires”, is a term Freud uses.

4. KdM: I see this title of Helmuth Plessner’s “Der Verspätete Nation” more widely translated as “The Delayed Nation”, although I am not able to ascertain for certain at this time if the whole of the book has ever actually been translated into English. For reference, in Spanish, into which the book has been translated, this title is rendered as “La nación tardía”. I don’t quite like “delayed” for the title, and it is translated less frequently as “The Belated Nation”, which I believe is a better fit.

5. KdM: In the original text, this appears to be an inadvertent repetition of the same sentences from a few paragraphs prior, but I have retained it as it appears for the sake of integrity and faithfulness to the original text.

6. KdM: The word I translate here as “urge” is Triebhaftigkeit, a term that seems to be more in vogue with Freudians, as discussed above, but I cannot find a very suitable word in English beyond “lust” or “lustfulness” but these also don’t quite fit, so I resorted to “urges”. “Impulses” was also a consideration.

7. (Footnote 1 in “Aggression”): Honneth’s criticism of Adorno shows clearly the devastating consequences of forcing a constructive approach. (see Honneth, Kritik der Macht: Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie (1985)). Honneth’s argument is by no means new. It is based on the work of Durkheim and has already undergone a thorough treatment in Parsons. Honneth’s interpretation of Adorno’s writings overshoots the mark. Namely, he applies Adorno’s premises to Adorno’s societal theory. While this logical method is formally correct, it however assumes that Adorno is as consistent as Honneth’s reconstruction of his premises. This assumption is not tenable, though.

8. KdM: While I have managed to translate some 30,000 words of a dense dissertation from German to English, I have not managed to figure out if Substack actually supports an underline feature, so I have used bold instead to emphasize words that Dr. Karp underlines in his own dissertation.

9. (Footnote 2 in “Aggression”) See Parsons: The Structure of Social Action (1937), and: Economy and Society (1956). On the basis of a concept of “unit actions” and an examination of utilitarianism, Parsons attempts to develop criteria for assessing social science approaches. Utilitarian approaches presuppose, for example, a form of rationality by which actions can be evaluated: “The other principal element of the subsystem of action which is of special interest here may now be approached – the character of the normative element of the means-end relationship in the unit act. There has been, in the thought with which this discussion has been concerned, an overwhelming stress upon one particular type, which may be called the ‘rational norm of efficiency.’ Hence the second predominant feature of the developing system here outlined, atomism being the first, is the problem of ‘rational’ action. It would not be correct to speak of the rationalism of the wider body of thought since a large section of it has been marked by the minimization of the role of rational norms. But in spite of this disagreement over the concrete role of rationality there has been, on the whole, a common standard of rationality and equally important, the absence of any other positive conception of a normative element governing the means-end relationship. Departures from the rational norm have been described in such negative terms as ‘irrational’ and ‘non-rational.’ ” (Parsons, 1937: 56) The problem of normative evaluation of social action will haunt us throughout our discussion. It would go beyond the framework of this text to examine it from all sides. We will therefore treat rationality in the Lebenswelt, but not as a philosophical concept.

10. (Footnote 3 in “Aggression”): Whose work is encompassed by the term “classic” is a debated issue in sociology. I consider Freud, Durkheim, Parsons, Simmel, Marx, and Weber as classics.

11. KdM: The translation of “abweichende” here and elsewhere, as Dr. Karp uses it quite a bit, is a challenge. One could translate it as “deviant”, but elsewhere in this section Dr. Karp is using this term to encompass behaviors he clearly regards positively, such as Dr. King’s civil protest movement, and the term “deviant”, even though it is being used to describe behavior that deviates outside of preexisting social frames (such as Rosa Parks’ bus ride) has, to me, often an implicit negative moral judgement on the behavior itself that doesn’t seem to be intended by Dr. Karp here. “Divergent” or “dissenting” both sound too clinical in English, and neither seem to capture the bravery demonstrated in a person who steps outside a preexisting social frame. So I settled on “transgressive” where I believe it fits uses such as these, which in my opinion better captures the daring nature of the actor while making less of a moral judgement on their actual behavior. Elsewhere, the reader may notice, I have translated this as “deviant” or “divergent” where I think it more a appropriate fit. To the extent the reader sees one of these words, the reader may safely assume I am simply translating “abweichende”.

12. (Footnote 4 in “Aggression”) See Gould: Revolution in the Development of Capitalism (1987).

13. (Footnote 5 in “Aggression”) Primarily „Jenseits des Lustprinzips“ (Freud, 1920) and „Das Ich und das Es“ (Freud, 1923).

14. (Footnote 6 in “Aggression”) Parsons, 1970, 18-19.

15. (Footnote 7 in “Aggression”) The amalgamation of concepts that draw from Parsons’ concept of culture or from Habermas’ concept of the Lebenswelt, is technically not possible. At the least it requires an explanation. Parsons dismisses the concept of the Lebenswelt. It can nevertheless be helpful to understand the process of such displacement. In the context of this work the instructive relationships between system and Lebenswelt are established. Culture and Lebenswelt are not mutually interchangeable concepts. Therefore we will extensively engage ourselves with the concepts of Lebenswelt, culture, and system, each of which sometimes draws in part from traditions that are not compatible with each other. The goal is to take into account the concepts of personality and Lebenswelt within the cultural systems of Parsons, and in so doing, establish a basis for a new conceptual framework.

16. (Footnote 8 in “Aggression”) In saying this, the students of Freud and Durkheim should feel addressed. (Parsons, 1970: 20)

17. (Footnote 9 in “Aggression”) Parsons, 1970: 20.

18. (Footnote 10 in “Aggression”) Parsons, 1970: 20.

19. (Footnote 11 in “Aggression”) Parsons adds: “We had best begin this next phase of exposition by stating what are to us the two most fundamental theorems of our general treatment. The first of these is that the primary structure of the human personality as a system of action is organized about the internalization of systems of social objects which originated as the role-units of the successive series of social systems in which the individual has come to be integrated in the course of his life history. (...) The second theorem is that this structure of the personality develops, not primarily by the process of the modification of ‘primary drives’ or ‘instincts’ but by a process of differentiation of a very simple internalized object-system (...) into progressively more complex systems.” (Parsons, Family Structure and the Socialization of the Child, 1955: 54).

20. (Footnote 12 in “Aggression”) I use the phrase “for the time being” in this context, without making reference to the background from which it originally and in a very strict sense takes its meaning. The reader who is familiar with this background is rightly suspicious. It suggests a use of a concept from Schütz, freely borrowed from Husserl, which is simply not acceptable, especially since Parsons, as already discussed, has expressly refuted this model. In this context I am still compelled to leave for the moment those contradictions that should be directly addressed. Additionally, Parsons’ approach is not aimed at concepts that recognize the stability of the system, but instead at a explanation of this stability as such. In this respect, even within this framework, the terms that describe the constituent components of a culture can be used without issue. The epistemological foundation of these approaches, however, requires a justification. In other words, Parsons’ objection to the use of terminology does not apply to the concepts but instead to their conceptual framework. With that, however, I put off another problem: namely, the meaningfulness of a terminology which is taken out of his approach that is then used within the context of another approach. In this context, I view the terminology that I use as an instrument that I may henceforth claim for my own purposes, because they can be connected to Parsons’ approach, even albeit with some effort.

21. KdM: There is no good companion word for this in English, so I have chosen to leave it untranslated, but it seems to suggest something like the person-I’m-with-for-now, but can also mean significant other.

22. (Footnote 13 in “Aggression”) Parsons, 1970: 22.

23. (Footnote 14 in “Aggression”) See Simmel, Georg: Soziologie: Untersuchung über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (1992).

24. (Footnote 15 in “Aggression”) Parsons writes further: “With increasing emphasis recent analytical work has borne upon us the extreme importance of the fact that any large scale social system (a society) should be considered not in a ‘monolithic’ way, but as an intricate network of interdependent and interpenetrating subsystems. This has been one of the most important contributions of the concept of role, to throw into relief the fact that the same individual participates in many social systems not merely one.” (Parsons, 1955: 36)

25. (Footnote 16 in “Aggression”) See Parsons: Social Structure and Personality (1970).

26. (Footnote 17 in “Aggression”) It should be emphasized that it does not ipso facto follow from Parsons’ argument that the caregiver must be a woman. Parsons writes to this point: “it is furthermore most important not to confuse the mother-object (...) with the concrete woman as seen in the common sense terms by an adult who knows her.” (Parsons, 1955: 44, Footnote 14). And he writes further: “Even at this (early) stage we will treat the problem first in social interaction terms, attempting to interweave with this the appropriate consideration of psychological process in both adult and infant. For simplicity we will refer to mother and child, but recognizing that ‘agent of care’ is the essential concept and that it need not be confined to one specific person, it is the function which is essential.” (Parsons, 1955: 44) Parsons is naturally constrained by a terminology of his time, which easily gives the impression that he actually believes that socialization only succeeds if traditional circumstances prevail. It is certainly unfortunate that Parsons has done so little to avoid that confusion which leads to such a reading, especially since he has no intention of approving of traditional family structures. The mother, that is the one with whom the child has its first relationship and the one who “leverages” the libidinal “Instinkte des Kindes“ [KdM: “Instincts of the child”; here a Freudian concept discussed] in order to draw them toward socialization, is critical for the transformation of the “pleasure principle” into the “love principle”. The figure can be a man without any impact to Parsons’ argument. It is important to remember that Parsons wants to introduce analytical arguments. As such, the categories must make roles or functions comprehensible, but should not contain any content. Whether Parsons succeeds in introducing such categories is of course controversial, but certainly not that he strives toward it. (See to this point Habermas: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Band II (1981))

27. (Footnote 18 in “Aggression”) See J. Laplanche und J.-B. Pontalis: Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse (1967). Here we recall the two meanings of the term “identification”: namely viewing something (or someone) identically and actions, whereby two individuals become identical to each other. (J. Laplanche und J.-B. Pontalis, 1967: 219ff.) The term gained increasing significance for Freud, because he wanted to explain (and had to explain) how the psychic apparatus develops in such a way so that an “Ego” would emerge from an “Id” and a “Superego” from there. Otherwise, social action would not be comprehensible conceptually.

28. (Footnote 19 in “Aggression”): Parsons, 1955: 36ff.

29. (Footnote 20 in “Aggression”): Parsons, 1970: 91.

30. (Footnote 21 in “Aggression”): Parsons 1970: 90.

31. (Footnote 22 in “Aggression”): See J. Laplanche und J.-B. Pontalis: Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse, Band I (1967). Here occupation is defined as cathaxis.

32. (Footnote 23 in “Aggression”) See J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis: Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse, Band I (1967: 93).

33. (Footnote 24 in “Aggression”) If one wanted to take as a basis the difference between language and drive, one could utilize the formulation: a form of communication through which cathaxis occurs.

34. (Footnote 25 in “Aggression”): Parsons, 1970, 23.

35. KdM: The word used here, “Reparaturleistung”, does literally mean “repair service” as in a place one takes broken machinery to be repaired.

36. (Footnote 26 in “Aggression”): Habermas writes to this point: “Communicative actors always move within the horizon of their Lebenswelt; they cannot step out of it.” (Habermas, 1987, 192) Following that, I would also like to note here that the assumption that actors cannot simply step out of their culture, either through conscious action or through chance, underlies the approaches of almost all of the classics of sociology. However, the immediate impact of this assumption can only be thoroughly examined after sociology has first referred to the communicative situation. Therefore it is little wonder that Mead, Parsons, and Habermas furnish us with so detailed an account of these facts in the social life. For they all set their sights on an examination of the internalization of social action within the framework of communicative systems of culture.

37. KdM: “Nouveau riche”, or “new money”, is my best attempt to capture Dr. Karp’s idiomatic usage of “Lackaffe”, which directly translates to “lacquer monkey”; someone who has great wealth, but little taste, and thinks highly of themselves while being generally socially frowned upon by others. “Dandy” or “showboat” might be alternative translations, but to me these terms sound rather outdated.

38. (Footnote 27 in “Aggression”) The processes in which information is brought up in the scope of a conversation and the structures of the Lebenswelt out of which this information is composed, must also be examined in further detail. In this context I will refer to the work of Habermas, who undertakes a revision of Schütz and Luckmann in such a way that their somewhat ontological foundation is no longer applicable, but the instruments that are derived from it are still useful. (See Habermas: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Band II (1981), and: Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1984)).

39. (Footnote 28 in “Aggression”) Saying this of course speaks to a complicated problem in social theory, namely the relationship that culture and system have to each other. Building on the concept of the Lebenswelt, must one, I believe, come to the conclusion that a system can clearly have autarkic characteristics, although not (entirely) autopoietic ones. Conversely, it can be inferred that in a crisis, each autarkic redundant system must be problematized in terms of its cultural meeting. (See Habermas: Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (1973), and: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Band I and II). I also further assume that a crisis can be related to the goals, norms, and values of a culture. I hold that the criticism of Habermas from Parsons’ perspective, that he conflates norms and values in „Legitimationsprobleme des Spätkapitalismus“, is justified.

40. (Footnote 29 in “Aggression”) Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Band II, 1987: 191.

41. (Footnote 30 in “Aggression”) That this is so is as clear as day, and examples to this point scarcely need be mentioned. Still I would like to give the reader an example, and indeed out of the area of system. In the framework of a system there is a logical form of argumentation, which is illogical in the culture. A paradigmatic example is the praxis “arguing in the alternative”, which is particular judicial arguments. An attorney can put forward contradictory arguments, without becoming implicated in contradictions. If her client has, for example, been accused of premeditated murder, the attorney can argue that her client was out of the country at the time of the crime, or if he was in the country, then he was not in the city, if he was in the city, then he was at the bar down the street, if he was at the scene, then he had a quarrel with the victim, if he had a quarrel with the victim, then he was not in his right mind.

42. (Footnote 31 in “Aggression”) See Habermas: Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, Band II (1981).

43. (Footnote 32 in “Aggression”) Habermas, 1987: 192.

44. (Footnote 33 in “Aggression”) Parsons, The Structure of Social Action, 1937: 16.

45. (Footnote 34 in “Aggression”) Parsons 1937: 17.

46. (Footnote 35 in “Aggression”) Parsons, Über wesentliche Ursachen und Formen der Aggressivität, 1947.

47. (Footnote 36 in “Aggression”) Parsons, Beiträge zur soziologischen Theorie, 1968: 224–225.

48. (Footnote 37 in “Aggression”) Parsons 1968: 223, Footnote 1.

49. (Footnote 38 in “Aggression”) Parsons, Social Theory and Modern Society, 1967: 298.

50. (Footnote 39 in “Aggression”) This concept of coercion, which obviously draws on the social science tradition following Hobbes, overlooks all kinds of forms of action that relate to mutual understanding. Here, interaction in the social world, is, figuratively speaking, held together with screws, which pierce through the culture by means of force in order to ensure that everything does not collapse into pieces. The Hobbesian concept of power all too often tempts one to assume that aggressiveness and power ought to be interchangeable; or alternatively, that aggressiveness forms the emotional basis for power. Power is clearly being confused here with coercion. Since Parsons’ criticism, the Hobbesian concept of power has proven untenable. Parsons structures his work about power in reference to Durkheim. However, Parsons is certainly not responsible for the wider dissemination of a post-Hobbsesian concept of power. Only Foucault, who unmistakably picks up on Parsons’ work, brought about a new formulation of the power concept to a broader public. Foucault utilizes his term in the background of a completely different tradition, so that power becomes a medium in and of itself, or rather, power is no longer a medium, but instead a structure that produces meaning. The influence of Heidegger is plainly self-evident and, for Foucault, leads to conceptual difficulties that can barely be resolved. It says much about the state of social sciences, that one of the few steps toward epistemological progress, which is generally recognized as such, is a resolution in which a concept of power based on coercion is then replaced by a sociological concept of power. (Compare Parsons: Sociological Theory and Modern Society (1967), and: Foucault, Surveiller et Punir (1993))

51. (Footnote 40 in “Aggression”) Parsons, 1967: 298.

52. (Footnote 41 in “Aggression”) Parsons, 1967: 308.

53. (Footnote 42 in “Aggression”) See Habermas: Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Band II (1981).

54. (Footnote 43 in “Aggression”) See Gould: Revolution in the Development of Capitalism (1987).

55. (Footnote 44 in “Aggression”) In contrast to Parsons, Freud utilizes a dual concept of drives that adds a destructive drive to the libidinal drive.

56. (Footnote 45 in “Aggression”) Parsons’ use of aggression particularly presupposes that aggression directed against one’s own family is taboo. In this essay, Parsons is exclusively concerned with aggression in modern Western societies. The societies Parsons had in mind at the time, were also Christian in their religious character. With the background of the developments since the Second World War, the question arises to what extent his approach can be applied to non-Christian modern societies. On one hand, Christian teaching demands an especially high level of repression of aggression. As is known, Freud held this repression of aggression, which was raised under Paul to a prime imperative, responsible for the vehemence of antisemitism. (See Freud: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1930)) On the other hand, Christianity places its concept of normative order above that of the family (see Bellah: Beyond Belief (1970)). Parsons does not analyze the impact of a teaching that normatively places the family above society. Here, it cannot simply be further assumed that increasing the normative obligations to the family (to the disadvantage of society) leads to an increase in aggressiveness. This is certainly possible, but is essentially only rationally deduced. To place the obligations to the family above the obligations to society could also lead to a more direct encounter with aggressive desires and therefore result in a more adequate satisfaction of the same.

57. (Footnote 46 in “Aggression”) There are some authors, like Axel Honneth, who apply Adorno’s argumentation exclusively to ideas of power and coercion. Therefore, the social science approach is far too superficial to be able to grasp the gamut of social action.

58. (Footnote 47 in “Aggression”) Honneth, Kritik der Macht. Reflexionsstufen einer kritischen Gesellschaftstheorie. Frankfurt am Main, 1985.

59. (Footnote 48 in “Aggression”) Goethe’s “Faust” essentially describes this problem, which Honneth would prefer to ignore, namely: that the spiritual bond which actually binds Adorno’s essay together, cannot be entirely reduced to the explicitly stated premises he has made. Honneth attempts to reconstruct Adorno’s approach alongside the explicitly introduced premises he gathers from Adorno. The essay that is “reconstructed” in this way is, however, of Honneth’s creation, and no longer from Adorno: “Who wants to know and describe that which lives / Look first to drive out the spirit, / Then he has the parts in his hand, / Sadly missing! Only the spiritual bond.” (Goethe, Faust, Erster Teil, zitiert nach: Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, München 1986, Band 3: 63)

60. KdM: The word being translated here is “die Herrschaft”; alternative translations are power, dominion, domination, control. I struggled with exactly which tone to put on this word, and this is where a deeper background in the Frankfurt School would have been of help. I personally don’t have an immediate negative connotation with “Herrschaft”, as this is the same term used to describe God’s dominion, God’s lordship or rule (Gottesherrschaft) but I have the impression, although it could certainly be wrong, that the Frankfurt School takes a dimmer view of Herrschaft, and, from what I have gathered, the Frankfurt School’s discussion of Herrschaft gets more broadly translated into “domination”, which is the term that I resort to more frequently, even though I personally dislike its more negative implications. Here, “colonized by rule” sounded a little more descriptively elegant to me as a first introduction of the concept, although it is the same word Herrschaft that is largely translated as “domination” elsewhere.

61. (Footnote 49 in “Aggression”) We will further address the theme of religion and jargon below. Adorno writes this: “After subtracting out the existential rigmarole, what remains left over is the reference to religious custom removed from religious content; the fact that, as objects of folklore, cultic forms outlive their mystery as empty husks, is not unmasked, but rather, with the help of jargon, is defended.” (Adorno, 1973: 429)

62. (Footnote 50 in “Aggression”) See Adorno, Aufsätze zur Gesellschaftstheorie und Methodologie, 1970.

63. (Footnote 51 in “Aggression”) Wahrig gives the following definition: “Within a language, ways of expression of certain social or professional social circles.” Larousse rather emphasizes the distortion of language: 1) Péjor. Langue savate d’un groupe professionnel, d’une science, d’une technique, d’une activité quelconque (distincte de l’argot) – 2) Fam. Langue qu’on ne comprend pas.

64. (Footnote 52 in “Aggression”) As an example: “The American role theory is so popular because it rolls out the structure of society at all. …” (Adorno, 1973: 460).

65. (Footnote 53 in “Aggression”) Those things which are self-evident in the Lebenswelt are legitimate. As such, their refutation through rational arguments does not in any way mean that that actors can give them up without any trouble.

66. (Footnote 54 in “Aggression”) Adorno speaks about Heidegger’s emphasis on the concept of dwelling, in order to illustrate the culmination of this propensity.

67. (Footnote 55 in “Aggression”) Presumably, this was the unexpressed background in the argument between Parsons and Schütz. For the concept of the Lebenswelt should repair us, to fill up the epistemological hole that for many scientists emerges through the reconsideration of the Marxist approaches, and certainly by means they held defensible. In this frame, I myself cannot turn to the question as to whether Marxist assumptions have become, in actual fact, questionable. I am only speaking here of the implications that follow out of many scientists holding the reconsideration of Marxist assumptions for a fact.

68. (Footnote 56 in “Aggression”) In Parsons, “constitutive elements” of a culture are understood as patterns of meaning or norms of social action and fall out accordingly from the standpoint of the model. The idea of a (drive-) energy-charged language that is conferred its meaning from the culture, continually passed down, goes beyond the frame of such a model in any case. Parsons deems the phenomenological tradition upon which Schütz and Luckmann built their approach, as already overcome.

69. (Footnote 57 in “Aggression”) See Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, Bd 2, 1987.

70. (Footnote 58 in “Aggression”) At the same time, however, they function for Adorno as a normative lever. It is hardly surprising that Adorno consciously indulges himself in performative contradiction, where he again and again lets the normativity of his description seep in, but yet questions the means that could justify criticism.

71. KdM: I am here translating Dr. Karp’s use of the German word “lebenslüge” into “sham existence”, but there is no great fit for this in English. “Lebenslüge” directly translated means “life-lie”, and is not necessarily particular to a person’s own life, but can also be spoken of nations and societies. It is a very essential delusion, “living a lie”, and implies there is some more terrible truth concealed underneath it. This concept may be of special interest to the Girardians.

72. (Footnote 59 in “Aggression”) See Goethe, “Urfaust”: “Refreshment you have not won, / If it does not stream out of your own soul.” (Goethe, Faust in ursprünglicher Gestalt (Urfaust), a.a.O., Band 3: 373)

73. KdM: The term used here is an outdated legal term, “Leumundszeugnis”, which was provided by the governments of some countries as a kind of predecessor to the modern-day background check that demonstrated a person’s criminal record or lack thereof.

74. (Footnote 60 in “Aggression”) Luhmann writes in summary: The theory of instrumental-rational organization must attempt to bring its areas of research in the form of end/means-chains. That is relatively quite possible, so long as one is limiting oneself to looking at the course of action in an organized system ... (Luhmann, Niklas: Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität: über die Funktion von Zwecken in sozialen Systemen (1968))

75. (Footnote 61 in “Aggression”) See Scarry, Der Schmerz im Körper. Die Chiffren der Verletzbarkeit und die Erfindung der Kultur, 1992.

76. (Footnote 62 in “Aggression”) Freud, S. (1930), Das Unbehagen in der Kultur. GW 14, 419-506.

77. (Footnote 63 in “Aggression”) Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Frankfurt am Main 1969.

78. (Footnote 64 in “Aggression”) See Horkheimer über Antisemitismus (Horkheimer und Adorno, 1947).

79. KdM: The original sentence here already has an English word provided by Dr. Karp in the parenthetical. The German word “Sehnsucht” is usually translated as “longing”; for ease of reading here I have translated it as “yearning” (as I have elsewhere) to avoid a double use of the word in the sentence given Dr. Karp’s parenthetical. The full sentence in the original is: “Das Ergebnis ist eine Sehnsucht (oder Longing) nach etwas, das nicht greifbar ist, eine Sehnsucht, die an bereits vorhandenen destruktiven Strukturen der Lebenswelt anhaftet.”

80. (Footnote 65 in “Aggression”) Foucault, Power/Knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, 1980.

81. (Footnote 66 in “Aggression”) In this context, it perhaps should be reiterated that modernity frowns upon regression into the myths of the past: “The modern consciousness of time of course prohibits any thought of regression, of the sudden returning to the mythical origins.” (Habermas, 1985: 108)

82. (Footnote 67 in “Aggression”) See Goldhagen. Further: Brede and Karp, Eleminatorischer Antisemitismus: Wie ist die These zu halten? Psyche 51, 606-621, 1997.

83. (Footnote 68 in “Aggression”) Of course, the charge that Plessner neglects the significance of antisemitism is not fully refuted.

84. (Footnote 69 in “Aggression”) At the beginning, Plessner thus cites Thomas Mann, Deutschland und die Deutschen: “what I told to you in ragged brevity … is the history of the German interiority. This history may let us take one thing to heart: that there are not two Germanys, one evil and one good, but instead only one, whose best turned to evil through the devil’s cunning.” (Plessner, 1994: 9)

85. KdM: Here, rendering “das Volk” as “the people” doesn’t make sense in English as it suggests that people themselves are useless once nations are established, so I have chosen to retain the nominative declension of “die Idee des Volks” to suggest a more specific idea. I assume the reader is familiar enough with the use of “das Volk” in historical Nazi contexts to understand it as something like suggestive of a blood-and-soil ethnostate, although this is certainly not the entirety of its meaning, which is why I believe Dr. Karp studies it as a kind of jargonism with multiple connotations that can allow for a particular kind of communication.

86. (Footnote 70 in “Aggression”) Plessner, 1994: 37.

87. (Footnote 71 in “Aggression”) See Habermas on Heine: Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung, 1986.

88. (Footnote 72 in “Aggression”) This is no less the case if the legitimacy of such institutions is founded on an existing “questionable self-evidentness” in the Lebenswelt.

89. KdM: I am presumptuous enough to provide a little more color of my own here: the Walser speech should be understood in the context of the Berlin Holocaust memorial, which was the subject of great controversy in Germany as it was being designed and constructed in the late 1990s. Walser’s speech is given in 1998; he calls the memorial “a nightmare the size of a football field.” The Bubis referenced here is Ignatz Bubis, the chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany at the time of the speech, who was present in the audience, and was himself a survivor of the Holocaust.

90. (Footnote 73 in “Aggression”) Of course, there are indications that Walser is correct, but the dichotomy between “we” and ”them”, which forces us to make blanket statements, includes always accepting undifferentiated statements.

91. (Footnote 74 in “Aggression”) In his laudatory speech, Schirrmacher praised Walser for his “poetic investigation of the world”. He surely meant his poetic investigation “in the world”. This praise was the announcement that a socially critical opinion on current politics is not to be expected at the awarding of the Peace Prize. The terminology which Schirrmacher is implicitly using is that of Heidegger’s security. I will speak in detail below on Walser’s adherence to this tradition.

92. KdM: Here, I am translating “Sonntagsreder”, literally, “Sunday speaker”, a derivative of “Sonntagsrede”, a “Sunday speech”, which is used elsewhere in this discussion as well. As I understand it, this has more idiomatic usage in German, where it is more like a “soap box” or a “political stump speech”, playing off the notion of a “Sunday sermon” but in a more punchy, less neutrally descriptive light. Walser titled his Paulskirche speech “Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede”, which is typically translated as “Experiences While Drafting a Soap-box Speech”.

93. KdM: I note to the reader that Walser’s speech is very casually spoken in German. I also note here that I have kept in Walser’s speech his use of “das Volk” rather than translating it as “people”, as Dr. Karp comments on Walser’s usage of the particular term “das Volk” elsewhere.

94. KdM: The text here has “Adorno, 197: 465”. I believe a number is missing after the “7” and have assumed the 1973 Adorno text is intended to be referenced here as it is elsewhere in this section.

95. KdM: The word Walser uses here, that Dr. Karp emphasizes, is “fremder”, which as a noun (“das Fremder”) is discussed at length earlier in the dissertation where I have translated it as “the stranger”. To say that “nothing is more strange to the conscience” didn’t quite capture, to my ear, the point Dr. Karp is making here to pick up the relationship with the stranger he discussed earlier, so I have chosen to translate “fremder” as “alien”, sacrificing some symmetry in the text to the higher goal of making sure the nuance is distinguishable enough.

96. (Footnote 75 in “Aggression”) See Parsons, Sociological Theory and Modern Society, 1967: 297-354.

97. KdM: In the original text at page 119, this paragraph is intended with a “1” in front of it. This formatting convention seems so out of step with the rest of the text that I have assumed it was done in error and omitted the “1” and the indentation.

98. (Footnote 76 in “Aggression”) In contrast, Levy, in his role as an observer traveling through Germany, quickly caught on to the cultural specialty of this religious background. He writes to this point: “And if Martin Walser plainly thought he was Martin Luther? And what if this Catholic had gotten it into his head that he was literally going to speak like Luther? Oh, not like Luther, the anti-Semite. Not like the one from the ‘table talks’ at the end: “Burn the Talmud!” But rather like the Luther of the call to conscience. The Luther of ‘sola fide’ [KdM: here I render “Der Luther des eingzigen Glaubens”, literally, “the Luther of the single faith”, assuming that the doctrine so popularized by Luther of sola fide or “justification by faith alone”, is intended to be referenced], of the muted, commanding ‘interiority’. A Luther, who, in fitting with Walser’s current fashion, would say to us: Against the ritualization of remembrance, against the simultaneously Jewish and Catholic ways of remembering, I appeal to the autistic interiority of the conscience with itself and with God. ‘Alone against all,’ says Walser. ‘I am alone against all, but I will not be dissuaded.’ And as an echo, one still hears Luther, ‘I cannot do otherwise, here I stand’ before [Emperor] Charles V. (...) religion and politics. Even in today’s debates, the oldest religious questions resurface again. Or as Laurent Dispot, who accompanied me on this trip as an ‘elephant-driver’, said: ‘You can’t do enough religious sociology if you’re trying to comprehend contemporary Germany.’ (...) Martin Luther ... Martin Heidegger ... Martin Walser. At every critical turning point in German history: a Martin? That is to say: a ‘great reformer’ who offers his ‘great founding speech’: Luther’s ‘95 Theses’ at the church doors of Wittenberg; Heidegger’s ‘rector’s speech’ in Freiburg; and now this time the acceptance speech for the ‘Peace Prize of the German Book Trade’. (...) But let us see if that is not what he has in mind when he bemoans about this ‘remembrance service’ — ‘service’: also a word of Heidegger’s – to which the Germans of today are obliged. Let us see once more, if that is not exactly what all think who have taken his side in this affair. Even this morning, the taxi driver: ‘Do you not find it weird that we’re being smothered with this memorial just at the very moment when, as it happens, the Jews are demanding money from banks and insurance companies?’” (Schirrmacher, Die Walser-Bubis-Debatte: Eine Dokumentation, 1999: 631-632)