Deborah Cook
Two figures took centre stage on the philosophical scene in Germany in the 1920s: Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Focusing on Husserl in his 1924 doctoral thesis, Adorno continued to engage with his ideas in later work as well.1 However, Adorno was neither a Husserlian nor a Heideggerian. He first criticized Heidegger’s work in “The Idea of Natural History” (INH: 260–61), where he rejected Heidegger’s notion of historicity, opting instead for a Marxist perspective on history. His critique of Heidegger became far more strident in subsequent work where, among other things, he charged that Heidegger’s philosophy of Being devolves into “an irrationalist world view” (ND: 85, tr. mod.). Indeed, Martin Jay remarks that Adorno viewed phenomenology as a whole as “the last futile attempt of bourgeois thought to rescue itself from impotence”. Content merely to reproduce existing conditions, phenomenology not only “turned against action in the world”; it had a “subterranean connection with fascism” because both “were expressions of the terminal crisis of bourgeois society”.2
Adorno’s formative influences were astute commentators on this crisis. They included the culture critic Siegfried Kracauer, whom Adorno met towards the end of World War I. Acquainting him with the work of Immanuel Kant, Kracauer taught Adorno to interpret all philosophical works as coded texts from which “the historical condition of the mind could be read” (NLII: 59). Kracauer also introduced Adorno to Walter Benjamin, who remained a close friend until Benjamin’s death in 1940. From Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Adorno borrowed the idea that truth is accessible through constellations of concepts. Following Benjamin, he adopted “the later Nietzsche’s critical insight that truth is not identical with a timeless universal; . . . rather it is solely the historical which yields the figure of the absolute” (P: 231). As Simon Jarvis observes, Adorno also learned from Benjamin that philosophical interpretation should begin with “the material specificity of the minute particulars uncovered by historical and philological inquiry rather than the highest, most general, and hence emptiest concepts”.3
In the early 1920s, Adorno was greatly impressed by Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia as well as by Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, which, as Kracauer taught him, kept alive the longing for “vanished meaning” in a world bereft of gods.4 Even more important for Adorno’s critical social theory was History and Class Consciousness, where Lukács extends Karl Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism to disparate aspects of human life. In this brief account of the major influences on Adorno, however, I shall narrow my focus to four thinkers whose ideas play a prominent role in his work: Kant, Hegel, Marx and Freud. Following this discussion, Adorno’s impact on other thinkers will be examined. A first-generation critical theorist, Adorno influenced not just his contemporaries in the Institute for Social Research, but later generations of critical theorists as well, including the philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas. After describing the impact of Adorno’s radical critique of late capitalist society on Habermas and his successors, I shall comment briefly on his contributions to empirical social research, sociology, communications studies and literary theory.
Adorno endorses Kant’s idea that there is an obstacle or “block” to our understanding of objects; this block points to “an irreducible residue”, to something non-identical with thought. Unlike Kant, however, Adorno claims that the block that separates natural objects from our understanding of them is not completely unbridgeable. The major problem with Kant was that he radically separated things-in-themselves from concepts. As a result, “it turns out that what remains of everything independent of the subject, or that comes to the subject from outside, is at bottom completely null and void”. Quoting Bertolt Brecht, Adorno complains that things-in-themselves are nothing more than a “noble feature” in Kant’s work: they “survive as a reminder that subjective knowledge is not the whole story, but they are without further consequence themselves” (KCPR: 128). To be sure, a noumenal realm of things-in-themselves must be postulated on largely logical grounds. But Kant no sooner posits the noumenal realm than he bars all knowledge of it. He confines the cognitive subject to examining its inner perceptions because these are allegedly all it can know.
Interestingly, Adorno thinks that the greatness of the Critique of Pure Reason lies in the clash of two contradictory “motifs”. On the one hand, Kant succumbed to identity thinking by reducing “synthetic a priori judgements and ultimately all organized experience, all objectively valid experience, to an analysis of the consciousness of the subject”. Recognizing that our knowledge of objects is mediated, Kant wrongly concludes that we can apprehend only the concepts that we use to grasp objects. On the other hand, Kant was also a non-identity thinker. Rather than reducing objects to our understanding of them, he points to the obstacles that impede a complete understanding of objects. For Adorno, then, Kant’s first Critique contains both “an identity philosophy — that is, a philosophy that attempts to ground being in the subject — and also a nonidentity philosophy — one that attempts to restrict that claim to identity by insisting on the obstacles, the block, encountered by the subject in its search for knowledge” (KCPR: 66, tr. mod.)
Adorno constantly stresses the non-identity of concept and object, mind and matter, the individual and society. Non-identity is the pivot on which his work turns. However, non-identity does not mean that mind and nature, concept and object, the individual and society, are radically distinct. Indeed, Kant’s failure to recognize their affinity also mars his philosophy. After insisting that consciousness is “part impulse itself, and also part of that in which it intervenes”, Adorno adds that, without the affinity between consciousness and its objects which Kant denies, there could be no “idea of freedom, for whose sake he denies the affinity” (ND: 265, tr. mod.). Freedom requires action, but we can act only because we are ourselves physical, non-conceptual objects, part of the natural and social worlds. Against Kant, who thought that reason alone motivates practical activity, Adorno counters that “practice also needs something else, something physical which consciousness does not exhaust”, something both “conveyed to reason and qualitatively different from it” (ibid.: 229).
Still, Adorno greatly admired Kant’s discussion of the antinomy of freedom and causality. On Adorno’s view, the doctrine of determinism, which states that all human action is causally determined, implicitly endorses commodification and reification. Determinists act as though “dehumanization, the totally developed commodity character of labour power, were human nature pure and simple”. But the champions of free will are equally wrong because they completely disregard the effects of commodification and reification on human behaviour. For Adorno, then, each extreme thesis is false because both “proclaim identity” (ND: 264, tr. mod.). His lectures on moral philosophy end with the claim that the “highest point” to which moral philosophy can rise today is “that of the antinomy of causality and freedom which figures in Kant’s philosophy in an unresolved and for that reason exemplary fashion” (PMP: 176).
The antinomy of freedom and causality is instructive because it reveals the contradictions in which reason is entangled. Although Kant thought he could resolve this antinomy, Adorno claims that it actually reveals a contradiction in reality itself (ibid.: 30). In fact, he gives this antinomy a social interpretation while using it as model to clarify his dialectical practice. Since we can discover neither a positive freedom nor a positive unfreedom in ourselves, the truth content in Kant’s antinomy consists in its disclosure of this ambivalent state of affairs (ND: 223). Adorno further argues that because “there can be no answer to the question of whether freedom or unfreedom of the will exists” (ibid.: 263), the antinomy indicates that the universal — in the form of existing socio-economic institutions and practices — and the particular individuals who make up its living human substratum have not yet been reconciled.
But Adorno also argues that the social conditions that currently obstruct freedom point dialectically to their own reversal. Moreover, he traces this idea back to Kant, who taught that “the entanglement of progress ... in the realm of unfreedom, tends by means of its own law toward the realm of freedom” (CM: 149–50).5 Progress is dialectical because “historical setbacks ... also provide the condition needed for humanity to avert them in the future” (ibid.: 154). Calling this reversal of fortune the dialectic of progress, Adorno contends that experiences of oppression encourage some individuals to conceive of conditions under which oppression will end. In other words, oppression is actually “the prerequisite for settling the antagonism” (ibid.: 150, tr. mod.).
Adorno thinks that Hegel borrowed his own notion of progress —the cunning of reason in history — from Kant’s idea that “the conditions of the possibility of reconciliation are its contradiction, and . . . the conditions for the possibility of freedom are unfreedom” (ibid.: 150). Applying Spinoza’s famous dictum — all determination is negation — to the trajectory of spirit (Geist), Hegel shows that at each stage of its development, spirit determines itself and its objects more adequately and concretely when it acknowledges its own limitations, thereby enabling it to surpass them. On Adorno’s own interpretation of Spinoza, a critical understanding of the negative aspects of the human predicament today makes it possible to conceive of an improved state of affairs. Although we shall never have a completely positive sense of “what the correct arrangement of human affairs should be”,6 Adorno frequently argues that “the false, once determinately known and precisely expressed, is already an index of what is right and better” (CM: 288).
Nevertheless, while Hegel thought that determinate negation allowed spirit progressively to acquire knowledge of the absolute, Adorno denies that it necessarily advances the human condition. Emerging in the negation of negative social conditions, our ideas about what is right and better are often flawed owing to their derivation from these very conditions. Although he employs these ideas himself in his trenchant and sustained critique of capitalist society, Adorno emphasizes their fallibility in his lectures on metaphysics when he states that critics have no choice but to work their way “through the darkness without a lamp, without possessing the higher [i.e. Hegelian] concept of the negation of the negation”, by immersing themselves “in the darkness as completely as possible” (ME: 144).
Moreover, where Hegel thought world spirit was the motive force underlying history, Adorno views it as a cipher for “permanent catastrophe” because it implicitly discloses real antagonisms between the individual and society (ND: 320). Just as Kant’s antinomies reveal real contradictions in society, so too Hegel’s idea of a supra-individual spirit which determines the course of human history ultimately shows that individuals are “dictated by the principle of perverted universality” (ibid.: 344). Hegel’s world spirit foreshadows our current predicament: a “world integrated through ‘production,’ through the exchange relationship” — a world that “depends in all its moments on the social conditions of its production, and in that sense actually realizes the primacy of the whole over its parts”.7 For Adorno, it is imperative to submit these oppressive conditions to a sustained and trenchant critique.8
Adorno also objects that Hegel ignores the “matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history”, namely “nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity” (ND: 8). Conceding that knowledge of non-conceptual particulars has never been attained, he criticizes Hegel for denying that such knowledge is attainable. More importantly, Hegel failed to understand that our conceptually mediated relationship to objects entails the existence of something that lies beyond concepts. Although our knowledge of objects is acquired in a mediated way, objects are immediate in the sense that they do not “require cognition — or mediation — in the same sense in which cognition requires immediacy”. Here Adorno is not simply making a logical point: he also argues that experience itself posits the existence of something immediate because it discloses “that what it transmits is not thereby exhausted” (ND: 172, tr. mod.).
Despite this criticism, Adorno praises the dynamism of Hegel’s system where critical reflection sets in motion Kant’s antinomies of “form and content, nature and spirit, theory and praxis, freedom and necessity, the thing in itself and the phenomenon”.9 At the same time, he charges that Hegel ignored the preponderance or weightiness of the material world. For Adorno, mind is not ontologically distinct from matter, concepts from objects, or individuals from society. While they cannot be reduced to them, concepts are inextricably entwined in non-conceptuality, mind in matter, and the individual in society. If Kant’s antinomies implicitly reveal both their affinity and their heterogeneity, Hegel failed to recognize that these antinomies “register the very moment of nonidentity that is an indispensable part of his own conception of the philosophy of identity”.
Adorno’s negative dialectics consists in a concerted attempt to surpass Hegel’s dialectics by transforming it into a consistent sense of the non-identity of subject and object, individual and society, while simultaneously stressing that both are material in character.10 Neither reductive nor dualistic,11 his negative dialectics is materialist because it reveals that both nature and history preponderate over human beings. At the start of a lengthy account of the history of materialism, Adorno states that there have always been two types of materialism: a social type, which focuses on society, and a scientific one, which focuses on nature. The two converge in their opposition to the “lie” perpetrated by the mind when it “repudiates its own natural growth”.12 Both types of materialism effectively locate “the origin of mind — even its most ostensible sublimations — in material scarcity”.13 Trying to accommodate the two types, Adorno claims that the material objectivity that weighs upon individuals is both natural and social, even though we largely ignore how these two dimensions of the material world preponderate over our thought and behaviour.
In fact, Adorno thought that society’s influence on individuals had become so far-reaching that it could plausibly be described as totalitarian. Referring to society as the “universal”, he invariably stresses its power over individuals. Today human beings must depend upon the performances of the state and the economy because these institutions are responsible for their survival (ND: 311). If this increasingly totalitarian situation was prefigured by the transcendental subject in Kant and by world spirit in Hegel (CM: 248), Adorno agrees with Marx, who more aptly describes it as the “law of value that comes into force without individuals being conscious of it”. This law, expressed in exchange relations, is the “real objectivity” to which individuals are subjected (ND: 300–301). Today, “the standard structure of society is the exchange form”. The rationality of exchange now “constitutes people: what they are for themselves, what they think they are, is secondary” (CM: 248).
We have also been oblivious to the role that nature has played within our history. Adorno wants to correct our flawed understanding of ourselves as superior to the natural world by breaking through what he calls “the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity” (ND: xx). A critique of this idealist fallacy largely entails demonstrating that the mind is not primary. In setting himself this task, Adorno maintains that he is endorsing Marx, whose historical materialism became “the critique of idealism in its entirety, and of the reality for which idealism opts by distorting it” (ibid.: 197). On Adorno’s view, Hegel himself derived self-conscious mind from its relationship to heterogeneous matter in labour. Hypostasizing the mind, he was barely able to conceal the origin of the “I” in the “Not-I”. Even for Hegel, then, mind implicitly originates “in the real life process, in the law of the survival of the species, of providing it with nutrients” (ibid.: 198, tr. mod.).
Again, this real-life process is both instinctually driven and shaped by the capitalist mode of production with its rapacious and exploitative relationship to nature. Citing a famous passage of The German Ideology, Adorno declares that in it, Marx stressed the “unending entwinement” of nature and history “with an extremist vigor bound to irritate dogmatic materialists”. For Marx:
We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be conceived from two sides, divided into the history of nature and the history of humankind. Yet there is no separating the two sides; as long as human beings exist, natural and human history will qualify each other.
Adorno follows this quotation with the claim that the traditional antithesis between nature and history is true in one respect and false in another. It is “true insofar as it expresses what happened to the natural element” — namely, that nature has been concealed to such a degree that what now appears to be natural is actually social. However, the antithesis is false because “it apologetically repeats the concealment of history’s natural growth by history itself” (ND: 358, tr. mod.).
Borrowing the idea of natural history from Marx, Adorno tries throughout his work to capture the important senses in which nature is always also historical and history always also natural. To avoid misunderstanding, however, he does not adopt the goal “of ‘naturalizing’ human beings and ‘humanizing’ nature”. Instead, as Lambert Zuidervaart insightfully remarks, Adorno actually thought that “human beings already are natural, all too natural, and nature is unavoidably human, all too human”. Human beings are “all too natural” because they “carry out domination as if they were beasts of prey”, oblivious to the fact that survival instincts motivate their behaviour. For its part, nature has become thoroughly historical to the extent that it “has become a mere object of human control”.14
To be sure, Adorno wants us to acknowledge both that we are inextricable parts of nature and that nature has always been (and always will be) entwined in human history. But, to adopt a controversial formulation, he simultaneously wants to “dehumanize” nature and “denaturalize” humanity. For even as he underscores both our natural creatureliness and our “humanization” of nature, he aims to foster the partial transcendence of nature by human beings, and of human beings by nature. If it is crucial for our self-understanding to acknowledge our affinity with nature, it is also the case that the non-identity of nature and human history must be given equal weight. In the final analysis, Adorno’s goal is to develop a more fully dialectical conception of both human beings and nature.
To say that nature is always also historical does not authorize the reduction of nature to history. Conversely, the “naturalness” of human history does not mean that history can be reduced to nature. In fact, Adorno’s former student Alfred Schmidt claims that Marx was the first to advance this non-reductive view of the relationship between nature and history. For Marx: “Natural and human history together constitute ... a differentiated history”. Precisely because they form an internally differentiated unity, “human history is not merged in pure natural history; natural history is not merged in human history”.15 As the material substratum of human life, nature remains something apart from its historical manifestations. Although it is always also historically and socially mediated, nature is not entirely identical with its mediated forms. For its part, human history has been impelled by natural forces both within and without, but it is something distinct from nature because our cognitive development has enabled us to distinguish ourselves from nature to a limited extent.
Charging that Marx often tended to focus on the preponderance of society over individuals, thereby failing fully to explore the preponderance of nature, Adorno nonetheless borrowed a great deal from his critique of capitalism. To return to an earlier point, he maintains that “freedom remains no less delusive than individuality itself” because the “law of value comes into play over the heads of formally free individuals” who have become “the involuntary executors of that law”. Even in the earlier liberal phase of capitalism, the freedom and autonomy enjoyed by bourgeois entrepreneurs was essentially a function of economic conditions that fostered a certain measure of autonomy to improve its performance (ND: 262). Under monopoly capitalism, however, the ruling class itself is “ruled and dominated by the economic process”. As Marx predicted, the ruling powers have become appendages of their own machinery of production (CLA: 116).
Against both Marx and Hegel, however, Adorno rejects the idea of necessity in history. After describing the continuity of history in terms of our growing capacity for destruction and self-destruction, Adorno insists that doubts about the inevitability of this trajectory cannot but arise for those who “want to change the world” (ND: 323). To be sure, he questions the extent to which the proletariat can act as an agent for radical social change today owing to its lack of class consciousness. But he also puts paid to those who view him as unremittingly pessimistic when he observes that relations of production remain “thoroughly antagonistic” in “their relationship to the subjects from which they originate and which they enclose”. Owing to the antagonism between the individual and society, it is not possible for society “to extort that complete identity with human beings that is relished in negative utopias” (CM: 156).
While Marx tended to focus on the preponderance of society over individuals, Freud was obviously more concerned with the impact of instincts on human behaviour. Yet Adorno argues that Marx implicitly endorsed the idea that history has been instinctually driven: the truth content in his idea of natural history, its critical content, lies in Marx’s recognition that human history, which takes the form of the progressive mastery and domination of nature, merely “continues the unconscious history of nature, of devouring and being devoured” (ND: 355). Furthermore, if Marx thinks that the first premiss of human existence is that human beings must work to produce the means to satisfy their needs, Freud observes in Civilization and its Discontents that human life has as one of its foundations “the compulsion to work, which was created by external necessity”.16 For both Marx and Freud, then, history to date has consisted largely in the activities that provide human beings with the material necessities of life.
Adorno also agrees with Freud that “it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction (by suppression, repression, or some other means?) of powerful instincts”.17 In Adorno’s own words, the “idea of the renunciation of instinct ... formulated in recent years by psychoanalysis goes hand in hand, or so I have been arguing, with the direction of civilization, and we could also say with the basic tendency of an urban civilization that is bourgeois in the broadest sense, that is to say, orientated towards work” (PMP: 136–7). Repressing their instincts in order to dominate external nature and other human beings, individuals rarely profit from their acts of renunciation. Consequently, “there is no real equivalence between renunciation of instincts in the present and compensation in the future”. Society is organized “irrationally” because “the equivalent reward it always promises never arrives” (ibid.: 139).
Adorno also follows Freud’s attempt to promote enlightenment by establishing a more accommodating relationship between ego and id. More generally, he maintains that rational insight into our affinity with nature “is the point of a dialectics of enlightenment” (ND: 270). Here he refers to the central thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment, which states that a critique of our naturally driven subjugation of nature can “prepare the way for a positive notion of enlightenment which will release it from entanglement in blind domination” (DE, C: xvi; J: xviii). In Freudian terms, only when the ego acknowledges that it is not entirely master in its own house, that it is not omnipotent but subject to natural impulses, can it sublate its instincts by harnessing their energy to more emancipatory ends.18 For Adorno, “we are no longer simply a piece of nature” only “from the moment that we recognize that we are a piece of nature” (PMP: 103). Paradoxically, perhaps, to rise above nature in any meaningful sense, we must first become fully conscious of ourselves as instinctually driven creatures.
Adorno was interested in Freud’s account of narcissism as well, describing narcissism as the “new type of psychological affliction” characteristic of an era that has witnessed “the decline of the individual and his [sic] subsequent weakness”.19 Now that society assumes responsibility for our material survival, it can dispense with “the mediating agencies of ego and individuality” that it originally fostered in its more competitive liberal phase. It encourages the formation of weak and submissive egos by arresting “all differentiation” and exploiting “the primitive core of the unconscious”.20 In so doing, it fosters narcissistic pathologies where the “self-preserving function” of the ego is, “on the surface at least, retained but, at the same time, split off from that of consciousness and thus lost to rationality”.21 Since the narcissistic ego is too weak to accommodate its instincts, these can be exploited easily by politicians and the mass media. Given this ego weakness, effective resistance to society has all but disappeared.
Unlike Freud, however, Adorno thought that psychopathologies such as narcissism would be overcome, not by psychoanalysis, but only by completely transforming society. He also objected that Freud vacillates between criticizing “the renunciation of instinct as repression contrary to reality, and applauding it as sublimation beneficial to culture” (MM: 60). Still, Adorno developed a remarkably sophisticated psychoanalytic account of anti-Semitism and Nazism based on his discussions with Freudian social psychologists.22 He gave pride of place to psychoanalysis in his criticisms of the culture industry and in much of his empirical work as well.23 If he famously declared that “nothing in psychoanalysis is true but the exaggerations” (ibid.: 49), he also insists that what is essential to thought is just this “element of exaggeration” (ibid.: 126). Readily admitting that he too is exaggerating the sombre side of the human predicament, Adorno defends himself by stating that he is simply following the maxim that “only exaggeration per se today can be the medium of truth” (CM: 99). Exaggeration can play an important role in critical social theory by highlighting the destructive and self-destructive tendencies in contemporary society.
In keeping with the profoundly ethical thrust of first-generation critical theory, Habermas also orients his work towards the goal of a more rational society that would permit individuals to enjoy greater freedom and autonomy. Just as Adorno believed that a deep understanding of the present situation is needed to bring such a society to fruition, Habermas too endorses the view that only undiminished, critical insight into our current predicament can provide the basis for positive change. Like Adorno, he offers penetrating analyses of life in the West, examining problems such as the crises that periodically afflict capitalism, reification, civil privatism, democratic deficits in the West, and globalization. While far less critical of Western institutions, procedures and practices than Adorno was, Habermas continues to sound a distinctly Adornian note in Between Facts and Norms when he observes that, more than any other, the twentieth century has taught us “the horror of existing unreason”. To banish that horror, reason must put itself on trial.24
Following Adorno, Habermas agrees with Marx’s claim that “reason has always existed but not always in a rational form”.25 Moreover, in their respective critiques of Western reason, Adorno and Habermas declare themselves partisans of the enlightenment tradition described by Kant in “What is Enlightenment?”26 Each sees himself as advancing this tradition with its emphasis on rational, autonomous and critical thought. For his part, Adorno claims that his work contributes to enlightenment by promoting the “self-critical spirit of reason” (ND: 29). Like Kant, he wants individuals to gain greater political maturity, to become capable of independent and critical judgement (CM: 281–2). Situating his own work within the enlightenment tradition, Habermas too wants individuals progressively to free themselves from superstition and authoritarian belief systems in order to submit to the unforced force of the better argument alone.
Although he denies that the proletariat can ever play the role of the universal subject of history, Habermas is indebted to Marx’s critique of capitalism and the commodity form. In fact, he links his critical idea of the colonization of the lifeworld to the problem of reified social reality that Marx first targeted in his critique of commodity fetishism, and which Lukács subsequently adopted. As he told an interviewer: “When I was writing The Theory of Communicative Action my main concern was to develop a theoretical apparatus with which the phenomena of ‘reification’ (Lukács) could be addressed.”27 Furthermore, while criticizing the Marxist claim that the economy determines the political, social and cultural superstructure, Habermas accepts Marx’s view that capitalism defines the development of Western society as a whole.28
Adorno constantly stresses the catastrophic tendencies in Western societies. For him, “the complete reification of the world ... is indistinguishable from an additional catastrophic event caused by human beings, in which nature has been wiped out and after which nothing grows any more” (NLI: 245). By contrast, Habermas believes that the trajectory of Western society is double-edged. On the one hand, since the rationality that characterizes action within the economic and political systems now penetrates into the lifeworld, it unsettles communicative practices geared to reaching agreement about aspects of the objective, social and subjective worlds. On the other hand, these practices have become more rational in their growing reliance on good reasons — rather than on beliefs or dogmas that are immune from criticism — as the basis for validity claims. Indeed, given his positive view of the rationalization of the lifeworld, Habermas rejects Adorno’s assessment of life under late capitalism — a view he describes as biased because it focuses on pathological tendencies in modernity to the virtual exclusion of countertendencies.29
Yet for Habermas as well, the reconciliation of society and the individual is key. He endorses the “idealizing supposition of a universalistic form of life, in which everyone can take up the perspective of everyone else and can count on reciprocal recognition by everybody” because this supposition “makes it possible for individuated beings to exist within a community — individualism as the flip-side of universalism”.30 Again, Habermas pursues the project that animates all the Institute’s endeavours: to formulate a theory of society that examines the effects of economic and political institutions on social life and the development of individuals, with the ultimate goal of achieving “a reasonable organization of society that will meet the needs of the whole community”.31 Unlike his former professor, however, Habermas thinks that a radical transformation of society is unnecessary because conditions of life that will enable each individual to enjoy the same possibilities for self-realization and self-determination as all the rest are already latent in existing institutions. In other words, a more rational society is already within reach.
This more conciliatory view of Western society is echoed in the work of Habermas’s successors, including the philosophers Albrecht Wellmer and Axel Honneth. Honneth, who is currently (2007) director of the Institute for Social Research, follows Habermas when he rejects Adorno’s bleak view of prevailing tendencies in the West. Yet Honneth has recently defended Adorno, maintaining that he was not trying to explain capitalism, but to offer a “hermeneutic of natural-historical disaster”32 that makes use of Max Weber’s methodology of ideal types.33 Moreover, Honneth continues to champion the goals of first-generation theorists, including Adorno. In a recent brochure, the Institute commits itself to examining contradictory tendencies in Western society, tendencies that have led both to greater freedom (in new familial arrangements, for example, or in the legal recognition of the equality of women, and ethnic and racial minorities) and to lesser freedom owing to the deregulation of labour markets and the arms race.
Never conceived as an exclusively theoretical enterprise, the Institute has also contributed enormously to the development of empirical social research. In fact, Adorno’s own empirical work, as well as his many essays on empirical research methods, are exemplary in this regard. To be sure, projects such as The Authoritarian Personality came under critical fire, but this criticism by no means detracts from Adorno’s pioneering role. As Jay rightly insists, to dwell on the problems with the methodology and conclusions of The Authoritarian Personality would “miss the tremendous achievement of the work as a whole”. Jay also remarks that one astute reviewer described the eight volumes of Studies in Prejudice as “an epoch-making event in social science”. These studies, which included The Authoritarian Personality, unleashed an enormous flood of research.34 Moreover, the impact of this work on the social sciences was felt both in North America and Europe because Adorno brought back to Germany the research methodology that he helped to develop in the United States.
Adorno not only contributed to the development of the social sciences; his work on the culture industry had a significant impact on research in the field, initially influencing analysts such as Paul Lazarsfeld and Elihu Katz. Examining radio and the recording industry in the late 1930s, Adorno continued to study the mass media throughout his life, offering a highly critical account of the commodification of culture. In “Free Time”, written in the 1960s,35 he commented on the leisure activities of individuals in the West, offering a nuanced assessment of their reception of television. His assessment was based in part on an empirical study he conducted at the Institute in 1966 which showed that television viewers were more critical of what they watched than might otherwise have been expected. However, the importance of these studies of mass culture is largely overshadowed by the impact of Adorno’s theoretical work on writers as diverse as Guy Debord and Stuart Ewen. Here too Adorno pioneered the exploration of many problems now treated in media studies and communications departments in Western countries.
If disciplines such as sociology and media studies have felt the impact of both Adorno’s empirical and his theoretical work, it should also be noted that Adorno influenced the study of literature and music as well. Contemporary literary theorists, such as Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson, have certainly been drawn to his work. Indeed, Adorno’s many essays on literary topics are taught with some frequency in departments of literature.36 Still, Adorno was a far more prolific critic of modern music. His many essays and books on composers as diverse as Arnold Schönberg, Ludwig von Beethoven, Igor Stravinsky and Richard Wagner continue to interest critics and musicologists alike. Surprisingly, perhaps, given Adorno’s denunciation of many aspects of mass culture, Max Paddison points out that some of his aesthetic ideas have been taken up by writers who study rock music, including Michael Coyle, Jon Dolan, Allan Moore and Simon Frith.37
Given the breadth of Adorno’s impact, it is difficult to mention even briefly all the areas in which his influence has made itself felt. However, one thing remains to be said. Despite all the interpretive work that has been done on Adorno, Adorno scholarship is still very much in its infancy. No one can claim to have deciphered completely what Adorno described in Dialectic of Enlightenment as his message in a bottle. Indeed, Adorno remarks that, to ensure that it does not perish, his message about the hellishness of conditions here on earth is bequeathed, neither to the masses, nor to the impotent individual, but to an imaginary witness capable of turning his theoretical insights into emancipatory social practice (DE, C: 256; J: 213). Since this witness has not yet materialized, a definitive discussion of Adorno’s impact is woefully premature. But his work is certainly rich enough to warrant the prediction that it will continue to influence philosophy and the social sciences for generations to come.
1. See, for example, Against Epistemology (AE). See Ståle Finke’s essay in this volume (Chapter 5) for an extensive consideration of Adorno’s engagement with Husserl.
2. Jay, Dialectical Imagination, 70.
3. Simon Jarvis, “Adorno, Marx, Materialism”, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (2004), 83–4.
4. Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 67.
5. See Kant’s fourth proposition in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose”, Kant’s Political Writings (1971), 44; emphasis in the text: “The means which nature employs to bring about the development of innate capacities is that of antagonism within society, in so far as this antagonism becomes in the long run the cause of a law-governed social order.”
6. Adorno, “Individuum und Organisation”, Gesammelte Schriften 8 (1972), 456.
7. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies (1993), 27.
8. Ibid., 87–8.
9. Ibid., 8.
10. See Alison Stone’s discussion of Adorno’s logic in this volume (Chapter 3) for a more detailed discussion of the relationship between Adorno’s and Hegel’s dialectics.
11. Brian O’Connor was the first to point out that Adorno offers both a non-reductive and a non-dualistic account of the epistemological subject and its objects; see Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (2004). But this characterization of the relationship between subject and object can be extended to Adorno’s conception of the relationship between mind and matter, and the individual and society as well. More generally, it can also be applied to the relationship between nature and history.
12. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie zur Einleitung, vol. 2 (1974), 172.
13. Ibid., 173.
14. Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion (1991), 165.
15. Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (1971), 45.
16. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents (1975), 38.
17. Ibid., 34.
18. See Joel Whitebook’s Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory (1996), especially ch. 2, for an illuminating attempt to reconcile two of Freud’s most famous dictums: “where id was, there ego shall be” and “the ego is not master in its own house”.
19. Adorno, “Freudian Theory and the Pattern of Fascist Propaganda”, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (1978), 120.
20. Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology”, 87.
21. Ibid., 88, tr. mod.
22. Müller-Doohm, Adorno, 292.
23. See, for example, Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, David J. Levison & R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality (1950).
24. Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy (1996), xli.
25. Seyla Benhabib quotes this comment, made by Marx in an 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge, in Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (1986), 34. Adorno cites this letter himself in “Critique”: CM: 282.
26. See Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1959).
27. Habermas, “Morality, Society, and Ethics: An Interview with Torben Hviid Nielsen”, Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics (1993), 170.
28. Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (1987), 343: “Marx was right to assign an evolutionary primacy to the economy” in the West because “problems in this subsystem determine the path of development of the society as a whole”. Yet Habermas also claims that the capitalist economy gained primacy only when the lifeworld had been sufficiently rationalized.
29. Ibid., 391.
30. Habermas, “Individuation through Socialization: On George Herbert Mead’s Theory of Subjectivity”, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays (1992), 186.
31. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory”, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1972), 213.
32. Axel Honneth, “A Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life: A Sketch of Adorno’s Social Theory”, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 12 (1) (March 2005), 50.
33. Ibid., 53–4.
34. Jay, Dialectical Imagination, 250.
35. See Adorno, “Free Time”, CM: 167–75. For a far more detailed account of Adorno’s views about Western culture, readers should turn to Robert W. Witkin’s discussion of Adorno’s philosophy of culture in this volume (Chapter 10).
36. See, for example, Robert Kaufman, “Adorno’s Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics, Modernity”, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, 354–75.
37. Max Paddison, “Authenticity and Failure in Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music”, The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, 212–15.