Abstract: ing from the concrete qualities of objects and attending solely to their causal powers and then treating those causal powers in generalized form to the point where concepts designating the properties of objects are taken as condensed causal laws are the essential gestures for attending to objects in ways sufficient for routine activities of hunting, growing, harvesting, heating, clothing, transporting, building, housing, mending, and so on. The original formation of reason in its subsumingdeductive orientation is thus a product of the drive for self-preservation, or, to give the thesis its full Adornoian statement, ideal-type determinative judgment and scientific reason are forms of instrumental reason because they are that formation of human cognition necessary for individual and collective self-preservation, making them the expression of the drive for self-preservation in rational form. Hence for Adorno, the authority of ideal-type scientific reason is in fact the authority of nature once removed (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, pp. 1–34; Bernstein 2001, ch. 2). Hence, in so far as this form of reason becomes dominant, human rational spiritual relations remain under the authority of nature, under the authority of a reason that is designed narrowly and reductively to satisfy the ends of individual and species survival in utter indifference to other features of human lives – everything we might say that makes them distinctly human and not merely animal lives. Adorno’s genealogical gesture is not intended as a critique of instrumental reason as such – in its appropriate place it comprises a cornerstone of spiritual life; only its hegemony requires challenge, the claim of ideal-type determinative judgment and scientific reason to exhaust the possibility of cognitive encounter. In fact, this way of setting up the problem is not unique to Adorno; he was anticipated, powerfully, by both Schiller and, in a different register, Hegel. Although he does not conceive the drive of theoretical reason as a historical formation of the drive to self-preservation, Schiller does analyze Kantian reason as producing a fragmentation of the human subject in which rational freedom (form) and determined nature (sense) are taken as incommensurable with each other. Schiller equally anticipates Adorno’s dialectic of enlightenment in arguing that in repudiating and subordinating our encounters with qualitatively effulgent nature, we make a principle of nature into the principle of reason, roughly, construing Kantian moral reason – as the site of human rational independence from nature – as the force of nature (the drive to self-preservation) in rational form: “We disown Nature in her rightful sphere only to submit to her tyranny in themoral, andwhile resisting the impact shemakes upon our senses are content to take over her principles” (Schiller 1967: Fifth Letter, p. 27). Robert Hullot-Kentor comments on this passage: “Reason, the “Our Amphibian Problem” 199