Critical inquiry: contemporary critics & contemporary critique

This chapter links closely to the one we have just left. It will reinforce the continuity between the two if we take up again the matter of Habermas ‘s judgment on Adorno, referred to at the end of Chapter 6.

Habermas, the most illustrious of the second-generation Frankfurt theorists, claims that Adorno, in rejecting identity logic, ‘surrendered to an uninhibited scepticism concerning reason’ (Habermas 1987, p. 129). Adorno, as Habermas understands him, replaced reason with a mimesis that presents itself as ‘the sheer opposite of reason, as impulse’ (Habermas 1984, p. 390). This would be an Adorno whose mimesis is romantic irrationalism and who, in consequence, is closing himself off from the possibility of social critique.

This does not square well with Adorno’s rejection of Bergson’s ‘cult of irrational immediacy’ and his insistence that any cognition whatsoever requires rationality. Nor, on the face of it, does it square well with Adorno’s demand that, in experiencing the inadequacy of thought and thing ‘in the thing’, we are to ‘present society with the bill which the object does not redeem’. Wiggershaus leaves us in no doubt about his view on Adorno’s relationship to rationality:

Adorno’s approach in philosophy was similar to that of his writings on sociology, music and literature. He was concerned to produce a philosophy that would increase the rationality of the perceiving subject and make the subject sensitive to the structure of objects. (Wiggershaus 1994, p. 530)

Habermas’s reading of Adorno is hardly a generous interpretation, therefore, and this no doubt reflects the strained relations that characterised Habermas’s involvement with the Institute for Social Research. In that involvement with the Institute we find a useful setting for our consideration of his ideas.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.