Abstract

The approach of the present paper is settled by the premise that we can no longer pretend that the assumptions of the Enlightenment set the rules for all rationality. The original contribution of the Frankfurt School philosopher, Theodor W. Adorno is firstly examined in his critique of the “enlightened” bequeathal of exclusionary epistemologies, an analysis which culminates with his account of the alternative “aesthetic understanding”. From this moment on, the working hypothesis is that art functions as a legitimate form of knowledge that acknowledges the “excess” of experience that cannot be quantified by rational categories. Then, Martin Buber’s dialogical thinking functions in the logic of the argumentation as an illustration of the non-instrumental relation to the world through the artist/educator who is in a peculiar relation of faithfulness with what meets him in the world, overcoming the distance by means of a communing and inclusive love for the creation and the people entrusted to him. The Jewish thinker has joined art to the fundamental relations between one being and other being, as different than, but on a par with, knowledge. The focus of the main three sections is a cluster of themes of Dialectic of Enlightenment, the essence of the first generation of critical theory, which will then be narrowed down by Theodor Adorno in Negative Dialectics to the critique of the prototype of “identity logic”. All this is meant to function as an anticipation of Adorno’s final position in his Aesthetic Theory. The scope of these subtitles will be narrow and broad at once. Narrow, because Adorno’s work has been abstracted from the larger intellectual enterprise of the Frankfurt School and reference will be strictly made to the thematic critique of instrumental reason and its further development in the philosopher’s mature writings. Broad, because the alternative aesthetic reasoning Adorno ushers in might stand for the horizon of a dramatic renewal within the Romanian educational approaches and contemporary culture interaction.