Page 95 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

72 Communication and Evolution of Society

I do not wish to go into the thesis of the end of the individual
here.> In my view, Adorno and Marcuse have allowed them-
selves to be seduced, by an overly sensitive perception and an
overly simplified interpretation of certain tendencies, into de-
veloping a left counterpart to the once-popular theory of totali-
tarian domination. I mention those utterances only to draw
attention to the fact that critical social theory still holds fast to
the concept of the autonomous ego, even when it makes the
gloomy prognosis that this ego is losing its basis. Nonetheless,
Adorno always refused to provide a direct explication of the
normative content of basic critical concepts. To specify the
make-up of the ego structures that are mutilated in the total
society would have been regarded by him as false positivity.
Adorno had good reasons to reject the demand for a positive
conception of social emancipation and ego autonomy. He de-
veloped these reasons theoretically in his critique of First Phi-
losophy: the attempts of ontological or anthropological thought
to secure for themselves a normative foundation, as something
first and unmediated, are doomed to failure. Additional reasons
stem from the practical consideration that positive theories harbor
a potential for legitimation that can be used, in opposition to
their stated intentions, for purposes of exploitation and repres-
sion (as the example of classical doctrines of natural law shows).
Finally, the normative content of basic critical concepts can be
reconstructed nonontologically, that is, without recourse to a
first unmediated something (or if you will, dialectically) only in
the form of a developmental logic. But Adorno, despite his
Hegelianism, distrusted the concept of a developmental logic
because he held the openness and the initiative power of the
historical process (of the species as well as of the individual) to
be incompatible with the closed nature of an evolutionary pat-
tern.
These are good reasons that can serve as a warning; but they
can grant no dispensation from the duty of justifying concepts
used with a critical intent. And Adorno did not always avoid
doing so in philosophical contexts. In Negatzve Dialectic he says
about the Kantian concept of the intelligible character: ‘‘Accord-
ing to the Kantian model subjects are free to the extent that they