Adorno by Roger Foster

Author:Roger Foster [Foster, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-02-17T05:00:00+00:00

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ADORNO

Scientific comportment [ Verhalten] [is] the opposite pole to immediate experience . . . , it is itself also something mediated, namely through the ends of the divisions of labor, and, as Henri Bergson above all has demonstrated with the greatest of astuteness in his analyses, it is mediated through the ends of the domination of nature, of technique [ Technik] above all, so that science does not at all represent the immediate or the ultimate. (1973, 90) It is striking that Adorno here links the most recognizable thesis in Dialectic of Enlightenment with Bergson’s reading of selective perception, the practical origin of habitual cognition.4 Instrumental reason, the form of cognition that is behind the domination of nature, would therefore be intelligible as the roughhewing of what is given so that only those elements suggesting possible lines of practical activity are foregrounded. Bergson develops this point into a critique of empiricism prefiguring that of Husserl.

What one ordinarily calls a fact is not reality such as it would appear to an immediate intuition, but an adaptation of the real to the interests of practice and to the exigencies of social life. . . . The error [of empiricism] is not to value experience too highly, but on the contrary to substitute for true experience, that which originates in the immediate contact of the mind with its object, an experience that is disarticulated and in consequence, no doubt, distorted [ dénaturée]; arranged at any rate for the greatest convenience of action and of language. (1939, 203–204)

The object, in its experiential richness, is always kept at a certain distance from the subject because of the operation of a mechanism of selection that filters experiential items based on their usefulness. The work of habit builds up typical schemes for filtering perception, and these schemes work automati-cally, that is, unconsciously, in any given situation. Bergson here asserts the thesis that nothing can count as a “fact” that is not already mediated by the subject’s conceptual understanding, but he adds to this the all-important caveat that those mediating structures have as their basis what is instrumentally useful. Adorno would of course want to criticize Bergson’s explication of the intelligence in terms of biological evolution.5 Adorno interprets natural-scientific thinking as a historical product, a structure that develops in the course of the interchange of human beings with nature. Over time, this structure begins to twist free of its original purpose in securing human self-preservation through the control of nature. It gradually embeds itself within social life as its dominant institutional logic, and, in the shape of the constituting subject, begins to function as an authority that determines the boundaries of Failed Outbreak II

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legitimate cognition.6 Despite these important differences, Bergson’s attempt to circumscribe the intelligence as a strategy rooted in the evolutionary life process, and Adorno’s view of conceptual cognition as the outcome of a history of subject-object interactions both tell a strikingly similar story about natural-scientific thinking as a dependent form of cognition that is unaware of itself as such.

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