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

[James Rovira]

Ralph -- just a preliminary idea:

The "block" in the first paragraph = "ban on thinking the absolute."

The "block" in the second paragraph = "bar erected against the absolute."

So I think the "block" Adorno refers to is nothing more than the
subject/object distinction in Kant.  We can know the mind knowing the
object, but we can't directly know the object, the thing in itself
that exists independently of mind, or in other words the absolute.  We
can only make inferences about the the object known from the
characteristics of the mind knowing it.

So that is what I think Adorno means by a "ban on thinking the
absolute" or a "bar erected against the absolute" -- that is the
"block," that subject/object distinction.

That means the subject/object distinction, according to Adorno in the
first paragraph, "drifts toward a ban on all thinking" -- if we can't
know any object but those produced by our own minds, what can we know?

Adorno also calls this the "mutilation of reason," presumably because
he believes reason most naturally works by drawing conclusions about
external realities based upon a generally reliable sense perception
that gives us real knowledge about the world outside our minds.

The second paragraph is a bit more of a leap, but I think Adorno is
arguing that since we can't  know any object, and certainly not the
"absolute" that might constitute knowledge of all objects, we're
"trapped in immanence" -- trapped "within" something.  Adorno's use of
the word "immanence" here sounds borrowed from Kierkegaard, esp. as
Adorno uses it to refer to social categories later in the paragraph.
I think the "within" is our own subjective need for self-preservation,
which manifests itself in labor.  So Adorno argues that because we
can't think "outside of" our own immediate minds and its concern for
self-preservation, we're stuck with what society hands to us as our
means of survival (existing divisions of labor), and what it tells us
is truth, etc.

While he may have a point, I don't think Adorno is being completely
fair to Kant here, as in Kant's philosophy there are absolutes such as
cause and effect, time, space, etc. (in COPR), without which our sense
perceptions would make no sense, and which he believed were common to
all rational agents.  So while the world as we know it is constructed
by our minds, it is necessarily constructed in this way -- which means
we do have some absolute upon which our thinking can hinge.

But, I haven't read the entire essay by Adorno, and he may address this.

Jim

>>"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)
>>
>>"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."