In the 'Introduction' to his Adorno: Disenchantment and the Ethics J.M. Bernstein writes thiis interesting passage:
By staking his philosophy on the critique of scientific rationalism Adorno is following what is by now a well-worn path. Almosty all critiques of scientific rationalism share the attempt to demonstrate that it posseses necessary conditions that it cannot eschew, take account of, or get on level terms with. However, since in almost cases what these demonstrations reveal are nonrational conditions of rational thought, then they suffer from two deficiencies: they leave the gap separating justifying reason and motivating reasons unabridged, and thereby leave the non-rational exposed to sceptical from reason (or the inversion of this: simply espouse the cause of the nonrational).
"....where the only way to become a member is to cut your own head off and at the same time cut the head off one of the others, who would, siumultaneously, also become a member. Through this mutual act, we follow each other into the most impossible, that which we could not live together or give to each other, death itself. Which means, of course, that anyone who accomplishes this act will die. A community of dead people. Or, even better: a community of the dying.."
Adorno,in contrast, expands reason. He does so in terms of a critique of an instrumental scientific rationalism, which argues that scientific reason is involved in a process of systematically negating particularity in favour of universality. The expansion by highlighting the constitutive role of sensuous particulars in rationality to give us a practical ethical reason concerned with a damaged life and its insight that a wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 29, 2005 11:58 PM | TrackBack