Despite appearing side by side as keynote speakers at a congress in 1962 devoted to the question of progress, Löwith’s and Adorno’s accounts of progress have never been linked. This paper is an attempt to establish this missed connection, to reveal important connections, striking similarities, and a fundamental difference between these two eminent thinkers’ work on progress. For one, Löwith diagnoses the three main problems that Adorno attempts to solve with his dialectical account of progress. Moreover, each is sympathetic towards (...) crucial aspects of the other’s account: Löwith towards Adorno’s claim that progress is dialectical, Adorno towards Löwith’s claim that progress necessarily has a redemptive aspect. A fundamental disagreement nevertheless divides them: whether the problem of suffering in history is part of our ontological condition, or something we must struggle against and overcome through political action. By establishing this missed connection, I hope to show how progress might still have an important role to play in our present-day historical and political consciousness. (shrink)

The idea that Adorno should be read as a “realist” of any sort may indeed sound odd. And unpacking from Adorno’s elusive prose a credible and useful normative reconstruction of epistemology and metaphysics will take some work. But we argue that he should be added to the growing group of epistemologists and metaphysicians who have been developing post-positivist versions of realism such as contextual, internal, pragmatic and critical realisms. These latter realisms, however, while helpfully showing how realism can coexist with (...) ontological pluralism, for example, as well as a highly contextualised account of knowledge, have not developed a political reflexivity about how the object of knowledge—the real—is constructed. As a field, then, post-positivist realisms have been politically naïve, which is perhaps why they have not enjoyed more influence among Continental philosophers. (shrink)

When Adorno refers to the concept of maturity (Mündigkeit), he generally means having the courage and the ability to use one’s own understanding independently of dominant heteronomous patterns of thought. This Kantian-sounding claim is essentially an exhortation: maturity demands self-liberation from heteronomy, i.e. autonomy. The problem, however, is that in spite of Adorno’s general endorsement of Kant’s definition of maturity, he ultimately rejects the corresponding Kantian definition of autonomy. Yet Adorno does not simply discard the Kantian concept of autonomy. On (...) the contrary, he will try to correct it by returning to it what it lacks, namely, intimacy or ‘live contact with the warmth of things’. In this gesture, he aims to restore to autonomy its ethical substance or lived ethical context, not as a mere supplement to the purity of duty, but rather as necessary to the very process of becoming mature. This article examines Adorno’s concept of maturity in the context of the dialectical relationship between autonomy and intimacy. (shrink)

This article seeks to clarify the potential that Herbert Marcuse's and Theodor W. Adorno's psychoanalytic accounts may have with respect to the philosophy of education today. Marcuse and Adorno both share the view that psychoanalytic theory enables a deeper understanding of the social and biological dynamics of consciousness. For both thinkers, psychoanalytic theory provides conceptual tools for thinking through contradictions between the needs of an individual and those of the governing entity. In fleshing this out, I first explore Marcuse's radical (...) account of sublimation which seeks to demonstrate how the revision of instinctual energy makes it possible to establish a subjectivity which utilises the human potentiality to its fullest. I then turn to Adorno who emphasises the importance of understanding that exterior conditions transform our instinctual energies. After recapitulating Adorno's conception of natural, instinctual impulses and his use of psychoanalytic theory, I will explore the possibility of a critical rationality through a critique of rationality's current mode. From the perspective of Adorno's and Marcuse's theories, both rationality and sensuous desire play their respective roles in enabling critical rationality. In conclusion, the article reflects the different advantage points of Marcuse's and Adorno's accounts from the perspective of philosophy of education. Thus, education should provide individuals with the ability to recognise the subtle and invisible ways through which the calculating mode of rationality operates in late-capitalist society. Regarding education, Adorno's conception of non-identity could be developed in the direction of promoting ways of experiencing non-conformity within such a society. (shrink)

To make Adorno’s difficult notion of “identity thinking” more amendable to sociological research, this project brings his Negative Dialectics into conversation with Schutz’s theory of typification. When revised with Adorno’s attention to political economy and the pathologies of reification, Schutz’s framework allows for an analysis of identity thinking in everyday life. Both theorists argue that categories of thought: automatically subsume objects for pragmatic yet socially conditioned reasons, are socially formed, transferred, and selected, and suppress particularizing characteristics of objects. Their overlapping (...) arguments are cross-fertilized to propose a critical approach to cognitive sociology that can engage in a form of ideology critique that illuminates forms of thinking that conceal social contradictions. This approach is useful for explaining the “mundane dialectic of enlightenment”: the daily reproduction of unreflective rationalization that breeds irrationality in the form of social domination and environmental harm, a contradiction which finds its ultimate expression in climate change inaction. (shrink)

This article discusses the problem of understanding in Adorno’s critical theory. It is argued that another rationale for the contingency of understanding is provided by Adorno, one that justifies understanding critical theory as disclosing critique. For Adorno, what is responsible for the contingency of understanding is not the local limitation of our knowledge and vocabulary, but the presupposition of understanding itself. In this article, two readings of this contingency of understanding are distinguished: an epistemo-critical one and an ideology-critical one. Finally, (...) the case is made for adopting the epistemo-critical view of the contingency of understanding in preference to the ideology-critical view - not least because it contains a normative impulse which goes beyond contextualism. (shrink)

Violence in psychiatric clinics has been a consistent problem since the birth of modern psychiatry. In this paper, I examine current efforts to understand and reduce both violence and coercive responses to violence in psychiatry, arguing that these efforts are destined to fall short. By and large, scholarship on psychiatric violence reduction has focused on identifying discrete factors that are statistically associated with violence, such as patient demographics and clinical qualities, in an effort to quantify risk and predict violent acts (...) before they happen. Using the work of Horkheimer and Adorno, I characterize the theoretical orientation of such efforts as identity thinking. I then argue that these approaches lead to epistemic imperceptiveness and a subtle form of conceptual restraint on patients. I suggest a reorientation in psychiatric research, away from identity thinking and toward a more productive and just approach to the problem of violence in psychiatric clinics. (shrink)

According to a longstanding metaphysical tradition, actuality is prior and in some ways superior to possibility. From Aristotle to Hegel, the exceptions to this fundamental belief are fairly rare; but there is a marked trend in post-Hegelian thought to undermine this traditional priority, with Theodor W. Adorno representing an important line of attack. Here, the guiding question is: how does Adorno take issue with Hegel's version of the thesis on the subordination of possibility to actuality? Indeed, certain key aspects of (...) Adorno's utopianism can only be understood as a reaction to Hegel's theory of actuality. Specifically, Adorno defends a type of possibility that has no place in Hegel's system and so, in essence, sketches a revised dialectical theory of modality. (shrink)