Negative Dialectics, selections
Theodor Adorno
Negative Dialectics was published in 1966. Lectures that Adorno gave in the years leading up to its publication are now available in English, released as a number of separate volumes. While readers may find the volume entitled Lectures on Negative Dialectics to be of interest, the material that reappears in Negative Dialectics figures most centrally in three other volumes, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Problems of Moral Philosophy and, to a certain extent, History and Freedom.1 (There are additional volumes in the series, all of which are relevant to one degree or another.) Negative Dialectics is notoriously difficult to understand if one does not already know what Adorno means to say. The lectures, by contrast, contain repeated statements such as: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I fear that I confused you last time. Let me try to clarify what I said.” I cannot recommend the three that I’ve pointed to highly enough, as a place to begin a study of Adorno’s work.
The following snippets from Negative Dialectics offer just a hint of Adorno’s thinking about thought. The opening line of the Introduction—“Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed”—echoes Marcuse’s question, posed decades before in “Philosophy and Critical Theory,” regarding the role of reason in an irrational society: “What, however, if the development outlined by the theory does not occur?” Adorno replies that, at a minimum, “[t]he summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried.” But while Adorno too retains a role for reason, his assessment of what Marcuse in 1960 called “the power of negative thinking” is considerably more pained than is Marcuse’s.
Adorno is concerned that thought is inherently problematic. Not just in the sense described by Marcuse in “A Note on Dialectic” (viz., that given forms of thought are always already implicated in existing relations of power, such that in a context of reification one must literally, or at least almost literally, find a way to think outside the box), but more deeply still. Kant had argued that phenomenal objects are constituted as objects (i.e. as material entities that can be experienced) via what he, Kant, called the unity of apperception, an a priori synthesis carried out by the faculty of pure reason. On the one hand, Adorno is resistant to this account. For one thing, what Kant took to be the doings of a transcendental subject, Adorno assumes to be society itself (see “Subject and Object”). Beyond this, Adorno at least wants to say that objects have their own being, separate from the cognitive acts of subjects. On the other hand, Adorno is not prepared to simply reject the crux of Kant’s position. Every act of thought, he insists, imposes the structure of subjectivity upon the object-as-cognized, even if thought and the object of thought are not thereby brought into a relation of equivalence, or identity.
It follows for Adorno that critical thought amounts, above all, to appreciating, via thought, that thought necessarily does an injustice, if not a violence, to the objects of thought. “[W]e can think against our thought,” he writes, and if it were possible to define dialectics, this would be a definition worth suggesting. This said, negative dialectics as Adorno conceives of it is not simply an ex post facto fallibilism. Rather, it is the recognition of the fact (if it is one) that it is impossible to capture, in thought, the unmediated nature of an object of thought. For Adorno, this is because what the inescapable imposition of subjectivity upon objects of thought does to them is obscure their particularity. If the negative task of critical thought is to register, without falling into nihilism, that ultimately no thought can be true (in the sense of being adequate to its object), the positive epistemic task is to attempt to get beyond what Adorno takes to be the inherent universality of thought, so as to catch a glimpse of the particular.
Negative Dialectics, selections
Introduction
The possibility of philosophy
Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world miscarried. Philosophy offers no place from which theory as such might be concretely convicted of the anachronisms it is suspected of, now as before. Perhaps it was an inadequate interpretation which promised that it would be put into practice. Theory cannot prolong the moment its critique depended on. A practice indefinitely delayed is no longer the forum for appeals against self-satisfied speculation; it is mostly the pretext used by executive authorities to choke, as vain, whatever critical thoughts the practical change would require.
Having broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself. Once upon a time, compared with sense perception and every kind of external experience, it was felt to be the very opposite of naïveté; now it has objectively grown as naïve in its turn as the seedy scholars feasting on subjective speculation seemed to Goethe, one hundred and fifty years ago. The introverted thought architect dwells behind the moon that is taken over by extroverted technicians. The conceptual shells that were to house the whole, according to philosophical custom, have in view of the immense expansion of society and of the strides made by positive natural science come to seem like relics of a simple barter economy amidst the late stage of industrial capitalism. The discrepancy (since decayed into a commonplace) between power and any sort of spirit has grown so vast as to foil whatever attempts to understand the preponderance might be inspired by the spirit’s own concept. The will to this understanding bespeaks a power claim denied by that which is to be understood.
The most patent expression of philosophy’s historical fate is the way the special sciences compelled it to turn back into a special science. If Kant had, as he put it, “freed himself from the school concept of philosophy for its world concept,”1 it has now, perforce, regressed to its school concept. Whenever philosophers mistake that for the world concept, their pretensions grow ridiculous. Hegel, despite his doctrine of the absolute spirit in which he included philosophy, knew philosophy as a mere element of reality, an activity in the division of labor, and thus restricted it. This has since led to the narrowness of philosophy, to a disproportionateness to reality that became the more marked the more thoroughly philosophers forgot about the restriction—the more they disdained, as alien, any thought of their position in a whole which they monopolized as their object, instead of recognizing how much they depended on it all the way to the internal composition of their philosophy, to its immanent truth.
To be worth another thought, philosophy must rid itself of such naïveté. But its critical self-reflection must not halt before the highest peaks of its history. Its task would be to inquire whether and how there can still be a philosophy at all, now that Hegel’s has fallen, just as Kant inquired into the possibility of metaphysics after the critique of rationalism. If Hegel’s dialectics constituted the unsuccessful attempt to use philosophical concepts for coping with all that is heterogeneous to those concepts, the relationship to dialectics is due for an accounting insofar as his attempt failed.
Dialectics not a standpoint
No theory today escapes the marketplace. Each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions; all are put up for choice; all are swallowed. There are no blinders for thought to don against this, and the self-righteous conviction that my own theory is spared that fate will surely deteriorate into self-advertising. But neither need dialectics be muted by such rebuke, or by the concomitant charge of its superfluity, of being a method slapped on outwardly, at random. The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism was bound to transfigure it into: it is not of the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.
Yet the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify. Conceptual order is content to screen what thinking seeks to comprehend. The semblance and the truth of thought entwine. The semblance cannot be decreed away, as by avowal of a being-in-itself outside the totality of cogitative definitions. It is a thesis secretly implied by Kant—and mobilized against him by Hegel—that the transconceptual “in itself” is void, being wholly indefinite. Aware that the conceptual totality is mere appearance, I have no way but to break immanently, in its own measure, through the appearance of total identity. Since that totality is structured to accord with logic, however, whose core is the principle of the excluded middle, whatever will not fit this principle, whatever differs in quality, comes to be designated as a contradiction. Contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity; the dialectical primary of the principle of contradiction makes the thought of unity the measure of heterogeneity. As the heterogeneous collides with its limit it exceeds itself.
Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity. It does not begin by taking a standpoint. My thought is driven to it by its own inevitable insufficiency, by my guilt of what I am thinking. We are blaming the method for the fault of the matter when we object to dialectics on the ground (repeated from Hegel’s Aristotelian critics on2) that whatever happens to come into the dialectical mill will be reduced to the merely logical form of contradiction, and that (an argument still advanced by Croce3) the full diversity of the noncontradictory, of that which is simply differentiated, will be ignored. What we differentiate will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity: as long as its demand for totality will be its measure for whatever is not identical with it. This is what dialectics holds up to our consciousness as a contradiction. Because of the immanent nature of consciousness, contradictoriness itself has an inescapably and fatefully legal character. Identity and contradiction of thought are welded together. Total contradiction is nothing but the manifested untruth of total identification. Contradiction is nonidentity under the rule of a law that affects the nonidentical as well.
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Fragility of truth
The dismantling of systems, and of the system at large, is not an act of formal epistemology. What the system used to procure for the details can be sought in the details only, without advance assurance to the thought: whether it is there, or what it is. Not until then would the steadily misused word of “truth as concreteness” come into its own. It compels our thinking to abide with minutiae. We are not to philosophize about concrete things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of these things. But if we surrender to the specific object we are suspected of lacking an unequivocal position. What differs from the existent will strike the existent as witchcraft, while thought figures such as proximity, home, security hold the faulty world under their spell. Men are afraid that in losing this magic they would lose everything, because the only happiness they know, even in thought, is to be able to hold on to something—the perpetuation of unfreedom. They want a bit of ontology, at least, amidst their criticism of ontology—as if the smallest free insight did not express the goal better than a declaration of intention that is not followed up.
Philosophy serves to bear out an experience which Schoenberg noted in traditional musicology: one really learns from it only how a movement begins and ends, nothing about the movement itself and its course. Analogously, instead of reducing philosophy to categories, one would in a sense have to compose it first. Its course must be a ceaseless self-renewal, by its own strength as well as in friction with whatever standard it may have. The crux is what happens in it, not a thesis or a position—the texture, not the deductive or inductive course of one-track minds. Essentially, therefore, philosophy is not expoundable. If it were, it would be superfluous; the fact that most of it can be expounded speaks against it. But if a mode of conduct shields no primacy, harbors no certainty, and yet—because of its definite presentation, if on no other grounds—concedes so little to relativism, the twin of absolutism, that it approaches a doctrine, such a mode will give offense. It goes beyond, and to the point of breaking with, the dialectics of Hegel, who wanted his dialectics to be all things, including prima philosophia, and in fact made it that in his principle of identity, his absolute subject.
By dissociating thought from primacy and solidity, however, we do not absolutize it as in free suspense. The very dissociation fastens it to that which it is not. It removes the illusion of the autarky of thought. The falsehood of an unleashed rationality running away from itself, the recoil of enlightenment into mythology, is rationally definable. To think means to think something. By itself, the logically abstract form of “something,” something that is meant or judged, does not claim to posit a being; and yet, surviving in it—indelible for a thinking that would delete it—is that which is not identical with thinking, which is not thinking at all. The ratio becomes irrational where it forgets this, where it runs counter to the meaning of thought by hypostasizing its products, the abstractions. The commandment of its autarky condemns thinking to emptiness, and finally to stupidity and primitivity. The charge of bottomlessness should be lodged against the self-preserving mental principle as the sphere of absolute origins; but where ontology, Heidegger in the lead, hits upon bottomlessness—there is the place of truth.
Truth is suspended and frail, due to its temporal substance; Benjamin sharply criticized Gottfried Keller’s arch-bourgeois dictum that the truth can’t run away from us. Philosophy must do without the consolation that truth cannot be lost. A truth that cannot plunge into the abyss which the metaphysical fundamentalists prate about—it is not the abyss of agile sophistry, but that of madness—will at the bidding of its certainty principle turn analytical, a potential tautology. Only thoughts that go the limit are facing up to the omnipotent impotence of certain accord; only a cerebral acrobatics keeps relating to the matter, for which, according to the fable convenu, it has nothing but disdain for the sake of its self-satisfaction. No unreflected banality can remain true as an imprint of the wrong life.
Any attempt to bring thought—particularly for its utility’s sake—to a halt with the hackneyed description of it as smugly exaggerated and noncommittal is reactionary nowadays. The argument might be reduced to a vulgar form: “If you want me to, I’ll make innumerable analyses like that, rendering each one worthless.” Peter Altenberg gave the appropriate reply to a man who cast the same sort of aspersion on his abbreviated literary forms: “But I don’t want you to.” The open thought has no protection against the risk of decline into randomness; nothing assures it of a saturation with the matter that will suffice to surmount that risk. But the consistency of its performance, the density of its texture, helps the thought to hit the mark. There has been an about-face in the function of the concept of certainty in philosophy. What was once to surpass dogmas and the tutelage of self-certainty has become the social insurance of a cognition that is to be proof against any untoward happening. And indeed, to the unobjectionable nothing happens.
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Noncontradictoriness not to be hypostatized
Such reflections come to seem paradoxical. Subjectivity, thinking itself, is called explicable not by itself but by facts, especially by social facts; but the objectivity of cognition in turn is said not to exist without thinking, without subjectivity. Such paradoxicality springs from the Cartesian norm of explication: reasons for what follows—for what follows logically, at least—have to be found in what goes before. This norm is no longer compulsory. Measured by it, the dialectical state of facts would be the plain logical contradiction. But the state of facts is not explicable by a hierarchic schema of order summoned from outside. If it were, the attempt to explain would presuppose the explication that remains to be found; it would presuppose noncontradictoriness, the principle of subjective thinking, as inherent in the object which is to be thought.
In a sense, dialectical logic is more positivistic than the positivism that outlaws it. As thinking, dialectical logic respects that which is to be thought—the object—even where the object does not heed the rules of thinking. The analysis of the object is tangential to the rules of thinking. Thought need not be content with its own legality; without abandoning it, we can think against our thought, and if it were possible to define dialectics, this would be a definition worth suggesting. The thinker’s equipment need not remain ingrown in his thinking; it goes far enough to let him recognize the very totality of its logical claim as a delusion. The seemingly unbearable thesis that subjectivity presupposes facts while objectivity presupposes the subject—this thesis is unbearable only to one so deluded, to one who hypostatizes the relation of cause and effect, the subjective principle to which the experience of the object fails to bow.
Dialectics as a philosophical mode of proceeding is the attempt to untie the knot of paradoxicality by the oldest means of enlightenment: the ruse. Not by chance has the paradox been the decaying form of dialectics from Kierkegaard on. Dialectical reason follows the impulse to transcend the natural context and its delusion (a delusion continued in the subjective compulsion of the rules of logic) without forcing its own rule upon this context—in other words, without sacrifice and without vengeance. Dialectical reason’s own essence has come to be and will pass, like antagonistic society. Antagonism, of course, is no more limited to society than is suffering. No more than dialectics can be extended to nature, as a universal principle of explication, can two kinds of truth be erected side by side, a dialectical one within society and one indifferent to society. The division of social and extra-social Being, a division that takes its bearings from the arrangement of the sciences, deceives us about the fact that heteronomous history perpetuates the blind growth of nature.4
The only way out of the dialectical context of immanence is by that context itself. Dialectics is critical reflection upon that context. It reflects its own motion; if it did not, Kant’s legal claim against Hegel would never expire. Such dialectics is negative. Its idea names the difference from Hegel. In Hegel there was coincidence of identity and positivity; the inclusion of all nonidentical and objective things in a subjectivity expanded and exalted into an absolute spirit was to effect the reconcilement. On the other hand, the force of the entirety that works in every single definition is not simply its negation; that force itself is the negative, the untrue. The philosophy of the absolute and total subject is a particular one.* The inherent reversibility of the identity thesis counteracts the principles of its spirit. If entity can be totally derived from that spirit, the spirit is doomed to resemble the mere entity it means to contradict; otherwise, spirit and entity would not go together. It is precisely the insatiable identity principle that perpetuates antagonism by suppressing contradiction. What tolerates nothing that is not like itself thwarts the reconcilement for which it mistakes itself. The violence of equality-mongering reproduces the contradiction it eliminates.
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On the dialectics of identity
As the thinker immerses himself in what faces him to begin with, in the concept, and as he perceives its immanently antinomical character, he clings to the idea of something beyond contradiction. The antithesis of thought to whatever is heterogeneous to thought is reproduced in thought itself, as its immanent contradiction. Reciprocal criticism of the universal and of the particular; identifying acts of judgment whether the concept does justice to what it covers, and whether the particular fulfills its concept—these constitute the medium of thinking about the nonidentity of particular and concept.
And not of thinking only. If mankind is to get rid of the coercion to which the form of identification really subjects it, it must attain identity with its concept at the same time. In this, all relevant categories play a part. The barter principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the principle of identification. Barter is the social model of the principle, and without the principle there would be no barter; it is through barter that non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical. The spread of the principle imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total. But if we denied the principle abstractly—if we proclaimed, to the greater glory of the irreducibly qualitative, that parity should no longer be the ideal rule—we would be creating excuses for recidivism into ancient injustice. From olden times, the main characteristic of the exchange of equivalents has been that unequal things would be exchanged in its name, that the surplus value of labor would be appropriated. If comparability as a category of measure were simply annulled, the rationality which is inherent in the barter principle—as ideology, of course, but also as a promise—would give way to direct appropriation, to force, and nowadays to the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques.
When we criticize the barter principle as the identifying principle of thought, we want to realize the ideal of free and just barter. To date, this ideal is only a pretext. Its realization alone would transcend barter. Once critical theory has shown it up for what it is—an exchange of things that are equal and yet unequal—our critique of the inequality within equality aims at equality too, for all our skepticism of the rancor involved in the bourgeois egalitarian ideal that tolerates no qualitative difference. If no man had part of his labor withheld from him any more, rational identity would be a fact, and society would have transcended the identifying mode of thinking. This comes close enough to Hegel. The dividing line from him is scarcely drawn by individual distinctions. It is drawn by our intent: whether in our consciousness, theoretically and in the resulting practice, we maintain that identity is the ultimate, that it is absolute, that we want to reinforce it—or whether we feel that identity is the universal coercive mechanism which we, too, finally need to free ourselves from universal coercion, just as freedom can come to be real only through coercive civilization, not by way of any “Back to nature.”
Totality is to be opposed by convicting it of nonidentity with itself—of the nonidentity it denies, according to its own concept. Negative dialectics is thus tied to the supreme categories of identitarian philosophy as its point of departure. Thus, too, it remains false according to identitarian logic: it remains the thing against which it is conceived. It must correct itself in its critical course—a course affecting concepts which in negative dialectics are formally treated as if they came “first” for it, too. It is one thing for our thought to close itself under compulsion of the form which nothing can escape from, to comply in principle, so as immanently to deny the conclusive structure claimed by traditional philosophy; and it is quite another thing for thought to urge that conclusive form on its own, with the intent of making itself “the first.”
In idealism, the highly formal identity principle had, due to its formalization, an affirmative substance. This is innocently brought to light by terminology, when simple predicative sentences are called “affirmative.” The copula says: It is so, not otherwise. The act of synthesis, for which the copula stands, indicates that it shall not be otherwise—else the act would not be performed. The will to identity works in each synthesis. As an a priori task of thought, a task immanent in thought, identity seems positive and desirable: the substrate of the synthesis is thus held to be reconciled with the I, and therefore to be good. Which promptly permits the moral desideratum that the subject, understanding how much the cause is its own, should bow to what is heterogeneous to it.
Identity is the primal form of ideology. We relish it as adequacy to the thing it suppresses; adequacy has always been subjection to dominant purposes and, in that sense, its own contradiction. After the unspeakable effort it must have cost our species to produce the primacy of identity even against itself, man rejoices and basks in his conquest by turning it into the definition of the conquered thing: what has happened to it must be presented, by the thing, as its “in-itself.” Ideology’s power of resistance to enlightenment is owed to its complicity with identifying thought, or indeed with thought at large. The ideological side of thinking shows in its permanent failure to make good on the claim that the non-I is finally the I: the more the I thinks, the more perfectly will it find itself debased into an object. Identity becomes the authority for a doctrine of adjustment, in which the object—which the subject is supposed to go by—repays the subject for what the subject has done to it.
The subject is to see reason against its reason. The critique of ideology is thus not something peripheral and intra-scientific, not something limited to the objective mind and to the products of the subjective mind. Philosophically, it is central: it is a critique of the constitutive consciousness itself.
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Starting out from the concept
Because entity is not immediate, because it is only through the concept, we should begin with the concept, not with the mere datum. The concept’s own concept has become a problem. No less than its irrationalist counterpart, intuition, that concept as such has archaic features which cut across the rational ones—relics of static thinking and of a static cognitive ideal amidst a consciousness that has become dynamic. The concept’s immanent claim is its order-creating invariance as against the change in what it covers. The form of the concept—“false” in this respect also—would deny that change. Dialectics is a protest lodged by our thinking against the archaicisms of its conceptuality. The concept in itself, previous to any content, hypostatizes its own form against the content. With that, however, it is already hypostatizing the identity principle: that what our thinking practice merely postulates is a fact in itself, solid and enduring. Identifying thought objectifies by the logical identity of the concept.
On its subjective side, dialectics amounts to thinking so that the thought form will no longer turn its objects into immutable ones, into objects that remain the same. Experience shows that they do not remain the same. The unstable character of traditional philosophy’s solid identity can be learned from its guarantor, the individual human consciousness. To Kant, this is the generally predesigned unit underlying every identity. In fact, if an older person looking back has started early on a more or less conscious existence, he will distinctly remember his own distant past. It creates a unity, no matter how unreal the elusive picture of his childhood may seem. Yet the “I” which he remembers in this unreality, the I which he was at one time and potentially becomes again—this I turns simultaneously into another, into a stranger to be detachedly observed. Such ambivalence of identity and nonidentity extends even to logical problems of identity. For those, technical terminology stands ready with the customary formula of “identity in nonidentity”—a formula with which we would first have to contrast the nonidentity in identity. But such a purely formal reversal would leave room for the subreption that dialectics is prima philosophia after all, as “prima dialectica.”* The test of the turn to nonidentity is its performance; if it remained declarative, it would be revoking itself.
In the traditional philosophies, even in the “constructive” ones of Schelling’s slogan, the construction was in truth an imitation, a refusal to tolerate anything not pre-digested by the philosophies. By interpreting even heterogeneity as their own self and finally as the spirit, they already reconverted it into sameness, into the identity in which they would repeat themselves as in a vast analytical judgment, leaving no room for the qualitatively new. They got into a rut, into the habit of thinking that without such a structure of identity there could be no philosophy, that it would crumble into purely juxtaposed statements. The mere attempt to turn philosophical thought towards the nonidentical, away from identity, was called absurd. By such attempts the nonidentical was said to be a prior reduced to its concept, and thus identified.
Plausible considerations of this kind are too radical and, like most radical questions, are therefore not radical enough. Lashed by some of the driving ethos of labor, the form of tireless recourse takes us farther and farther from what we should see through, until in the end we leave it alone. The category of the root, the origin, is a category of dominion. It confirms that a man ranks first because he was there first; it confirms the autochthon against the newcomer, the settler against the migrant. The origin—seductive because it will not be appeased by the derivative, by ideology—is itself an ideological principle.
Karl Kraus’s line “The origin is the goal” sounds conservative, but it also expresses something that was scarcely meant when the line was uttered: namely, that the concept “origin” ought to be stripped of its static mischief. Understood this way, the line does not mean that the goal had better make its way back to the origin, to the phantasm of “good” nature; it means that nothing is original except the goal, that it is only from the goal that the origin will constitute itself. There is no origin save in ephemeral life.
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Constellation
The unifying moment survives without a negation of negation, but also without delivering itself to abstraction as a supreme principle. It survives because there is no step-by-step progression from the concepts to a more general cover concept. Instead, the concepts enter into a constellation. The constellation illuminates the specific side of the object, the side which to a classifying procedure is either a matter of indifference or a burden.
The model for this is the conduct of language. Language offers no mere system of signs for cognitive functions. Where it appears essentially as a language, where it becomes a form of representation, it will not define its concepts. It lends objectivity to them by the relation into which it puts the concepts, centered about a thing. Language thus serves the intention of the concept to express completely what it means. By themselves, constellations represent from without what the concept has cut away within: the “more” which the concept is equally desirous and incapable of being. By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts potentially determine the object’s interior. They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised from thinking.
The Hegelian usage of the term “concrete”—according to which the thing itself is its context, not its pure selfhood—takes note of this; and yet, for all the criticism of discursive logic, that logic is not ignored. But Hegelian dialectics was a dialectics without language, while the most literal sense of the word “dialectics” postulates language; to this extent, Hegel remained an adept of current science. He did not need language in an emphatic sense, since everything, even the speechless and opaque, was to him to be spirit, and the spirit would be the context. That supposition is past salvaging. Instead, what is indissoluble in any previous thought context transcends its seclusion in its own, as nonidentical. It communicates with that from which it was separated by the concept. It is opaque only for identity’s claim to be total; it resists the pressure of that claim. But as such it seeks to be audible. Whatever part of nonidentity defines definition in its concept goes beyond its individual existence; it is only in polarity with the concept, in staring at the concept, that it will contract into that existence. The inside of nonidentity is its relation to that which it is not, and which its managed, frozen self-identity withholds from it. It only comes to in relinquishing itself, not in hardening—this we can still learn from Hegel, without conceding anything to the repressive moments of his relinquishment doctrine.
The object opens itself to a monadological insistence, to a sense of the constellation in which it stands; the possibility of internal immersion requires that externality. But such an immanent generality of something individual is objective as sedimented history. This history is in the individual thing and outside it; it is something encompassing in which the individual has its place. Becoming aware of the constellation in which a thing stands is tantamount to deciphering the constellation which, having come to be, it bears within it. The chorismos of without and within is historically qualified in turn. The history locked in the object can only be delivered by a knowledge mindful of the historic positional value of the object in its relation to other objects—by the actualization and concentration of something which is already known and is transformed by that knowledge. Cognition of the object in its constellation is cognition of the process stored in the object. As a constellation, theoretical thought circles the concept it would like to unseal, hoping that it may fly open like the lock of a well-guarded safe-deposit box: in response, not to a single key or a single number, but to a combination of numbers.
1 Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/66, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008); Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Schroder, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); (Theodor W. Adorno, History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-65, ed. Thomas Schroder, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006).
1 Cf. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd edn, Works III (Drittes Hauptstück der Transzendentalen Methodenlehre)—Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan Co., New York 1929.
2 Cf. F. A.Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, Vol. I, Leipzig 1870, pp. 43ff., 167ff.
3 Cf. Benedetto Croce, Lebendiges und Totes in Hegels Philosophie, trans. K. Büchler, Heidelberg 1909, pp. 66ff., 68ff., 72ff., 82ff.
4 2. Cf. Weltgeist und Naturgeschichte, passim.
* In the history of modern philosophy, the word “identity” has had several meanings. It designated the unity of personal consciousness: that an “I” remains the same in all its experiences. This meant the Kantian “I think, which should be able to go with all my conceptions.” Then, again, identity was what is legally the same in all rational beings—thought as logical universality—and besides, it was the equality with itself of every object of thought, the simple A = A. Finally, epistemologically, it meant that subject and object coincide, whatever their media.
Not even Kant keeps the first two layers of meaning strictly apart, and this is not due to a careless use of language. It is due to the fact that, in idealism, identity designates the point of indifference of the psychological and logical moments. Logical universality, as the universality of thought, is tied to individual identity, without which it would not come into being—for nothing past would be maintained in something present, and thus nothing would be maintained as the same at all. The recourse to this in turn presupposes logical universality; it is a recourse of thinking. The Kantian “I think,” the moment of individual unity, always requires the supra-individual generality as well. The individual I is one I solely by virtue of the generality of the principle of numerical unity; the unity of consciousness itself is a form of reflection of the logical identity.
That an individual consciousness is one applies only on the logical premise of the excluded middle: that it shall not be able to be something else. In that sense its singularity, to be possible at all, must be supra-individual. Neither of the two moments has priority over the other. If there were no identical consciousness, no identity of particularization, there would be no universal—no more than there would be one the other way round. This is what lends epistemological legitimacy to the dialectical conception of particularity and universality.
* “If it does no more than re-process the yield of the several sciences and think it through to a whole, dialectics is a higher empiricism and really no more than the kind of reflection that would use experience to construe an overall harmony. But dialectics, then, must not break with the genetical view; it must not boast of immanent progress—which, after all, excludes the accidental acquisition of observation and discovery. Dialectics, then, works only in the same fashion and by the same means as other sciences and differs only in the goal of uniting the parts in the idea of the whole. We thus face another thought-provoking dilemma. Either the dialectical development is independent and solely self-determined; if so, it must indeed know everything by itself. Or it presupposes the finite sciences and empirical knowledge—but then its immanent progress and continuous context is interrupted by that which has been received from outside, and besides, it is acting uncritically toward experience. Dialectics may choose. We see no third possibility.” (F. A. Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. I, Leipzig, 1870, p. 91f.)