[FRA:] [Adorno-Hegel] Something about Kant from ND

[Ralph Dumain]

[Here's an exchange from the Adorno-Hegel list.  Examples of more 
quotes from Adorno on the Absolute I can't make sense of.]

This is all highly suggestive, but taken by itself, it reads like 
nonsense. I don't see the structure of the argument behind these assertions.

"The block" is mentioned in Adorno's lectures on Kant. There Adorno 
tends to make more sense.

At 03:36 PM 8/21/2008, John Bardis wrote:

>I've been working like a dog this week--and next week won't be much
>better. I'm afraid reading philosophy and working like a dog just
>don't go very well together. So whatever it was I was wanting to post
>this weekend will just have to wait. But part of it had to do with
>the following about Kant in the ND:
>
>"The authority of the Kantian concept of truth turned terroristic
>with the ban on thinking the absolute. Irresistibly, it drifts toward
>a ban on all thinking. What the Kantian block projects on truth is
>the self-maiming of reason, the mutilation reason inflicted upon
>itself as a rite of initiation into its own scientific character."
>(page 388)
>
>Wow!
>
>Then:
>
>"Socially there is good reason to suspect that the block, the bar
>erected against the absolute, of being one with the necessity to
>labor, which in reality keeps mankind under the same spell that Kant
>transfigured into philosophy. The imprisonment in immanence to which
>he honestly and brutally condemns the mind is the imprisonment in
>self-preservation, as it is imposed on men by a society that
>conserves nothing but the denials that would not be necessary any
>more."
>
>If we're imprisoned in immanence by having to work like dogs in order
>to pay the rent, surely there's no need for denials about the
>absolute or anything like that--as if we had time to be messing with
>the absolute.
>
>But then:
>
>"Once the natural-historic cares we share with beetles were broken
>through, a change would occur in the attitude which human
>consciousness takes toward truth."
>
>This is a continual refrain in Adorno--the idea that one day we won't
>have to work so hard, which will make some things possible which just
>really aren't possible today.
>
>Then:
>
>"The social qualification of the sensual realm might well permit the
>split to disappear one day--whereas the idealists are ideologues,
>either glorifying the reconciliation of the unreconciled as
>accomplished or attributing it to the unreconciled totality."
>
>Again, Adorno very often expresses his disain for anyone who suggests
>that the world of Spirit as the world of second nature is the
>reconciled world, the finally redeemed world--as though the second
>syllogism were already the third syllogism.
>
>Also, as anything we do simply reinforces the spell of second nature,
>this calls all practice into question:
>
>"Such self-reflection happens even to the thesis of the primacy of
>practical reason, a thesis which from Kant, via the idealists, leads
>straight to Marx. Moreover the dialectics of practice called for the
>abolition of practice, of production for production's sake, of the
>universal cover for the wrong practice. This is the materialistic
>ground of the traits which in negative dialectics rebel against the
>official doctrinal concept of materialism." (page 389)
>
>But maybe Saturday I'll have the time to develop what's on my mind a
>little more thoroughly, based mainly on the "Contemplation" section
>of ND.
>
>John