CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT NEGATIVE DIALECTIC AND REASON

Abstract

The work Negative Dialectic (1966) provides an important reflection on the structuring of modern philosophical thought and a conceptual and epistemological legacy fundamental to the understanding of Theodor W. Adorno's thought. Its complex reading raises tensions about the limits of the role of reason and understands the methodological needs of building a dialectic that escapes the absolutizing tendency observed as immanent in the old dialectic. Thus, through a literature review, this article proposes to study the meanings that emerge from the concept of reason in Adorn's Negative Dialectic. Therefore, at first, it demonstrates how the criticism of reason is a constant of the author's thought that is gaining shape and relevance since the Dialectic of Enlightenment, which critically points to the positivist technicality expressed in the so-called instrumental reason, up to radicality of the criticism found in the work Negative Dialectic. Subsequently, it points to the limits of the predominant form of philosophy, materialized in Hegelian dialectics, and the limits of experience within the play of forces between theses and antitheses, highlighting the need to build a philosophy that does violence against itself. It is understood that other forms of structuring thought, such as aphorisms, can reach singular spaces of formative experience foreign to the predominant philosophical thought. Finally, it points to the totalitarianism of traditional dialectics as a fundamental obstacle, forwarding principles of another reason exposed in a Negative Dialectic, which does not aim at dissolving differences and appeasing tensions as a way of resolving thought.