Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 20:32:00 +0200
From: Claus Hansen <clausdh-AT-tdcspace.dk>
Subject: Re: [FRA:] Re: Adorno and Empirical Sociology




If I may be so free as to join this discussion I have a few comments that
I would like to add in connection to the question of Adorno, Kant and
metaphysics.


At 18:34 07-08-03 +0300, you wrote:

Greetings


Good, thanks Filipe. I understand. You think that {quot}German
idealism{quot}

(in quotation marks, because not all of the philosophy called
{quot}German

idealism{quot} actually isn't idealism), including transcendental

philosophy, is part of metaphysical tradition. That's a bit
worrying,

I think, because transcendental philosophy has exactly been an
effort

to step out of the metaphysics. It's crucial to the understanding 
of

German philosophy that it probably has utilized some old

(metaphysical) methods of argumentation and so forth, but in doing
so

haven't committed itself to the metaphysics in a sense of an effort
to

justify and explain phenomenal and experiential world by some

metaphysical principle (the Absolute, God, the One, Reason, Nature

etc.). on the other hand, there seem to be as many concepts of

metaphysics as there are discourses on metaphysics... oh,
well...


I think it's commonplace to think that Kant really overcame at 
least

the old metaphysics - crude or sophisticated - and began something

genuinely new as the founder of transcendental philosophy that
refuses

to rely on any metaphysically postulated or formulated foundation.

That's also called as (philosophical) modernity.

I don't think Adorno would agree on this characterization of Kant - while
it was indeed part of Kant's self understanding that he had overcome
metaphysics Adorno's critique of Kant seeks to show how this is
not the case. His critique is centered around the Kantian
separation of understanding and sensibility and Kant's inability to
adequately connect these two moments in his Critique of Pure Reason. Let
me quote a passage from Simon Jarvis introduction to Adorno that deals
with this issue:


{quot}In one passage of the second edition of the transcendental
deduction Kant answers the question of why it is that 'our
understanding...can produce a priori unity of apperception solely
by means of the categories, and only by such and so many' by ruling it
out of court: it is 'as little capable of further explanation as why we
have just these and no other functions of judgement, or why space and
time are the only forms of possible intuition'. The categories and the
logical functions of judgement are at this point regarded as raw givens
no less than the forms of sensibility. For Adorno, this, if true, means
that the deduction has not taken place. In the transcendental deduction
itself we come to a halt before 'something given, something simply to be
accepted, something which can no longer properly be deduced at
all'...Adorno is dissatisfied with the way in which the question of right
is itself thus modelled on facticity in the heart of the deduction - with
what he thinks is the dogmatic aspect of transcendental method
itself{quot} (Jarvis, 1998, p. 163).


Now this does not mean that Adorno thought himself to have rid his own
thinking of metaphysics altogether. On the contrary, on of the central
aspects of his philosophy is the fact that we cannot disavow the
moment of metaphysics in our thinking. I don't want to go into any
details on this matter but Jarvis' account of this in his Adorno: A
Critical Introduction (chapters 6,7,8) is excellent as well as
Bernstein's Adorno: Disenchantment & Ethics (last chapter). 








Things like that were at the
background when I originally made my

questions. Why? Because it's crucial for any interpretation of any

critical theorist whether he somehow relies on non-metaphysically

understood transcendental philosophy or on metaphysically 
understood

philosophy (say, {quot}German idealism{quot} in toto).


Therefore I also made a formulation you wrote about:


> Anyway, I don't know what you mean by {quot}being somehow along
the

> lines of Kantian or neo-kantian transcendental-philosophical

> discussion{quot} when we are talking about Adorno, but it is clear
for

> me that Adorno seeks to preserve the tensions that we can
identify

> at Kant and german idealism {quot}truth content{quot} or (if I
misuse this

> concept) the {quot}truth ambitions{quot} we find at Kant or
Hegel


[By the way, could we call them 'truth claims', or is this already

another concept?]

I think Felipe is right in using the concept of 'truth content' - for
Adorno all thinking, indeed all social phenomena whatsoever contained
'traces' of the social circumstances under which they arose. These traces
are the 'truth content' of these phenomena (and this is why he claimed
that even ideologies or artworks had moments of truth) and they can only
be deciphered by philosophical interpretation. Truth claims in my ears
sounds more like what is at stake when one pace Habermas asserts somekind
of claim to truth in discourse, thus even if the truth claims (in
Habermas' understanding) of Kant and German Idealism are wrong there is
nevertheless still a 'truth content' inherent in these philosophies that
Adorno wants to rescue.




Yeah, and Adorno distanced himself
from the 20th century strategy to

that. I referred to this earlier as transcendental-philosophical

problems of 'Lebenswelt'. However, Adorno wrote his infamous book 
on

Husserl - the one he wrote in England ({quot}Against
epistemology{quot}?), I

don't remember the original name - where he believed he had
disproved

phenomenological philosophy. Whatever his reasons were, he
practically

cut himself off from modern transcendental philosophy. Yet he tried
to

maintain same kind of non-metaphysical stance that there was

available. My point? It's twofold: (a) there are more than one way
to

tackle what you call subject-object dialectics, and (b) A. may have

been stronger dialectician had he been theoretically enlightened on

the problems of 'Lebenswelt'.



Could you elaborate on this a bit more please. From what I know, Adorno's
critique of phenomenology is widely appraised as being quite robust and I
believe that for instance Habermas' refers to Adornos critique at
grounding philosophy in first principles such as the ones conducted by
Husserl and his phenomenological reduction. BTW, the original name of the
book is Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie and was begun as Adorno's
Ph.D when staying in Oxford but never completed until the late 1950's. In
relation to your points I believe that for Adorno there actually was
no way 'to tackle what you call subject-object dialectics',
because this dicothomy is a real contradiction constitutive of our
very social practices not solely a deficit of our mind and thought as
much analytic-philosophy would believe it to be (for instance Habermas).



> I doubt Adorno would be happy
with a probabilistic account of

> human/social knowledge, but of course he is not an
{quot}absolutist{quot}

> whatever it means...


Whether happily or not, folks like Adorno were *leading the way*
after

WW2 in European social sciences. In USA refugees like Adorno 
learned

the new U.S. way of doing sociology: surveys, statistical analysis.

They brought these then new methods and techniques to Europe. In

sociology, {quot}Teddy{quot} was most modern then. In this sense he's
with

'probabilistic camp', so to speak, as everyone in human/social

sciences who understands the nature of the knowledge of his

discipline. I.e. knowledge like 'pure deductions of reason'
concerning

human/social world (presented, in worst cases, as absolute truths)
is

replaced by probabilistic knowledge.



Actually I would tend to agree with Felipe here again. Adorno once said
something like: 'Truth is objective, not plausible'. And I believe that
this sentence states that Adorno could not accept probability statements
as tokens of truth. I believe one should see Adorno's
philosopho-sociological method as that every social phenomena even the
knowledge produced by science as in need of some kind of deciphering so
as to reveal its 'truth content' e.g. that what is says about the society
in which it has been produced. Adorno clearly became highly inspired by
his exile in the States and was one of the forerunners for bringing
empirical methods into German sociology after the war but he was equally
critical of the 'positivists' that tried to reduce the results of the
questionaires and the like to true knowledge of society. This could only
be done by a 'second reflection' that deciphered the 'essence' of society
as it manifested itself, however distorted in the surface phenomena of
empirical data.


Claus



____________________________________________________________________________

{quot}Hos mange mennesker er det allerede en uforskammethed, når de
siger 'jeg'{quot} (T.W. Adorno)




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