Go Nagai meets Adorno, or how to philosophize with an atomic punch
| 1 |  After Auschwitz ... World War II came to an end with two massive nuclear explosions and the horrors of Auschwitz revealed to the general public. Symbolizing both the destroying power and the desolate impotence of Western civilization, these events were soon taken for absolute moments: their atrocity was perceived as a deep fissure in the ongoing flow of history, opening up a black hole in which Reason couldn't stare without being overcome by a deep feeling of nausea. Humanity was facing the abyss of its scientific mastery of the world, unable to tell the life-improving marvels of technological progress from the perverse logic of mass destruction, indoctrination and repression. This shock definitely made clear that mankind was facing an epochal turn and that it was running toward extinction unless some things would change radically. This thought moved scientists, writers and philosophers alike into action, which for most of them meant writing books and pamphlets in an appeal to public opinion. In an attempt to understand the role played by innocent looking bureaucratic zealousness in the extermination of the Jews, Hanna Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil." Time and again Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell — among others — warned against the dangers of nuclear weapons. |
| 2 | ... all Culture is rubbish. Not all intellectuals, though, were equally convinced that these events, as shocking as they were, represented a unique and anomalous tragedy, and that a recurrence — or even worse — could be prevented, nor that change could be brought about by cultural efforts. To this small group the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno certainly does belong. Yet, though his Dialectic of enlightenment claimed that Culture had proved its own impotence long before Hiroshima and Auschwitz, even he once sadly remarked that writing a poem after Auschwitz was an act of barbarism (Adorno, 1955: 30). Criticized for such defeatism, he corrected his statement by making it even stronger and applying it to his own writings. Actually, as he wrote in his Negative Dialektik (1966: 359), "... after Auschwitz all Culture, including its urgent critique, is rubbish." So, few intellectuals seemed to be immune from the contagious idea that a decisive fracture in the course of history had occurred, even if Krupp and Heuss — who voted for Hitler's "Enabling Act" in 1933 — could continue their economic and political career in the German Federal Republic. In the meantime, though atomic radiation was still far from being dispersed from the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, life in Japan quietly went back to normal — with most people there still unaware that on September 6, 1945, Go Nagai had been born in Wajima City. |
