The Dialectics of Experience: Eliot’s and Adorno’s Constructions of Modernism as Responses to the Crisis of Modernity

Abstract

The disenchantment of experience and the development of scientist objectivism limit the scope of objective knowledge to science and relegate the human realm to historicist relativity, which leads to the crisis of modernity. The late modern return to immediate experience as a condition that is antecedent to dualism comes as a response to the crisis and attempts to cure the diremption of experience. T.S. Eliot’s and Theodor Adorno’s accounts of immediate experience and the possibility of developing a vision of the whole out of it are compared to determine which response is more consistent and handles the crisis adequately. This may offer a possible way out of the crisis and indicate the role that art can play in restoring experience. Art may either work to recreate the lost totality of experience as Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral does or show alienated objectivity as a product of experience as another possible route to restoring experience.