INTRODUCTION

Adorno's Positive Dialectic is a solution to enlightenment's decline: a way of rescuing enlightenment from its own internal regression to myth. Our aim is to find a ‘positive’ solution to what Adorno has envisaged as the problems of subjectivity and knowledge in enlightenment. For our positive solution we look in particular to the realm of knowledge acquisition. We are not content, however, with the merely critical ‘solution’ offered in the previous chapter and wish to extend our analysis beyond the reach of the instrumental sphere altogether. For our solution we seek, in fact, a non-instrumental kind of knowledge acquisition. What would such a form look like and where in Adorno's work would we need to search in order to find it?

We explore areas of Adorno's philosophy that lie beyond his discussion of enlightenment or indeed of epistemological issues at all, and turn instead, to his work on aesthetics. We extricate a strand of thought from the main body of Adorno's aesthetics and examine the ‘cognitive’ potential of this. Hereby, we demonstrate a potential epistemological solution for enlightenment, one that takes us out of the instrumental sphere. We then pursue the ramifications of this for Subjectivity and for the enlightenment's aims.

In developing this positive thesis we follow Adorno's texts, although not in the sense of simply finding an already constructed thread of ideas. We in fact build upon thoughts that Adorno alludes to but has not himself systematically developed.