3 - Thought thinking itself

Summary

Adorno ventured the claim that the entire programme of Western philosophy consists in self-reflection: “philosophy in general has been the implementation of just this νóησις υοήσεως that he [Aristotle] ascribes to the divine principle as the primal image of all philosophy” (MCP 94–5). He repeats this claim in his lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: “philosophy is really a matter of ‘thinking on thinking’, as Aristotle defined it” (KCPR 82). But if self-reflection has been the lifeblood of philosophy, Adorno insists that it is not an end in itself. Denouncing Western reason because it effectively condemns thought to thinking itself, he argued that, to escape the sphere of immanence, of narcissistic navel-gazing, thought must become self-critical. He stressed the need for critical self-reflection throughout his work, and dignified it with the name “metaphysics”. Metaphysics should not limit itself to the “self-reflection of thought and of the pure forms of thought”. As self-critical, metaphysics must question the tacit, unexamined “thesis of the whole metaphysical tradition”, namely “whether thought and its constitutive forms are in fact the absolute” (MCP 99).

Metaphysics must question whether, and to what extent, thought can transcend the sphere of concepts to grasp objects. Although philosophy's confidence in its ability to transcend concepts is as “doubtful as ever”, it is both one of philosophy's “inalienable features and part of the naïveté that ails it”.