"There was no value except exchange value..."

Deadly reason

Did too much rational thinking lead to the Holocaust? The German philosopher Theodor Adorno argued it did

– by Jonathan Rée –MONDAY, 13TH JANUARY 2014

"There was no value except exchange value, and it had infiltrated our lives so completely that we had forgotten how to love anything for its own sake. We had even lost the ability to give thoughtful presents: the act of making a gift had degenerated into a tactical ploy, a grudging exchange of objects executed with “careful adherence to the prescribed budget, sceptical appraisal of the other, and the least possible effort”. Meanwhile every encounter with popular culture made us coarser and more stupid, and we were always far too busy to spend much time on art, settling at most for “trashy biographies” that “humanise” the achievement of great artists by bringing them down to our own level. The strenuousness of original thinking had been replaced by the “salaried profundity” of university professors, who train their students to harmonise their judgements with those of their colleagues so as to earn a living as “spokespersons for the average”. The only possible remedy was to turn our backs on the “cultivated philistines”, renounce the old ideal of “theoretical cohesion” and strive to attain truth in the only form that still has any meaning: not the premasticated platitudes of common-sense rationality, but jagged fragments of insight whose value lies not in their plausibility but in their “distance from the continuity of the familiar”."