ABSTRACT
To separate knowledge of a thing from the thing itself is only a first step. Next comes the question how knowledge appropriates the real, and here again there is an essentially realist understanding brought to bear by Adorno. It includes a depth ontology of causes, conditions, structures and their generative mechanisms, which theoretical knowledge identifies and explains. For Adorno, as for Bhaskar, the bankruptcy of Kantian philosophy is seen in the split that allows Kant to say that ‘the “transcendental idealist” is also an “empirical realist”’. This is an admission of defeat. Kant’s acceptance of this point ‘paralyses the specifically philosophical impulse to blast a hidden truth out from behind the idols of conventional consciousness’ (Adorno, 1973, pp 72-73). The impulse to bring something hidden into view is central to Adorno’s negative dialectics, just as it is caught in Bhaskar’s critical realism. Recall that Bhaskar opposes both transcendental idealism and empirical realism as a pair blocking the possibility of ‘hidden truths’ that could be revealed by depth explanatory enquiry. It is just this impulse, indeed, that drove Bhaskar to formulate the idea of transcendental, or critical, realism. Both philosophers embrace the notion of ontological depth which knowledge strives to grasp and understand.
