>> Me
> Dennis Redmond
>> Adorno wrote somewhere (in _Minima Moralia_, IIRC) that intelligence
>> is a moral category.
>
> Historical, not moral. Adorno was talking about how Hitler's military
> stupidity was really just a part of the total stupidity of Fascism --
I was thinking of this passage:
========== 127 "Wishful Thinking"--Intelligence is a moral category. The separation of feeling and understanding that makes it possible to absolve and beautify the blockhead hypostatizes the dismemberment of man into functions. Praise of the simpleton has an undertone of anxiety lest the severed parts reunite and put an end to the derangement. "If you have understanding and a heart," a verse of Holderlin's runs, "show only one. Both they will damn, if both you show together.". . .It is rather for philosophy to seek, in the opposition of feeling and understanding, their--precisely moral--unity. Intelligence, in asserting its power of judgement, opposes anything given in advance, by at the same time expressing it. (p. 197-198, _Minima Moralia_, E.F.N. Jephcott trans.) ==========
Further down in this passage, Adorno writes that "people within the narrowest horizons grow stupid at the point where their interest begins, and then vent their rancour on what they do not *want* to understand because they could understand it only too well." (My emphasis) The whole thing is pertinent to Chomsky's position that people are smart and therefore should be able to grasp left critique: it isn't a question of cognitive capacity, it's a question of how one identifies oneself and how one classifies intelligence. In particular, if one considers intellectual effort something that is only exercised in certain areas--jobs or hobbies--and not something relevant to an ongoing process of introspection, then lapses into political positions that are stupid and vicious can be justified a la Limbaugh: it's just entertainment.
I guess that in the analytic ideolect this passage would be considered an attack on the fact/value distinction, but rather than collapse the two, or "spice-up" the realm of the factual with the bits of irrationality, a possible way out of the distinction would be to note that there is an ineradicable element of emotion in thought and then interrogate that: "The severance of thought is not remedied by the synthesis of mutually estranged psychic departments, not by therapeutically imbuing reason with irrational ferments, but by self-conscious reflection on the element of wish that antithetically constitutes thinking as thinking." This is not the same as noting that theories and facts presuppose values. It's the observation that thinking, whether as the preparatory work for writing a scholarly monograph or plain old woolgathering, is somehow the expression of a desire (could Adorno have been thinking of Hobbes here?) and one's desires may be inchoate in a way that values that underwrite facts and theories--for example, parsimoniousness of axioms, simplest explanations, no unnecessary entities--are not. As above, it's the absence of interrogation/reflection that makes it possible for intelligent people to support beastly things.
Curtiss