Habermas’s theory of communicative action replaced Adorno’s philosophy of the subject.
Evidence
There was a desperate hope in the way Adorno counted on the shattering power of a form of art that was constantly, as a result of its aporetic state, being driven further forward and increasingly weakened, and which was being taken less and less seriously in society. But there was no less desperation in Habermas’s hope for an alliance between new forms arising in the political public sphere and the guiding, self-reflective power of science in particular, which was being used by society more and more selectively, and more and more insistently, as a productive force and as an ideology, and whose educative and reflective disciplines or variants were being marginalized into an `autonomous’ and irrelevant role similar to that to which art had long since been assigned. The shift in paradigmsfrom the philosophy of the subject and the utopia of a reconciliation between mind and nature, to the theory of communicative action and the utopia of exhausting the normative content of action that was based on consensuspromised a new perspective on society and history, one that would for the first time make possible a systematic perception of progress in the approach to the creation of a human race that could achieve consensus about its essential goals without fear of dominationif such a human race was possible. Adorno’s approach was not taken up into the new paradigm, nor was it supposed to have been, since Habermas considered it essentially mistaken. Some of the significance Adorno attributed to art later found its way into Habermas’s assumption that a rationalization of the life-world was taking place as a result of the potential of science and philosophy for interpreting both the world and themselves, as a result of the potential for enlightenment provided by strictly universalist concepts of law and morality, and as a result of the radical experiences of modernism in aesthetics. The fact that not only art, but all three dimensions, embodied such a promise was a plausible idea. What was not plausible, however, was the exclusion of a further dimension which played an important part for Adorno: the beauty of nature. Another question was also disregarded, one which had not yet been reduced to insignificance by being raised and emphasized by a restricted paradigmthe question of the relationship between the domination of external nature and internal, corporeal nature and the connection between the domination of nature and social conditions. This was a problem which had yet to be examined with a degree of concreteness and a degree of saturation in the subject-matter that Adorno and Horkheimer had never attempted. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2746
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to Habermas’s own works, notably The Theory of Communicative Action, and to the broader Frankfurt School lineage from Adorno/Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Also relevant to the reader’s prior work on instrumental reason and the domination of nature. — connects to: Habermas’s early work directly extended Adorno’s critical theory motifs. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2323; Habermas replaced the reconciliation-with-nature ideal with a language-based ideal of emancipation — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2451; Habermas’s paradigm dropped Adorno’s concern with the domination of nature. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2746 (+1 more)
- SEED: The overlooked dimension of the beauty of nature in Habermas’s rationalization of the life-world could seed an essay comparing Adorno’s aesthetic theory with Habermas’s three-dimensional rationalization — an underexplored seam.
Broader Connections
- Habermas grounds universalizing reason in the dialogical structure of communication.
#expands(0.85) — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 356 - Habermas’s paradigm dropped Adorno’s concern with the domination of nature.
#expands(0.82) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2746