From: M Salter1 <MSalter1-AT-aol.com> Date: Sun, 21 Dec 1997 17:34:58 EST Subject: Re: MT: "Ideology" (1) In a message dated 15/12/97 01:27:46 GMT, Jukka writes: << Michael reminded me of some of Adorno's formulations last summer. These can be summarized bluntly like that: we can imagine a world without ideal but we cannot imagine ideal without material. Or: without body there won't be thinking. >> I think Adorno's point was that there is a dialectic between subject and object of lived-experience, that it is a phenomenological dialectic; that even here (within a realm confined to the contents of our "consciousness-of-X", it supplies evidence whose basic fornm refutes an "idealist" reduction of the object into the subjectivity of the subject, i.e., that whilst we can IMAGINE (but not otherwise experience) an object whose significance is unmediated by intersubjectivity, we cannot EVEN imagine a form of consciousness that is unmediated by the materiality of objects. This contention represents an a decidedly immanent form of critique of phenomenological idealism (albeit a mode of critique or "determinate negation" whose own roots are Hegelian). isn't one of the points of dialectics to try to counter any kind of reductionism in which the complexity of lived-experience is treated as "nothing-but" an instance of one side of the traditional dualisms, mind / body, idealism / materialism power / law, reason / passion, and yet avoid predetermining any empirical result. (After all dialectics in practice is often stronger on challenging underlying assumptions than it is on providing empirically convincing concrete analysis). Michael
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