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Adorno, Negative Dialectics, and the Political

This essay attempts to cover some of the most prominent ways in which Adorno specifically addresses,

particularly in his philosophy of negative dialectics, political problems and issues. The aim is not to give a

fully developed argument which unfolds throughout the essay, ending with a particular conclusion; instead, I

have divided the essay into four distinct, self-contained sections, each tackling a single topic by reading one

(or more) of Adorno's texts. The essay then takes the form of a kind of juxtaposition, which tries to open up

the difficult question of “Adorno's politics”, shining light on it from different directions. This approach will

hopefully best illustrate the somewhat paradoxical view I wish to express: that Adorno does not have a

politics, but that this lack is politically motivated.

'Adorno the apolitical' is, of course, how Adorno has traditionally been interpreted, but the recent academic

trend seems to be increasingly revisionist on this, seeking to portray Adorno rather as an eminently political

thinker. My reading attempts a kind of reconciliation (although my sympathies lie more with the original

interpretation): Adorno's lack of a politics is not a failure of his philosophy, an omission, by which we can

criticise Adorno for a lack of engagement1; rather, it is a calculated aversion to what passes for politics, and

indeed that is the whole point of Adorno's enterprise: as he begins his introduction to Negative Dialectics,

since the time for philosophy's realization has passed, the proper response is to consciously return to

philosophy, to critically interrogate it, in reading the missed revolution as the political failure of the

philosophical itself2. Yet one cannot turn this back around and argue that Adorno is simply political, that in

the edifice of his philosophy there is already a political programme contained within, which only required a

new vigorous interpretation or re-reading to free. Adorno's legacy as a political thinker is as a sceptic of

politics, and his philosophy is supposed to instil a critical self-awareness within the consciousness of the

more (conventionally) politically minded, but is limited in what it can tell him to think. But Adorno's philosophy

needs to retain the hope of a changed world in order to function, but it is not really as if Adorno had more

than a hope that such a thing would ever come to pass3.

Espen Hammer writes, for instance, that the core of Adorno's efforts politically considered was to “think and

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act such that the space of the political is liberated from the grasp of identity”, with this meaning the criticism

above all of “the limitation of the field of politics to the management of social positivity”. I think this is a very

good summary. But he is careful to balance his conclusion, admitting that “Adorno's negativism is unhelpful

when it comes to analyzing the conscious decision-making processes that must be part of any collective

political project”4. It is with this qualification that I want to avoid reading explicit political concerns into

everything Adorno says, especially given his hostility to the possibility of immediacy in politics. To give one

prominent example, on the issue of Adorno's confrontations with the student movement of the late 1960s,

considering that this has previously always been taken as an instance of Adorno's reluctance to engage

politically – can we really counter this perception today by saying that this is really Adorno at his most

political? Marianne Tettlebaum argues that “Adorno's refusal to acquiesce in the face of the students'

demands was itself a form of political resistance, an individual denial of the logic of force”, going on to say

that “given the current political climate in the West, where the use of force has become synonymous with

realizing freedom, Adorno's example is especially relevant”5. This seems to me to go beyond the bounds of

what one can seriously maintain as 'political', even as we can readily acknowledge that 'the political' goes

much further than interventions within social positivity, as it is reduced to meaning merely something like

'taking a position'.

These are the deep controversies involved in this discussion, which I hope helps to explain the cautious and

non-committal format of the essay.

Adorno's scepticism of the possibility of directly changing the objective conditions of society, with his belief in

the irresistible logic of the administered society, meant he placed an extra emphasis on the subjective side, if

it can be so called: the importance of influencing the attitudes of the general public. For Adorno, the

immediate overriding concern as a scholar – an educator – was education. This is, I want to argue, Adorno at

his most liberal Adorno; but, that it is also Adorno at his most political.

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In 'Education after Auschwitz', Adorno introduces his central demand of education: “Every debate about the

ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz”6. This

has to be read as applying to the subjective attitudes of people, the remnants of the psychological causes of

fascism that were not dealt with in the defeat and downfall of the Nazi regime7. Adorno suggests two

educational remedies: firstly, he strongly emphasises psychological development in early childhood,

obviously concentrating on schooling, but also stresses the need for 'general enlightenment' amongst the

population, occurring throughout ones's life.

He gives examples of the brooding authoritarian potential within childhood, beginning at school. Adorno

looks at 'Initiation rites' (I think with the playground in mind) that fetish the group as such, perpetuating the

blind identification of the collective. This is done by “inflict[ing] physical pain – often unbearable pain – upon a

person as the price that must be paid in order to consider oneself a member, one of the collective”. Such

practices might be seen as “a direct anticipation of Nationalist Socialist acts of violence”8. Adorno believes

this is part of a much wider sphere animated by another ideal, that “plays a considerable role in traditional

education: the ideal of being hard”. Adorno is unflinching in condemning this: “This educational ideal of

hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong. The idea that virility

consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as

psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism. Being hard, the vaunted quality

education should inculcate, means absolute indifference toward pain as such”9.

Adorno then moves on to consider general problems within the culture. He is concerned with two related

phenomena in particular. First is what he calls the 'manipulative character', distinguished by a “rage for

organization” and an “overvalued realism”. This is easily identified as the psychological counterpart to the

systemic impetus of instrumental reason. The manipulative character is “obsessed by the desire of doing

things [Dinge zu tun], indifferent to the content of such action”, making a “cult of action, activity, of so-called

efficiency as such, which reappears in the advertising image of the active person”10. The general formula for

the manipulative character is that “[p]eople of such a nature have, as it were, assimilated themselves to

things” - reminding us of Adorno's thoughts on reification – meaning that they also have to assimilate others

to things11. This is intrinsically linked to technocratic consciousness, the fetishization of technology as such.

Adorno believes such an obsessive personality trait “described a deficient libidinal relationship to other

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persons”. The possible educational remedies he suggested included the commission of educational

television programmes, mobile 'educational groups' who would tour the country with convoys of volunteers,

discussions, what we would call today life-long learning courses, and supplementary instructions for adults.

These phenomena - the manipulated character, the fetishization of technology, both components of reified

consciousness – are all caused by the general character of bourgeois society, which I suppose it is the final

and most fundamental aim of education to mitigate: that of bourgeois coldness. This coldness is based in the

very structure of society itself: society is based on the pursuit of one's own interests against the interests of

everyone else. This is the basic principle behind the totalitarian horrors of Nazi Germany, and – given the

Dialectic of Enlightenment supposition, for instance, that Nazi Germany and America are grounded in the

same 'state capitalist' economic base12 – represents a sure warning for the future of all Western nations:

“Every person today, without exception, feels too little loved, because every person cannot love. This inability

to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that

something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people”13.

This, for Adorno, resulted in the mere silence that confronted the terror. What the world needs, in its lack of

warmth, is love – but to preach love today is only to mock the victims of coldness: the exhortation to love –

contradictory, since love is immediate – can only provide an ideological cover-up of the real futility of

genuine love. As Adorno says, “love cannot be summoned in professionally mediated relations like that of

teacher and student”14.

But what then does the educator really do, if the main aliment lies within the objective structure of society?

Adorno's proposed measures cannot address this fundamental problem, and he is open in admitting that the

potential for a return to barbarism always remains while society itself does not change. But I think it is wrong

to thereby portray Adorno as unremittingly pessimistic on this; his belief in education is not just a second-

best option. Rather, I think we should read Adorno's thoughts on education as betraying his core belief in

enlightenment per se, that increasing levels of education can make for a more informed general public,

increasing the chances that the formal democratic structures set up in West Germany will function through a

renewed democratization of the culture of the population itself. Adorno asserts that “the only education that

has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection”15, and by this he can only really be

referring to the project of Kantian autonomy or political maturity. Where Adorno is sceptical of 'democratic'

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mediums like television, or the transformative potential of the 'public sphere', it is because he is unconvinced

that the democratic 'groundwork' exists in public culture for these to function as they should. Adorno is

convinced that democratic leaders must treat people as subjects (capable of rational self-reflection) rather

than as objects (to be manipulated). His insistence on the individual's political awareness and responsibility

reflects the importance Adorno attributes to critique in the functioning of democracy, and Adorno argues that

“critique and the prerequisite of democracy, political maturity, belong together”16

Education is, then, the closest thing Adorno gets to a politics. This is the controversial belief I have come to,

which I think has a certain support in Adorno's own personal commitment to the university.

II

In his 1965 lecture series on Negative Dialectics, Adorno quotes a Freudian remark to illustrate his own

approach to the philosophical project: “Whereas Freud remarks in a magnificent passage in the Introductory

Lectures on Psychoanalysis that psychoanalysis is concerned with 'the dregs of the phenomenal world', we

might say that in its own approach philosophy generally finds its object precisely in what it denies itself: the

dregs of the concept, in other words, in what is not itself concept”17. This Freudian view, a recapitulation of

the views Adorno already outlined in his inaugural lecture thirty years earlier (where he refers to the 'refuse

of the physical world'18), is the key to unravelling Adorno's radically original model of philosophy as

interpretation, a weapon designed to disarm the dominant tradition of philosophical logic19. The core principle

of this logic, we might surmise, is its claim to identity; that is, of the identity of concept and object, that the

concept is always adequate to its object. The object is always more than the concept, and Adorno's

philosophy is arguably geared more toward fidelity to the object than anything else.

Adorno's philosophical efforts, which he sees as the undoing of the failed enterprise of identity logic, sees

him consumed primarily with the critique of Hegel. In the sixth lecture of the series on 'negative dialectics',

Adorno uses a specific movement of Hegel's Science of Logic - “the most important text dealing with

philosophical identity”20 - as a heightened, particularly guilty example of the kind of swindle that the

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philosophy of identity has tried to pull. Adorno remained concerned throughout his career with rescuing the

'dregs of the concept', not simply in order to do justice to the fullness of the object that the concept seems to

disregard, but in the further belief that it is precisely in this remainder, in the refuse, that the illuminating truth

of the object can be found.

Adorno is interested here in the dialectic of Being, and the movement by which Hegel attempts to show the

identity of Being and Nothing. Adorno begins with Hegels attempt to show21 - constituting the basic offending

thesis – that 'being' is indifferent to the concept 'being' and the thing 'being'. This formulation comes about

through a process of abstraction that Hegel seeks to detail in the Logic; the abstraction the product of a

progressive movement of determining. The paradoxical end result of this determination is the complete

abstraction of the concept out from all content, emptying it: what Adorno calls the “empirical nullity of the

concept”22. The dialectical consequence is that each progressive determining of the concept, the leap of

abstraction, is also simultaneously a regressive step out of determination. Being, in its full determination,

becomes the indeterminate: it is determined as indeterminate23.

Thus Being = Nothing24. But Adorno is adamant that Being does not equal Nothing, far from it. Adorno

argues that Hegel's transition here is actually smuggled through in a subtle linguistic nuance, a slippage in

the language: the rigorous logical process only 'works' through a kind of Freudian slip that no one is

supposed to notice. Adorno explains that Hegel begins by talking of the indeterminate, but goes on

imperceptibly to replace it with indeterminateness. Adorno argues that in 'the indeterminate', there is no

distinction between concept and thing: “because there has been no determination the distinction between the

determinant, namely the category, and the thing, does not emerge” and thus it might be said to “possess

both”25. However when Hegel substitutes 'indeterminateness', “the absence of determinateness as such

takes the place of what is undetermined”, and the linguistic move from “'the indeterminate', the term that

denotes what is underlying, to indeterminateness is itself the turn to the concept”26.

The 'indeterminate' contains a genuine moment of indecision in its relation to the given, but this gets washed

away in indifference with the purely conceptual self-identity of 'indeterminateness'. To be equal with Nothing,

Being has to be conceived as purely conceptual: Hegel as Idealist, achieving identity by dispatching the

memory of the object. Adorno is making a materialist intervention: identitarian reason is the sin of Idealism.

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(This is materialist because, in Adorno's view, materialism rejects the concept of an inherently meaningful

reality as this could only be justified by appeal to some metaphysical conception of the nature of reality)27

What is the political relevance of this? Well, in this one moment, it is possible to read most if not all of

Adorno's philosophical critique of politics. I cannot pretend to be exhaustive on this. But I want to suggest

one pattern of argument that I am interested in, in which we might see Adorno's position here as analogous

to that advanced by Karl Marx in his critique of Hegel's doctrine of the state. In Adorno's reading of the

Science of Logic – that Hegel achieves identity through the abstracting out of material content, propagating

the idea of the autonomous movement of concept, forgetting the given – has, I think, certain unavoidable

parallels with Marx's earlier Feuerbachian critique.

I will give a summary of Marx's argument: In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel – according to Marx – achieves

identity through a conflation of the concept and the given (of the 'real' and the 'rational'), in a two-stage move

that inverts the relation between subject and predicate. In the first stage, Marx accuses Hegel of reducing

being to thought: the realm of positivity, of sheer empirical facts, is in effect denied the status of genuine

reality because it is viewed solely in terms of the immanent movement of the concept (of the Hegelian

Absolute)28. The concept takes the role of the subject, meaning the Idea is taken as the real and the state is

seen as the mere embodiment of the Idea.

The second accompanying stage of Marx's critique concerns the politics of Hegel's state. As identity thinking

results in an “uncritical idealism”, where the real is simply taken as identical to the rational, as its product or

manifestation, it also equally entails an “uncritical positivism”, whereby the rational is already assumed to

exist as the real, and the currently existing socio-political conditions are thus given legitimation29. This is the

source of the conservative, or apologetic, character of Hegel's political philosophy. Marx writes that the

political narrative Hegel provides in the Philosophy of Right is really in contradiction to the logical structure at

work: so, instead of the movement from the family and civil society towards the state, as it is presented, the

actual movement is one from the state towards society: what are, in reality, the preconditions of the state,

appear as the effects of the state's own self-development, as 'objectifications' of it30.

I now want to suggest, in this Marxian vein, a reading in which Adorno's critique of Hegelian identity thinking

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is seen (at least in part) as pursuing something similar to Marx's dual charges of “uncritical idealism” and

“uncritical positivism”, albeit in a different context. Adorno's attempt to break open such identity with a

negative dialectics, to prevent the closure of the system, highlighting contradiction and opposition within

society instead of seeking reconciliation in the concept, can be read as both a return to a critical idealism

and, in a certain attenuated sense, to a critical positivism.

We can see this in Adorno's claim that concept and object are non-identical in two ways, in his concept of

contradiction: the concept is always less than, but also always more than, the object.

The point of saying that the concept is less than the object, as I interpret it, is that the concept misidentifies

the object, meaning for our purposes that it thereby cannot understand what is really happening in the world:

it misrepresents existing socio-economic conditions. As we have seen Adorno claim, it is within the dregs of

the concept that the object can be found. When the concept subsumes a series of characteristics, it achieves

identity by taking what is common – what is equivalent – in each, and necessarily ignoring all that is

dissimilar. This logic leads us directly to Adorno's explanatory reading of two separate issues: firstly, of

Auschwitz and the Holocaust, and secondly, of reification.

Adorno reading of Auschwitz contains many disparate elements, but one of the most striking of his

comments is his claim that it the disaster succeeded in robbing the victims of their individuality. It was the

genus, the species, the Jew as such, that perished: “That in the concentration camp it was no longer an

individual who died, but a specimen.... Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death”31

This is also the way to read Adorno's critique of reification, which in its spirit is crucially removed from

Lukacs's overtly Marxist reading. In the latter interpretation, stemming mostly to Marx's analysis of the

fetishism of commodities, Lukacs remained fundamentally concerned with the alienated objectification of

subjectivity, the reduction of a fluid process into a dead thing. For Adorno meanwhile – and here his debt to

Nietzsche on the origin of exchange was evident – reification meant precisely the suppression of

heterogeneity in the name of identity32. Adorno's usage of reification, although still engaged in a Marxian

concern with the dominance of the exchange principle, of exchange-value over use-value, means therefore a

rather savage critique of Marxism and its treatment of nature. Adorno , interested in otherness in general,

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was opposed to the reification inherent in the logic of single-minded industrial production as such, in the way

that it would reify the natural world into quantitatively fungible fields for human control and manipulation. In a

early essay 'On Natural History', Adorno was already quite scathing of the orthodox Marxian privileging of

history over nature as the realm of freedom, preferring to play nature off against history or society and vice

versa chiasmically.

These two examples illustrate how the idea that the concept is less than the object, can point to what Adorno

calls contradictions in reality itself – in other words, contradictions which split the object itself. The model for

this is the fact that we live in an antagonistic society, and further, a society that exists by virtue of its

antagonism or contradiction: a society based on the profit motive33. This is, if you like, a concern with the

positive, the really existing essence, as opposed to an 'uncritical positivism'

But as Adorno also remarks, the reverse side of this non-identity of concept and object in contradiction, that

the concept is always more than the object, must mean a surplus of normative potential within the concept,

as the object could be said to fail the concept. To illustrate such a non-identity, he uses the example of

'freedom': it cannot be said to be “simply the unity of the characteristics of all the individuals who can be

defined as free” today, which in liberal-bourgeois society would have a basis in “a formal freedom within a

given constitution”. Rather, the concept of 'freedom' “contains a pointer to something that goes well beyond

those specific freedoms, without our necessarily realizing what this additional element amounts to”34. And

Adorno seems to put this model into action elsewhere in his writings35. This is an example of an idealism at

work against (uncritical) idealism

III

During the turbulent times of the late 1960s, and of the confrontations between the authorities and student

activists, Adorno was often accused of political quietism. On one infamous occasion, in August 1969, a group

of female students publicly humiliated Adorno during one of his lectures, protesting his refusal to renounce

his decision to call the police when student activists occupied the Institute for Social Research. Adorno's

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response came in the form of two essays, 'Resignation', published in 1969, and 'Marginalia to Theory and

Practice'.

In his own defence, Adorno insisted not simply that critical thought remained indispensable for any effective

practical resistance, but that thought is today more practical than practice. Adorno recalls an incident where

a student's room was smashed and his wall scrawled with graffiti because he “preferred to work rather than

join in actions” (at least this is how Adorno remembers it), and castigates the perpetrators in a typical

dialectical reversal: “The thinking denigrated by actionists apparently demands of them too much undue

effort: it requires too much work, is too practical”36. Adorno's charge here initially takes two forms, both of

which are linked to his essential conviction in the impossibility of praxis today, at least as it has been

traditionally understood37. He firstly recounts the history of praxis, warning the “actionists” that they put the

effectiveness of praxis in jeopardy if they forget its essential contradictory character, meaning its roots in

labour. Secondly, building upon this insight, Adorno emphasises the need for critical thought to throw light on

such contradictions – the 'fallen', compromised nature of praxis – in the hope of something better: by

exposing the lie of praxis, its impossibility, one points beyond it, one keeps the possibility of a genuine praxis

open, and so in this sense, thought today is more 'practical' than practice.

Adorno treats the division of theory and practice in particular as the result of the historical spilt between

physical and intellectual labour, but all praxis arises from labour. Adorno traces back the possibility of praxis

to the emergence of a certain level of socio-historical development, where labour “no longer wanted to

merely reproduce life directly but to produce its conditions”, with this obviously resulting in a clash with those

having an overriding interest in the already existing conditions. Adorno claims that this origin in labour means

praxis “carries the baggage of an element of unfreedom”, that of its Freudian “struggle against the pleasure

principle for the sake of one's own self-preservation”. Adorno warns that “contemporary actionism” (Adorno's

pet term for those who fetishize action for its own sake) has to function through a repression of this memory,

namely that “the longing for freedom is closely related to the aversion to praxis”: praxis was “the reaction to

deprivation” and “this still disfigures praxis even when it wants to do away with deprivation”38. Yet as Adorno

mentions explicitly elsewhere39, the issue today is not the doing-away of deprivation, since the productive

forces are already developed enough. The issue is rather – at least as I interpret it – the increasingly

excessive importance of technical or instrumental reason in achieving system integration within

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contemporary capitalism: action as means is legitimized as such, and the goal of overcoming deprivation

falls from sight. This is related to Adorno's lament over the dominance of the exchange principle, whereby

the capitalist economy, geared solely toward the realization of surplus-value in exchange, is indifferent to

meeting the needs of the most deprived.

Next Adorno engages again in a dialectical reversal, looking at the relationship between 'means' and 'ends'.

He sees that today, the means become the end, and the end becomes the means. Adorno implicates the

'actionists' in perpetuating the logic of the rationalized society they are fighting against – just as the society

fetishizes 'busyness' for its own sake, so do those of a revolutionary disposition who fetishize 'doing

something' even when nothing can be done. Adorno claims that a sure sign of praxis becoming such an

ideology is when “the question 'what is to be done?'” becomes “an automatic reflex to every critical thought

before it is fully expressed, let alone comprehended”. It “recalls the gesture of someone demanding your

papers”40. This problem is closely related to the question of organisation too – an institution set up to fulfil a

role, realize an end state, becomes important in-and-of-itself: one must show loyalty to the cause: “praxis

obscures its own present impossibility with the opiate of collectivity.... More implicit and therefore all the more

powerful is the commandment: you must sign”41. This appears to be Adorno's primary argument for the

impossibility of praxis, that it is trapped within this bad infinity. He chooses to call the dialectic “hopeless”,

that “through praxis alone is it possible to escape the captivating spell praxis imposes on people”42. This is

the most important aspect of the reversal, means becoming hypostatized as ends43.

Given this, it is theory – or critical thought as such – that is charged with the task of being practical. This

seems somewhat counter-intuitive, and I do not believe Adorno is really claiming that theory is practical in-

itself, unmediated (when he claims that thought is already a form of praxis, he seems to be arguing against

what he calls “the ideology of the purity of thought”, the naïve idea that the real world has no influence upon,

does not colour, thought. Obviously thinking itself does not change the objective character of the world). The

emphasis is rather on thought as negativity, as resistance, not as intervention within the realm of positivity.

Adorno writes both that “theory is the guarantor of freedom in the midst of unfreedom” and, forthrightly, that

“whoever thinks, offers resistance”44

This is the first level of what should really be described as Adorno's two-tiered analysis. It is crucial to not

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misunderstanding Adorno to realise that the dissonance between means and ends, the reactionary nature of

existing praxis and the blunted hope for a praxis informed by theory in the future, is all an objectification of

the contradictions running deep within society itself. This is the first-tier. But Adorno still holds fast to the

need for the unity of theory and praxis, the dialectical interrelation between means and ends, and does not

renounce each for the sake of the other. This is the second-tier of analysis, which critical thought today is

supposed to point to, to leave a space for, changing circumstances in the future45. It is only through this

splitting-up of Adorno's argument that one can make sense of his comments, whereby he ends the same

essay on the impossibility of praxis and the autonomy of theory by insisting that theory must come from

praxis, in a spontaneous emergence. Praxis appears in theory as a blindspot, as that which cannot be

prescribed by it. The point is that the unity of theory and practice is wrong, undialectical, if it is asserted as

simply existing, as a programmatic obligation for anyone who would engage in either. The unity requires

struggle.

As Adorno asserts that the unity of theory and practice stems from the unity of subject and object, so does

Adorno's critique of Lukacs subject-object of history apply equally to the Hungarian's accompanying activist

strain46: the unity of theory and practice that takes place in thought is identity thinking writ large, as the

unexamined idealist strain of Hegelian thought carried into Marxism. The proper materialist response, if it can

be phrased as such, is to perpetrate and exaggerate the distance between theory and practice, to expose

the lie of their identity with non-identity thinking, in order to keep rational identity within the realm of the

possible47.

IV

Without an understanding of the impact Auschwitz had on Adorno, the philosophy of negative dialectics is

nigh incomprehensible. This is felt most acutely in his mediations on metaphysics, toward the end of

Negative Dialectics. For Adorno, Auschwitz spells the end of metaphysics: the optimism of Hegel's story of

the frantic self-development or fulfilment of Geist through his philosophy of History is disproved in the face of

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the Holocaust. Metaphysical speculation, as it had been practised since Plato and Aristotle, becomes

grotesque in this light. To try and make sense of what happened, to come to terms with it, rationalise it,

seems to Adorno a recondite insult to its victims48.

Of course, Adorno does not really believe in metaphysics anyway. He is a proper post-Kantian, and seems to

have accepted the results of Kant's dialectic – that knowledge cannot transcend the experiential conditions of

objecthood – wholesale when it comes to the possibility of thinking God or the soul. But Adorno is also a

Hegelian, and metaphysics has always been social, and it is in sense that Auschwitz disproves metaphysics,

as we can see that it is (no longer) compatible with the course of human history. The power of metaphysical

experience itself shows the corruption of the discipline of metaphysics as purely a priori speculation: the a

priori is wrenched down from on high by the experience it was supposed to account for.

But the point is not just that Auschwitz disproves the claim of metaphysics, but that Auschwitz represents the

historical realization of aspirations inherent in the metaphysical tradition itself. Adorno identifies the following

characteristics of the metaphysics: that it celebrates the immutable and non-temporal at the expense of the

transient and temporal, that it is essentially affirmative of the world (for instance, in the the theological

problem of evil; it asserts that the existence of evil and chaos in the empirical world is compatible with the

existence of a rational and moral order in the suprasensible realm), and, of course, that it subordinates to its

conceptions of totality the particularity of human experience and suffering, as well as the concrete material

world. The concentration camp is the culmination of these tendencies – it becomes a world unto itself, a

closed totality beyond the exigencies of historical time; it subordinates the individual, and every individuating

feature of the individual, to the universality of the genus or race; and it assumes a radical immanence,

shutting down the possibility of thought escaping in transcendence as it prevents inmates from escaping the

camp walls.

Despite this, Adorno believes we would be the worse off in dropping the metaphysical. He believes this

because metaphysics still holds a claim for transcendence from the false totality of modern life, and sense

that 'this cannot be all'. But this possibility of transcendence comes in a dialectical form: the irrationality, in a

sense, of postulating a beyond that we cannot 'grasp with both hands', amounts to an escape from the crude

reduction of reason to its instrumental-functional conception; yet, the metaphysical cannot abandon reason, it

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cannot be conceived as a purely immediate receptivity, as this is ruled out by the 'fallen' human being, mired

in the real-material world. This experience must still contain a constitutive intellectual element49.

Adorno does not outline a theory of metaphysical experience, but he does make some further remarks on

what it might entail. What I want to emphasise is the way that the chance of metaphysical experience evokes

some conception of moral responsibility in the subject. Adorno insists that the experience of negativity – of

death and radical evil, and indeed also of the utter loss of meaning which he thinks characterizes ordinary life

in the rationalized social world – brings out a 'metaphysical need'. The link between metaphysics and

morality comes in Adorno's grounding of metaphysical transcendence in the experience of suffering.

Metaphysical experience generates a demand that suffering be resisted and a less violent social world

created.50 This metaphysics creates an 'illusion' of a changed world, not the belief that such is actually

happening or going to happen: the value of this supposed metaphysical experience lies in negation from

what exists, it must place the hope of a reconciliation with the object in the imitation of transcendence

beyond the object51.

This ties us in with what has been described as Adorno's 'negative moral philosophy'. By this, Adorno takes

the step of beginning his moral philosophy with the statement that a moral philosophy is today impossible,

since the modern social world is radically evil. “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly”52. Again, Auschwitz is the

model for the whole of society: one both cannot live rightly, because of the guilt context of evil society, in its

cold pursuit of self-interest, indifferent to the needs of other; but neither can one live, since life becomes

uniform and regimented, as people react to external systematic imperatives (and internal repression) rather

than exercise a capacity for proper self-determination53.

Given this negativism, how can Adorno want us to act? Does he have an ethics at all? He retains a belief in

the morality of thought, undoubtedly. But it is interesting for us that what Adorno does insist on in, terms of

ethics of right living, is a refusal to take part. His 'negative prescriptions' centre around what I am interpreting

here as a negative freedom, a belief in the limited remaining value in living an independent life from others,

avoiding determination by society as much as one can. Adorno believes in the rather modest ideal of

empathy with others, but solidarity with a group in a collective political struggle is ruled out. Adorno thinks

that such struggle would really betray the cause it fought for, it being tainted with the evil of existing society.

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 MA Social and Political Thought – The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory (939M1) – 50655

And Adorno is adamant that true freedom has to be grounded in public freedom, that the good life is

ultimately meaningless unless it is institutionalized in the good society – abstract, formal ideals amount to

little if they are not shared in social practices, in Sittlichkeit. But, still, the hollow model of the isolated

intellectual is the best we can expect.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics Continuum, 1973

Adorno, Theodor W. Metaphysics Polity, 2001
Adorno, Theodor W. 'The Actuality of Philosophy' in The Adorno Reader
Adorno, Theodor W. 'Messages in a Bottle', New Left Review
Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia Verso, 2005
Adorno, Theodor W. 'Education after Auschwitz', in Critical Models
Adorno, Theodor W. 'Resignation', in Critical Models
Adorno, Theodor W. 'Marginalia to Theory and Practice', in Critical Models
Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Models Columbia University Press, 2005
Adorno, Theodor W. Lectures on Negative Dialectics Polity, 2008
Agamben, Giorgio Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive Zone Books, 2005
Colletti, Lucio 'Introduction', Karl Marx Early Writings Penguin, 1974
Cook, Deborah Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts Acumen, 2008
Finlayson, James Gordon 'Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable', European Journal of Philosophy
Gibson, Nigel & Rubin, Andrew (ed.) Adorno: A Critical Reader Blackwell, 2002
Hammer, Espen Adorno and the Political Routledge, 2006
Hammer, Espen 'Adorno and extreme evil', Philosophy and Social Criticism (Vol. 26 No.4)
Hegel, G.W.F Science of Logic George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1969
Held, David Introduction to Critical Theory Polity 2004
Honneth, Axel Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (2009), Columbia
Huhn, Tom (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Adorno Cambridge, 2004
Inwood, Michael A Hegel Dictionary Blackwell, 1992
Jarvis, Simon Adorno: A Critical Introduction Polity, 1998
Jay, Martin Adorno Fontana, 1984
O' Connor, Brian (ed.) The Adorno Reader Blackwell, 2004
Rose, Gillian The Melancholy Science Macmillan Press, 1978
Therborn, Goran 'The Frankfurt School', in Western Marxism: a Critical Reader, New Left Books 1977
Thompson, Alex Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed Continuum, 2006

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1 This has been the standard Marxist view, for instance Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism and
Goran Therborn, in his essay on 'The Frankfurt School'. For a summary, see David Held's 'A reply to Marxist
critics', Introduction to Critical Theory, p.354-364
2 Adorno famously wrote that “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it
was missed”. But this is a failure of philosophy too, as Adorno goes on: “Having broken its pledge to be as one with
reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself.” Negative Dialectics, p.3 See
also the treatment of this topic in Alex Thompson, Adorno: A Guide to the Perplexed
3 We can look at the very last fragment of Minima Moralia, 'Finale', where Adorno writes “Knowledge has no light
but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique” but adds “But beside the
demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters”
4 Hammer goes on to add of Adorno that “At worst his politics may amount to a form of subjectivist anarchism that
fails to take into account the communal dimension of political struggle and the essential difference between
sovereign aesthetic or philosophical meaning and the more down-to-earth process of committing oneself to genuine
political decisions and policies” (Adorno and the Political, p.179
5 Marianne Tettlebaum, 'Political Philosophy', Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts, p.134
6 'Education after Auschwitz', Critical Models (CM) p.191
7 This is the aspect of fascism that Adorno concentrates on, given that the possibility of changing the social conditions
responsible for fascism is minimal. Thus it is entirely false to charge Adorno with giving a purely psychological
account of fascism, as for example in Goran Therborn, 'The Frankfurt School'
8 CM, p.197
9 Ibid., p.197-8
10 Ibid., p.198
11 Ibid., p.199
12 Discussed in Russell Berman, 'Adorno's Politics' (Adorno: A Critical Reader).
13 CM, p.201
14 Ibid., p.202
15 CM p.193
16 Quoted by Marianne Tettlebaum, 'Political Philosophy', Key Concepts
17 LND p.63
18 'The Actuality of Philosophy', The Adorno Reader p.32
19 Take the following quote from 'The Actuality of Philosophy' to illustrate 'philosophy as interpretation': “Authentic
philosophic interpretation does not meet up with a fixed meaning which already lies behind the question, but lights it
up suddenly and momentarily, and consumes it at the same time... Interpretation of the unintentional through a
juxtaposition of the real by the power of such interpretation is the programme to which the materialist procedure
does all the more justice, the more it distances itself from every 'meaning' of its objects and the less it relates itself to
an implicit, quasi-religious meaning”
20 LND p.60
21 In the Objective Logic, Book One (The Doctrine of Being), the section on Quality or determinateness, chapter 1. In
A.V. Miller's translation of the Science of Logic, Adorno's critique refers to pages 98-99
22 LND p.60
23 “But it is this very indeterminateness which constitutes its determinateness; for indeterminateness is opposed to
determinateness; hence as so opposed it is itself determinate or the negative, and the pure, quite abstract negative. It
is this indeterminateness or abstract negation which thus has being present within it, which reflection, both outer and
inner, enunciates when it equates it with nothing, declares it to be an empty product of thought, to be nothing.”
(Science of Logic, p.99)
24 This is not the entirety of Hegel's argument, of course. Being and Nothing are identical, but are at the same time
distinct, because they prove to be the same but from opposite 'starting points': being goes from being to nothingness,
while nothingness goes from nothingness to being. To 'capture' this relationship, that both are distinct but
interdependent, Hegel concludes by making them aspects of a third category, Becoming. See the entry for 'Being,
Nothing and Becoming' in Michael Inwood's A Hegel Dictionary
25 LND p.61
26 LND p.61
27 Editors Introduction to 'The Actuality of Philosophy', in The Adorno Reader
28 This argument follows Lucio Colletti, 'Introduction' p.19
29 Lucio Colletti p.20. Colletti tells us that Marx uses the phrases “uncritical idealism” and “uncritical positivism” in
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
30 Colletti p.32
31 'Mediations on Metaphysics: After Auschwitz' in The Adorno Reader
32 Martin Jay Adorno, p.68
33 Adorno adds that “This profit motive which divides society and potentially tears it apart is also the factor by means
of which society reproduces its own existence.” It is would adding that this reproduction of the conditions of
existence is, in fact, the naturalistic cause that Adorno attributes to identity thinking. He comments that in both cases
of contradiction – in reality and in the concept – we are “dealing with the principle of mastery, the mastery of
 nature, which spreads its influence, which continues in the mastery of men by other men and which finds its mental
reflex in the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is
introduced to it or that it encounters into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of
influence.” (all LND, p.9)
34 LND p.7
35 This seems to be Adorno's method in 'Freedom as they know it', one of Adorno's previously unpublished fragments
from Minima Moralia (published now as 'Messages in a Bottle', New Left Review). Adorno refers there, in a
persuasively simple way, to the “objective spirit of language”, where “German and English reserve the word 'free'
for things and services which cost nothing”. This is supposed to “bear witness to the unfreedom posited in the
exchange relationship itself”.
36 'Marginalia to Theory and Praxis', Critical Models p.263
37 By this I mean the way in which 'praxis' has, more often or not, been equated with the practices of
Leninist/Trotskyist vanguardist organisations. This issue has been commented on by various authors: David Held
describes Adorno, and Critical Theory in general, as having “an explicit hostility to Leninist forms of organization”,
where “Leninist vanguard organizations were looked upon critically because it was thought they reproduced a
chronic division of labour, bureaucracy and authoritarian leadership” (Introduction to Critical Theory, p.360). Espen
Hammer adds simply that Adorno “is profoundly unsympathetic towards the classical Marxist problem of
organization” (Adorno and the Political, p.33)
38 CM p.262
39 For Adorno, the forces of production have already developed to the point where “it would be possible to organize
the world in such a way that there would no longer be any want and hence deprivation and pressure”. He is
unequivocal: “this would be immediately possible now” (LND p.48)
40 CM p.276
41 CM p.276
42 CM p.262
43 But we can note the reverse of this equation – the way in which Adorno discusses the refraction of theory “through
the archbourgeois primacy of pure practical reason”, that is, reason “devoid of [an] object”. This emphasis on ends
above all else – the Kantian 'treat everyone as an ends and never merely as means' – can only mean that pure
practical reason can have no end(s). When all that one can see is the end, one cannot see anything else, and one ends
up seeing nothing. This can be formulated as the end becoming the means: it is left to praxis to reinstitute (the
primacy of) the object. Adorno writes: “The primacy of the object must be respected by praxis; this was first noted
by the idealist Hegel's critique of Kant's ethics of conscience”. And that “praxis rightly understood is what the object
wants: praxis follows the object's neediness” (CM p.265)
44 CM p.263
45 I notice that Adorno tends to use “thought” in the contexts of what I have called here the first-tier analysis, reserving
“theory” for the second-tier. This is interesting, not simply because it supports what I am saying: it allows one to
speculate on whether by “theory” Adorno can mean Marxist science, or something like it, rather than philosophy as
such. It could be a useful researching into the role negative dialectics would have, if any at all, if the much vaunted
unity of theory and practice was ever achieved.
46 Adorno draws the parallel between theory-practice and subject-object at the beginning of the essay, the very first
sentence being: “A simple consideration of history demonstrates just how much the question of theory and praxis
depends on the question of subject and object.” p.259. The idea that Adorno's essay on theory and praxis can be read
as a critique of Lukacs is advanced in Henry W. Pickford 'The Dialectic of Theory and Praxis: On Late Adorno',
Adorno: A Critical Reader
47 See the helpful table on the difference between identity thinking, non-identity (negative dialectics) and rational
identity, in David Held, p.215
48 Although as we have seen, Adorno remains a paradoxical position on Auschwitz. On the one hand, to speak about
Auschwitz is to give a voice to the unspeakable, yet to ignore it risks the possibility that it may happen again.
Giorgio Agamben sums up Adorno's position, with a spotlight on his thoughts on death, in Remnants of Auschwitz:
The Witness and the Archive, p.80-81
49 In his lecture on the concept of intellectual experience, Adorno touches on these issues. He lectures that “Thinking
that is rigorously disciplined from the outset is just as incapable of engaging in philosophy as undisciplined
thinking”. He adds that “We might also say that speculative ratio, the kind of ratio that goes beyond the conceptual
order of an already owned, positive given, necessarily possesses an irrational element in that it offends against the
secure knowledge it already has. There is no rationality without this intrinsic element of irrationality” LND p.78
50 Espen Hammer, 'Metaphysics', Key Concepts p.72
51 Drawing on Adorno's idea of mimesis, which he borrows from Walter Benjamin
52 'Refuge for the homeless', Minima Moralia, p.39
53 Fabian Freyenhagen, 'Moral Philosophy', p.101