Solving the Unsolvable: Western Responses to Otherness From Saint Augustine

Theodor Adorno's writings on the interdependence of subject and object provided the impetus for this project. Following Adorno the work argues that agency comes from an awareness of the limitations of one's conception of the world and more generally of the existence of an external world beyond human determinations. In order to avoid the pitfalls of an unintelligible jargon through an abstract discussion that runs the risk of becoming esoteric, I then looks at concrete examples, instances in the past, of individuals struggling to find what they took to be an authentic subjectivity and, intertwined with this, a means of coming to terms with otherness. At the same time, I attempt to show by way of these examples—the point of origin for what I take to be ideologies that sought to eliminate the place for the subject. My intention is to examine the genesis of the Western expectation that otherness was something ephemeral, or illusory, something that could be definitively overcome. By virtue of the interdependence of subject and object, and in turn of agency as a product of the recognition of the non-identical, I argue that it is by tracing this moment and its implications that one can also find the starting point for, and thus have a better understanding of, contemporary attempts to eliminate, or constrain, the subject. As with Adorno's negative dialectics I want to clear a path to otherness through showing the failure of man's conceptions, but in this case through showing the failures of man's conceptions of himself rather than the failures of his conceptions of the external world.

It is my contention that Saint Augustine’s theology, with his City of God especially as its culmination, present a kind of threshold for this kind of thinking, a point at which the wave of humility before the object and doubts about man’s place in the universe and his destiny, that perhaps prior to him had risen and fallen, finally broke and never rolled back. Every component of his thought was geared toward not simply transcending but definitively solving otherness. Augustine envisioned human beings as actually responsible for non-identity's existence and so as capable of doing away with it through orientating their action in such a way as to remedy the primordial error that was its cause. Paradoxically for Augustine it was agency itself that was the problem, man's self assertion had caused him to fall away from his divine nature, yet the error that accompanied Adam's agency could be cancelled out by obedient human action. Totality, obedience, and man as the cause of otherness were interlinked, inextricable elements of his approach. Following the discussion of Augustine's theology I proceed to examine the origins and characteristics of three other transformative ideologies or worldviews in Western history; the idealistic, the social, and the transcendental of Francesco Petrarch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Arthur de Gobineau respectively. The crux of my argument is that the unique characteristics of Augustine's search for certainty created a sort of sure and stable foundation on which later ideologies which restricted the subject, so as to solve non-identity, could build and flourish. I show how each stemmed from individual attempts to come to terms with the otherness that overshadows human existence by putting forth definitive answers to the question of what man is.

By contrasting the figures I then show, in the conclusion of this work, that Augustine's approach while powerful and reassuring was ultimately self-destructive. This is because Augustine's monolithic conception of human nature limited man's ability to appreciate and work with otherness and at the same time it created an expectation that human understanding should ultimately be error free. As becomes clear at the end of the project, the restriction of agency to contend with non-identity ultimately had the effect of eliminating non-identity itself. Reality came increasingly to be perceived as mundane and self-evident as the importance attributed to the subject diminished in the later figures, thereby demonstrating by way of example the interdependence of the two as Adorno argued. While the works examined constitute a niche in intellectual history it is nonetheless a highly influential one. This dissertation, at the very least, identifies an approach to non-identity and a conception of the subject that was a counterpart, perhaps even a predecessor or progenitor, to the rationality that predominates in modernity and which the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School criticized so vociferously.