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Negative Dialectics
By Theodor Adorno
Suhrkamp Verlag © 1970 Frankfurt am Main
Original text is copyright © 1997 by Suhrkamp Verlag. The text of this
translation is copyright © 2001 Dennis Redmond
Introduction
Part I. Relationship to Ontology
Part II. Negative Dialectics: Concept and Categories
Part III. Models. Freedom: Metacritique of Practical Reason
Part III. Models. World-spirit and Natural History: Excursus on Hegel
Part III. Models. Meditations on Metaphysics
Translation by Dennis Redmond © 2001
The formulation “negative dialectics” transgresses against tradition. Already in Plato dialectics intended to establish something positive through the thought-means of the negation; the figure of a negation of the negation named this precisely. The book would like to emancipate dialectics from these types of affirmative essence, without relinquishing anything in terms of determinacy. The development of its paradoxical title is one of its intentions.
What in accordance with the conception of philosophy would be the foundation, the author develops only after a great deal of explication of what that conception presumes would be raised on a foundation. This implies the critique of the concept of the foundation, as well as of the primacy of substantive thought. Its self-consciousness achieves its movement solely in its consummation. It requires what, according to the ground rules of the Spirit which always remain in effect, is secondary.
What is given herein is not solely a methodology of material labor of the author; according to the theory of negative dialectics, no continuum exists between the former and the latter. However such a discontinuity, and what instructions may be read out of it for thinking, will indeed be dealt with. The procedure is not grounded, but justified. The author lays, so far as he can, his cards on the table; this is by no means the same thing as the game.
When Benjamin in 1937 read the part of the Metacritique of Epistemology which the author had finished at that time - the last chapter of the published work - he commented, one had to journey through the icy wasteland of abstraction in order to definitively arrive at concrete philosophizing. Negative dialectics now indicates such a path, retrospectively. Concretion was for the most part smuggled into contemporary philosophy. By contrast the largely abstract text wishes to vouch for its authenticity no less than for the explanation of the author’s concrete mode of procedure. If one speaks in the newest aesthetic debates of anti-drama and anti-heroes, then Negative Dialectics, which holds itself distant from all aesthetic themes, could be called an anti-system. With logically consistent means, it attempts to put, in place of the principle of unity and of the hegemony of the supra-ordinated concept, that which would be outside of the bane of such unity. Since the author has trusted himself to follow his own intellectual impulses, he felt it to be his task to break through the delusion of constitutive subjectivity by means of the power of the subject; he no longer wished to put off this task. To reach stringently across the official division of pure philosophy and what is relevant to the matter [Sachhaltigem] or what is formally scientific, was one of the determining motives therein.
The introduction expounds the concept of philosophical experience. The first section starts out from the state of the ontology which dominates today in Germany. It is not judged from above, but is comprehended out of its need, which is no less problematic for its part, and criticized immanently. The second section proceeds from the results to the idea of a negative dialectics and its position in relation to several categories, which it preserves as well as qualitatively transforms. The third section then carries out models of negative dialectics. They are not examples; they do not simply illuminate general considerations. By leading towards what is relevant to the matter, they would like to simultaneously do justice to the substantive intention of what is at first dealt with generally, out of necessity, in contrast to the usage of examples as something indifferent in themselves, which Plato introduced and which philosophy has ever since merely repeated. While the models are supposed to clarify what negative dialectics would be, and to drive this latter, according to its own concept, into the realm of reality, they elucidate, not dissimilar to the so-called exemplary models, key concepts of philosophical disciplines, in order to centrally intervene in these. A dialectics of freedom will do this for the philosophy of ethics; “World-Spirit and Natural History” for that of history; the last chapter circles, feeling its way, around metaphysical questions, in the sense of the axial revolution of the Copernican turn, by means of critical self-reflection.
Ulrich Sonneman is working on a book which is supposed to be entitled Negative Anthropology. Neither he nor the author knew beforehand about the coincidence. It refers to a compulsion in the thing itself.
The author is prepared for the resistance, which Negative Dialectics will provoke. Without rancor, he does not begrudge the joy of all those, both hither and yonder [i.e. on both sides of the Berlin Wall], who will proclaim that they had always said it and now the author would be confessing it.
Frankfurt, Summer 1966
On the Possibility of Philosophy 15-16
Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. The summary judgement that it had merely interpreted the world is itself crippled by resignation before reality, and becomes a defeatism of reason after the transformation of the world failed. It guarantees no place from which theory as such could be concretely convicted of the anachronism, which then as now it is suspected of. Perhaps the interpretation which promised the transition did not suffice. The moment on which the critique of theory depended is not to be prolonged theoretically. Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs. After philosophy broke with the promise that it would be one with reality or at least struck just before the hour of its production, it has been compelled to ruthlessly criticize itself. What once, against the appearance [Schein] of the senses and every outwards-oriented experience, felt itself to be that which is purely unnaive, has for its part become as naive as those miserable candidates Goethe received a hundred and fifty years ago, who nourished themselves on speculation. The introverted thought-architect lives behind the moon which extroverted technicians have confiscated. In the face of an immeasurably expanded society and the progress of positive cognition of nature, the conceptual structures in which, according to philosophic mores, the totality is supposed to be housed, resemble remnants of simple commodity society amidst industrial late capitalism. The meanwhile completely mismatched relationship (since degraded to a mere topos) between each Spirit and power, strikes the attempt to comprehend this hegemony by those inspired with their own concept of the Spirit with futility. The very will to do so betokens a power-claim which countermands what is to be understood. The retrogression of philosophy to a narrow scientific field, rendered necessary by the rise of specific scientific fields, is the single most eye-opening expression of its historical fate. Had Kant, in his words, freed himself from the scholastic concept of philosophy into its world-concept,1 then this has regressed under compulsion to its scholastic concept. Where it confuses this latter with the world-concept, its pretensions degenerate into sheer ludicrousness. Hegel knew this, in spite of the teaching of the absolute Spirit to which he assigned philosophy, as a mere moment of reality, as an activity in the division of labor, and thereby restricted it. Since then, its own narrowness and discrepancy to reality has emerged out of this, and all the more so, the more thoroughly it forgot this delimitation and expunged it from itself as something alien, in order to justify its own position in a totality which it monopolizes as its object, instead of recognizing how very much its immanent truth depends on such, down to its innermost composition. Only the philosophy which dispenses with such naivete is the slightest bit worth thinking further. Its critical self-reflection may not stop however before the highest achievements of its history. It needs to be asked if and whether, following the collapse of the Hegelian one, it would even be possible anymore, just as Kant investigated the possibility of metaphysics after the critique of rationalism. If the Hegelian doctrine of the dialectic represented the impossible goal of showing, with philosophical concepts, that it was equal to the task of what was ultimately heterogenous to such, an account is long overdue of its relationship to dialectics, and why precisely his attempt failed.
Dialectics Not a Standpoint 16-18
No theory escapes the market anymore: each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions, all are made available, all snapped up. Thought need no more put blinders on itself, in the self-justifying conviction that one’s own theory is exempt from this fate, which degenerates into narcissistic self-promotion, than dialectics need fall silent before such a reproach and the one linked to it, concerning its superfluity and randomness as a slapdash method. Its name says to begin with nothing more than that objects do not vanish into their concept, that these end up in contradiction with the received norm of the adaequatio. The contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism unavoidably transfigured it into: no Heraclitean essence. It is the index of the untruth of identity, of the vanishing of the conceptual into the concept. The appearance [Schein] of identity dwells however in thinking itself as a pure form from within. To think means to identify. Conceptual schematas self-contentedly push aside what thinking wants to comprehend. Its appearance [Schein] and its truth delimit themselves. The former is not to be summarily removed, for example by vouchsafing some existent-in-itself outside of the totality of thought-determinations. There is a moment in Kant, and this was mobilized against him by Hegel, which secretly regards the in-itself beyond the concept as something wholly indeterminable, as null and void. To the consciousness of the phenomenal appearance [Scheinhaftigkeit] of the conceptual totality there remains nothing left but to break through the appearance [Schein] of total identity: in keeping with its own measure. Since however this totality is formed according to logic, whose core is constructed from the proposition of the excluded third, everything which does not conform to such, everything qualitatively divergent assumes the signature of the contradiction. The contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity; the primacy of the principle of contradiction in dialectics measures what is heterogenous in unitary thinking. By colliding against its own borders, it reaches beyond itself. Dialectics is the consistent consciousness of non-identity. It is not related in advance to a standpoint. Thought is driven, out of its unavoidable insufficiency, its guilt for what it thinks, towards it. If one objected, as has been repeated ever since by the Aristotelian critics of Hegel,2 that dialectics for its part grinds everything indiscriminately in its mill down into the mere logical form of the contradiction, overlooking - even Croce argued this3 - the true polyvalence of that which is not contradictory, of the simply different, one is only displacing the blame for the thing onto the method. That which is differentiated appears as divergent, dissonant, negative, so long as consciousness must push towards unity according to its own formation: so long as it measures that which is not identical with itself, with its claim to the totality. This is what dialectics holds up to the consciousness as the contradiction. Thanks to the immanent nature of consciousness, that which is in contradiction has itself the character of inescapable and catastrophic nomothetism [Gesetzmaessigkeit: law-abiding character]. Identity and contradiction in thinking are welded to one another. The totality of the contradiction is nothing other than the untruth of the total identification, as it is manifested in the latter. Contradiction is non-identity under the bane [Bann] of the law, which also influences the non-identical.
Reality and Dialectics 18-19
This law is however not one of thinking, but real. Whoever submits to dialectical discipline, must unquestionably pay with the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience. The impoverishment of experience through dialectics, which infuriates mainstream opinion, proves itself however to be entirely appropriate to the abstract monotony of the administered world. What is painful about it is the pain of such, raised to a concept. Cognition must bow to it, if it does not wish to once again degrade the concretion to the ideology, which it really begins to become. Another version of dialectics satisfied itself with its lackluster renaissance: with its derivation in the history of ideas from the Kantian aporias and that which was programmed into the systems of his successors, but not achieved. It is to be achieved only negatively. Dialectics develops the difference of the particular from the generality, which is dictated by the generality. While it is inescapable to the subject, as the break between subject and object drilled into the consciousness, furrowing everything which it thinks, even that which is objective, it would have an end in reconciliation. This would release the non-identical, relieving it even of its intellectualized compulsion, opening up for the first time the multiplicity of the divergent, over which dialectics would have no more power. Reconciliation would be the meditation on the no-longer-hostile multiplicity, something which is subjective anathema to reason. Dialectics serves reconciliation. It dismantles the logical character of compulsion, which it follows; that is why it is denounced as pan-logism. In its idealistic form it was bracketed by the primacy of the absolute subject as the power, which negatively realized every single movement of the concept and the course of such in its entirety. Such a primacy of the subject has been condemned by history, even in the Hegelian conception, that of the particular human consciousness, which overshadowed the transcendental ones of Kant and Fichte. Not only was it suppressed by the lack of power of the waning thought, which failed to construe the hegemony of the course of the world before this latter. None of the reconciliations, however, from the logical one to the political-historical one, which absolute idealism maintained - every other remained inconsequential - was binding. That consistent idealism could simply not otherwise constitute itself than as the epitome of the contradiction, is as much its logically consistent truth as the punishment, which its logicity incurs as logicity; appearance [Schein], as much as necessary. Reopening the case of dialectics, whose non-idealistic form degenerated in the meantime to dogma just as the idealistic ones degenerated into educational baggage, does not solely determine the contemporary relevance of a historically established mode of philosophizing or of the philosophical structure of the objects of cognition. Hegel reconstituted the right and capacity of philosophy to think substantively, instead of settling for the analysis of empty and in the emphatic sense null and void forms of cognition. Its contemporary version falls back, wherever anything at all substantive is dealt with, either into whatever mundane world-view is handy or into that formalism, that “indifference”, against which Hegel rebelled. The development of phenomenology, which was once animated by the need for content, into one which dismissed any sort of content as polluting the invocation of being, is historical evidence for this. Hegel’s substantive philosophizing had as its fundament and result the primacy of the subject or, in the famous formulation from the introduction to the Logic, the identity of identity and non-identity.4 To him, the determinate particular was determinable by the Spirit, because its immanent determination was supposed to be nothing other than the Spirit. Without this supposition, philosophy would, according to Hegel, be incapable of cognizing that which is substantive and essential. If the idealistically-achieved concept of dialectics did not hide experiences which, contrary to Hegel’s own emphasis, are independent from the idealistic apparatus, then nothing would remain of philosophy than the unavoidable renunciation which rejects the substantive insight, restricts itself to the methodology of science, declares this latter to be philosophy and thereby virtually cancels itself out.
Interest of Philosophy 19-21
Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence. Its theme would be the qualities which it has degraded to the merely contingent, to quantité négligeable [French: negligible quantity]. What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept. Bergson as well as Husserl, the standard-bearers of philosophical modernity, innervated this, but shrank away from it back into traditional metaphysics. Bergson created, by fiat, a different type of cognition for the sake of the non-conceptual. The dialectical salt was washed away in the undifferentiated flow of life; that which was materially solidified was dismissed as subaltern, instead of being understood along with its subalternity. Hatred of the rigid general concept produced a cult of irrational immediacy, of sovereign freedom amidst unfreedom. He designed both of his cognitive modes as dualistically against one another as the doctrines of Descartes and Kant, which he repudiated, had ever been; the causal-mechanical one remained, as pragmatic knowledge, as little illuminated by the intuitive one as the bourgeois establishment from the relaxed, easy-going attitude of those who owe their privileges to that establishment. The celebrated intuitions themselves appear as something rather abstract in Bergson’s philosophy, hardly moving beyond the phenomenal consciousness of time, which already underwrote Kant’s chronological-physical one; in Bergon’s insight, spatialized time. In fact, the intuitive mode of conduct of the Spirit, although somewhat difficult to develop, does continue to exist as the archaic rudiments of mimetic reactions. What transpired before its past promises something beyond the hardened present. Intuitions succeed, however, only desultorily. Every cognition, even Bergson’s own, requires the rationality which he so despised, precisely if they are ever to be concretized. Duration raised to an absolute, pure becoming, the actus purus [Latin: pure act], recoils into the same timelessness which Bergson chastises in metaphysics since Plato and Aristoteles. It did not occur to him that what he gropes for, if it is not to remain a Fata Morgana, could only be viewed through the instrumentarium of cognition, through the reflection upon its own means, and degenerates into sheer caprice in a procedure which is, from the very beginning, unmediated to that of the cognition. - The logician Husserl, on the other hand, sharply contrasted the mode by which one becomes aware of the essence against the generalizing abstraction. He had a specific intellectual experience in mind, which was supposed to be able to descry the essence in the particular. The essence, however, to which this referred, did not differentiate itself in the slightest from that of the then-current general concept. A crass discrepancy reigns between the functional organization of the apperception [Wesensschau] and its terminus ad quem [Latin: end-point]. Neither break-out attempt succeeded in moving beyond idealism: Bergson oriented himself, just like his positivistic arch-enemies, towards the données immédiate de la conscience [French: immediate facts of the consciousness], Husserl likewise towards the phenomena of the stream of consciousness. The former as well as the latter remained frozen in the demesne of subjective immanence.5 What is to be insisted on against both is what each tries to conjure up in vain; pace Wittgenstein, to say what cannot be said. The simple contradiction of this demand is that of philosophy itself: it qualifies the latter as dialectics, before it embroils itself in its specific contradictions. The work of philosophical self-reflection consists of working out this paradox. Everything else is signification, post-construction, today as in Hegel’s time pre-philosophical. A faith, as always subject to question, that philosophy would still be possible; that the concept could leapfrog the concept, the preparatory stages and the final touches, and thereby reach the non-conceptual, is indispensable to philosophy and therein lies something of the naivete, which ails it. Otherwise it would have to capitulate and with it everything to do with the Spirit. Not even the simplest operation could be thought through, there would be no truth, everything would be emphatically nothing. Whatever of the truth can be gleaned through concepts beyond their abstract circumference, can have no other staging-grounds than that which is suppressed, disparaged and thrown away by concepts. The utopia of cognition would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it the same as them.
The Antagonistic Whole 21-22
Such a concept of dialectics casts doubt on its possibility. The anticipation of universal movement in contradictions seems, however varied, to teach the totality of the Spirit, precisely the identity-thesis just nullified. The Spirit, which would unceasingly reflect on the contradiction in things, ought to be this itself, if it is to be organized according to the form of the contradiction. The truth, which in the idealistic dialectic drives past every particularity as something false in its one-sidedness, would be that of the whole; if it were not already thought out, then the dialectical steps would lose their motivation and direction. Against this one must counter that the object of intellectual experience would itself be the antagonistic system, something utterly real, and not just by virtue of its mediation to the cognizing subject which rediscovers itself therein. The compulsory constitution of reality which idealism projected into the regions of the subject and Spirit is to be retranslated back out of these. What remains of idealism is that society, the objective determinant of the Spirit, is just as much the epitome of subjects as their negation. In it they are unknowable and disempowered; that is why it is so desperately objective and a concept, which idealism mistakes as something positive. The system is not that of the absolute Spirit, but of the most conditioned of those who have it at their disposal, and cannot even know how much it is their own. The subjective pre-formation of the material social production-process, entirely separate from its theoretical constitution, is that which is unresolved, irreconcilable to subjects. Their own reason which produces identity through exchange, as unconsciously as the transcendental subject, remains incommensurable to the subjects which it reduces to the same common denominator: the subject as the enemy of the subject. The preceding generality is true so much as untrue: true, because it forms that “ether”, which Hegel called the Spirit; untrue, because its reason is nothing of the sort, its generality the product of particular interests. That is why the philosophical critique of identity steps beyond philosophy. That it requires, nonetheless, what is not subsumed under identity - in Marxian terminology, use-value - so that life can continue to exist even under the ruling relations of production, is what is ineffable in utopia. It reaches deep into that which secretly forswears its realization. In view of the concrete possibility of utopia, dialectics is the ontology of the false condition. A true one would be emancipated from it, as little system as contradiction.
Disenchantment of the Concept 23-24
Philosophy, Hegel’s included, invites the general objection that insofar as it would have compulsory concepts as its material, it already characterizes itself in advance as idealistic. As a matter of fact none of them, not even extreme empiricism, can haul off the facta bruta [Latin: brute facts] and present them like anatomical cases or physics experiments; none, as so many paintings tempt one to believe, glue specific things onto the text. But the argument in its formal generality grasps the concept as fetishistically as the manner in which it naively explicates itself within its domain, as a self-sufficient totality, which philosophical thinking cannot do anything about. In truth all concepts, even philosophical ones, move towards what is non-conceptual, because they are for their part moments of the reality, which necessitated - primarily for the purpose of controlling nature - their formation. That which appears as the conceptual mediation from the inside, the preeminence of its sphere, without which nothing could be known, may not be confused with what it is in itself. Such an appearance [Schein] of the existent-in-itself lends it the movement which exempts it from the reality, within which it is for its part harnessed. The requirement that philosophy must operate with concepts is no more to be made into a virtue of this priority than, conversely, the critique of this virtue is to be the summary verdict over philosophy. Meanwhile, the insight that its conceptual essence would not be its absolute in spite of its inseparability is again mediated through the constitution of the concept; it is no dogmatic or even naively realistic thesis. Concepts such as that of being in the beginning of Hegel’s Logic indicate first of all that which is emphatically non-conceptual; they signify, as per Lasks expression, beyond themselves. It is in their nature not to be satisfied by their own conceptuality, although to the extent that they include the non-conceptual in their meaning, they tend to make this identical to itself and thereby remain entangled in themselves. Their content is as immanent in the intellectual sense as transcendent in the ontical sense to such. By means of the self-consciousness of this they have the capacity of discarding their fetishism. Philosophical self-reflection assures itself of the non-conceptual in the concept. Otherwise this latter would be, after Kant’s dictum, null, ultimately no longer the concept of something and thereby void. The philosophy which recognizes this, which cancels out the autarky of the concept, strikes the blinders from the eyes. That the concept is a concept even when it deals with the existent, hardly changes the fact that it is for its part enmeshed in a non-conceptual whole against which it seals itself off solely through its reification, which indeed created it as a concept. The concept is a moment like any other in dialectical logic. Its mediated nature through the non-conceptual survives in it by means of its significance, which for its part founds its conceptual nature. It is characterized as much by its relation to the nonconceptual - as in keeping with traditional epistemology, where every definition of concepts ultimately requires non-conceptual, deictic moments - as the contrary, that the abstract unity of the onta subsumed under it are to be separated from the ontical. To change this direction of conceptuality, to turn it towards the non-identical, is the hinge of negative dialectics. Before the insight into the constitutive character of the non-conceptual in the concept, the compulsion of identity, which carries along the concept without the delay of such a reflection, dissolves. Its self-determination leads away from the appearance [Schein] of the concept’s being-in-itself as a unity of meaning, out towards its own meaning.
The disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy. It prevents its overgrowth: that of becoming the absolute itself. An idea is to be refunctioned which was bequeathed by idealism and, more than any other, corrupted by it, that of the infinite. It is not for philosophy to reduce the phenomenon to a minimum set of axioms, exhausting things according to scientific usage; Hegel’s polemic against Fichte, that the latter started out from a “dictum”, registers this. On the contrary it wishes to literally immerse itself into that which is heterogenous to it, without reducing it to prefabricated categories. It would like to adhere as closely to this as the program of phenomenology and of Simmel vainly wished for: it aims at undiminished realization [Entaeusserung: realization, relinquishment]. Philosophical content is to be grasped solely where philosophy does not mandate it. The illusion that it could captivate the essence in the finitude of its determinations must be given up. Perhaps the word infinite dropped so quickly from the tongues of the idealistic philosophers because they wished to hush up gnawing doubts about the threadbare finitude of their conceptual apparatus, even Hegel’s, in spite of his intent. Traditional philosophy believes it possesses its object infinitely, and thereby becomes as philosophy finite, conclusive. A different one ought to cashier that claim, no longer trying to convince itself and others that it has the infinite at its disposal. Instead of this it would become, put delicately, infinite to the extent that it refuses to define itself as a corpus of enumerable theorems. It would have its content in the polyvalence of objects not organized into a scheme, which impinge on it or which it seeks out; it would truly deliver itself over to them, would not employ them as a mirror, out of which it rereads itself, confusing its mirror-image with the concretion. It would be nothing other than the full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection; even the “science of the experience of consciousness” would degrade the content of such experiences to examples of categories. What spurs philosophy to the risky exertion of its own infinity is the unwarranted expectation that every individual and particular which it decodes would represent, as in Leibniz’s monad, that whole in itself, which as such always and again eludes it; to be sure, in the manner of a prestabilized disharmony rather than harmony. The metacritical turn against prima philosophia [Latin: originary philosophy] is at the same time one against the finitude of a philosophy, which blusters about infinity and pays no heed to it. Cognition holds none of its objects completely. It is not supposed to prepare the fantasm of a whole. Thus it cannot be the task of a philosophical interpretation of works of art to establish their identity with the concept, to gobble them up in this; the work however develops itself through this in its truth. What may be glimpsed in this, be it the formal process of abstraction, be it the application of concepts to what is grasped under their definitions, may be of use as technics in the broadest sense: for philosophy, which refuses to suborn itself, it is irrelevant. In principle it can always go astray; solely for that reason, achieve something. Skepticism and pragmatism, latest of all Dewey’s strikingly humane version of the latter, recognized this; this is however to be added in to the ferment of an emphatic philosophy, not renounced in advance for the sake of its test of validity. Against the total domination of method, philosophy retains, correctively, the moment of play, which the tradition of its scientifization would like to drive out of it. Even for Hegel this was a sore point, he reproached “…types and distinctions, which are determined by pure accident and by play, not by reason.”...
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