Adorno's Modernism : Art, Experience, and Catastrophe (9781316412848) by Hammer Espen

Author:Hammer, Espen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge Univ Pr
Published: 2015-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

Hegel’s dialectical argument is well known. In its barest outline it leads to the twofold realization that (a) such apparently rich content, since it lacks any determination, is in fact infinitely poor, and (b) as soon as the attempt is made to articulate or comprehend the “pure being” of the singular “This,” one will have to use language and thus introduce mediation by way of conceptual universality. Even the bare indexical pointing to the “This” requires spatiotemporal determination, generating a “Now” and a “Here,” which then respectively will have to be cashed out in terms of predicates (“night,” say, or “tree”), making description (“Now is night,” “Here is a tree”) possible. If consciousness restricts itself exclusively to using deictic expressions, it may be able to receive momentary sense impressions. What it will not be able to do is take itself as having established a referring relation to the object. For this to be possible, the Hegelian account makes reference to concepts, judgments, and ultimately self-consciousness.

This is not the place to reconstruct this whole, complex argument.27 Suffice it to say, though, that Kant and Hegel agree that while there may be forms of intentional awareness that function as mere episodes of conscious life but are non-cognitive (in the sense of lacking cognitive value, lacking objectivity), human subjects are capable of judging that thus-and-so is the case, thereby taking up a manifold and uniting it as a truth-functionally responsive, cognitive unit for which the knowing subject can take epistemic responsibility. Rather than merely undergoing an experience, in judging the subject actively takes itself to have an experience by judging accordingly, thus placing the experience within the space of reasons and normativity. Truth, moreover, is normative; if a representation is true, then every rational being ought to accept it. The same is true of justifications. They purport to be valid for all rational speakers. By contrast, experiential episodes simply occur at the level of causally interacting events under laws, and as such they do not have a normative structure. For Kant and Hegel, judgments are rationally generated actions, requiring spontaneity. When a judgment is made, the experiential episode is conceptually determined not because nature dictates the predication, but because the subject freely decides to take itself as being committed to the judgment. That is when a cognitive, intentional awareness becomes possible.

If something like this argument is correct, then notions such as “non-intentional truth” and “non-discursive judging,” suggesting that truth could arise from some kind of immediate encounter with the object and that judging could take place without the self-reflexive, rational action it is to determine conceptually a particular as something, seem deeply problematic, if not incoherent. Yet is this Adorno’s view? Is he really committed to the view that the mind is bifurcated into the conceptual powers – generating the illusion of generality in a world of particulars – and the intuitional or purely perceptual powers – being on their own able to open the subject to the world and, in lieu of

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