Adorno: The Recovery of Experience

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Adorno evidences the direct influence of Proust on this project in his mention, in a letter to Thomas Mann, of the origin of the idea of a spiritualization through “idiosyncratic exactness” in Proust (1974c, 679). 2. J. M. Bernstein provides an exemplary elucidation of the importance of this distinction to Adorno’s critique of what I am calling classificatory thinking (2001, 306–19). My account here mirrors his in important respects. 3. Martin Jay (1984) rightly notes that experience is the key concept in Adorno’s critique of modern philosophy. 4. I discuss this below, and more fully in chapter 1. 5. This is true both of Sherry Weber Nicholsen’s excellent translation of Drei Studien zu Hegel and E. B Ashton’s deficient translation of Negative Dialektik. In her seminal study on Adorno, Gillian Rose (1978) also adopts the translation “intellectual experience.” 6. I am here borrowing the terminology of Robert Brandom’s “inferentialist” reading of Kant (2002, 46). I am using Brandom’s terms simply to illustrate the distinction between Adorno’s view and the basic structure of determinate judgment. 7. To use one of Brandom’s examples: to determine something in terms of the conceptual content “copper coin” is to license the inference “it melts at 1084 degrees” (2002, 6). 8. I will spell out this argument in detail in chapter 1. 9. For the record, here are the page references: (1966, 21, 22, 41[*4], 55, 57, 64). 10. 1966, 172, 189. CHAPTER 1. THE CONSEQUENCES OF DISENCHANTMENT 1. This is in essence an echo of the motivating insights of the Lebensphilosophie generation, of whom Simmel and Bergson in particular were important influences on Adorno. Though this certainly does not mean that Adorno’s thought is describable as 205 Notes lebensphilosophisch. It is the insight about what goes wrong with rationalization that attracts Adorno to these thinkers, not their purported solutions. 2. Bernstein, it must be noted, is attempting to reconstruct the ethical focus of Adorno’s thinking. My focus in this work is more on the social-critical and self-reflective role of philosophy as Adorno sees it. 3. Adorno, he argues, shows that “concepts, as vehicles for cognition and with respect to meaning, are dependent upon, and hence not detachable from, what they are about” (2001, 229). 4.To anticipate here: if critique is able to reveal philosophical works as expression, then it will be possible to bring that process to self-awareness. This is key to Adorno’s critical strategy. 5. This sharp division is the process that Hegel referred to as Entzweiung, or diremption. I will come back to this idea later in this chapter. 6. I am referring, of course, to Kant’s claim that “intuitions without concepts are blind” (1974, 98). 7.This theme is obviously one of the animating ideas of Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno 1972a, 26, 54). Dialectic of Enlightenment was written jointly at a time of an immensely productive convergence of thinking between Adorno and Max Horkheimer. For the purposes of this work, however, I will ignore the question of the distinct contribution of each author. All references to this text are attributed to Adorno simply for ease of reference. 8. While Adorno’s reading of disenchantment ties its harmful effects to the formation of the subject as the constituting subject, it would certainly not be true to say that Adorno’s philosophy boils down to a critique of idealism. Kantian idealism is the philosophical inscription of disenchantment at one particular moment in its history. At a later stage in this history, the process of disenchantment finds expression in the radical empiricist notion of experience that underlies positivist thinking. What connects positivism to idealism is its conception of objectivity as “purified of all subjective projections ” (Adorno 1972b, 285). The blind particulars that wait on the synthesizing activity of the subject for a determination of their worth on the idealist picture, have become the brute givens, or “sense data” of positivism, shorn of all subjective significance .This is why the empiricist conception of experience in positivism is, for Adorno, simply idealism without the hubris. 9. The clearest indication of this influence in Dialectic of Enlightenment occurs in the following passage: “In every century, any living reminiscence of olden times, not only of nomadic antiquity but all the more of the pre-patriarchal stages, was most rigorously punished and extirpated from human consciousness. The spirit of enlightenment replaces the fire and the rack by the stigma attached...