J. M. Bernstein

Blind Intuitions: Modernism's Critique of Idealism

Adorno contends that something of what we think of knowing and rational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique, singular presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interests and needs; hence, in accordance with the presumptions of transcendental idealism, we have come to mistake what are, in effect, historically contingent, species-subjective ways of viewing the world for an objective understanding of the world. And further, this interested understanding of the world is deforming in a more radical way than just obscuring what is there for the sake of interested needs and purposes; these instrumental ways of knowing and acting, are broadly self-interested, in the interest of survival, without effective concern for the well-being and worth of others; by becoming generalized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes of encountering things and persons that support their differences and independence, their needs and interests, these instrumental practices are the deepest cause of the ills of our time. As heightened forms of rational self-interest, self-interest being the drive of reason, transcendental interests suppress the interests of others. Adorno argues that modernist artistic practices perform a critique of the set of assumptions governing idealism by demonstrating how there is a suppressed rational form of human comportment directed towards the making and comprehension of unique sensuous particulars. Art, according to Adornos ‘Aesthetic Theory’, is a broken off and isolated fragment of human knowing; in its hibernates the rational forms of acting and knowing that have been suppressed in the coming to be of Enlightened modernity.