Cold, cold, warm: Autonomy, intimacy and maturity in Adorno

Abstract

When Adorno refers to the concept of maturity (Mündigkeit), he generally means having the courage and the ability to use one's own understanding independently of dominant heteronomous patterns of thought. This Kantian-sounding claim is essentially an exhortation: maturity demands self-liberation from heteronomy, i.e. autonomy. The problem, however, is that in spite of Adorno's general endorsement of Kant's definition of maturity, he ultimately rejects the corresponding Kantian definition of autonomy. Yet Adorno does not simply discard the Kantian concept of autonomy. On the contrary, he will try to correct it by returning to it what it lacks, namely, intimacy or 'live contact with the warmth of things'. In this gesture, he aims to restore to autonomy its ethical substance or lived ethical context, not as a mere supplement to the purity of duty, but rather as necessary to the very process of becoming mature. This article examines Adorno's concept of maturity in the context of the dialectical relationship between autonomy and intimacy.

The melancholic gaze: Adorno's concept of interpretation as dialectical negation and critical speculation

“…Determinate negation “proceeds through a rational response to the experience of contradiction” (O'Connor, 2011, p. 548). According to Iain Macdonald, in “determinate negation…consciousness experiences contradiction not as something meaningless or aporetic, but rather as the negative force that propels it to determine, that is, think through and diagnose, contradictions in order to overcome or ‘negate’ them” (Macdonald, 2011, p. 678). For Hegel this process is wholly conceptual, and it produces new, more complete knowledge (O'Connor, 2005, pp.…”

Minima Pedagogica: Education, Thinking and Experience in Adorno

“…The real subject always exists in relation to the objective world, and self‐reflective thought must ‘surrender itself to the subject matter’ (Adorno, , p. 129), and give precedence to the object before it dialectically returns to the subject. As Iain Macdonald () explains, Adorno's concept of autonomous thinking differs from that of Kant in that it involves an intimate connection with things, live contact with their ‘warmth’. For this reason, ‘The key position of the subject in cognition is experience’ (Adorno, , p. 254).…”

“…It rather operates in a way Adorno calls ‘expansive concentration’: ‘By gauging its subject matter, and it alone, thinking becomes aware of what within the matter extends beyond what was previously thought and thereby breaks open the fixed purview of the subject matter’ (, p. 131). As Iain Macdonald puts it, such thinking is ‘the ability to reflect objectivity […] in order to reveal the (dys)functional context of the status quo’ (, pp. 10–11).…”

Adorno: Cultural Education and Resistance

“…Thinking for oneself does not entail the abandonment of the context which has called forth the thinking in the first place, rather moral thinking is 'squeezed out of ''matter'' with which moral philosophy did not want to dirty its hands ' (1966/1981a, p. 243). Intimacy is Adorno's corrective to Kant's concept of autonomy because there are 'irreplaceable faculties which cannot flourish in the isolated cell of pure inwardness, but only in live contact with the warmth of things ' (1951Macdonald, 2011). 'Live contact' is described as a non-coercive gaze and as 'differentiation without domination'; this is in stark contrast to the Enlightenment rationality which Adorno and Horkheimer condemn as having the sole aim of dominating nature and other human beings.…”