Astrology’s opaqueness mirrors worldly opaqueness, so belief needs no transcendent faith

Evidence

What allows astrology to be accepted, believed and obeyed, by sceptical, disillusioned people is the way its opaqueness mirrors that of the empirical world, so as to require little, if any, transcendent faith. It survives by overtly cognitively and affectively demanding so little while apparently offering so much. Why refuse such an offer? Adorno typifies the intellectual attitude expressed here as one of ‘disoriented agnosticism’. The demand for strict belief appears as not required, agnosticism appears as legitimate. The reader is never asked to evaluate the claims being made. By bracketing its cognitive status, astrology keeps the reader cognitively disoriented. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 40

Categorization

• DEFINE: ‘Disoriented agnosticism’ — the reader never evaluates claims because the text brackets its own cognitive status.