The Dialectics of Modernity and Tradition: Eliot and Adorno on Individualism and the Differentiation of Spheres

نوع المستند : المقالة الأصلية

المؤلف

English Department, Faculty of Arts, Damanhour University, Egypt

المستخلص

Modernity comes as a revolution against tradition in order to establish knowledge on a rational ground and set the individual free from its authority. Nevertheless, there is a strong anti-modern return to tradition among many modernist thinkers and writers. Both T. S. Eliot and Theodor W. Adorno formulate the relation between modernity and tradition in dialectical terms. This article argues that Eliot, on the one hand, forms the relation in a positive dialectical way to contain modernity through return to tradition. This imposes its parameters on modern rationality and recreates the same kind of hegemonic society against which modernity revolts. Adorno, on the other hand, analyzes the negative dialectical reversion of modern rationalism against itself and its liberatory potential which subjects all fields, including tradition, to its domination. Rather than imposing one on the other, this study proposes an unreconciled, non-coercive form of coexistence in a pluralistic culture in order to move beyond this impasse. Instead of subjecting one to the other, each may provide a critical perspective on the other.
جاءت الحداثة بسعيها لتأسيس المعرفة على أساس عقلاني وتحرير الفرد من السلطوية  کثورة على التراث. إلا أن ذلک قام بتحفيز تيار مناهض للحداثة يسعى لاستعادة التراث بين العديد من الکتاب والمفکرين الحداثيين. والسبب في ذلک هو حالة الخواء الروحاني وتفسخ وحدة المجتمع اللتين أدت إليها العقلانية الحداثية. نظر توماس ستيرنز إليوت وثيودور أدورنو للعلاقة بين التراث والحداثة على  أنها علاقة جدلية. تسعى هذه الدراسة لإثبات أن إليوت  قام بتشکيل العلاقة على أنها جدل إيجابي لکي يحتوي الحداثة عن طريق التراث. على العکس من ذلک، قام أدورنو بتحليل الجدل السلبي للعقلانية الحداثية وسجل انقلابها لنقيضها، إلا أنه أصر على تحليل التراث تحليلا عقلانيا. من خلال إثبات تحول کلا من التراث والحداثة لشکلين مختلفين من السلطوية، تسعى هذه الدراسة لتقديم شکل من أشکال التعايش المشترک يحطم هيمنتهما، دون فرض أي منها على الآخرفي مجتمع تعددي.

الكلمات الرئيسية

الموضوعات الرئيسية


Adorno, Theodor. (1993) “On Tradition” Telos (No. 94, Winter 1993-94) pp.75-82.
--- and Max Horkheimer. (2002) The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
---. (2002) Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Continuum
---. (2004) Negative Dialectics. Trans. E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge.
Anttonen, Pertti. (2005) Tradition through Modernity: Postmodernism and the Nation-State in Folklore Scholarship. Helsinki: Finnish Literature Society
Arendt, Hannah. (1958) The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Baudelaire, Charles. (2001) The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. Trans. Jonathan Mayne. London: Phaidon.
Berlin, Isaiah. (2014) Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Freedom. Princeton: Princeton University Press.                            
Cohen, Anthony P. (2001) The Symbolic Construction of Community. London: Routledge.
Dewald, Jonathan. (1993) Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Eliot, T.S. (1932) Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber.
---. (1934) After Strange Gods. London: Faber and Faber.
---. (1967) Christianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of Culture. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company.
---. (1968) “Experiment in Criticism” in Literary Opinion in America II (ed.) Morton Dawen Zabel. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Foucault, Michel. (1984) “What is Enlightenment?” Trans. Catherine Porter in TheFoucault Reader. (Ed.) Paul Rabinow. New York: Pantheon Books.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. (2006) Truth and Method. Trans. Joel Weinsheimer andDonald G. Marshall. London: Continuum.
Gardner, Helen. (1978) The Composition of Four Quartets.” London: Faber and Faber
Green, Michael K. (1986) “A Kantian Evaluation of Taylorism in the Workplace.” Journal of Business Ethics 5 (1986) 165-169.
Gross, David. (1992) The Past in Ruins. Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press.
Habermas, Jürgen. (1985) Theory of Communicative Action I. Trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
---. (1996) “Modernity: An Unfinished Project” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. (Ed.)  MaurizioPasserin d'Entreves and Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
---. (1998) The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Trans. Frederick Lawrence. Oxford: Polity Press.
Heidegger, Martin. (2001) Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward S. Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell.  
Horkheimer, Max. (2013) The Eclipse of Reason. London: Bloomsbury.
Kant, Immanuel. (1996) “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?”  Trans. James Schmidt in What is Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions James Schmidt (Ed.) Berkeley: University of California Press.
---. (1998) Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
---. (2015) Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Mary Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Karpov, Vyacheslav and Manfred Svensson. (2020) Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration. London: Palgrave Macmillan 
Mannheim, Karl. (2010) Diagnosis of Our Time. Oxford: Routledge.
Marody, Mira. (2021) The Individual after Modernity: A Sociological Perspective. London: Routledge.
Menand, Louis. (1996) “T. S. Eliot and Modernity.” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Dec., 1996), pp. 554-579.
Oretga Y Gasset, José. (1968) The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Owen, David. (1994) Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault and the Ambivalence of Reason. London: Routledge.
Warnke, Georgia. (2003) Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Zabel, Morton Dawen. (Ed.) (1968) Literary Opinion in America II. New York: Harper Torchbooks.