Introduction

With our modernist commitments and problems, we cannot avoid epistemology. Epistemology represents the ways in which modern subjectivity and our rational, discursive self-conceptions are articulated and defended; it both preserves something authentic about subjectivity and conceals it. This concealment, Adorno thinks, results from a misconception that must be corrected since it neglects the dependence of both subjectivity and meaning on an embodied and finite experience of nature and things.

Adorno's critique of epistemology also involves rethinking the claims of ontology. Appreciating Kant's critique of ontology as something that transcends the bounds of possible sense or conceptual intelligibility, Adorno cannot revert to ontological assumptions in the Aristotelian tradition. Yet he does not endorse Kant's rejection of ontology, which makes intelligibility a mere question of the subject's conceptually articulated experience and normative self-authorization. Instead, Adorno presents us with a critical self-consciousness which reminds us that nature, our form of life, the lives of other beings, and the nature of things intrinsically evade our discursively articulated experiences and claims. In the mature formulations of Negative Dialectics, the conception of ourselves as belonging to a natural lifeworld also involves acknowledging the problematic status of all ontological claims. We must acknowledge ourselves and our claims as indebted to an affinity with things and other beings which are recognized as finite individuals. An ontological claim to wholeness or completion cannot be defended; we can defend only individual expressions of particularity that invoke the whole without stating it.