ABSTRACT
We saw in the last chapter that Adorno is suspicious of attempts decisively to separate aesthetics from epistemology (the theory of knowledge, of what and how we know), from metaphysics (the theory of the basic features of reality) and from moral theory (the theory of what we ought (and ought not) to do). This suspicion is aimed not only at bolstering the claims of art and the aesthetic but at indicating the centrality of the aesthetic to epistemology, metaphysics and morals. There are significant general similarities between Adorno’s conceptions of thought and of art. For him, art points beyond existence while at the same time it nevertheless exists. The same kind of relation to existence and what does not yet exist obtains in the case of thought. According to the ‘Introduction’ to Negative Dialectics, thought ‘serves’ the non-existent, which is to say that thought is ‘a piece of existence that reaches, however negatively, to the non-existent’ (ND: 57 [translation modified]). The idea that thought, like art, is in the service of an existence opposed to the current wrong state of the world is strikingly anticipated earlier in the ‘Introduction’ when Adorno states that ‘Dialectics serves reconciliation’ (ND: 6 [translation modified]). Thought serves non-existence in that it serves a world different from the current one. The end or purpose of thought is not immediately identifiable with specific utilitarian purposes; rather, thought points to an existence in which such purposes cease to dominate.
