Blind Intuitions: Modernism's Critique of Idealism

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Blind Intuitions: Modernism's

Critique of Idealism
J.M. Bernstein
New School for Social Research

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of Idealism, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 22:6, 1069-1094, DOI:
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Vol. 22, No. 6, 10691094, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2014.993304
A RTICLE
BLIND INTUITIONS: MODERNISMS CRITIQUE OF
IDEALISM
J.M. Bernstein
Adorno contends that something of what we think of knowing and
rational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique,
singular presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interests
and needs; hence, in accordance with the presumptions of
transcendental idealism, we have come to mistake what are, in effect,
historically contingent, species-subjective ways of viewing the world
for an objective understanding of the world. And further, this
interested understanding of the world is deforming in a more radical
way than just obscuring what is there for the sake of interested needs
and purposes; these instrumental ways of knowing and acting, are
broadly self-interested, in the interest of survival, without effective
concern for the well-being and worth of others; by becoming
generalized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes of
encountering things and persons that support their differences and
independence, their needs and interests, these instrumental practices
are the deepest cause of the ills of our time. As heightened forms of
rational self-interest, self-interest being the drive of reason,
transcendental interests suppress the interests of others. Adorno
argues that modernist artistic practices perform a critique of the set of
assumptions governing idealism by demonstrating how there is a
suppressed rational form of human comportment directed towards the
making and comprehension of unique sensuous particulars. Art,
according to Adornos Aesthetic Theory, is a broken off and
isolated fragment of human knowing; in its hibernates the rational
forms of acting and knowing that have been suppressed in the
coming to be of Enlightened modernity.
KEYWORDS: modernism; idealism; intuition; concept; disinterestedness
INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY BECOMES AESTHETICS

There is a fairly standard debate about whether epistemology or the philosophy of language or moral philosophy (in the thesis of the primacy of practical reason) or metaphysics or even, now, philosophy of mind should be the
controlling domain for philosophical inquiry. Although proposed and then
2015 BSHP
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J.M. BERNSTEIN
abandoned by Schiller and Nietzsche, the idea that aesthetics should have
that role is never heard among Anglo-American philosophers. T. W.
Adorno is perhaps unique among twentieth-century philosophers in claiming
that aesthetics should be the critical core of modern philosophy. While I
cannot vindicate Adornos primacy of aesthetics thesis here, I can block in
the structure of his claim and chart some of the path he travels in his
defence of it.
Perhaps the most direct way of considering Adornos primacy of aesthetics thesis is as a reworking of Kants aesthetic theory. The initially surprising gesture of Kants aesthetics is his requirement that aesthetic reective
judgements be disinterested, and that such disinterestedness is already at
work in thinking of aesthetic judgements as reective as opposed to determinative. Determinative judgements subsume individuals or events under
empirical concepts in accordance with the categories of the understanding,
while aesthetic reective judgements begin with the individual thing prior
to (independent of) conceptualization and inquire into its intrinsic intelligibility, its unity of parts with whole (the purposiveness of its parts for that
whole) without a concept (without an extrinsic purpose). Kants Copernican
turn in aesthetics operates in the rst instance in a direction opposing what
happens in knowing and acting; rather than beginning with a determining
concept the categories or the moral law in aesthetics we begin with the
thing: we are called upon to make sense of the thing merely as it appears
to us and not in accordance with the demands of the transcendental interests
specied by the categories or the moral law (or the lower level empirical and
moral concepts they regulate). Those transcendental interests provide original horizons of intelligibility through which items light up as either knowable or as in relation to desire and worth. In aesthetics we must be
disinterested in those very orienting interests, those ways of the world lighting up for us. The kind of disinterest necessary for aesthetic reective judgement is thus against those determining interests that specify what knowing
and acting are (as well as against sensual and erotic interests that are specic
to each of us as particular individuals).
In a gesture he learned from Nietzsche, Adorno takes Kant at his word: the
interests of knowing and moral action are just that, deep and abiding interests
we have developed in the course of civilization for the sake of species survival: we needed to comprehend empirical objects in terms of their
lawlike, and ideally manipulable, causal powers; and we need to regard
others as fellow participants in a collective enterprise where rules of fair
cooperation allow each to freely pursue their own ends. The principles of
knowing allow items to appear with respect to their causal likenesses and
differences with (all) other items (that is what a unied science would represent); and the principles of morals regard all others as autonomous participants in the same, enduring practical world in which we participate. Without
adopting those principles, we could not have survived as a species; that is the
real source of their presumptive necessity. In Adornos way of expressing the
BLIND INTUITIONS
1071
thought, transcendental interests are the cognitive expressions of the (subjective) drive to self-preservation raised to a level in which they come to appear
as exclusive and necessary, as, simply, what objectivity and truth are.
That appearance of necessity is called into question in the demand for disinterestedness in aesthetic reective judging. In aesthetic reective judgement, judgement is not instrumentalized by the faculties of understanding
and reason, but allowed to operate autonomously and thus disinterestedly.
And when it so operates, its reections are the attempt to draw the potential
for cognitive signicance from the thing itself as it appears to our powers of
sensing and knowing, as if there could be a signicance of the thing or in the
thing that was not a shadow of the demands of the categories or the moral law
where Kant knows there must be such a sense of things if concept formation, concept learning, concept application, and concept extension to
new cases are to be possible. In naturalizing the presumptive necessity of
the categories and moral law, we explain how this relief from necessity is
possible: the necessity was real, but limited because once survival interests
are satised (or in principle satisable), then alternative ways of encountering objects and others is possible, some less interested, less instrumental
way.
Just this is Adornos hypothesis: something of what we think of knowing
and rational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique, singular presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interests and needs;
and hence we have come to mistake what are, in effect, historically contingent, species-subjective ways of viewing the world for an objective understanding of the world. And further, this interested understanding of the
world is deforming in a more radical way than just obscuring what is there
for the sake of interested needs and purposes; these instrumental ways of
knowing and acting, are broadly self-interested, in the interest of survival,
without effective concern for the well-being and worth of others; by becoming generalized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes of encountering things and persons that support their differences and independence,
their needs and interests, these instrumental practices are the deepest cause
of the ills of our time. As heightened forms of rational self-interest, selfinterest being the drive of reason, transcendental interests suppress the interests of others.
What is directly evident in this account, if somewhat perplexing, is how
the transcendental subjective-interested structure of knowing and acting
aligns with the claim of conceptuality and generality, while the objectivedisinterested structure of aesthetic reective judgement aligns with singular
presentations; this is the opposite of what we normally believe. It is equally
the perplexity of the claim of the aesthetic, namely, its binding of objectivity
to what is regarded as outside ordinary conceptual discourse. In the next
section, I track Adornos genealogical account of how this reversal occurred,
and hence why the aesthetic became the refuge for a suppressed objectivity.
In the third section, I show how Adorno views this state of affairs as about
1072
J.M. BERNSTEIN
morality even more than about knowing. In the fourth section, I show why
Adorno substitutes the claim of modernist art practices for Kantian aesthetic
reective judging; and in the fth section and following, I begin working out
how aesthetics redeems that suppressed claim to objectivity and rationality,
that is, why aesthetics has a claim to be the orienting domain of philosophical
inquiry.
CONCEPT AND INTUITION

Near the beginning of Dialectical of Enlightenment, Adorno offers a minor
genealogy of the separation between concept and intuition that is structural
for the entirety of his later thinking. He argues that with
the clean separation between science and poetry the division of labor which
science had helped to establish was extended to language. For science the
word is rst of all sign; it is then distributed among the various arts as
sound, image, or word proper, but its unity can never be restored by the
addition of these arts, by synaesthesia or total art. As sign, language must
resign itself to being calculation and, to know nature must renounce the
claim to resemble it. As image it must resign itself to be a likeness and, to
be entirely nature, must renounce the claim to know it. With advancing
enlightenment, only authentic works of art have been able to avoid the
mere imitation of what already is.1
Adorno, writing here with Max Horkheimer, goes on to state that it was this
distinction between sign and image that was given philosophical articulation
in the Kantian dualism of concept and intuition. Roughly, they claim that the
division of labour between science and art rst generated a linguistic division
of labour between sign and image in which science, whose authority stems
from it being all sign from being non-sensible, general/universal, subsuming, and explanatory and not image (sensible and mimetic), becomes in
time the rational ordering and manipulation of signs (and eventually the
pure sign language of mathematics), while the moment of the image
comes to be exiled (banished) in its distribution among the different arts:
sound images (as such) are preserved in music, the perceptual image (as
such) hibernates in painting and sculpture, and word proper is inherited by
poetry (in the widest sense of that designation). What is so preserved in
the arts, however, implicitly, is the rational-cognitive signicance of the
image, its authority, that has been effectively disenfranchised and delegitimized by the sign becoming hegemonic (constitutive) for knowing and
rationality. It is because the image function has been delegitimized, that
the arts carry the burden of the signicance of the image function only
1
Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1213.
BLIND INTUITIONS
1073
quixotically or aporetically: however materially insistent, the claim to some

form of independent rational authority by the arts has, from Platos and Aristotles rst wrestling with the issue, appeared incapable of being satised.
The arts always seem more important, more signicant, more knowing
and urgent than aesthetic theory has ever managed to vindicate. If Adorno
is right, both sides of that equation are right: the arts are urgent, and their
existing claim to direct rational signicance incapable of justication. (To
concede the obvious: because art is the bearer of a fundamental connection
to or way of relating to the world that has been suppressed and delegitimated,
then aesthetics becomes important because it is the reective comprehension
of that now disenfranchised portion of knowing. The primacy of aesthetics is
derived from the primacy of knowing under conditions in which a signicant
portion of human knowing has been separated from its other core feature,
exiled, dispersed, and emptied.)
As the translation of the sign/image duality into concept and intuition
makes plain, what is sundered is the appropriate relation between universal
and sensuous particularity: universals without sensuous particulars are
empty, sensuous particulars without the controlling orientation of universals
are blind just the world all over again, an ideological doubling, a compliant reproduction.2 No matter how formed, when rationally cut off from the
authority of reigning universals, the art image carries within itself some
version of the blindness, some version of being a mere mirroring or repetition of what is (Platos original complaint about the arts) that justies
the sense that the cognitive-rational role of the arts is incapable of justication. What the image function has become is nearly as misbegotten as its ercest critics, sceptics and philistines, claim.
Horkheimer and Adorno concede that the separation of sign and image is
inescapable, that there is a legitimacy to the division of labour between
science and art, and hence that the idea of a total knowledge of the
world is an illusion (there is not and cannot be one unied and total
account of how the world is). Nonetheless, they also argue that if the separation is hypostatized over again, then each of the isolated principles tends
toward the destruction of truth.3 What Horkheimer and Adorno mean by
the dialectic of enlightenment is precisely the long historical path whereby
this hypostatization incrementally occurs, and truth is thus destroyed by subjective species- interests coming to parade as necessary, objective, and complete. Thus, the path through which sign and concept become hegemonic for
our self-understanding of what knowledge and truth are, and hence what
reason must be, drives out to the point of becoming a vanishing moment
(Hegels phrase) the sensuous particular as recorded in the image function.
And further, that it is philosophical idealism, as forwarded by Kant and
Hegel, that most radically and systematically performs this hypostatization
2
3
Ibid., 13.
Ibid.
1074
J.M. BERNSTEIN
of the separation, giving it its quintessential rational form and unassailable

authority.4 Hence, in some fundamental way for Adorno, the philosophies
of Kant and Hegel are perspicuous accounts of the authority of the deformed,
because hypostatized, sign/concept, and hence of the massively deformed
rationality of the modern world that is pervasively governed by that
concept of the concept. These are enormous claims, and it will not be my
task to defend them here.5
My interest, again, is in matters directly downstream from this originating
thesis about concept and intuition, namely, how this thesis informs Adornos
conception of aesthetics. Let me begin this by broadening the sign/concept
versus image/intuition duality one step further. Adorno terms the regime
of the hypostatized sign/concept constellation identity thinking. What he
means by identity thinking and his precise critique of it is proximate to
Nagels conception of the view from nowhere (and the worry that it
drives out rst-personal, subjective experience, and the whole domain of
what things are like from the inside); and with Bernard Williamss conception of Descartess project as seeking to provide an absolute conception
of the world, that is, some conception of the world as what is there anyway
such that multiple perspectives could converge on it.6 That those ideals of
objectivity have the character they do for us now, Adorno argues, is a consequence of identity thinking; it derives from a conception of rationality in
which the abstract-formal-general concept becomes the sole bearer of cognitive signicance. Once this is accepted, then what depends on any individuals experience for its authority, either as a subjective matter of what it is
like (Nagel), or as a matter of perspective (Williams) must be surmounted
and overcome.
From this vantage point, Adornos general critique of identity thinking is
familiar enough: there is no signicant stretch of human knowing that cannot
be subsumed under the laws of natural science or its social scientic extensions; nor any signicant stretch of human practice that can be rationally
meaningful in itself apart from exemplifying some general practice. Identity
thinking reduces sensuous particulars to universals in the sense that the
meaning and signicance of any sensuous particular item is exhausted in
being an instance of some universal, concept, law, social function or
social type. Nothing is meaningful in itself, all any item can mean comes
from the universal it falls under or exemplies. Here then is the familiar contrast between the nomothetic sciences and the ideographic arts: science concerns the meaning of things insofar as they are exemplars of universal law,
4
Adorno thinks of all modern philosophies, however, rationalistically or naturalistically

inclined, as just hypertrophied and self-deceived versions of the great idealist systems
which is pretty much what the idealists themselves thought.
5
For an effort to provide these claims with prima facie plausibility, see Bernstein, Adorno:
Disenchantment and Ethics, Chapters 2 and 4.
6
Nagel, View from Nowhere and Williams, Descartes Project of Pure Inquiry.
BLIND INTUITIONS
1075
while art provides for an encounter with an object that is presumptively

unique and meaningful in itself. The difculty with this thought is, of
course, that to date, no rational sense can be made of the idea of objects
being unique or meaningful in themselves. For Adorno that difculty is historically true: it is what has happened to unique sensuous particulars as a
consequence of the coming to be of the hegemony of identity thinking
over both knowledge and social practices. Which further entails that art practices too are not intrinsically or immediately rational.
Rather, the arts historically carried and sustained the de-authorized authority of the image function at one remove because ofcially what the arts
were about was never art itself but religion, or politics, or social hierarchy
or human affective experience. Only as art becomes modern, autonomous
from other domains and social practices, does the old problem of the authority of the image function return; or rather, Adorno argues, as the arts
become aware of their autonomy, they become increasingly aware that
their previous sense of authority was borrowed (from the gods and kings
and empires they celebrated), and that their image function on its own was
in need of purication (embracing autonomy) and justication, with the
hope that, somehow, the effort of purication would yield justication.
The modern arts become reective about being just art, and hence about
their status as belonging to the image function in its separation from conceptual reason. Not too surprisingly, modern aesthetics arises at the precise
moment when the question of art suddenly devolves back into the problem
of the authority of the image function. Kant was the rst to survey the parameters of the problem; Schiller was the rst to see it as a problem, as a
contest in which the claim of sensuous particularity (the sense drive) had
been disenfranchised by categorical knowing (the form drive).7
Adornos thought in this regard could not be simpler and more direct: the
image function as relayed through the history of art into modern autonomous
art cannot be directly rationally vindicated because that version of the image
function really is only a remnant, a part of a larger whole, a fragment of
knowing or reason that has been loosened from the setting in which its claiming originated. But that, after all, is a genealogical claim about a past whole
of knowing that even Adorno concedes cannot be recaptured or even reconstructed anew. Hence the genealogical claim, however useful, is insufcient
on its own. What the genealogy urges is the thought that the arts have been,
however tacitly and implicitly, carrying and sustaining the suppressed cognitive and rationality potential of the image function. Modernist arts, Adorno
argues, are the effort of, minimally, making thematic and, optimally, seeking
to vindicate the suppressed rationality potential of the image function. But
vindication is something that artworks cannot do themselves precisely
7
Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters. The opening seven letters
lay out the diagnosis of modernity, while the immediately following letters provide an outline
of Schillers drive theory.
1076
J.M. BERNSTEIN
because they are bound to the rationally eviscerated image function; the task
of vindication is thus inherited by aesthetics. Thus the primary object of
aesthetic reection becomes demonstrating that the arts, while not
rational-cognitive in themselves (about this the sceptical tradition has been
right), because they are bearers of the image function, contain a suppressed
cognitive and rationality potential; we care about the modernist arts in the
way we do because they bear upon another form of human encountering,
and hence another way in which things and persons can be experienced;
or even, they return the experience of things and persons to the centre of
what encountering them necessarily involves.
Adornos further thought is that the image function cannot be comprehended outside the aesthetic effort of excavating that claim from the arts;
we cannot just turn our attention to the sensory modalities themselves, to
seeing and listening and speaking, to gather up the image function portion
of cognition since our understanding of these forms of sensory engagement has already been deracinated by the reigning protocols of the
concept. In this his procedure is self-consciously Hegelian in spirit: in
the same way in which we cannot fully comprehend the nature of
knowing apart from the historically evolved exemplars of knowing,
namely, the natural sciences, so we cannot investigate the image function
outside the historical practices that bind themselves to sustaining and
working through it, the arts. Hence, what the genealogical account is
meant to license is a reading of aesthetics as, shall we say, a philosophical
underlabourer to the modernist arts in their task of registering and preserving the claim of the now fractured and alienated image function; with the
further proviso that the analytic work of aesthetics should, nally, vindicate the theoretical substance of the genealogical thesis. Only the actual
practice of aesthetics can demonstrate that the circularity here is virtuous
rather than vicious.
Aesthetics, as it is conceived by Adorno, thus concerns an alienated
portion of knowing. But because this knowing is alienated, what is at
issue in aesthetics are matters of both morals and epistemology. I shall
come to the morals claims directly. Aesthetics for Adorno, as the conceptual
exposition of the logic of artistic modernism, is thus not primarily about art
at all, but concerns the features of the practice of artistic modernism that can
be shown to be attempting to bear the burden of the epistemic-rational claim
of the now deracinated image function. Correctly understood, modernist art
practices are the effort to bear the burden of the image functions claim to
knowing, to be a portion of what knowing is and what truth is, in a setting
in which the image itself (the work of art itself) is not and cannot be a
form of knowing or deliver empirical truths about the world. Because
what is suppressed by deformed rationality and knowing, by the rationality
of the hypostatized sign or concept, is the claim of sensuous particularity,
then, again, the stakes are as much moral as cognitive-rational, as I shall
show below.
BLIND INTUITIONS
1077
SUFFERING AND TRUTH

As critics of Adorno have been quick to point out, if he truly believes that the
path of enlightenment is the destruction of truth, then his own philosophical
efforts must be self-defeating: he has sawn off the limb upon which he is
standing. How is philosophy, as the discourse of truth, to proceed if the
regime of the concept it employs (identity thinking) has destroyed the
truth? A provisional answer to this worry has three aspects. First, as
already noted, Adorno does not deny truth to the positive sciences; what
he denies is that the positive sciences possess a hegemonic control over
knowing, and hence over truth. History is already a bald counterexample
to the exclusivity claim, and hence to the exclusive privileging of nomothetic
knowing as opposed to ideographic. One might summarize Adornos project
as the attempt to demonstrate how there can be knowledge that is not further
translatable into science, and how such knowing bears on practical engagements with others. Hence, second, what thus has been destroyed by identity
thinking is not truth as such, but moral truth, which here means not general
truths about what is right and what wrong, but truths about the weal and woe
of human beings with respect to the worth of human lives; some notion of
truth whereby the individual him- or herself is counted as being of unique,
non-exchangeable value as a matter of experiential encounter; and, in consequence, how such encountering partially determines what is to be done with
respect to them.8 Third, once this is acknowledged, then it brings into view
what might be otherwise perplexing, namely, Adornos insistent contention
that what philosophy (as the discourse about the meaning of the concept) and
art (as the practice sustaining the rationality potential of the image function)
share is that, in the nal instance, they must be answerable to senseless
human suffering.
In the Introduction to Negative Dialectics Adorno bluntly states: The
need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth. For suffering is
objectivity that weighs upon the subject: its most subjective experience, its
expression, is objectively conveyed (ND, 1718).9 Let me unpack the
second sentence rst. By suffering is objectivity that weighs on the
subject, I take Adorno to mean that suffering is the subjective register of
an objectively intolerable state of affairs. But suffering itself is a normative-cognitive experience of what should not be the case for the subject,
and hence, by inference, what should not exist objectively since it brought
about that suffering. Suffering is thus an experience in which what is fully
8
Adorno does not think that Kantian moral thought can salvage the worth of individual lives
through the transformation of individual maxims into universal laws; that is dragging the very
domain of particular encounter into the domain of generalizability and so identity thinking.
Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, Chapter 3 is an effort to support Adornos
thesis that Kantian moral reason is, despite itself, a form of instrumental reason.
9
I will use ND to refer to Adorno, Negative Dialectics and AT to refer to Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory.
1078
J.M. BERNSTEIN
subjective and fully objective are fused: as a reason to change ones state, as
required by any functional account of the meaning of pain, the experiential
awfulness of a state of suffering already belongs to the space of reasons.
I take the plain sense of Adornos rst sentence to be that philosophy, as
responsible for registering the relation between subjective experience and
objective fact, must become answerable to the exigency presented by senseless suffering if it is not to lose its claim to rationality. Suffering, as what
should not be, is in this respect foundational for moral reection; the inection of our historical present lies in the vast amounts of wealth and practical
knowledge that prima facie seems capable of putting an end to senseless suffering. Senseless suffering is the historical prole of human suffering under
conditions of plenty: the gap between the suffering and the capacity to put an
end to it speaks to a failure. One might argue that the failure could be merely
practical, not a failure of reason or rationality but of motivation or organization; Adorno thinks that thesis empty: if we are not moved to do what is
prima facie morally necessary, or we cannot organize ourselves to do what
should be done, then something is amiss in moral reasoning and reection.
Later, he says The smallest trace of senseless suffering in the empirical
world belies all the identitarian philosophy that would talk us out of that suffering (ND, 203). Plainly, the suffering is a condition of truth claim the
view that a criterion for philosophical truth is that it be answerable to the
existence of senseless suffering is the premise supporting the dismissal
of traditional philosophy whose practice, identity thinking, Adorno argues
is that cause of suffering that has been produced by reason itself. Identity
thinking is the dominant cause of senseless suffering in industrially and technologically developed countries. The whole vast arrangement of the modern
world operates in perfect indifference to the most salient moral fact about it:
massive and wholly unnecessary human suffering and death. Identity thinking would attempt to talk us out of this suffering as, roughly, the way of the
world, as inevitable; there is no alternative to present practices. The senseless
suffering caused by rationalized reason is thus the suffering that could (begin
to) be addressed by the transformation of what we now think reason, rationality, and human knowing are. Lending a voice to suffering becomes the condition of all truth when the suffering is unnecessary and the primary cause of
its perpetuation and covering over is a regime of reason itself. This concern
gives Adornos epistemological inquiries a practical orientation.
This same privileging of opposition to senseless suffering as a criterion of
validity scores the argumentation of Adornos Aesthetic Theory. Indeed, the
book ends on just this thought:
but it would be preferable that some ne day art vanish altogether than that
it forget the suffering that is [arts] expression and in which form has its substance. This suffering is the humane content that unfreedom counterfeits as
positivity.
(AT, 260; italics mine)
BLIND INTUITIONS
1079
While there are a series of questions about past and future art here, nonetheless the relation between art and suffering is intimate: senseless, rationally
caused suffering is arts expression, what it nally expresses and why it is,
for now, an essentially expressive medium. This thesis only makes sense
against the background of the genealogical hypothesis: the regime of identity
thinking causes senseless suffering because of its indifference to sensuous
particularity. The rational marker of that indifference is the now decimated
rationality potential of the image function as the bearer of the burden of
the claim of sensuous particularity as such. Hence arts forever eviscerated
claim to objectivity as being the bearer of the rationality potential of the
image function must be taken as, at one remove, an expression of senseless
suffering. If art is the bearer of that burden, then a fortiori, objectivity in art,
what makes artworks valid as artworks is determined by successfully conveying that expression. Said more directly, if sign and concept necessarily
transcend the claims of sensuous particularity, the world as experienced
(Nagels thought) from here (Williams thought), then a fortiori it extinguishes the expression of that experience. The image function in its ideographic determination necessarily has an expressive dimension. The
science of pain concerns no individuals pain but the mechanisms of pain;
each pain, however, as something felt, makes its way into the world
through its expression.
Adorno cashes out this thesis with his surprising claim that the demand
for the expression of suffering is the substance determining arts form.
Form must have two aspects. Adorno is assuming that form is that in
virtue of which an organization of materials is aesthetic, a matter of
art, and not, say, epistemic or practical. Substantively, form is an artworks procedures for attaining unity with itself, its organizing principle,
and thereby that which is experienced as the principle of gravitation
through which the elements of a work are bound together. If we then
understand by what Adorno calls bindingly eloquent [stimmig Beredten]
form that in virtue of which a work is authentic or valid or true, then the
expression of suffering is here too a condition of truth. What binding
eloquence is, how it operates, and how we judge it are, at least here,
utterly opaque. It is that opacity that will need to be removed if
Adornos claim about the rationality potential of the image function is to
be vindicated.
Despite the structural convergence, suffering inhabits philosophy and art
differently. Early in Aesthetic Theory, Adorno explains: Suffering
remains foreign to knowledge; though knowledge can subordinate it conceptually and provide means for its amelioration, knowledge can scarcely
express it through its own means of experience without itself becoming
irrational. Suffering conceptualized remains mute and inconsequential
(ND, 18). Philosophy is not self-sufcient since it cannot express, that is,
cannot give experiential meaning to the very thing on which it pivots,
while arts expressivity is discursively mute it cannot articulate what its
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J.M. BERNSTEIN
expressions mean. This adumbrates the diremption constituting the fragmentation of rational subjectivity, and, in consequence, the spiritual division of
labour between art (as the bearer of the image function and intuition) and
philosophy (as the critical reection on the meaning of the identitarian,
rationalized concept).
Adorno is insisting that unless philosophy and art have senseless suffering
as their humane content they will become so morally complicit in its perpetuation that it would be better that they disappear. But the reason for this moral
complicity belongs to the practices of philosophy and modern art themselves: philosophys reason and arts form are somehow bound to this suffering such that in turning away from it they are or would be mutilating
themselves. Hence the thesis that suffering should be taken as the condition
of all truth is a claim about philosophy coming to self-consciousness about
its own history, social placement and commitments; and that suffering is the
meaning of modern arts expressivity concerns not a specic content, but,
too, the placement of modern art in society why this art takes on the
forms it does.
THE CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION AS A LOGIC OF

RESISTANCE
What does it mean to say that philosophy, and art, in particular, must be
answerable to senseless suffering? Arts task of preserving the image
function begins to take shape as Adorno attempts to answer this question.
Famously, Negative Dialectics opens with a situating of philosophy:
Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete [in the light of Marxs
eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, say10], lives on because the moment to
realize it was missed (ND, 3). What this now can be taken to mean is
that in place of the revolution that failed to occur what is required is
reective resistance. Resistance is the politics of the state of emergency
in the absence of revolution; it is a minor politics in the absence of signicant politics; it is the praxial refusal of despair.11 This was always
Adornos thought about the meaning of modern art: Art is a matter
not of pointing up alternatives but rather of resisting, solely through
artistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol
to the heads of human beings.12 Adorno elaborates this claim in
Aesthetic Theory:
Marx, Concerning Feuerbach, 423.
I am relying on the opening sentences of thesis VIII of Walter Benjamins, Theses on the
Philosophy of History: The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception
of history that is in keeping with this insight. In Illuminations, 259. For a dialectical encyclopaedia of the meaning of resistance, see Caygill, On Resistance.
12
Commitment, op. cit., 244 (italics mine).
10
11
BLIND INTUITIONS
1081
Much more importantly, art becomes social by its opposition to society, and it
occupies this position only as autonomous art. By crystallizing in itself as
something unique to itself, rather than complying with existing social
norms and qualifying as socially useful, it criticizes society by merely existing Art keeps itself alive through its force of resistance; unless it reies
itself, it becomes a commodity.
Let me begin to unpack this claim. Adorno binds his aesthetics to the art of
high modernism out of standard Hegelian scruple: aesthetics cannot begin
with a formal denition because [t]he concept of art is located in a historically changing constellation of elements (AT, 2). Hence, Adornos procedure in Aesthetic Theory is to engage in an elaborate dialogue with the
history of the philosophy of art and aesthetics, in its conceptualization of
what art is and how it matters, in the light of the unfolding logic of high modernism. That is, the concepts central for the understanding of art must be
regimented and honed to the most advanced artistic practices of our time,
which from the last third of nineteenth century through to the last third of
the twentieth century was modernism.
We are already well placed to begin unearthing the fundamental gestures
of modernism because, if Adorno is right about sign and image, concept and
intuition, then we know that: (a) modernist artworks in being for the sake of
preserving the image function must reveal their sensuous medium as a condition of possibility of aesthetic meaningfulness; and (b) but if mediums are
the condition of meaning, then to bring the claim of a medium to self-consciousness is to be concerned with form rather than representational
content (a thought already anticipated by traditional art suppressing the signicance of the medium beneath its high contents). Eli Friedlander, in
unpacking Clement Greenbergs Kantian modernism, states the thought
this way:
The turn of art into its own medium, which is also the prohibition of art to be
as it were the servant of independently communicable contents, denes the
tendency of art toward form. We can also call this the tendency of art
toward the abstract. Yet, the idea of abstraction would be badly understood
if it is thought of merely as lack of any recognizable representation from
our everyday surroundings. Abstraction, the presentation of form, is rather,
the revelation of the conditions of possibility of artistic practice.13
Modernism begins with a bracketing of representational content as the

source of the meaning and authority of works: the requirements of the practice itself, the how of a Van Gogh sunower or Cezanne apple is what
demands acknowledgement: The plastic arts speak through the How of
apperception (AT 168). The How of apperception is the moment of
13
Friendlander, Expressions of Judgment, 101.
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J.M. BERNSTEIN
form itself; this recession into form, into the demands of the practice itself,
takes over in modernism and becomes the source of arts dynamic
developments.
That modernism at its height could be, ironically, so vital was only possible because it obeyed a stringent logic; that there could be a real logic to its
practice, and not just a series of internally consistent conventions, depends
on it being the case that the mere practice of art is already infused with a
rational demand: Art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it (AT, 55); the rationality of art is the rationality potential
of the image function, while the rationality criticized is that of identity thinking. Aesthetic Theory is the discursive excavation of modernisms logic. At
the centre of that logic is what has come to be called arts negative autonomy,
the thought that arts asociality, its expulsion and exclusion from the mechanisms of societal reproduction (AT, 225, 252), its being without any positive social purpose or function, forced it, if it were to survive at all, to
become the determinate negation of a determinate society, to make itself
unavailable for readable social purposes, unusable. Art was forced back in
on itself, onto the stringency of its own elements, media, and practices.
This entails that all modernist works must negate the conceits supporting
their traditional forms; in the case of painting, the metaphysical conceit
was, centrally, representational form, with linear perspective conquering
all that came before it. Representation established the connection between
the work and the world, giving art its aboutness and meaning.
Although the metaphysical conceits supporting traditional art were doubtless complex, nonetheless Adorno takes one to be primary, namely, that principle that Hegel argued was the great insight of Kants philosophy the
world-making authority of subjectivity: I think must be able to accompany
all my representations otherwise something would be represented in me
which could not be thought at all (B 132). Hegel made this the principle
of his own Logic: The Concept, when it has developed into a concrete existence that is itself free, is nothing other than the I or pure self-consciousness
But the I is, rst, this pure self-related unity.14 The driving idea here is
beautiful, powerful, nearly inevitable, and deadly: nothing can be meaningfully in my mind unless I can put it into functional conversation with everything else in mind; hence, the fundamental structures of mind that Kant calls
categories and Hegel the Concept are functions of mental unity; so the
unity of the self and the unity of the concept are the same unity. But since
this work of unifying is the condition for anything being recognizable by
a human mind, then this unity of the subject is responsible for the unity of
the world. The world comes to appear as a world only if it can appear as
in accord with the functions providing for the unity and freedom (from
nature) of subjectivity. The principle of idealism states that we can have a
world at all, and can represent the world to ourselves only through
14
Hegel, Science of Logic, 583.
BLIND INTUITIONS
1083
conceptual unication, where establishing such conceptual unication simultaneously yields the unity of the self with itself: the world necessarily
appears as my world all else would be phantasmagoria, hallucination,
chaos. This is the logic of the concept in Kant and Hegel; and it is also
the principle Adorno labels identity thinking.
In order to critique idealism, the effort must be to demonstrate that the
order and unity of an object is not (necessarily) dependent on the unifying
activity of the subject. If one could demonstrate this, then it would show
that there was a rationality potential in given sensuous particulars not reducible to the rationality of the idealist concept. This species what Adorno
takes to be the implicit logic governing modernism: it is the practice of
undoing the unity objects as dictated by the unity of the self in order to
reveal the possibility of another possibility of order and unication. Modernism accomplishes as an art practice what aesthetic reective judgement
accomplished for the judgemental encounter with natural beauties. This
logic patently has a negative aspect the work of undoing rational unity
and given interests and an afrmative aspect, the revelation of a nonsubject derived possibility of order and unication, and calling into being
disinterested pleasure.
In his essay on Samuel Becketts Endgame, the negation of the principle of
idealism is stated explicitly: Nonidentity [of object with concept] is both the
historical disintegration of the unity of the subject and the emergence of
something that is not itself subject.15 Each modernist artwork operates a
version of this negation, seeking a unity of the artwork that does not
depend on the unity of the self, on the world appearing to a unied self as
a unied object in accordance with determinate mind-dependent categories;
hence such works seek forms that enable the material elements of those
works to escape the dictates of conceptual determination, however eetingly
and partially.
But this is patently insufcient on its own; it is solely a negative canon
(AT, 34). Identity thinking is a false rationality because it involves a systematic perversion and deformation of conceptuality: the complete selfdetermination of the self in the concept, what Kant and Hegel consider as
freedom, denies its dependency, both causally and semantically, on what
it unies.16 One pervasive gesture in modernist painting demonstrating
Trying to Understand Endgame, in Adorno, Notes to Literature, 252.
Calling identity thinking a deformation or perversion of the concept is less than fully accurate, since clearly this formation of the concept allows for the massive achievements of
modern science and technology; they are not to be decried. So a better way of stating
Adornos thesis is to say that he is objecting to the hegemony of identity thinking over our
understanding of concept, knowledge, and rationality; and we have overwhelming reasons
to think that hegemony is irrational and unearned because that formation of the concept
cannot take account of the dependency of concepts on their objects causally and semantically.
Hence, another regime of the concept, another concept of the concept, and hence of knowing
and rationality must be possible.
15
16
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J.M. BERNSTEIN
how misbegotten is the principle of conceptual self-determination is the tendency towards monochromes and colour eld paintings (and all their
progeny and relations); these directly and emphatically explode that
conceit, as if the meaning of a colour could ever have been bestowed by
the mind, because, say, it was nothing other than its difference from surrounding colours. An Yves Klein blue, or a Barnett Newman zip painting
in their monochrome character and use of colour elds demonstrate an
experiential order and meaning that cannot be solely the product of conceptual synthesis. The recurrence of the drift towards the monochrome in
modern painting is for the sake of repudiating the authority of subjectivity:
these are appearances of meaning or proto-meaning or the emergence of
meaning that cannot be conceived as owing their claim to meaning solely
to the powers of mind-giving order.
Working from the opposite direction, the paintings of Matisse and Pollock
and Cy Twombly appear to let order emerge from chaos rather than imposing
it, rather than contorting their materials into an order. Even the diverse uses
of geometry, repetition, and mechanism in modernist art are for the sake of
twisting free of transcendental subjectivity, of letting something appear
whose meaning cannot conceivably be owed to me (my rules, principles,
intentions), and hence exposing me to what I can but acknowledge but not
own, something explicit in the almost ritual quiet of Agnes Martins
seeming wholly geometrical works.
MIMESIS AND INTUITION

Why should we feel aesthetically compelled by works that lack explicit
humane meaning, that resist it? Why not condemn modern art as technical
bravado without signicant meaning? This kind of art has been so condemned often enough. Adornos answer concerns, still, the structure and
nature of the concept. If conceptual meaning causally and semantically
depends on objects in the world, then there must be an aspect or feature of
concepts themselves, or some aspect or feature of conceptualization that
acknowledges and manifests that dependency. Kant calls the matter of concepts, intuitions, as if intuitions were components of concepts themselves
rather than a separate and separable ingredient in cognition. Intuitions are
the worldly individuals that concepts work on, unify, order, and turn into
meaning. Intuitions are also the deliverances of the senses, they are the
givens upon which concepts work, and without concepts, Kant famously
avers, they are blind meaningless images attacking the human sensorium.
Intuitions, in their role of being the rationalized form of the image function,
is where we began. How can this historical determination of intuitions be
reversed?
In order to make the cognitive and rational dependence of the concept on
its object visible we require something other than passive sensory reception
BLIND INTUITIONS
1085
as our way of registering the moment of our exposure to the world (since it is
already that in Kant). There must be an action of receptivity, a mode of
acting or a comportment that in its doing involves acknowledging, registering, and recording what appears to it as it appears, a doing that is a mirroring.
Adorno terms this form of doing mimesis; mimesis, we might say, is the act
of intuiting, the act of responding to sensuous particularity in a sensuously
particular manner. And in the same way in which intuition is the act of intuition and what is intuited, so Adorno considers mimesis to refer to both the
comportment of following the signicative demands of objects (hence a
version of what Kant regards as aesthetic reective judgement), and its resultant, the objectication of the object in the subject, what becomes the
mimetic moment of works themselves, their material content (AT, 285).
For Adorno, mimetic activity is taken to be one, primary source of the
image function.
In art, then, the unity of concept and intuition is rewritten by Adorno as the
polarity between construction and mimesis, where the goal of constructive
synthesis the active-ordering-forming pole of art making is the release
of the mimetic moment. The dialectic of construction and mimesis involves
not a balancing of the moments, but enabling each pole to realize itself in or
through the other, to have construction a response to the mimetic moment,
and mimesis become the emergence of constructive form (AT, 44). For
example, Sol LeWitt uses a puried constructive practice involving formal
and usually iterative procedures for producing the work (which can then
be carried out by anyone) Wall Drawing 16 has the rule: Bands of lines
12 inches (30 cm) wide, in three directions (vertical, horizontal, diagonal
right) intersecting that yield an hypnotic material object whose power or
beauty patently transcends the narrow procedural rules producing the
image. Oppositely, Helen Frankenthalers paint soaked and stained canvasses Mountains and Sea (1952) is exemplary somehow emerge as
formal wholes. Plainly, Frankenthalers method of soaking and staining
raw canvas, which gives her oils the feel of delicate, owing watercolours
on a mammoth scale, is not itself a mimesis of anything. Rather, and this
is Adornos thought generally about modernism, her practice objectivates
[nds a replicable procedure for capturing] the mimetic impulse, holding it
fast at the same time that it disposes of its immediacy and negates it (AT,
285). Modernist art is not a mimetic practice; rather, art means to display
and so recuperate the mimetic impulse, not copying reality but elaborating
techniques and methods that can release subjective control over the material
(staining or soaking for Frankenthaler; dripping and splashing for Pollock;
etc.) that allows moments of material signication, materials found signicative in themselves, to emerge; and when they so emerge, then they can only
be judged reectively and not determinatively. Adorno states the aesthetic
ideal here as one of a nonviolent integration of what diverges (AT, 190);
it is nonviolent because the order emerges from the materials rather than
being conceptually imposed upon them. And, again, because what is at
1086
J.M. BERNSTEIN
stake here is overcoming the controlling determinations of the logic of

concept, a logic owed to subjectivity, then Adorno also species these procedures as nding a practice of self-relinquishment (ND, 13). Self-relinquishment here is not a meditative practice of forgetting the self
altogether, but rather a procedure of staining, dripping, pouring
whereby the subject locates a practice or procedure that can effectively
isolate or make independent its capacity for sensory encounter, thus a practice whereby a following of materials, a sense of the materials taking form
as if from themselves, becomes possible. The emergence of these signicative materials is marked, as we shall see in more detail directly, by the dispossession of the judging subject who can reectively respond to but not
conceptually order what is experienced the appearance of meaning
without conceptual meaning.
BLIND AND BINDING

I have argued that Kantian intuitions are the philosophical fate of the image
function the image function cancelled and preserved, one might say, by a
constitutive conceptual synthesis that is world-making in its ambition.17
Because he is always thinking about identity thinkings concept of the
concept and its erasure of the authority of intuitions, Adornos aesthetic
theory makes recurrent use of the notions of emptiness and blindness,
which always have lying behind them the self-indicting statement of the
principle of identity from Kant: concepts without intuitions are empty, and
intuitions without concepts are blind18 the principle in virtue of which
the given is without sense on its own and derives whatever meaning it can
have from the work of conceptual synthesis; hence intuitions can only
appear and have cognitive signicance after they have been conceptually
synthesized.19 For Adorno, Kants principle is the blinding of intuitions by
a hypostatized conceptuality (transcendentalizing the categorical structure
is the process of philosophical hypostatization20), depriving intuitions of
whatever integral sense they may have through judgemental synthesis.
17
For a contemporary defence of this way of erasing and preserving intuitions, and hence for a
defence of the position Adorno is centrally critiquing, see Brandom, Some Pragmatist
Themes in Hegels Idealism, 16489.
18
That is not literally what Kant says, which is Gedanken ohne inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 75. The rst phrase literally states
that thoughts without content are empty; but since the paragraphs in question are all about
the relation between concepts and intuitions, then drawing a strict parallel between the rst
and second clauses is more than justied; it is what Kant is saying.
19
There is of course a debate about the role intuitions in Kant; I summarize that debate, and
explain why he is committed to the blindness thesis in Bernstein, Against Voluptuous
Bodies, Introduction.
20
Of course, in so doing, Kant is doing no more than what science had already accomplished;
Kants epistemology legitimates the scientic worldview.
BLIND INTUITIONS
1087
Blindness is what has been done to the image function, and hence to nature in
its material sensuous particularity by identity thinking. Art, as a repudiated
fragment of knowing, cannot by itself restore to the image function or sensuously particular nature what has been done to it, but it can rewrite what
Kantian blindness is, namely, the insistence of the given as it imposes
itself on our sensory apparatus. Art wants blind intuitions to appear in
their blinded insistence. Said differently, the effort of modernist artworks
is to make fragments (or after-images or remnants) of the image function
appear as simultaneously necessary, unavoidable, insistent, and yet
somehow damaged, unable to provide what their very insistence promises:
material meaning.
Here is a cramped and cluttered passage in which Adorno is attempting to
say everything all at once, turning the concept/intuition structure once more
into construction and mimetic capacity, but now adding the blindness problematic. The expressiveness of objects is part of what is lost as they
become conceptualized by idealist principles and positive science.
Mimesis in artworks, Adorno claims, is of the expressive features of
objects that the world no longer contains. In attempting to elaborate what
this means, he comes up with following formulation:
The sense of form is the reection, at once blind and binding, of the work in
itself on which that reection must depend; it is an objectivity closed to itself
that devolves upon the subjective mimetic capacity, which for its part gains its
force through its antithesis, rational construction. The blindness of the sense of
form corresponds to the necessity in the object. The irrationality of the expressive element is for art the aim of all aesthetic rationality. Its task is to divest
itself, in opposition to all imposed order, both of hopeless natural necessity
and chaotic contingency.
If intuitional blindness were what Kant states, then blindness would be chaos
and contingency without relief. Hence to produce what is blind and binding
is to show that the presumptively blind has an intelligibility and sense
beyond the terms of conceptual intelligibility and sense. Binding then is
Adornos word for objective authority, what must rationally compel us. So
the argument is that authentic works of art are rationally compelling but in
a manner that refuses determining judgement with its conceptual demands.
This is why response to the authentic works devolves upon the subjective
mimetic capacity, that is, our capacity to sensuously track, survey, experience, follow along with an objects sensuous appearing without conceptually
dominating it. Again, it is probably easiest to consider this the kind of part/
whole synthesis accomplished by Kantian reective judging. To bring parts
and whole into alignment without a concept is to nd an order that is not
imposed by concept or nature, hence an order whose bindingness satises
all one could want from an object by way of a ttingness of part and
1088
J.M. BERNSTEIN
whole without there being anything further one can say about its validity
(criticism does not authorize but provides the conditions and intelligibility
behind claims to validity). Ones experience of that unity (which is
always, we shall see, a fragmented or broken unity) is the experience of bindingness; but because accomplished without conceptual determination, then
nonetheless blind. (I shall return to the business about expression directly.)
Modernist painting is odd because, as abstract, it seems to almost withdraw from the precincts of culture altogether. I have been suggesting that
the image function had as its original direct object sensuously appearing
nature, and that in losing the authority of the image function we have lost
the authority of material nature in its role of being the habitat for human
living. So modernist artworks as blinded intuitions, as moments of sensuous
particularity appearing for its own sake, is more like nature than like culture;
perhaps it is that stratum of nature in culture that conceptual culture must
acknowledge if it is to acknowledge its dependence and non-self-sufciency.
Something like this thought is present in this passage from Adorno:
Only what had escaped nature as fate would help nature to its restitution. The
more that art is thoroughly organized [constructed] as an object by the subject
and divested of the subjects intentions [= conceptual synthesis], the more
articulately does it speak according to the model of a nonconceptual, nonrigidied signicative language; this would perhaps be the same language that is
inscribed in what the sentimental age gave the beautiful if threadbare name,
The Book of Nature.
(AT, 67)
I cannot think of a more accurate way of expressing the kind of access and
withdrawal one experiences in perceiving a Picasso or Matisse or Pollock or
Frankenthaler than that of a nonconceptual, nonrigidied signicative
language: things meaning without conceptually meaning. Another way of
expressing the same thought would be to say that modernist artworks seek
to appear as natural rather than cultural, and that some sense of their authority is derived from this appearing as nature-like, as if a spontaneous
self-ordering. Two thoughts hence merge here: as intentionless images,
images whose signicance does not explicitly depend on whatever intention
lay behind the placement of their elements, modernist artworks appear to
escape the authority of constituting consciousness. Oppositely, because
their sense is nonconceptual, then it appears more a cipher than a useable
language. But to say that is equally to say that such works lack something
in way of their meaningfulness, and thus appear more as a promise of meaningfulness, or even, perhaps, as possessing a suppressed rationality potential.
It is of course just this that Adorno is arguing is the true meaning of modernist art, its truth: art is the rationality potential of the now suppressed and
de-authorized image function. When that claim appears nakedly, as it does
in modernist art, it appears quixotically, as meaning without conceptual
BLIND INTUITIONS
1089
meaning, or as hidden meaning, or as a promise of meaning. But all those

ways of talking about modernist art fall into place once it is recognized
that art is bearing the burden of the historically exiled image function.
Adornos theory explains how modernist artworks function, and why in
functioning in that way they should have the exorbitant but puzzling cultural
signicance that they do.
A SUBLIME LOGIC: ON THE EXPRESSION OF SUFFERING

In the previous section, I have attempted to explicate the claim that modernist artworks are responses to the blinding of intuitions by identity thinking,
making them a return of the repressed: the insistence of the moment of intuition without the covering of misbegotten conceptuality. And that, in order to
make good on this claim, Adorno had to demonstrate how what is blind can
be nonetheless binding, binding without being conceptually binding. And,
further, that one image of this bindingness is of a nature-like language of
meaning, the artwork appearing as if a purposive natural thing without any
external, determining purpose. Both these ways of talking about artworks
plainly parallel the way in which Kant and Burke talk about the experience
of sublime nature, where the missing extra is that the experience of sublime
nature is one of an intense experience of both pain and pleasure, of threatening nature seen from a safe distance that allows one to experience its power
without imminent fear.21 Sublime nature undoes one, safely.
This directly speaks to an ineliminable burden in understanding modernist
art, namely, explaining its experiential depth, how it is that things lacking
readily communicative meaning can be felt experienced to be so meaningful, the excess of experiential intensity in works that prima facie appear
implausible candidates for delivering it? We could not be as affectively devastated and then so radically disappointed by art unless it bore an experiential
charge. How can we explain why the experience of hermetic works is so
charged? Adorno contends that modernist practice produces works that
operate in a manner analogous to the way in which Burke and Kant
thought the experience of the natural sublime works, namely, through dispossessing the spectator of the sources of meaning, unity, order that would
allow them to assimilate the work to themselves. The experience of the
sublime was always in the rst instance the experience of an exit from the
authority of reason over nature, and hence a remembrance of the authority
of nature.
The experience of being overwhelmed and undone migrated in the course
of the nineteenth century from the aesthetic experience of nature to art, a
migration that is essential to Adornos understanding of modernist art.
This is why, despite much of his argument sounding as if he were thinking
21
Kant, Critique of Judgment, 2530 and Burke, Philosophical Enquiry.
1090
J.M. BERNSTEIN
of modernist works as material instantiations of aesthetic reective judging,

nonetheless, what allows the logic to operate is that modernist works block,
inhibit, and undo the conditions for conceptual reception, that works of this
kind have their signicance in challenging our capacity for responsiveness in
general, and hence they install themselves in our midst through demanding
to be recognized in their own terms and not ours. And all this is necessary,
after all, if the issue is one of seeing how something singular and sensuously
particular can be meaningful in itself. Unless it actively blocked our powers
of cognitive assimilation, such a claim could not even get started. Hence,
underlying the two gestures examined in the previous section, there must
lie a third, some sort of logic of the sublime as intrinsic to the working of
any authentic modernist artwork.
This thought brings us back to my initial formulations about modernism,
form, and the critique of representation. Let us call all the direct ways in
which a work might conrm existing sources of meaning and so afrm
the unity of the subject communicative meaning. Communicative
meaning is extensionally equivalent to representational content. If representation is determined by conceptual synthesis, then a critique of representation must eschew communicative meaning. Adornos shorthand for the
operation of advanced works is that they refuse communicative meaning
their being for another for the sake of immanent determination (AT,
109). Advanced works turn away from the spectator in order to achieve
meaningfulness in themselves, to be what they must be, being somehow
truly self-determined (the way a living thing is self-determined, not the
way a person is self-determined). All modernist works, nally, must repudiate communicative meaning for the sake of absorptive signicance. If
Adorno is right about modernist works being fragments of a disenfranchised
feature of human knowing, then absorptive signicance or meaningfulness
in itself is best construed not as a kind of obscure or opaque meaning (a
thought to which even modernist artists themselves have been drawn),
but, again, as a defused potentiality for meaningfulness. So perhaps we
might say that modernist works sacrice communicative meaning for the
sake of revealing the possibility of another site and way of making
meaning, another way of encountering and responding to things, another
way of knowing.
Adornos term for that moment in the modernist work conveying its departure from communicable meaning, its moment of sublime excess, is dissonance. Dissonance, he claims, is the truth about harmony (AT, 110).
Harmony in this setting is the operation of identity thinking in traditional
music, and by analogy, the operation of identity thinking in modern (but
not modernist) art generally. Dissonance is the truth of harmony because
harmony, in its violent suppression of all that does not t into its organizing
principle, produces dissonance; dissonant sounds are those expelled by the
drive for harmony; they are what is left of sound after harmony has done
its work what Adorno calls the nonidentical. Dissonance expresses
BLIND INTUITIONS
1091
delity to the other of communicative reason; it sounds the others anguish

of exclusion and denial.
Dissonance, in repudiating communicative meaning, is equally arts rebellion against its consignment to societal purposelessness. Dissonance, then, is
rebellion against semblance, arts dissatisfaction with itself Art, whatever its material, has always desired dissonance, a desire suppressed by
the afrmative power of society with which aesthetic semblance has been
bound up (AT, 110; italics mine). Dissonance, disrupting or baldly negating
the experience of art being a communicative encounter by making the work
incommensurable with the demands of unifying subjectivity, replaces communicative experience with another modality of experience, expression:
Dissonance is effectively expression Expression and semblance are fundamentally antithetical. If expression is scarcely to be conceived except as the
expression of suffering expression is the element immanent to art
through which art defends itself against the immanence that it develops
by its law of form.
Expression and semblance are fundamentally antithetical because expression

belongs to the disavowed image function. The stakes in this passage are thus:
under what conditions can something belonging to the image function escape
both the dictates of conceptual reason and the image functions emptying
into mere repetitive mirroring, and so express the lost expressivity which
belongs to the image function in the order of experience?
Adornos answer unfolds this way: Arts law of form requires that artworks be self-sufcient, unied wholes. But if artworks were real wholes,
they would be empirical things in the world, not art, not ctions or semblances or illusions; being a semblance is substantive for works of art
since it is the marker of their separation from empirical reality. Identity
thinking teaches us to identify what is real with achieved unity, that is,
the establishing of unity is the establishing of existing in its own right. It
is this that makes artworks semblances they appear to be what they
cannot be; the illusion of wholeness is exploded when, say, a character in
a drama turns to address the audience; or when a strident tone erupts breaking the ow of harmonically unied and rhythmically compelling music; or
when the harsh impasto dissolves the tender leaf into green paint stuff; or
when the novel narrator directly addresses the reader; or when the dancer
lets her body succumb fully to gravitational pull, falling. These experiences
of dissonance are not of a piece; patently, dissonance functions differently in
the linguistic and non-linguistic arts. In painting, to experience dissonance is
to experience the undoing of constitutive subjectivity through an experience
of material insistence that cannot be fully or nally absorbed into a formal
order. But to experience this moment, whether it arrives through overallness,
as it does in Matisse, or fragmentation and distortion, as it does in Picasso, or
1092
J.M. BERNSTEIN
through emphatic presentation of sheer materiality and the emergence of

form, as it does in Pollock is to experience of an intelligible order that simultaneously makes a claim on the experiencing subject while refusing the
demand for assimilation and rational transparency. The expressivity of modernist works is just the experience of them as works ordered other than by the
principle of identity; they appear as nonidentical with constitutive
subjectivity.
Adorno elaborates this thought by arguing that the shock aroused by
important works of art
is the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the
work; it is the moment of being shaken. The recipients lose their footing;
the possibility of truth, embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible
The experience of art as that of its truth and untruth is the irruption of
objectivity into subjective consciousness Shudder [as the name for one
version of this shock] provides no particular satisfaction for the I
Rather, it is a memento of the liquidation of the I, which, shaken, perceives
its own limitedness and nitude.
(AT, 2445)
In this passage Adorno is tying together what a rst glance might appear to
be two disparate experiences: the experience of the internal complexity of a
modernist work, its mode of unity and disunity as objective, with the kind of
experience associated with the disruptive overwhelmingness of the sublime.
What was important about the experience of the sublime, especially in
Burke, is that in confronting the might and innity of nature those starry
heavens humans are returned to their place in nature, so to their embodiment and nitude. As nite beings they are essentially non-self-sufcient
beings, dependent beings. No one really doubts nitude in this sense. But
the principle of idealism, no matter how formally stated, does emphatically
deny that human reason derives any of its force and character from nature.
The principle of idealism is the repudiation of the thought that human mindedness might be emphatically and constitutively dependent, and so continuous with humans as members of the natural world even in their rational
functioning. So the image function is not only a suppressed component of
knowing, but that component of knowing its matter! that binds
knowing to nature. This then explains why the claim of the image function
should appear in works whose validity is like that of natural beauty rather
than art beauty.
It is a further lemma of autonomous reason that it cannot suffer being
directed by what is outside it; hence, the existence of senseless suffering
cannot in itself be an overriding reason for action. In being shaken by the
sublime moment of artistic modernism we are equally recalled to our standing as suffering mortals among suffering mortals, and hence that there is
nothing higher or more demanding and more intrinsic to what might be
BLIND INTUITIONS
1093
demanded here and now than the acknowledgment of suffering, the acknowledgment that if we let reason set itself free from suffering nature, then it
becomes unclear how anything might matter. Idealist reason hopes to
leave nature behind; artistic modernism is the reminder of how deluded
and misbegotten that hope is.
Submitted 8 May 2014; revised 21 November; accepted 25 November
New School for Social Research
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton.
London: Routledge, 1973.
Adorno, Theodor W. Vol. 1 of Notes to Literature. Translated by Shierry
Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
Benjamin, W. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. London: Collins/
Fontana Books, 1973.
Bernstein, J. M. Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics. New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
Bernstein, J. M. Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the
Meaning of Painting. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press,
2006.
Brandom, Robert. Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegels Idealism:
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and Content of Conceptual Norms. European Journal of Philosophy
7, no. 2 (1999): 16489.
Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of the Sublime
and Beautiful: And Other Pre-revolutionary Writings. London:
Penguin Books, 1998.
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Bloomsbury, 2013.
Friendlander, Eli. Expressions of Judgment: An Essay on Kants Aesthetics.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
Hegel, G. W. F. Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. London:
George Allen & Unwin, 1969.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment:
Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Redwood
City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.
Kant, Immanuel. Vol. 1 of Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Frankfurt am Main:
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Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar.
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Marx, Karl. Concerning Feuerbach. In Early Writings, translated by
Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, 4213. Harmondsworth:
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Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. New York: Oxford University
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whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection

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British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2014

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KEYWORDS: modernism; idealism; intuition; concept; disinterestedness

INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHY BECOMES AESTHETICS

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CONCEPT AND INTUITION

Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1213.

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quixotically or aporetically: however materially insistent, the claim to some

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of the separation, giving it its quintessential rational form and unassailable

Adorno thinks of all modern philosophies, however, rationalistically or naturalistically

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while art provides for an encounter with an object that is presumptively

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SUFFERING AND TRUTH

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THE CRITIQUE OF REPRESENTATION AS A LOGIC OF

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Modernism begins with a bracketing of representational content as the

Friendlander, Expressions of Judgment, 101.

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Hegel, Science of Logic, 583.

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MIMESIS AND INTUITION

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stake here is overcoming the controlling determinations of the logic of

BLIND AND BINDING

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meaning, or as hidden meaning, or as a promise of meaning. But all those

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A SUBLIME LOGIC: ON THE EXPRESSION OF SUFFERING

Kant, Critique of Judgment, 2530 and Burke, Philosophical Enquiry.

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of modernist works as material instantiations of aesthetic reective judging,

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delity to the other of communicative reason; it sounds the others anguish

Expression and semblance are fundamentally antithetical because expression

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through emphatic presentation of sheer materiality and the emergence of

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Blind Intuitions: Modernism's Critique of Idealism

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