ABSTRACT
Wandering about in the Panopticum Waxworks we meet on the stairs a charming lady whom we do not know and who seems to know us, and who is in fact the well-known joke of the place: we have for a moment been tricked by a waxwork figure. As long as we are tricked, we experience a perfectly good percept: we see a lady and not a waxwork figure. When the illusion vanishes, we see exactly the opposite, a waxwork figure that only represents a lady. (1900-1, vol. 2, p. 609)
It is impossible to correct a mistake of idealistic epistemology without necessarily producing another error. One concept is evolved out of another so that contradictions may be corrected in ordered succession, but none would come closer to the 'thing' than the first one. Indeed each falls deeper into the thicket of invention. (Adorno, 1956, p. 211)
127 Flesh with Trimmings: Adorno and Difference
For Adorno it is Kant who represents the norm for modernity, and who stands at the peak of 'Enlightenment' thought. He emphasizes how in Kant's moral philosophy all differences between individuals have to be set to one side, so that moral duty involves subjecting individuals to the 'universal'. Furthermore, in a passage explicitly linked with Kant's epistemology (and the role of the schematism in imposing spatiotemporal 'rules' on the material presented by the senses), Adorno and Horkheimer note that instrumental reason 'recognizes no function other than the preparation of the object from mere sensory material in order to make it the material of subjugation' (1944, p. 84). Thus, on the one hand, Adorno explicitly binds the 'instrumental' use of reason in Kant's philosophy with the tendency to treat 'persons' as equivalents. On the other hand, he also links the over-emphasis on the subject and its reification of the object in the bourgeois era with Kant's tendency to treat matter as a mere thing that can be mastered by reason.
