Adorno saw formal logic as a social artifact mirroring commodity exchange.

Evidence

From Husserl’s epistemology Adorno went on to criticize his mathematical realism and logical “absolutism.” The triumph of mathematical thinking in the West, Adorno argued, contained a mythical element. The fetish of numbers had led to a repudiation of nonidentity and a kind of hermetic idealism. Similarly, the reliance on formal logic as a mental absolute contained mythical traces. These modes of thought were also not without social significance. The reification of logic, Adorno asserted, “refers back to the commodity form whose identity exists in the ‘equivalence’ of exchange value.” 126 Instead of formal logic, which perpetuated the false dualism of form and content, Adorno suggested a more dynamic alternative that referred back to Hegel. “Logic,” he wrote, “is not Being, but a process that cannot be simply reduced to the pole of ‘subjectivity’ or `objectivity.’ The self-criticism of logic has as its result dialectics. … There is no logic without sentences, no sentences without the synthetic mental function.” 129 Formal logic with its laws of contradiction and identity was a kind of repressive taboo that ultimately led to the domination of nature. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 266

Categorization

• XREF: Connects Adorno’s critique of exchange-equivalence logic to Lukács’s reification chapter in History and Class Consciousness, the core Frankfurt grounding. — connects to: Adorno made instrumental reason a transhistoric urge rather than a capitalist product — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 380; Adorno’s identification of exchange with identity logic is meta-economic, not capitalist — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1298; Adorno treats exchange as a principle shaping thought and feeling to the innermost being. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 930 (+6 more)
• SEED: Article angle: how the abstraction of formal logic structurally mirrors the abstraction of the commodity form — a dialectical-materialist account of logic itself.

Broader Connections

• Adorno’s identification of exchange with identity logic is meta-economic, not capitalist #expands (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1298
• Adorno treats exchange as a principle shaping thought and feeling to the innermost being. #corroborates (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 930