Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth

Owen Hulatt

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780231542203
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Esthétique en philosophie

In Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth, Owen Hulatt undertakes an original reading of Theodor W. Adorno's epistemology and its material underpinnings, deepening our understanding of his theories of truth, art, and the nonidentical. Hulatt's novel interpretation casts Adorno's theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth as substantially unified, supporting the thinker's claim that both philosophy and art are capable of being true.

For Adorno, truth is produced when rhetorical "texture" combines with cognitive "performance," leading to the breakdown of concepts that mediate the experience of the consciousness. Both philosophy and art manifest these features, although philosophy enacts these conceptual issues directly, while art does so obliquely. Hulatt builds a robust argument for Adorno's claim that concepts ineluctably misconstrue their objects. He also puts the still influential thinker into conversation with Hegel, Husserl, Frazer, Sohn-Rethel, Benjamin, Strawson, Dahlhaus, Habermas, and Caillois, among many others.

1

Models of Experience

Adorno claims that art, “authentic” art, is true. This is a provocative enough claim for any philosopher to advance, and difficult enough for us to make sense of. But this is compounded in Adorno’s case by the fact that it is not immediately clear what precisely it means, for Adorno, for something to be true. Adorno’s epistemology—his account of what claims can be true and what there is to be known—is knotty and complex. It seems at least plausible that his claims about the truth of art are related to his understanding of what it means for things like assertions and philosophical systems to be true. (And our investigation in this book will show this to be so.) But until we have a firm grasp of that epistemology—of what exactly Adorno takes nonaesthetic truth to be—we will not be able to know what this relation is or whether Adorno is making a literal, analogical, or merely rhetorical claim. So, it seems that understanding Adorno’s claim that art is true requires us first to cash out and explain what he means by “truth”—and this requires us to inquire into his epistemology first.

Any introductory gloss on Adorno’s epistemology will point out that Adorno has a “negative” account of truth—that he denies that the truth is positively expressible and rather confines himself to a negative project of uncovering and analyzing falsehoods, inconsistencies, antinomies, and aporiae. While I think this picture is not quite right, it serves as a broad sketch to begin with—Adorno holds, in the main, that concepts and objects are in fact in conflict. Our experience and thought are communicated through concepts. But these are, for reasons I will bring out in detail in this chapter, faulty tools; and so the world is communicated to us in experience and thought in a faulty fashion. Thought takes itself to exhaustively grasp the world, but in fact misconstrues it. We cannot, then, positively express the true—we must rather analyze our concepts and theories and demonstrate their falsity, by finding where they break down and fail.

I say that this picture is not quite right, as not all of Adorno’s philosophy fits this model of complete negativism, broadly accurate though it is. For example, Adorno has a penchant for making what appear to be direct, positive statements of fact (the analyses of Minima Moralia are particularly significant in this regard). Still more significant is Adorno’s account of truth in philosophy and art.

As it will turn out, these two spheres—the epistemic and the aesthetic—are not as divorced from each other as we might conventionally expect. Indeed, Adorno understands them to be characteristically aiming at the same thing—the “nonidentical.” Both “dialectical” philosophy and artworks¹ are capable of instantiating this “nonidentical,” and doing so is internally related to their being true. This idea of the “nonidentical” is a notoriously difficult concept in Adorno’s work, and I will unpack and clarify it as we go. For now, we can note that Adorno defines nonidentity as something constitutively uncapturable by concepts—as begrifflos. “Nonidentity” is something that the concept is incapable of capturing and, for reasons that we will enter into shortly, this rebuff to conceptuality is held to be highly important by Adorno.

We are told by Adorno that philosophical analysis should not merely remain negative and trace a “logic of disintegration”² in the continual failure and breakdown in concepts. Rather, philosophy should try to somehow model nonrational experiences of this nonidentical. This modeling—by a conceptual practice of something constitutively nonconceptual—should be accomplished at least in part by philosophy’s use of rhetorical form. ³ Likewise, we are told that artworks can express the truth through nonrational means, and in doing so can express the same truth-content as philosophical works. ⁴ So we are not in an epistemic blank about Adorno’s idea of aesthetic and epistemic truth—in either case, we are told that it is a matter of capturing, or in some way exhibiting, “nonidentity.” And we can also see that some important points of commonality can be drawn between philosophy and art; in either case, the target is the same, namely, the nonidentical. We can also see that both philosophy and art borrow from each other to an extent—the content of philosophy acquires a dependence on rhetorical form, and the form of art is employed in order to express the same truth-content as philosophy.

From this thumbnail sketch, what we can see in the first instance is that both art and philosophy seem to share an insurmountable task—to “capture” and make cognitively palpable something that is constitutively opposed to and uncapturable by concepts. Or, to use Adorno’s phrase, their task is to “identify the nonidentical.”⁵ As we will see, both art and philosophy are constitutively conceptual disciplines for Adorno. If their truth is internally related to capturing the nonidentical, and the nonidentical is constitutively nonconceptual, we must begin—if we want to understand how art and philosophy could be true—by trying to understand the parameters of the discussion. What, exactly, are concepts for Adorno? What does it mean to be “nonidentical,” or begrifflos? If we want to understand how art can be true—or even what “truth” in general means to Adorno—we must first work upward to this question by clarifying some of these basic ideas.

We must begin, then, with Adorno’s theory of the concept, and inquire into just what concepts are for Adorno, and why it is that concepts prevent us from properly comprehending objects in the world. An investigation into the nature of the concept for Adorno will simultaneously be an investigation into the nature of experience. This is because, on the one hand, all experience for Adorno comes through concepts; concepts mould and model our experienced world. But, more than this, for Adorno concepts are contingently formed by reacting to the pragmatic structures that are bound up with that experience. As Cook notes in Adorno on Nature, Adorno does not conceive of concepts as atemporal features of human experience. ⁶ Rather, Adorno understands concepts and the use of our reason as emerging out of pragmatic human practices. Concepts are not formed entirely autonomously within our heads, but rather, he argues, they are formed in negotiation with the pragmatic needs and situation of the person who employs them.

This understanding of conceptuality has significant consequences for Adorno’s theory of truth in both art and philosophy. While Adorno gestures toward this conception of rationality consistently, it is given the clearest exposition in Dialectic of Enlightenment, written with Max Horkheimer. The aim of the Dialectic was to provide a genealogy of reason and conceptual thought that was capable of explaining the persistence of irrationality in what were apparently wholly rationalized forms of life. In providing this account, Adorno and Horkheimer revisited the genealogical origin of reason, and attempted to bring out how this origin served to determine the ongoing nature of concepts and conceptual employment. It is in examining this genealogy of reason that we can gain a better understanding of the account of concepts and conceptual behavior that underpins Adorno’s work.

DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT—KANT AND THE GENEALOGY OF REASON

In this chapter I will clarify Adorno’s understanding of what concepts are, how concepts work, and what their relationship is to those objects they apply to. Much of the oddity and complexity of Adorno’s position on these matters can be helpfully brought out by contrasting his account with that of Kant.

Construed roughly, Kant’s Transcendental Deduction argues that the conceptual (“categorial”) mediation of experience is absolutely necessary for the experience of finite beings. This necessity is predicated on certain features of theoretical reason—most saliently, the transcendental unity of apperception and the prerequisites for continuous experience. Kant recognizes that experience consists in discrete moments, and that each of these discrete moments are characteristically experienced as belonging to an “I.” In order to unify these discrete experiences (and discrete “I”s) as experiences of a temporally enduring I that can recognize itself across these discrete experiences, one must employ a judgment that is capable of synthetically unifying the common features of these discrete experiences. ⁷ There is a finite set of forms of judgment (elaborated in the Metaphysical Deduction), each of which has a categorical (“conceptual”) counterpart. These categories serve to unify these discrete experiences in judgment, and thereby make possible a unified, continuous experience belonging to a single identified and consistent “I.”⁸ These forms of judgment, then, serve to “stitch” together discrete moments in accordance with the continuity that they find exhibited across them. Each form of judgment (category) addresses a distinct form of continuity (continuity in extension, number, and so on). If the categories were confronted with phenomena that could not be synthesized in judgment, could not be stitched together, the phenomena therefore could not be experienced; the experience of the phenomena could not be unified across time, and the unity of apperception that is constitutive for experience could not be achieved. Experience is therefore necessarily conceptually mediated, for Kant. ⁹

From this rather rough-and-ready sketch of Kant’s position, we can draw two key points. First, conceptual mediation is unqualifiedly necessary for experience of an object—in the absence of conceptual mediation, experience itself is impossible. Second—and this point will become relevant at the beginning of the next chapter—Kant’s phenomenal ontology (his account of what objects there are to be experienced) is strictly limited by the transcendental conditions on one’s experiencing this ontology. To put this in a different way—to exist as phenomena, objects must be experiencable; accordingly, any phenomenal existent that does not or cannot conform to our categories therefore simply is not a phenomenal existent. ¹⁰ So, we have from Kant a conceptualist account of experience. For Kant, conceptuality is necessary for the unification and continuity of experience; and nonconceptual experience of an object is impossible.

From this conceptualism, we can draw two claims. (1) The application of concepts is necessary for continuous unified experience, and (2) experience of an object that is not conceptually mediated is impossible. We will see that in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno mirrors the general structure of Kant’s account; however, while Adorno argues for claim (1), he will jettison claim (2). While Adorno argues that conceptuality is necessary for experience, he also accepts that experience not mediated by concepts is possible. In order to prevent this from being merely contradictory, Adorno is obliged to finesse the meaning of the terms employed. Adorno does this by finessing the meaning of the term “experience” in each of these two claims, as well as modifying the force of the necessity of the conceptuality of experience. To anticipate, Adorno does this by translating Kant’s demonstration out of the theoretical and into the pragmatic. Adorno holds the conceptuality of perception to be pragmatically rather than unqualifiedly necessary and, moreover, pragmatically motivated. Similarly, an experience that is not conceptually mediated is held to be possible by Adorno but pragmatically unsustainable. This difference from Kant will lead to Adorno’s positing concepts as not transcendentally necessary, or intrinsically truth-apt, but rather products of self-preservation.

A particularly striking example of Adorno’s acceding to claim (1) can be found in Negative Dialectics, where Adorno asserts that “without concepts, that experience [individual experience] would lack continuity.”¹¹ This is, of course, a sentence with very strong Kantian resonance, presumably by design. ¹² Given the strong Kantian tenor of this assertion, it comes as some surprise that Adorno does not equate the continuity of experience with its possibility and go on to accede to claim (2). Adorno does not directly assert his denial of (2), and does not directly assert that nonconceptual experience is possible. In order to see his denial of (2), we will need to enter into Dialectic of Enlightenment’s outline of the nature and genesis of conceptuality.

CONCEPTS AND THE “CRY OF TERROR”

We find in Dialectic of Enlightenment an overdetermined, and at points undisciplined, attempt to give a philosophical, anthropological, and sociological account of the emergence of reason. As we will see, the history of reason Adorno gives is likely intended to be both real (modeling broadly some actual historical events) and ideal (modeling relations of priority and causation between concepts and ideas); likewise, it has both phylo- and ontogenetic elements. This will become important in chapter 2.

Adorno’s account begins with the claim that conceptuality originated in a primal experience of terror, caused by mankind’s inability to comprehend its immediate surroundings. The terror is caused not by an illusion, but by “the real preponderance of nature in the weak psyches of primitive people.”¹³ At the outset of this account, then, there is opposed a set of natural properties and processes and an individual whose “weak psyche” is not set up to be able to withstand interaction with this complexity. This overbearing complexity, which the natural world presents to the primitive individual, creates a “noonday panic fear in which nature appeared as all-powerful.”¹⁴

There are clear parallels between the account that Adorno and Horkheimer offer here and the one given by James Frazer in The Golden Bough. (Frazer is referenced explicitly in Philosophy of New Music, Adorno’s monograph on music, which was explicitly conceived by Adorno to serve as a “detailed excursus to Dialectic of Enlightenment.”)¹⁵ Frazer understood primitive fear to be rooted not in delusion, but in an incapability to distinguish between physical processes and processes guided by intentionality. ¹⁶ Nature appears threatening and “all-powerful” as in its complexity it appears as a threatening being outside of the control of the primitive consciousness. Accordingly, prehistoric religious behavior is understood by Frazer to be not mere irrationality, but rather an early stage in the maturation of rationality itself. ¹⁷ Adorno and Horkheimer’s account in Dialectic of Enlightenment parallels this approach very closely, understanding primitive religious behavior to be importantly continuous with the rational structures that determine modern rationality. ¹⁸ Unlike Frazer, however, Adorno and Horkheimer place this account in a more explicitly philosophical register, claiming that this terror of nature derives from inadequacy in the conceptual structure of experience.

This idea—that primal fear derives from a lack of conceptual sophistication rather than simple emotional distress—can be firmed up by looking at Adorno and Horkheimer’s account of what sufficed to address and remove this terror. The terror that Adorno and Horkheimer pick out is allayed through an increase in the sophistication of the conceptual tools with which the primitive consciousness is able to interact with nature. The terror is overcome by the primitive’s beginning to fix “the transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known.”¹⁹ As the use of the term “transcendence” signifies, the terror of the encountered unknown is here deriving from the encountered natural world’s ability to transcend the epistemological categories (and, hence, control) of the primitive consciousness confronted with it.

This then opens the question of how this “transcendence” can come to be “fixed.” If a collection of natural events and processes manifests a threatening epistemological excess, what is required is a means of reducing this excess. The experienced world must become subsumable, understood as governed by comprehensible laws, types, and processes. Adorno takes the view that this procedure, of reducing a menacing efflorescence of radically particular, uncontrollable objects and events to tokens of a limited number of kinds and to the operation of a limited set of laws, is not achieved through investigation and induction. In other words, we did not create the kind of conceptual knowledge that allowed us to manipulate the world by discovering that the world exhibited regular features and then basing our concepts on that discovery. Rather, the individual imposes these concepts and general classes onto the field of his or her experience, and forces the phenomena into regular congruence with them. For Adorno, concepts originate in a basic desire to control and limit the phenomena we experience:

Of course, mental representation is only an instrument. In thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered. Like the material tool which, as a thing, is held fast as that thing in different situations and thereby separates the world, as something chaotic, multiple and disparate, from that which is known, single and identical, so the concept is the idea-tool which fits into things at the very point from which one can hold of them. ²⁰

For Kant, concepts were autonomous, by which I mean they followed their own internal principles, and their behavior was explained only in terms of these principles. For Adorno, by contrast...