Subject and Object: Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology, and Method by Ruth Groff

Author:Ruth Groff [Groff, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, History & Theory, General, Philosophy, Political
ISBN: 9781623566418
Google: JoEtDQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2014-04-24T21:17:27+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Negative Dialectics, selections

Theodor Adorno

As noted in the Negative Dialectics blurb above, the analysis that Adorno offers in maximally condensed form in Negative Dialectics is presented carefully and plainly in Lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Problems of Moral Philosophy and History and Freedom. The following excerpts are included as key passages of a classic text, but I recommend reading them in light of the lectures.

Much of what I would say by way of summary here I’ve said in relation to “Subject and Object.” In his Preface to Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes: “To use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity—this is what the author felt to be his task ever since he came to trust his own mental impulses.” Kant, Adorno thinks, has mistaken society itself (one marked by the systematic alienation of human intentionality, so it’s understandable) for a Transcendental Subject, and has ascribed to this reified entity object-constituting powers. While it is true that subjects create artifacts out of raw materials, it is not true that objects as such owe their being to the synthetic a priori faculties of subjects. To imagine otherwise is to succumb to delusion, says Adorno; at best, the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity is indicative of a dim awareness that society could be organized differently than it is, i.e. that real relations of production could be consciously and collective controlled.

As a matter of ontology, then, Adorno is a materialist. The interesting question is exactly what kind of materialist, and whether or not his position adds up, in the end. This much is clear: Adorno reads Kant, whom he prefers to Hegel as an interlocutor in this regard, as pointing, explicitly or implicitly, to existence of genuine materiality. That which gives empirical content to concepts, as Kant puts it, is not itself consciousness. Nor is it any kind of abstract phenomenon. It is object, not subject. Adorno agrees with Kant about this. And he goes further. Unlike Kant, Adorno at least claims to believe that material objects exist, qua material objects, all by themselves. But what Adorno seems to be unwilling to say explicitly is that objects have their own identity, their own form, to put it in Aristotelian terms. It’s possible that his reluctance is borne of an implicit assumption that properties must be universals, and that the very ascription of a universal already implies the act of a subject. Perhaps it would be different if properties were conceived as particulars. In the language of contemporary metaphysics, it might that Adorno would be prepared to say, as Jonathan Lowe does, that material objects are characterized by (though not materially constituted by) tropes. But perhaps not. As an abstraction, “This redness” is no less a construction of thought than is “Redness,” after all, despite being a particular rather than a universal.

Adorno also reads Kant as sharing with Hume the view that causation is not a function of anything internal to objects. In the section “Kant’s Concept of

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