Date: Wed, 6 Aug 2003 18:00:17 +0300 (EEST)
From: j laari <jlaari-AT-cc.jyu.fi>
Subject: [FRA:] Re: Adorno and Empirical Sociology


Greetings,

and sorry for slow reply, Filipe. There has been something nasty with
my eyes for months now, so I must avoid kind of strain PC monitors
cause.

On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, filipe ceppas wrote:

> But the important question here is the critic of specialization,
> which goes with every Adorno's tips for philosophical reflections
> on knowledge and science at XX century (a problem which is crucial
> to think about school curriculum and the place of philosophy at
> high school level). It is just impossible to deal with the problem
> of meaning of specialization if we don't look back for
> philosophical metaphysical tradition and its ruins, as an
> unsuitable but necessary source of ideals to confront the feeble
> desire for social relevance of knowledge production and
> consumption as a part of 'culture-industrial-administred world'
> faced with catastrophe...

That (above) part of your post I don't grasp. Meaning what? - Do you
think that there isn't reference to Weberian views on modernization,
including bureaucratization & specialization in Adorno's social
theoretical texts?

As long as we don't have shared concept of metaphysics (etc.) we will
run in troubles, I'm afraid. Is critical transcendental philosophy
(Kant & turn-of-the-century neo-kantianism) part of metaphysical
tradition or is it not?

In other words, is Adorno's 'post-metaphysical' somehow along the
lines of Kantian or neo-kantian transcendental-philosophical
discussion? Is that what you meant in a first place?

> In almost every Adorno text we find Kant or german idealism being
> discussed, or mentioned at least, in a way that its "truth
> ambition" is seriously considered. But, at the same time, Adorno
> recognize its problematic nature. The plead for subject-object
> dialetics is intertwined with at least two related and dificult
> questions: the problematic nature of totality (the totality is the
> non-truth) and the chalenge of the 'Sachhaltige', as the
> non-identitical, which is a crucial concept of Adorno's Negative
> Dialetics. What does it means for the sociologists' mandatory
> philosophical debate?

Does it have to mean anything? I mean, must every twist and turn in
philosophical debate "translate" into special-scientific (e.g.
sociological) debate? If we (at least "hypothetically") think that
philosophy is concerned with the basics of all thinking, would it then
be possible that some new understanding or clarification could be
"purely philosophical" in a sense that there weren't any consequences
for specialized sciences? (Above I used the term 'special/-ized'
instead of 'empirical' in order to emphasize that not every science
has an empirical object in common English sense.) I must say that i
have no answer to questions like that.

I would, however, emphasize that human/social scientific knowledge is
in a sense along the lines of Adorno: it's probabilistic and therefore
not absolutizing (in a sense of old metaphysics, that systematically
tried to ground all beliefs on some sort of Absolute).

(By the way, I believe that what you've referred to as subject-object
dialectics can be solved only on the basis of Husserlian concept and
theory of Lebenswelt, where my 'social being' - and my 'being in the
world' in general - is finally theorized at the heart of the
philosophical problematics in a non-metaphysical way. However, that
line of reasoning would lead me out of the FS-domain so I end it now.)

> And as far as philosophical thinking is concerned, we find at
> Adorno another concept, Hegel's mediation (Vermittlung), that is
> crucial for the appraisal of all philosophical atempts to run away
> from the dificult situation where we lost any appeal to a stable
> or non-historical truth; confronting it with the relativistic, the
> positivistic, and the existencial-subjectivistic alternatives, and
> even with the Diamat kind of crude materialism. I think that it is
> reason enough to pay atention of Adorno's contribution to the
> post-metaphysical debate. It denies, at the same step, the "fully
> nonirritating game that postmodernism claimed itself to represent,
> the game it intended as the prelude for the ascent of posthistory"

That I don't grasp. Sorry that I have to ask. Are you saying that with
the theory of Vermittlung we can avoid impasses of the isms you
mentioned (relativism etc.)? How will that happen?

Sincerely, Jukka L