![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Adorno contends that something of what we think of knowing and rational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique, singular presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interests and needs; hence, in accordance with the presumptions of transcendental idealism, we have come to mistake what are, in effect, historically contingent, species-subjective ways of viewing the world for an objective understanding of the world. And further, this interested understanding of the world is deforming in a more radical way than just obscuring what is there for the sake of interested needs and purposes; these instrumental ways of knowing and acting, are broadly self-interested, in the interest of survival, without effective concern for the well-being and worth of others; by becoming generalized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes of encountering things and persons that support their differences and independence, their needs and interests, these instrumental practices are the deepest cause of the ills of our time. As heightened forms of rational self-interest, self-interest being the drive of reason, transcendental interests suppress the interests of others. Adorno argues that modernist artistic practices perform a critique of the set of assumptions governing idealism by demonstrating how there is a suppressed rational form of human comportment directed towards the making and comprehension of unique sensuous particulars. Art, according to Adorno's ‘Aesthetic Theory’, is a broken off and isolated fragment of human knowing; in its hibernates the rational forms of acting and knowing that have been suppressed in the coming to be of Enlightened modernity.
Notes
1Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 12–13.
2Ibid., 13.
3Ibid.
4Adorno thinks of all modern philosophies, however, rationalistically or naturalistically inclined, as just hypertrophied and self-deceived versions of the great idealist systems – which is pretty much what the idealists themselves thought.
5For an effort to provide these claims with prima facie plausibility, see Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Chapters 2 and 4.
6Nagel, View from Nowhere and Williams, Descartes' Project of Pure Inquiry.
7Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. The opening seven letters lay out the diagnosis of modernity, while the immediately following letters provide an outline of Schiller's drive theory.
8Adorno does not think that Kantian moral thought can salvage the worth of individual lives through the transformation of individual maxims into universal laws; that is dragging the very domain of particular encounter into the domain of generalizability and so identity thinking. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Chapter 3 is an effort to support Adorno's thesis that Kantian moral reason is, despite itself, a form of instrumental reason.
9I will use ND to refer to Adorno, Negative Dialectics and AT to refer to Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.
10Marx, ‘Concerning Feuerbach’, 423.
11I am relying on the opening sentences of thesis VIII of Walter Benjamin's, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’: ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.’ In Illuminations, 259. For a dialectical encyclopaedia of the meaning of resistance, see Caygill, On Resistance.
12‘Commitment’, op. cit., 244 (italics mine).
13Friendlander, Expressions of Judgment, 101.
14Hegel, Science of Logic, 583.
15‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in Adorno, Notes to Literature, 252.
16Calling identity thinking a deformation or perversion of the concept is less than fully accurate, since clearly this formation of the concept allows for the massive achievements of modern science and technology; they are not to be decried. So a better way of stating Adorno's thesis is to say that he is objecting to the hegemony of identity thinking over our understanding of concept, knowledge, and rationality; and we have overwhelming reasons to think that hegemony is irrational and unearned because that formation of the concept cannot take account of the dependency of concepts on their objects causally and semantically. Hence, another regime of the concept, another concept of the concept, and hence of knowing and rationality must be possible.
17For a contemporary defence of this way of erasing and preserving intuitions, and hence for a defence of the position Adorno is centrally critiquing, see Brandom, ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism’, 164–89.
18That is not literally what Kant says, which is ‘Gedanken ohne inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind’, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 75. The first phrase literally states that ‘thoughts without content are empty’; but since the paragraphs in question are all about the relation between concepts and intuitions, then drawing a strict parallel between the first and second clauses is more than justified; it is what Kant is saying.
19There is of course a debate about the role intuitions in Kant; I summarize that debate, and explain why he is committed to the blindness thesis in Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies, Introduction.
20Of course, in so doing, Kant is doing no more than what science had already accomplished; Kant's epistemology legitimates the scientific worldview.
21Kant, Critique of Judgment, §§25–30 and Burke, Philosophical Enquiry.