The Problem Of Knowledge And The Education Of Henry Adams

In this study we focus on the textual and thematic features of Henry Adams's work The Education of Henry Adams (hereafter abbreviated as Education) and try to analyze its critique to the alienation of the rationalistic knowledge with the help of the critical thinking of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Max Horkheimer, and Theodore Adorno. We situate the book in the macroscopic historical background of the second half of the nineteenth century when the United States accelerated its development of modernization and we highlight the microcosmic individual experience of Henry Adams's self-recognition in the age of great turbulence. We discuss in depth the modern man's anxiety and bewilderment as a result of the deification of the rationalistic knowledge and reveal the individual's wisdom to shatter the confines of the instrumental rationality.Education has become an important part of the cultural memory and Henry Adams is regarded as a prototype of the modern"American self."But Education impresses most readers with its tone of futility and frustration and Henry Adams frequently referred to himself as a"failure"in the book. In this dissertation we ascribe Adams's self-alleged"failure"to the problem of knowledge in the postbellum era of the United States. The problem, as we analyze, was the result of the deification of rationality and the suppression of sensitivity in the process of modernization. Rationality was gradually alienated from its humanistic basis and became a dominating force to control people's minds.In the first chapter, we propose that the problem of knowledge led to the inner fissure of Adams's subjectivity. The imbalance between reason and sense resulted in Adams's simultaneous self-negation and self-affirmation, which were revealed by the duality of voices in Education. In the following four chapters, we elaborate on how the problematic knowledge had led to Henry Adams's troubled personal identity and how Adams contested the desiccated and stupefying rationality by resorting to the power of the subjective spontaneity and activity. Each chapter deals with one area of knowledge, discussing the problems of the political, scientific, religious, and historical discourses respectively. And the last chapter is dedicated to discuss the therapeutic function of Adams's aesthetic imagination, which united the splitting narrative voices in the text and recuperated the author's fissured subjectivity. The problematic knowledge that had been discussed in Education is ever present in the history of the United Sates and Adams's thinking about politics, science, religion, and history challenged the totalizing grand discourses. Therefore, we believe that Henry Adams is never a"failure,"but a success in the history of the United Sates.