Adorno framed Negative Dialectics as philosophy extending itself from within

Evidence

You’ll have received the Negative Dialectics, that fat child, in the meantime, and of course I’m extremely excited to hear your reactionthough I wouldn’t want to pressure you into reading it faster than you or I would normally read this sort of thing. I hope you won’t see it as a reversion to philosophy. It was intended, rather, as an attempt to extend (to put it mildly) the traditional concept of the philosophical problematic from within itself … The only controversial aspect of it might be whether it was necessary to go into the so-called specialized philosophical field to do this; but this is just my passion for immanent criticismit is not merely a passionand may be justified to some extent in the book. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2520

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno’s own account of the method of immanent criticism — working inside the philosophical problematic rather than abandoning it — is useful for reference-level definition of critical theory method.
• XREF: Pairs with passages elsewhere on the tension between Adorno’s philosophy and Horkheimer’s more anti-specialist stance within the Frankfurt School. — connects to: Negative dialectics and modernist art share a paradoxical suspended architecture — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 122; Bloch’s Utopian Spirit offered Adorno a magic-inflected philosophy beyond method — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 264; Adorno treated philosophy as an independent instrument of discovery rather than applied science — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2508 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno reconceived philosophy as the teaching of the correct life rather than epistemology #expands (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 835
• Adorno reframes philosophy as reflecting on missed revolutionary practice #qualifies (0.75) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1210
• Adorno’s fragmented aphoristic style was itself a philosophical position against system #expands (0.72) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 834