ABSTRACT
The factual remains unchallenged, repeated by cognitive reason, merely perpetuated by pragmatic reason. In science, the Enlightenment’s critique of the existent becomes indifferent toward the prevalent value system. Indeed science consents to it as a means for self-preservation and accommodation. Scientific enlightenment no longer serves freedom, but only the self-preservation of the apparatus, which by better providing for our maintenance, at the same time subordinates and equalizes us. The parallelism between sociotechnical domination over nature and man and cognitive domination of the concept over the known is not merely formal. Rather, the cognitive domination also constitutes, for Adorno, the basic cause of the sociotechnical one. Thus, reason is by no means the humane authority to which we can appeal when faced with inhumane domination. Conceptual knowledge tends to regard the subsumed concrete object as already totally known.
