3.3.7. Adorno on the Dialectic of Subject and Object
In his first study on Hegel’s epistemology, Adorno (1963) discusses the dialectic of subject and object in relation to knowledge. He argues that there is not simply a human subject and an independent outside world as object of thought, but a dialectic of subject and object:
Hegel’s critique strikes at the empty center of the static analysis of knowledge into subject and object […], and the blow he strikes is so deadly because he does not set up an irrational unity of subject and object in opposition to that analysis but instead preserves the distinct moments of the subjective and the objective while grasping them as mediated by one another. The insight that in the realm of the Geisteswissenschaften, wherever the object itself is mediated by ‘spirit’, knowledge becomes fruitful not by excluding the subject but through its utmost exertions, through all its impulses and experiences – this insight […] comes from Hegel’s system (Adorno 1963, 7).
Figure 3.1 generalises Adorno’s insights and visualises the production of knowledge. All human cognition takes place in the context of a social environment, in which humans communicate, and a natural environment, with which humans stand in a physical metabolism. Cognition is the production of new individual knowledge and the reproduction of individual knowledge. Cognition’s objects are nature and society. Individuals do not always have to communicate with other humans in society to form and reproduce thoughts. They can merely observe and thereby gather experiences that form and reproduce knowledge. Individuals also do not have to work in order to cognise, i.e. they do not have to create social use-values out of nature and culture that satisfy general social needs. They can merely act in a social and natural environment without working and thereby form and reproduce knowledge. But of course all work is a dialectical unity of brain and body activity, mental and physical dimensions. Knowledge work in addition creates social knowledge as social use-value, whereas physical work creates physical products.
3.3.8. Adorno on Language and Communication
In his third study of Hegel’s epistemology, Adorno (1963) makes an important contribution on how to understand the relationship of communication and the reality that language and communication express:
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Critical Theory of Communication