CHAPTER EIGHT

Negative Dialectics, selections
Theodor Adorno

As noted in the Negative Dialectics blurb above, the analysis that Adorno offers in maximally condensed form in Negative Dialectics is presented carefully and plainly in Lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Problems of Moral Philosophy and History and Freedom. The following excerpts are included as key passages of a classic text, but I recommend reading them in light of the lectures.

Much of what I would say by way of summary here I’ve said in relation to “Subject and Object.” In his Preface to Negative Dialectics, Adorno writes: “To use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity—this is what the author felt to be his task ever since he came to trust his own mental impulses.” Kant, Adorno thinks, has mistaken society itself (one marked by the systematic alienation of human intentionality, so it’s understandable) for a Transcendental Subject, and has ascribed to this reified entity object-constituting powers. While it is true that subjects create artifacts out of raw materials, it is not true that objects as such owe their being to the synthetic a priori faculties of subjects. To imagine otherwise is to succumb to delusion, says Adorno; at best, the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity is indicative of a dim awareness that society could be organized differently than it is, i.e. that real relations of production could be consciously and collective controlled.

As a matter of ontology, then, Adorno is a materialist. The interesting question is exactly what kind of materialist, and whether or not his position adds up, in the end. This much is clear: Adorno reads Kant, whom he prefers to Hegel as an interlocutor in this regard, as pointing, explicitly or implicitly, to existence of genuine materiality. That which gives empirical content to concepts, as Kant puts it, is not itself consciousness. Nor is it any kind of abstract phenomenon. It is object, not subject. Adorno agrees with Kant about this. And he goes further. Unlike Kant, Adorno at least claims to believe that material objects exist, qua material objects, all by themselves. But what Adorno seems to be unwilling to say explicitly is that objects have their own identity, their own form, to put it in Aristotelian terms. It’s possible that his reluctance is borne of an implicit assumption that properties must be universals, and that the very ascription of a universal already implies the act of a subject. Perhaps it would be different if properties were conceived as particulars. In the language of contemporary metaphysics, it might that Adorno would be prepared to say, as Jonathan Lowe does, that material objects are characterized by (though not materially constituted by) tropes. But perhaps not. As an abstraction, “This redness” is no less a construction of thought than is “Redness,” after all, despite being a particular rather than a universal.

Adorno also reads Kant as sharing with Hume the view that causation is not a function of anything internal to objects. In the section “Kant’s Concept of Causality,” Adorno writes: “The only feature of Kant’s rescue operation that lifts it above Hume’s denial is that what Hume swept away is to Kant innate in reason … Causality is to arise, not in the objects and their relationship, but solely in inescapable subjective thought.” Adorno recognizes that although Kant has restored necessitation, “[t]he simplest meaning of the phrase that ‘something is the cause of something else’ is ignored.” And again, “A causality rigorously insulated against the interior of objects is no more than its own shell.” It is worth noting that Adorno connects Kant’s “rescue” of necessity via the rule that every cause must have an effect to Kant’s accompanying analysis of freedom, which Adorno believes to be problematic. (This connection is spelled out carefully in the lectures, especially in History and Freedom and Problems of Moral Philosophy.) A substance-based account of causation, he observes (to use the contemporary analytic parlance) would allow for a different conceptualization of freedom.

Negative Dialectics, selections

The Indissoluble “Something”

There is no Being without entities. “Something”—as a cogitatively indispensable substrate of any concept, including the concept of Being—is the utmost abstraction of the subject-matter that is not identical with thinking, an abstraction not to be abolished by any further thought process. Without “something” there is no thinkable formal logic, and there is no way to cleanse this logic of its metalogical rudiment.* The supposition of an absolute form, of “something at large” that might enable our thinking to shake off that subject-matter, is illusionary. Constitutive for the form of “subject-matter at large” is the substantive experience of subject-matter. Correlatively, at the subjective counter-pole, the pure concept, the function of thinking, is not to be radically segregated from the entity “I.” Idealism’s πρωτον ψενδοζ ever since Fichte was that the movement of abstraction allows us to get rid of that from which we abstract. It is eliminated from our thought, banished from the realm where the thought is at home, but not annihilated in itself; the faith in it is magical.

Without specific thoughts, thinking would contravene its very concept, and these thoughts instantly point to entities—entities which absolute thinking in turn has yet to posit. This simple νοτερον προϖτερον would remain an offense to the logic of noncontradictoriness; dialectics alone can grasp it in the self-critique of the concept. This critique is objectively caused by epistemology, by the substance of what we discuss in the critique of reason, and it therefore survives the downfall of idealism, which culminated in it. The thought leads to the moment of idealism that runs counter to idealism; it cannot be evaporated once again, into the thought. The Kantian conception still allowed dichotomies such as the ones of form and substance, of subject and object, without being put off by the fact that the antithetical pairs transmit each other; the dialectical nature of that conception, the contradiction implied in its own meaning, went unnoticed. It took Heidegger’s teacher Husserl so to sharpen the idea of apriority that—contrary to both his and Heidegger’s intention—the dialects of the ειδη could be derived from their own claim.²

Once dialectics has become inescapable, however, it cannot stick to its principle like ontology and transcendental philosophy. It cannot be maintained as a structure that will stay basic no matter how it is modified. In criticizing ontology we do not aim at another ontology, not even at one of being nonontological. If that were our purpose we would be merely positing another downright “first”—not absolute identity, this time, not the concept, not Being, but nonidentity, facticity, entity. We would be hypostatizing the concept of nonconceptuality and thus acting counter to its meaning. A basic philosophy, πρωτη φιλοσοφια, necessarily carries with it the primacy of the concept; whatever withholds itself from the concept is departing from the form of allegedly basic philosophizing. The thoughts of transcendental apperception or of Being could satisfy philosophers as long as they found those concepts identical with their own thoughts. Once we dismiss such identity in principle, the peace of the concept as an Ultimate will be engulfed in the fall of the identity. Since the basic character of every general concept dissolves in the face of distinct entity, a total philosophy is no longer to be hoped for.

Compulsory substantiveness

In the Critique of Pure Reason, sensation, as “something,” occupies the place of the inextinguishably ontical. But sensation holds no higher cognitive rank than any other real entity. Its “my”—accidental to transcendental analysis and tied to ontical conditions—is mistaken for a legal title by experience, which is nearest to itself and the captive of its own reflective hierarchy. It is as if that which some individual human consciousness takes for the ultimate were an Ultimate in itself, as if every other human consciousness, individual and confined to itself, were not entitled to claim the same privilege for its own sensations. But if sensation were strictly required before the form, the transcendental subject, could function—in other words, before it could pass valid judgments—that subject would be quasi-ontologically tied, not only to pure apperception, but to matter, the counter-pole of apperception. This would have to undermine the entire doctrine of subjective constitution, to which matter, according to Kant, cannot be traced back.

With that, however, the idea of something immutable, something identical with itself, would collapse as well. This idea derives from the rule of the concept, from the concept’s tendency to be constant as opposed to its contents, to “matter,” and from its resulting blindness to matter. Sensations—the Kantian matter, without which forms would not even be imaginable, so that the forms also qualify the possibility of cognition—sensations have the character of transiency. Nonconceptuality, inalienable from the concept, disavows the concept’s being-in-itself. It changes the concept. The concept of nonconceptuality cannot stay with itself, with epistemology; epistemology obliges philosophy to be substantive. Whenever philosophy was capable of substantiveness it has managed to deal with historic entities as its objects, long before Schelling and Hegel. Plato already did it, much against his will: it was he who gave to entity, to that which is, the name of “that which is not,” and yet he wrote a doctrine of the state in which the eternal ideas are akin to such empirical definitions as the barter of equivalents and the division of labor.

In today’s academic usage we have become inured to the difference between a regular, ordinary philosophy—said to have to do with the most sublime concepts, even though their conceptuality may be denied—and a merely genetical, extra-philosophical reference to society, the notorious prototypes of which are found in the sociology of knowledge and in the critique of ideology. The distinction is as invalid as the need for regular philosophy is suspect. A philosophy that fears too late for its purity is not only turning away from all that used to be its substance. Rather, what the philosophical analysis encounters immanently, in the interior of supposedly pure concepts and of their truth content, is that ontical element at which the purity claimants shudder, the element which, trembling with hauteur, they cede to the special sciences. The smallest ontical residue in the concepts that are vainly agitated by the regular philosophy compels that philosophy to include existing things in its own reflection, instead of making do with their mere concepts and feeling sheltered there from what the concept means. The contents of philosophical thinking are neither remnants after deducting space and time nor general findings about spatial-temporal matters. Philosophical thinking crystallizes in the particular, in that which is defined in space and time. The concept of entity pure and simple is the mere shadow of the false concept of Being.

“Peephole metaphysics”

Wherever a doctrine of some absolute “first” is taught there will be talk of something inferior to it, of something absolutely heterogeneous to it, as its logical correlate. Prima philosophia and dualism go together. To escape from this, fundamental ontology must try to avoid defining what comes first to it. What was first to Kant, the synthetic unity of apperception, suffered the same fate. To Kant, every definition of the object is an investment of subjectivity in unqualitative diversity—regardless of the fact that the defining acts, which he takes for spontaneous achievements of transcendental logic, will adjust to a moment which they themselves are not; regardless of the fact that we can synthesize only what will allow and require a synthesis on its own. The active definition is not something purely subjective; hence the triumph of the sovereign subject which dictates its laws to nature is a hollow triumph. But as in truth subject and object do not solidly confront each other as in the Kantian diagram—as they reciprocally permeate each other, rather—Kant’s degrading of the thing to a chaotic abstraction also affects the force that is to give it form.

The spell cast by the subject becomes equally a spell cast over the subject. Both spells are driven by the Hegelian fury of disappearance. The subject is spent and impoverished in its categorial performance; to be able to define and articulate what it confronts, so as to turn it into a Kantian object, the subject must dilute itself to the point of mere universality, for the sake of the objective validity of those definitions. It must cut loose from itself as much as from the cognitive object, so that this object will be reduced to its concept, according to plan. The objectifying subject contracts into a point of abstract reason, and finally into logical noncontradictoriness, which in turn means nothing except to a definite object. The absolute First remains necessarily as undefined as that which confronts it; no inquiry into something concrete and precedent will reveal the unity of abstract antithesis. Instead, the rigidly dichotomical structure disintegrates by virtue of either pole’s definition as a moment of its own opposite. To philosophical thought, dualism is given and as inescapable as the continued course of thinking makes it false. Transmission—“mediation”—is simply the most general and inadequate way to express this.

Yet if we cancel the subject’s claim to be first—the claim which surreptitiously keeps inspiring ontology—that which the schema of traditional philosophy calls secondary is no longer secondary either. It is no longer subordinate in a twofold sense. Its disparagement was the obverse of the trivium that all entity is colored by the observer, by his group or species. In fact, cognition of the moment of subjective mediation in the objective realm implies a critique of the notion that through that realm we get a glimpse of the pure “in-itself,” a forgotten notion lurking behind that trivium. Except among heretics, all Western metaphysics has been peephole metaphysics. The subject—a mere limited moment—was locked up in its own self by that metaphysics, imprisoned for all eternity to punish it for its deification. As through the crenels of a parapet, the subject gazes upon a black sky in which the star of the idea, or of Being, is said to rise. And yet it is the very wall around the subject that casts its shadow on whatever the subject conjures: the shadow of reification, which a subjective philosophy will then helplessly fight again. Whatever experience the word “Being” may carry can only be expressed in configurations of entities, not by allergies to entity; otherwise the philosophical substance becomes the poor result of a process of subtraction, not unlike the one-time Cartesian certainty of the subject, the thinking substance.

There is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within. This is where the truth and the untruth of Kantian philosophy divide. It is true in destroying the illusion of an immediate knowledge of the Absolute; it is untrue in describing this Absolute by a model that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, even if that consciousness were the intellectus archetypus. To demonstrate this untruth is the truth of post-Kantian idealism; yet this in turn is untrue in its equation of subjectively mediated truth with the subject-in-itself—as if the pure concept of the subject were the same as Being.

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Reversal of the subjective reduction

The prevailing trend in epistemological reflection was to reduce objectivity more and more to the subject. This very tendency needs to be reversed. The means employed by philosophical tradition to distinguish the concept of subjectivity from entity are copied from entity. That philosophy, suffering of deficient self-reflection to this day, forgot the mediation in the mediating subject is no more indicative of meritorious sublimity than any forgetting. As though to punish it, the subject will be overcome by what it has forgotten. It no sooner turns into an object of epistemological reflection than it will share that objective character whose absence is so often cited as elevating it above the factual realm.

The subject’s essentiality is an existence raised to the second potency and, as Hegel did not fail to state, presupposes the first potency: factuality. Factuality is a condition of the possibility—even though negated—of essentiality. The immediacy of primary reactions was broken, first, in the formation of the I; and broken with these reactions was the spontaneity which the pure I, according to transcendental custom, is to contract into. The centristic identity of the I is acquired at the expense of what idealism will then attribute to it. The constitutive subject of philosophy is more of a thing than the specific psychological content which it excreted, as naturalistic and reified. The more autocratically the I rises above entity, the greater its imperceptible objectification and ironic retraction of its constitutive role. Not only the pure I is ontically transmitted by the empirical I, the unmistakably pellucid model of the first version of the deduction of purely rational concepts; the transcendental principle itself, the supposed “first” of philosophy as against entity, is so transmitted.

Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first to point out that hidden in this principle, in the general and necessary activity of the mind, lies work of an inalienably social nature. The aporetical concept of the transcendental subject—a nonentity which is nonetheless to act, a universal which is nonetheless to have particular experiences—would be a soap bubble, never obtainable from the autarkic immanent context of consciousness, which is necessarily individual. Compared with consciousness, however, the concept represents not only something more abstract; by virtue of its coining power it also represents something more real. Beyond the magic circle of identitarian philosophy, the transcendental subject can be deciphered as a society unaware of itself. Such unawareness is deducible. Ever since mental and physical labor were separated in the sign of the dominant mind, the sign of justified privilege, the separated mind has been obliged, with the exaggeration due to a bad conscience, to vindicate the very claim to dominate which it derives from the thesis that it is primary and original—and to make every effort to forget the source of its claim, lest the claim lapse.

Deep down, the mind feels that its stable dominance is no mental rule at all, that its ultima ratio lies in the physical force at its disposal. On pain of perdition, however, it must not put its secret into words. Abstraction—without which the subject would not be the constituens at large at all, not even according to such extreme idealists as Fichte—reflects the separation from physical labor, perceptible by confrontation with that labor. When Marx, in his critique of the Gotha Platform, told the Lassalleans that in contrast to the customary litany of popular socialists labor was not the sole source of social wealth,³ he was philosophically—at a time when the official philosophical thematics lay already behind him—saying no less than that labor could not be hypostatized in any form, neither in the form of diligent hands nor in that of mental production. Such hypostasis merely extends the illusion of the predominance of the productive principle. It comes to be true only in relation to that nonidentical moment which Marx in his disdain for epistemology called first by the crude, too narrow name of “nature,” later on by that of “natural material” and by other less incriminated terms.⁴

The essence of the transcendental subject ever since the Critique of Pure Reason has been functionality, the pure activity that occurs in the achievements of individual subjects and surpasses them at the same time. It is a projection of freely suspended labor on the pure subject as its origin. In further restricting the subject’s functionality by calling it empty and void without a fitting material, Kant undauntedly noted that social labor is a labor on something; his more consistent idealistic successors did not hesitate to eliminate this. Yet the generality of the transcendental subject is that of the functional context of society, of a whole that coalesces from individual spontaneities and qualities, delimits them in turn by the leveling barter principle, and virtually deletes them as helplessly dependent on the whole. The universal domination of mankind by the exchange value—a domination which a priori keeps the subjects from being subjects and degrades subjectivity itself to a mere object—makes an untruth of the general principle that claims to establish the subject’s predominance. The surplus of the transcendental subject is the deficit of the utterly reduced empirical subject.

Interpreting the transcendental

As the extreme borderline case of ideology, the transcendental subject comes close to truth. The transcendental generality is no mere narcissist self-exaltation of the I, not the hubris of an autonomy of the I. Its reality lies in the domination that prevails and perpetuates itself by means of the principle of equivalence. The process of abstraction—which philosophy transfigures, and which it ascribes to the knowing subject alone—is taking place in the factual barter society.

The definition of the transcendental as that which is necessary, a definition added to functionality and generality, expresses the principle of the self-preservation of the species. It provides a legal basis for abstraction, which we cannot do without, for abstraction is the medium of self-preserving reason. It would not take much artifice to parody Heidegger by interpreting the general philosophical idea of necessity as the need to reverse want, to remedy the lack of foodstuffs by organized labor. Thereby, of course, Heidegger’s language mythology itself would be unhinged—that apotheosis of the objective spirit in which reflection on the material process jutting into the spirit is banned from the outset, as inferior.

The unity of consciousness is that of the individual human consciousness. Even as a principle it visibly bears its traces, and thus the traces of entity. For transcendental philosophy, the ubiquity of individual self-consciousness will indeed turn it into a universal that may no longer boast of the advantages of concrete self-certainty; but insofar as the unity of consciousness is modeled after objectivity—that is to say, in so far as it is measured by the possibility of constituting objects—it is the conceptual reflex of the total, seamless juncture of the productive acts in society which the objectivity of goods, their “object character,” requires if it is to come about at all.

Moreover, the solid, lasting, impenetrable side of the I mimics the outside world’s impenetrability for conscious experience, as perceived by a primitive consciousness. The subject’s real impotence has its echo in its mental omnipotence. The ego principle imitates its negation. It is not true that the object is a subject, as idealism has been drilling into us for thousands of years, but it is true that the subject is an object. The primacy of subjectivity is a spiritualized continuation of Darwin’s struggle for existence. The suppression of nature for human ends is a mere natural relationship, which is why the supremacy of nature-controlling reason and its principle is a delusion. When the subject proclaims itself a Baconian master of all things, and finally their idealistic creator, it takes an epistemological and metaphysical part in this delusion. The practice of its rule makes it a part of what it thinks it is ruling; it succumbs like the Hegelian master. It reveals the extent to which in consuming the object it is beholden to the object. What it does is the spell of that which the subject believes under its own spell. The subject’s desperate self-exaltation is its reaction to the experience of its impotence, which prevents self-reflection. Absolute consciousness is unconscious.

In Kantian ethics this is grandiosely attested by an unconcealed contradiction: as an entity, the very subject Kant calls free and exalted is part of that natural context above which freedom would lift it. Plato’s doctrine of ideas, a great stride toward demythologization, reiterates the myth: under the name of essences it perpetuates the conditions of dominance which man took over from nature and is now practicing. If the control of nature was a condition of demythologization and a step in it, this dominance would have to spread to that other kind, lest it fall prey to the myth after all. But philosophy’s stress on the constitutive power of the subjective moment always blocks the road to truth as well. This is how animal species like the dinosaur Triceratops or the rhinoceros drag their protective armor with them, an ingrown prison which they seem—anthropomorphically, at least—to be trying vainly to shed. The imprisonment in their survival mechanism may explain the special ferocity of rhinoceroses as well as the unacknowledged and therefore more dreadful ferocity of homo sapiens. The subjective moment is framed, as it were, in the objective one. As a limitation imposed on the subject, it is objective itself.

“Transcendental delusion”

All this, according to traditional norms of philosophy, whether idealistic or ontological, has a touch of νστερον προτερον attached to it. One may say in a voice resonant with stringency that what we do in such reflections, without owning up to it, is to presuppose as transmitting what we would deduce as transmitted: the subject and its thought. Just by being definitions, one may say, all our definitions are already definitions of thought. But it is not the purpose of critical thought to place the object on the orphaned royal throne once occupied by the subject. On that throne the object would be nothing but an idol. The purpose of critical thought is to abolish the hierarchy.

The delusion that the transcendental subject is the Archimedean fixed point from which the world can be lifted out of its hinges—this delusion, purely in itself, is indeed hard to overcome altogether by subjective analysis. For contained in this delusion, and not to be extracted from the forms of cogitative mediation, is the truth that society comes before the individual consciousness and before all its experience. The insight into the fact that thinking is mediated by objectivity does not negate thinking, nor does it negate the objective laws that make it thinking. The further fact that there is no way to get out of thinking points to the support found in nonidentity—to the very support which thought, by its own forms, seeks and expresses as much as it denies it. Still transparent, however, is the reason for the delusion that is transcendental far beyond Kant: why our thinking in the intentio obliqua will inescapably keep coming back to its own primacy, to the hypostasis of the subject. For while in the history of nominalism ever since Aristotle’s critique of Plato the subject has been rebuked for its mistake of reifying abstraction, abstraction itself is the principle whereby the subject comes to be a subject at all. Abstraction is the subject’s essence. This is why going back to what it is not must impress the subject as external and violent.

To the subject, what convicts it of its own arbitrariness—and convicts its prius of aposteriority—will always sound like a transcendent dogma. When idealism is criticized strictly from within, it has the handy defense of thus being sanctioned by the critic—of virtually having the criticism within itself, by the critic’s use of its own premises, and accordingly being superior to the criticism. Objections from without, on the other hand, will be dismissed by idealism as pre-dialectical, belonging to the philosophy of reflection. But there is no need for analysis to abdicate in view of this alternative. Immanence is the totality of those identitarian positions whose principle falls before immanent critique. As Marx put it, idealism can be made to “dance to its own tune.” The nonidentity which determines it from within, after the criterion of identity, is at the same time the opposite of its principle, that which it vainly claims to be controlling. No immanent critique can serve its purpose wholly without outside knowledge, of course—without a moment of immediacy, if you will, a bonus from the subjective thought that looks beyond the dialectical structure. That moment is the moment of spontaneity, and idealists should be the last to ostracize it, because without it there would be no idealism. Spontaneity breaks through an idealism whose inmost core was christened “spontaneity.”

The subject as ideology lies under a spell from which nothing but the name of subjectivity will free it, just as only the herb named “Sneezejoy” will free the enchanted “Dwarf Nose” in Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tale. This herb was kept a secret from the dwarf, and as a result he never learned to prepare “pâté Suzeraine,” the dish that bears the name of sovereignty in decline. No amount of introspection would let him discover the rules governing his deformity and his labor; he needs an outside impulse, the wisdom of “Mimi the Goose.”

To philosophy, and to Hegel’s most of all, such an impulse is heresy. The limit of immanent critique is that the law of the immanent context is ultimately one with the delusion that has to be overcome. Yet that instant—truly the first qualitative leap—comes solely in the performance of immanent dialectics, which tends to transcend itself in a motion not at all unlike the passage from Platonic dialectics to the ideas, which “are in-themselves.” If it became totally conclusive, dialectics would be the totality that goes back to the identity principle. This was the interest served—against Hegel—by Schelling, who thus invited jeers at the abdication of a thought in flight to mysticism. The materialistic moment in Schelling, who credited matter as such with something like a driving force, may contribute to that aspect of his philosophy. But neither can we hypostatize the leap, as Kierkegaard does, lest we blaspheme against reason.

Our sense of dialectics makes us restrict dialectics. Yet our disappointment at philosophy’s failure to awaken from its dream by its own motion, without any leap—at its need for something else, for something new, for that which its spell keeps at a distance—this disappointment is none other than the disappointment of a child who reads Hauff’s fairy tale and mourns because the dwarf, though no longer misshapen, did not get a chance to serve the duke his pâté Suzeraine.

The object’s preponderance

Carried through, the critique of identity is a groping for the preponderance of the object. Identitarian thinking is subjectivistic even when it denies being so. To revise that kind of thinking, to debit identity with untruth, does not bring subject and object into a balance, nor does it raise the concept of function to an exclusively dominant role in cognition; even when we merely limit the subject, we put an end to its power. Its own absoluteness is the measure by which the least surplus of nonidentity feels to the subject like an absolute threat. A minimum will do to spoil it as a whole, because it pretends to be the whole.

Subjectivity changes its quality in a context which it is unable to evolve on its own. Due to the inequality inherent in the concept of mediation, the subject enters into the object altogether differently from the way the object enters into the subject. An object can be conceived only by a subject but always remains something other than the subject, whereas a subject by its very nature is from the outset an object as well. Not even as an idea can we conceive a subject that is not an object; but we can conceive an object that is not a subject. To be an object also is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not equally part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject.

That the I is an entity is implicit even in the sense of the logical “I think, which should be able to accompany all my conceptions,” because the sequence of time is a condition of its possibility and there is no sequence of time save in temporality. The pronoun “my” points to a subject as an object among objects, and again, without this “my” there would be no “I think.” The being of a subject is taken from objectivity—a fact that lends a touch of objectivity to the subject itself; it is not by chance that the Latin word subiectum, the underlying, reminds us of the very thing which the technical language of philosophy has come to call “objective.” The word “object,” on the other hand, is not related to subjectivity until we reflect upon the possibility of it definition.

This does not mean that objectivity is something immediate, that we might forget our critique of naïve realism. To grant precedence to the object means to make progressive qualitative distinctions between things which in themselves are indirect; it means a moment in dialectics—not beyond dialectics, but articulated in dialectics. Kant still refused to be talked out of the moment of objective preponderance. He used an objective intention to direct the subjective analysis of the cognitive faculty in his Critique of Pure Reason,⁵ and he stubbornly defended the transcendent thing-in-itself.* To him it was evident that being-in-itself did not run directly counter to the concept of an object, that the subjective indirectness of that concept is to be laid less to the object’s idea than to the subject’s insufficiency. The object cannot get beyond itself for Kant either, but he does not sacrifice the idea of otherness. Without otherness, cognition would deteriorate into tautology; what is known would be knowledge itself. To Kant’s meditation this was clearly more irksome than the inconcinnity of the thing-in-itself being the unknown cause of phenomena even thought the category of causality ends up on the subject’s side in his critique of reason.

The construction of transcendental subjectivity was a magnificently paradoxical and fallible effort to master the object in its opposite pole; but in this respect too, the accomplishment of what was merely proclaimed in positive, idealistic dialectics requires a critique of that construction. An ontological moment is needed in so far as ontology will critically strip the subject of its cogently constitutive role without substituting it through the object, in a kind of second immediacy. The object’s preponderance is solely attainable for subjective reflection, and for reflection on the subject. The state of facts is difficult to reconcile with the rules of current logic, and absurd in its abstract expression; it may clarify it to consider that one might write a primeval history of the subject—as outlined in Dialectic of Enlightenment*—but one cannot write a primeval history of the object. Any such history would be dealing with specific objects.

Nor does an ontological supremacy of consciousness follow from the counter-argument that without a knowing subject nothing can be known about the object. Every statement to the effect that subjectivity “is,” no matter what or how, includes an objectivity which the subject, by means of its absolute being, claims to have yet to establish. Only because the subject in turn is indirect—because it is not the radical otherness required to legitimize the object—is it capable of grasping objectivity at all. Rather than constitutive for objectivity, the subjective mediation is a block to objectivity; it fails to absorb entity, which objectivity is in essence. Genetically, the consciousness that has achieved independence, the epitome of what is done in cognitive performance, has branched off from the libidinous energy of the species. Human nature is not indifferent to this; it certainly does not define a “sphere of absolute origins,” as Husserl thought. Consciousness is a function of the living subject, and no exorcism will expel this from the concept’s meaning.

The objection that in the process the empirical moment of subjectivity would be mixed with its transcendental or essential moment is a feeble one. Without any relation to an empirical consciousness, to the living I, there would be no transcendental, purely mental consciousness. Analogous reflections on the object’s genesis would be meaningless. Mediation of the object means that it must not be statically, dogmatically hypostatized but can be known only as it entwines with subjectivity; mediation of the subject means that without the moment of objectivity it would be literally nil. An index of the object’s preponderance is the impotence of the mind—in all its judgments as well as, to this day, in the organization of reality. The negative fact that the mind, failing in identification, has also failed in reconcilement, that its supremacy has miscarried, becomes the motor of its disenchantment.

The human mind is both true and a mirage: it is true because nothing is exempt from the dominance which it has brought into pure form; it is untrue because, interlocked with dominance, it is anything but the mind it believes and claims to be. Enlightenment thus transcends its traditional self-understanding: it is demythologization—no longer merely as a reductio ad hominem, but the other way round, as a reductio hominis, an insight into the delusion of the subject that will style itself an absolute. The subject is the late form of the myth, and yet the equal of its oldest form.

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Kant’s concept of causality

The famous, utterly formal Kantian definition of causality is that whatever happens presupposes a previous condition “upon which it inevitably follows in line with a rule.”⁵ Historically it was directed against the Leibniz school and its interpretation of the sequence of conditions as due to inner necessity, a being-in-itself. On the other hand, Kant’s view differs from Hume’s, holding that unanimous experience is not possible without the regularity of thought which Hume turned over to the accident of convention, and pointing out that in any particular spot Hume must talk causally in order to make plausible what as a convention he would make indifferent.

To Kant, however, causality becomes a function of subjective reason, and what it means is therefore more and more attenuated. It dissolves like a bit of mythology. Causality approximates the principle of reason as such, of thinking in line with rules. Judgments about causal connections turn into semi-tautologies: reason employs them to determine what it effects anyway, as the faculty of laws. That it prescribes nature’s laws—or law, rather—denotes no more than a subsumption under rational unity. This unity, the principle of reason’s own identity, is transformed from reason to the objects and palmed off, then, as their cognition. Once causality is as thoroughly disenchanted as it would be by tabooing the inner determination of objects, it will disintegrate in itself as well.

The only feature of Kant’s rescue operation that lifts it above Hume’s denial is that what Hume swept away is to Kant innate in reason—its necessary nature, so to speak, if not an anthropological accident. Causality is to arise, not in the objects and their relationship, but solely in inescapable subjective thought. Kant, too, is dogmatic about the thesis that a state of things might have something essential, something specific to do with the succeeding state of things; but it would be quite possible, in line with his conception, to devise legalities for successions without anything to remind us of a causal connection. The interrelation of objects that have passed through inwardness virtually turns here into something outward for the theorem of causality. The simplest meaning of the phrase that “something is the cause of something else” is ignored. A causality rigorously insulated against the interior of objects is no more than its own shell. The reductio ad hominem in the concept of law is a mere borderline value where the law has ceased to say anything about the objects; the expansion of causality into a concept of pure reason negates causality.

Kant’s causality is one without a causa. As he cures it of naturalistic prejudice it dissolves in his hands. That consciousness cannot escape from causality, as its inborn form, is certainly an answer to the weak point in Hume’s argument; but when Kant maintains that the subject must think causally, his analysis of the constituents, according to the literal sense of “must,” is following the very causal proposition to which he would be entitled to subject only the constituta. If the constitution of causality by pure reason—which, after all, is supposed to be freedom—is already subject to causality, freedom is so compromised beforehand that hardly any place for it remains outside a consciousness complaisant toward the law.

In this entire antithetical construction, freedom and causality intersect. Kant’s freedom, being the same as rational action, is also according to law, and free acts also “follow from rules.” What has come out of this is the intolerable mortgage imposed on post-Kantian philosophy: that freedom without law is not freedom, that freedom exists only in identification with the law. Via the German idealists, this heritage has been passed on, with incalculably vast political consequences, to Friedrich Engels*; it is the theoretical source of the false reconcilement.

The plea for order

The end of the coercive epistemological character of causality would also end the claim to totality that will be made for causality as long as it coincides with the subjective principle. The very thing which in idealism can appear as freedom only in paradoxical form would then, substantially, become the moment that transcends the bracketing of the world’s course with fate. If in causality we were looking for a definition of things themselves—no matter how subjectively conveyed—such specification would open the perspective of freedom as opposed to the undiscriminated One of pure subjectivity. It would apply to that which is distinguished from compulsion. Compulsion, then, would no longer be extolled as an act of the subject; its totality would no longer evoke an affirmative response. It would be stripped of its a priori power that was extrapolated from real compulsion. The chance of freedom increases along with the objectiveness of causality; this is not the least of the reasons why he who wants freedom must insist upon necessity.

Kant, however, calls for freedom and prevents it. The argument for the thesis of the Third Antinomy, the thesis of the absolutely spontaneous cause—a secularization of the free divine act of creation—is Cartesian in style: it applies so that the method will be satisfied. Complete cognition is set up as the epistemological criterion; we are told that without freedom “the sequence of phenomena even in the natural course is never complete on the side of the causes.”⁶ The totality of cognition, which is here tacitly equated with truth, would be the identity of subject and object. Kant restricts it as a critic of cognition and teaches it as a theoretician of truth. A cognition that has at its disposal as complete a sequence as Kant holds to be conceivable only under the hypostasis of an original act of absolute freedom—in other words, a cognition that no longer leaves any sensorily given thing outside—would be a cognition not confronted with anything unlike itself.

The critique of such identity would strike not merely at the positive-ontological apotheosis of the subjective causal concept, but at the Kantian proof of the necessity of freedom, a proof about whose pure form there is something contradictory anyway. That there must be freedom is the supreme iniuria committed by the lawmaking autonomous subject. The substance of its own freedom—of the identity which has annexed all nonidentity—is as one with the “must,” with the law, with absolute dominion. This is the spark that kindles the pathos of Kant. He construes even freedom as a special case of causality. To him, it is the “constant laws” that matter. His timid bourgeois detestation of anarchy matches his proud bourgeois antipathy against tutelage. Here, too, society intrudes all the way into his most formal reflections. Formality in itself is a bourgeois trait: on the one hand, it frees the individual from the confining definitions of what has come to be just so, not otherwise, while on the other hand it has nothing to set against things as they are, nothing to base itself upon except dominion, which has been raised to the rank of a pure principle.

Hidden in the root of Kant’s Metaphysic of Morals lies Comte’s later sociological dichotomy between laws of progress and laws of order, along with the bias favoring the latter type. Order, on the strength of its legality, is to hold progress in check. We hear such overtones in a Kantian line from the proof of the antithesis: “Freedom (independence) from the laws of nature is indeed a deliverance from compulsion, but also from the guideline of all rules.”⁷ This guideline is to be “torn” by an “unconditional causality”—which is to say: by the free productive act; where this act is scientifically criticized in the antithesis, it has the epithet “blind”⁸ bestowed on it by Kant, as the stubborn fact has elsewhere. The haste with which Kant thinks of freedom as the law above shows that he is no more scrupulous about it than his class has ever been. Long before it dreaded the industrial proletariat—in the economics of Adam Smith, for example—that class used to combine praise of individual emancipation with the apologia for an order in which, one heard, the “invisible hand” was taking care of both the beggar and the king, while even the free competitor in this order had to observe the—feudal—rules of “fair play.”

Kant’s popularizer* was not misrepresenting his philosophical mentor when he called order “heaven’s bounteous daughter,” nor when he emphasized in the same poem that “welfare can’t thrive when peoples free themselves.” Neither man would hear of it that the “chaos” which their generation saw in the relatively modest horrors of the French Revolution (the atrocities of the Chouans shocked them far less) was produced by a repression whose traits live on in those who rise against it. All the other German geniuses who had been constrained at first to hail that revolution could not vilify it fast enough, once Robespierre gave them a pretext; and the same sense of relief is perceptible in Kant’s proof of the antithesis, when “legality” is praised at the expense of “lawlessness” and we actually hear the word “mirage of freedom.”⁹ Laws receive the encomiastic epithet “constant,” which is to raise them above the dread specter of anarchy without allowing the suspicion to dawn that they precisely are the old evil of unfreedom. How much Kant is dominated by the concept of law shows in the fact that he cites it, as their supposedly higher unity, in arguing for the thesis as well as in arguing for the antithesis.

* Hegel, in the first Note to the first Trias of his Logic, refuses to begin with Something instead of with Being (cf. Hegel, Works 4, especially p. 89, also p. 80). The entire work, which seeks to expound the primacy of the subject, is thus in a subjective sense idealistically prejudiced. Hegel’s dialectics would scarcely take another course if—in line with the work’s basic Aristotelianism—he were beginning with an abstract Something. The idea of such something pure and simple may denote more tolerance toward the nonidentical than the idea of Being, but it is hardly less indirect. The concept of Something would not be the end either; the analysis of this concept would have to go on in the direction of Hegel’s thought, the direction of nonconceptuality. Yet even the minimal trace of nonidentity in the approach to logic, of which the word “something” reminds us, is unbearable to Hegel.

¹ Cf. Theodor W.Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, Stuttgart 1956, p. 97 and passim.

² Cf. Karl Marx, Kritik des Gothaer Programms, Frankfurt am Main l956, p. 199ff.

³ Cf. Alfred Schmidt, “Der Begriff der Natur in der Lehre von Marx,” in Frankfurter Beiträge zur Soziologie, 11 (Frankfurt 1962), p. 21.

⁴ Cf. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Works III, p. 93ff.

* Literally, the preponderance of the object might be traced back to the point where a thought believes it has won its own absolute objectivity by rejecting any objectivity that is not thought—in other words, to formal logic. The “something” to which all logical propositions refer even when they are free to ignore it entirely is a copy of that which a thought means, and without which it could not be. The non-cogitative is a logically immanent condition of the cogitative. In fact, the copula “is” always conveys some objectivity already, after the model of existential judgments. This disposes of all the hopes kindled by our craving for security: that in formal logic we might possess something downright unconditional as the sure foundation of philosophy.

* Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Amsterdam 1947 [Dialectic of Enlightenment, New York 1972].

⁵ Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, p. 308.

* “Hegel was the first to present a correct picture of the relationship of freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity. ‘Necessity is blind only if it is not understood.’ Freedom does not lie in dreams about independence of the laws of nature; it lies in the knowledge of these laws, and in the ability conferred by that knowledge, to make the laws work according to plan and to definite ends. This applies in regard to the laws of external nature as well as to those which regulate the physical and mental existence of man himself—two sets of laws which we can separate, at best, in imagination, but not in reality. Free will, therefore, means nothing other than the faculty of being able to decide with material knowledge. The freer a man’s judgment in regard to a specific point in question, the greater, therefore, the necessity with which the content of his judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty based on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and contradictory possibilities of decision, demonstrates precisely thereby its unfreedom, its being dominated by the very object it ought to dominate. Freedom thus consists in our control, based upon our knowledge of the natural necessities, of ourselves and of external nature; it is thus necessarily a product of historic evolution.” (Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Werke, Berlin 1962, vol. 20, p. 106.)

⁶ Ibid., p. 310.

⁷ Ibid., p. 309.

⁸ Ibid., p. 311.

* A reference to Friedrich Schiller. Quotes are from Schiller’s poem Die Glocke (The Bell).—TRANS.

⁹ Ibid.