The functional change and inner historical transformation of the concept of system – which would be a topic for a doctoral thesis – offer substantial insights into the change of consciousness, and thus into its current state. For lack of time, Adorno has to stay at an overly high level of abstractness. The historical-objective problems of the system should be elaborated in detail. System in a strong sense has existed since rationalism. Some also speak retrospectively of system in Plato and Aristotle (Hegel),2 but this is an inauthentic approach. Classical philosophy lacks the historico-philosophical preconditions for what modern thought calls ‘system’. The ideal of the system in rationalism is the closed deductive context, based on a minimum of presupposed theorems, where these theorems are meant to be so self-evident that they are signs of their own truth. In this sense, Fichte’s philosophy is the ultimate perfection of the system: to deduce the totality from one theorem, even one concept. Any attempt to reduce the many to the one involves recourse to thought. The epitome of thought is subjectivity. The system is potentially geared towards an absolutization of the thinking subject. One might consider presenting the entire history of systems from the perspective that the primacy of subjectivity asserts itself ever more purely and consistently.
Hegel, Erdmann3 show that all major systems based on the subject or on thought do not quite work, that they are all patched together in certain places where critique should begin, for example Descartes’ two-substance theory,4 where, in medieval-ontological fashion, substance = thought. How the res cogitans and res extensa come together remains entirely unsolved. Likewise Spinoza:5 if there is only all-encompassing identity, how can there be a multiplicity of things? Pure identity is achieved in the epitome of godlike nature, of the whole of being. But the absolute comes at a price: the transition to manifoldness comes about only dogmatically through the concept of modes, which are changing manifestations of substance. The philosophy of Leibniz constitutes the most ingenious attempt to master these difficulties, but the decisive problem of the transition from the pure concept to existence remains unsolved, as the fluctuating definition of the monad – pure force field on the one hand, spatial-material being on the other – shows. To be truly consistent, Leibniz would have to be a pure spiritualist, but he actually proceeds in a contradictory, unreflecting fashion. Confusing the concept with the existential judgement is also the essence of Kant’s critique of the ontological proof of God’s existence.6
But the consistent opponents of the rationalists, the empiricists, also have difficulties with the problem of mediation. Their critique of causality, which is so central to Spinoza and Leibniz, must itself presuppose causality everywhere. The mutual mediation of concept and sensual manifoldness is necessary; herein lies the historical root of the origin of dialectics.
The two-hundred-year frenzy of systems until Hegel’s death can be explained by the need to reconstruct the disintegrated cosmos, the ordo, as presented most purely in the Summa of Aquinas, by means of the same spiritual power that dissolved it; to reconstruct objectivity by going through subjectivity.
The problem of the system concept becomes manifest in idealism. The problem of the non-identical has not been solved.7 Kant’s philosophy already presents itself as a system, but only as one of pure reason, of subjective forms, which does not let in the manifoldness of the sensually given. Only in a complicated and violent fashion does Kant, drawing on the concept of infinity like Leibniz, attempt to reconcile the two. The aim to deduce the abundance of the existent from pure thought, from the pure subject, was never fulfilled.
Nietzsche and Kierkegaard dispute the possibility of a system. Nietzsche speaks of the dishonesty of the system.8 Kierkegaard calls the system the hubris of finite human reason, which is so limited that it sets itself up as the absolute. All significant philosophy after Nietzsche is a rejection of system. Following on from Husserl, it was thought that one could move directly towards an ordering of being, now that it was no longer possible via thought. But a structuring of being does not work directly either. The idea of system was reduced to absurdity, but the systems did not disappear. Attempts to make systems after the crisis of the system can simply be dismissed as having fallen behind the world spirit, as ‘professorial philosophy’ (Schopenhauer).9 But the fact that the systems remain is not entirely coincidental. One needs systems in a different sense: no longer as attempts to grasp reality through one principle but, rather, as ordering schemata, found starkly in Heinrich Rickert’s concept of the open system,10 which is like a house, with enough space for an entire person to settle in. But the metaphor of the house as a structure that can be equipped with materials resigns before the system’s claim to give meaning and amounts to its self-liquidation. Thus the system loses the very thing that constituted its idea: the character of objective, binding validity, mediated by the subject. All the great systems were meant objectively (Kant, Hegel); objectivity of truth is to be established by means of the subject. Now objectivity is forgotten; the systems remain, change into ordering schemata, into merely thought-practical undertakings, in order to arrange material through thought in a well-organized, clear and convenient fashion. Meanwhile, the actual theorems from which the structure is supposed to follow are not truth judgements, ideae innatae or synthetic a priori judgements but, rather, arbitrary axioms.
For example, during his work in the USA, Adorno was supposed to compile a list of key statements expressing dogmatically fixed views, with each one following more or less stringently from the other. For example, the objective quality of works of art is a dogmatic conviction; that had to be put at the start, and then one would know how to proceed. But if one cuts off the movement of motivation and explication in this way and starts from such a statement, then the form of the axiomatics conceals the fact that this is an insight into the context of art. This is a direct misrepresentation of the matter.
Systems regress to what they were before philosophical dialectics, to mere modes of representation that organize their material from without, making systems of little compartments without understanding the matter itself – which would be possible only if the categories unlocked the phenomena themselves. A twofold deformation results: that of classification and the arbitrariness of instrumental categories that fulfil only practical requirements for organizing material. In addition, the means-to-end relation in philosophy falls apart; the end, namely to understand the matter itself, is driven out of theory.
The system becomes a contradiction of its own idea; it pushes administrative schemata and procedural rules into the foreground. The systematics of smooth subsumption already prevents thought itself; it matches the demands of the administered world. The concept of system becomes an empiricist image of reality in which everything stems from an organizational form comprising arbitrary concepts. The system of subsumption and order corresponds exactly to the world of today. The unity of subject and object is attained, an identity from which objectivity, the attempt to define the matter itself, is spirited away. Such identity is the opposite of a system and a world in which subject and object would be genuinely identical. For the individual sciences, the crisis of the system has remained strangely powerless and without consequences. The individual sciences, which consider themselves so realistically sober and factual, unknowingly don the threadbare wardrobe, the cavalier’s wardrobe from the philosophy of yore at a discount price. Systems enjoy great popularity in the positive sciences; they are not only a scholastic tail, something where the area of school did not keep up with the development of spirit; they are accommodated by a need in people for the systematic. This is connected to the weakness and excessive caution that afflict people today like an illness. In his play The Little Relatives, Ludwig Thoma portrays a stationmaster whose favourite word is ‘category’, roughly in the sense that ‘every person belongs in a category.’11 The spirit represented in the individual sciences resembles that of the stationmaster in Gross-Heubach: arranging everything in categorially assigned schemata. When theory and system are equated, as by Parsons, theory is no more than a polished and elaborated ordering schema.
Instead, one should call for an understanding type of systematic standard. The essence must be the focus. It is not tied to seamless unity, as the system once claimed. One can distinguish between essence and appearance, even if one is not keeping to an abstractly superordinate schema. On the other hand, one must hold on to an emphatic concept that is not limited to the classification of the facts it covers but, rather, has an element of independence.