File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2002/bhaskar.0205, message 91


Date: Fri, 10 May 2002 10:05:12 -0400
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: BHA: Is it Hegel or Adorno?


Hi Phil,

No prob, but thanks for the nice words anyhow.

There is actually a wonderful-looking symposium here next weekend that my advisor is involved with, on Adorno.  I'm, like, the only person who has ever worked with him who isn't presenting a paper there!  O well.  Critical realism it is.  

You wrote:

   Now to Adorno this alienation derives from the overconfidence and
>complacency of reason which never seems to be adequate to the richness of
>experience.  To Adorno, Hegel is implicated in this problem.


Yes, I think this is right (though it's not *only* reason that is involved).  


>But, as I read Hegel, what gives meaning to experience is precisely reason.
>By this I mean reason working through history, which is not pure and simply
>human reason, but is a teleology located in nature as a whole.  If I may put
>it like this, Hegel seems to be saying to Adorno "My dear fellow, human
>experience is indeed incredibly varied and important to analyse, but let's
>not imagine that human experience supplies reason.  It is in truth much
>closer to say that reason supplies human experience.".

I'm not in a position to assess Adorno's reading of Hegel, so I am really limited in what I can say, but it seems to me that our guys reach kind of an impasse here.  As I understand him, Adorno will say that this claim in Hegel's hands is the crux of what he, Adorno, calls the myth of constitutive subjectivity.  This is why Adorno prefers Kant in certain ways -- because in Kant there is at least the recognition that reason comes up against objective limits.  And it is not just a question of metaphysics; it relates to the qualifications of Hegel's politics that you introduce.  That is, Adorno thinks that it's not just that Hegel happens unfortunately to endorse the Prussian state.  He (along with Marx) would say that an illusory freedom is (at best) [the "at best" part is Adorno on his own] precisely what is expressed in the idea that reason can be co-extensive with being.

In one sense, for Adorno it comes down to Hegel not being a materialist.  It's interesting that this isn't a problem for you.  On the contrary, it sounds as though it is precisely the metaphysics that you are drawn to, because it authorizes a conception of reason as potentially all-extensive.  In fact, if I understand you, your criticism of Bhaskar is that his attempt at absolute idealism falls short.  (Bhaskar, I think, would in turn charge you with "cognitive triumphalism," I think he calls it.)

But back to Adorno for a second.  Adorno also suggests that the conception of reason that comes from Hegel is in some sense necessarily totalitarian.  I'm assuming that you don't buy that either!  I'm curious, though, how you think about that aspect of his critique, if you have.  

Warmly,
Ruth



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