Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund

« respect to the theory of rationality, anxieties about these sources of error led to the view that reason must be fullyautonomous, and not determined by anything external to it.

It is this thought that underlies the primacy of method.In the theory of language, the same project is pursued in the attempt to eliminate opacity, indeterminacy andvagueness from the meaning of concepts; this is the project of positivism and the analytic tradition generally.Dialectic of Enlightenment aims to provide a genealogy of enlightened rationality.

Enlightenment opposes myth, the enchantment of the natural world through the projection onto it of human fears and hopes.

The presumedsuperiority of reason over myth is hence its freedom from anthropomorphic projections; reason depicts the worldobjectively rather than through subjective projections.

Horkheimer and Adorno contend that this flattering self-image of reason is both formally and substantively fallacious.

Both myth and reason emerge in the course ofhumankind's struggle to free itself from bondage to mythic powers (themselves projections of primordial fear of thenatural world in which humankind was immersed) and to gain control over the natural world in order to satisfy humanneeds and desires.

Both myth and reason employ the principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as therepetition of a given pattern or law (what Adorno elsewhere calls ‘identity thinking'), in order to combat fear of thenatural world by bringing it into an explicable order.

Repetition, ‘the new is the old', originally provides for conceptualcontrol over the natural world by revealing an intelligible order and eventually, through the technological applicationof modern science, for actual control over the natural world.

Hence the formal features which provide for thesupposed autonomy of enlightened reason are in fact grounded in the anthropogenesis of human reason in itsstruggle with nature.

Enlightened reason is not objective, but subservient to the human desire to control nature;such reason can be construed as the discursive embodiment of the human drive for self-preservation, and hence asinstrumental.

4 Nonidentity and negative dialectics Enlightened reason is premised on a false inference: because some false beliefs (myths, superstitutions and the like) are subjective projections, then the medium of thoseprojections (sensory images, language, social practices and history) must themselves be systematic sources oferror.

Complete independence from these mediums is thus taken to be a condition for true knowledge.

This drive forindependence is most fully elaborated in the writings of the German Idealists, above all Kant and Fichte , where the autonomy of reason and the meaning-independence of concepts become explicitly identified with the spontaneity ofthe ‘transcendental' subject.

Unknown to itself, this subject and the philosophical concept of system it subtendsare still in the throe of the drive to self-preservation, their abstract conceptuality still harbouring both fear and rageagainst their objects.

The conception of idealism as rationalized rage is Adorno's appropriation and transformation ofNietzsche 's notion of ressentiment .

Idealist rage is directed at anything that refuses to fit or, in Adorno's terminology, is nonidentical with the demands of autonomous reason.

Because the autonomy of reason is securedthrough the meaning-independence of concepts from concrete experience and its mediums, then what isincommensurable with this reason is whatever is irredeemably particular and contingent.

The goal of Adorno'sphilosophy is the ‘rescue' of nonidentity - the thing in itself in its concrete, historically mediated sensuousparticularity.

Adorno's method of rescue is the use of dialectic.

The point of dialectical analysis is to demonstratethat the rationalized concept of an object does not exhaust the thing conceived.

It attains this end by showingthat what were conceived to be extrinsic encumbrances on reason (sensory images and so on) that could bestripped away in its attainment of autonomy are in fact the necessary mediations through which knowing subjects come into relation to objects known.

Adorno borrowed this conception of dialectic from Hegel .

Adorno construes his dialectic as ‘negative', in opposition to Hegel, because, on the one hand, he believes that Hegel's ‘system' collapsesback into the kind of identity thinking that dialectic opposes; and, on the other hand, because he believes thatdialectical analysis only works under conditions in which the mediations it elaborates are systematically, in theoryand in practice, denied.

Because an alternative conception of reason is not currently available, despite being a realhistorical possibility, Adorno's philosophy is utopian.

Cognitively and practically, utopia is conceived of by Adorno ‘asabove identity and above contradiction; it would be a togetherness of diversity' ( [1966] 1973: 150 ).

An image of such ‘togetherness of diversity' is provided by modernist works of art.

5 Aesthetic theory Adorno argues that distinctly modernist works of art exemplify the possibility of an alternative grammar of reason and cognition.

Hefocuses on modernist works - atonal music, abstract painting, ‘absurdist' literature (particularly Kafka and Beckett) -because these works self-consciously attempt to establish their aesthetic validity, and hence their objectivity, inexplicit opposition to all existing norms for artistic production and all established criteria in accordance with whichart works have been judged.

Existing norms and established criteria are the equivalents in art to the demands ofmethod in science.

Enlightened reason has it that such norms and criteria, in science and art, are spontaneousproducts of reason itself.

Success for a modernist work is for it to be compelling, demanding aesthetic attention andassent, in excess of established criteria of aesthetic value and, even more radically, in excess of all criteria whichheretofore have constituted what it is for an item to be a work of art.

‘The falsehood opposed by art,' Adornoargues, ‘ is not rationality per se but the fixed opposition of rationality to particularity' ( [1970] 1997: 144 ).

The binding of rationality to what occurs in particular cases refutes the thesis of the meaning-independence of conceptsfrom their objects and the autonomy of reason, and hence the principle of immanence.

That this refutation occursin art works entails that such binding is only a semblance or image of an alternative grammar of reason, since inmodernity art is no longer a rationally legitimated vehicle of representation; art works now are ‘meaningful' wholeswithout external purpose.

That what happens in art can none the less matter to rationality generally derives fromthe hypothesis that the language of art and the discourse of rationality outside the artworld are not mutuallyindifferent language games.

Rather, art picks up the debris of nonidentity left over from rationalization processesoutside art; it is the refuge of the nonidentical.

Further, art is driven to its modernist extremes of atonality,abstraction and absurdity in order to sustain itself as art, unique works of contemplation, in opposition to the recurrent demands of the principle of immanence.

Adorno's philosophical practice explicitly binds itself to thepractices and fate of artistic modernism, and in this he is being self-consistent.

Adorno aims to expose philosophy,the attempt to ground rationality and cognition, to its nonidentical other, forcing philosophy to surrender its claim toautonomy and meaning-independence.

This is an avowedly peculiar terminus for a radical philosopher: defending theclaims of the victims of history by forging an alliance between philosophy and high modernist art.

This state of. »