Deborah Cook
Following the general historical overview of Theodor W. Adorno’s work offered in Part I, Part II focuses on its distinct philosophical dimensions. Contributors examine Adorno’s philosophy under traditional rubrics: logic, metaphysics, ontology, epistemology and aesthetics; moral, social and political philosophy, as well as the philosophy of culture and the philosophy of history. Their examination reveals that Adorno completely rethinks these traditional areas of philosophical enquiry in his relentless critique of damaged life under capitalism.
Alison Stone’s essay serves as an excellent introduction to Adorno’s decidedly non-traditional mode of thought. After describing Hegel’s transformation of Kant’s transcendental logic into a dialectical logic, Stone explains how Adorno turns Hegel’s dialectics into a negative dialectics. Adorno makes use of dialectics, not to trace the development of concepts, but to explore social phenomena such as myth and enlightenment, and more broadly still, to grasp the historical relationship between nature and culture. Although nature and culture have been entwined throughout human history, negative dialectics reveals that our historically conditioned ideas about nature do not exhaust it: nature remains stubbornly non-identical with respect to all our conceptions of it. Stone’s account of Adorno’s dialectically inflected non-identity thinking issues in an analysis of his employment of constellations of concepts to apprehend objects that are at one and the same time bound up with concepts and fundamentally heterogeneous with respect to them. Stone concludes that, while it does not accord with the traditional idea of logic, Adorno’s negative dialectics has a logic of its own that attempts to do justice to nature — including human beings in so far as they are part of the natural world — while pointing to the prospect of a future reconciliation of concepts and objects, culture and nature.
Espen Hammer begins his thoughtful essay by contrasting traditional metaphysics with Adorno’s conception of it. Adorno criticized the affirmative character of traditional metaphysics — its ideological legitimation of the existing world — when he argued that horrific events, such as the Holocaust, give the lie to the metaphysical claim that this world is, at bottom, morally good. For this very reason, however, Adorno wants to retain the idea of something that transcends this world. More surprisingly still, perhaps, Adorno contends that the metaphysical idea of transcendence can be retained only by adopting a materialist perspective, that is, by focusing on singular experiences of our fragmentary, transient world. Borrowing from Walter Benjamin as he develops his idea of metaphysical experience, Adorno thinks that such experience can offer a glimpse of transcendence only within immanence. Based on experiences of evil in this world, as well as on intimations of our own mortality, metaphysics as Adorno understands it may give rise to the idea of a condition in which human beings would eventually be reconciled with nature. Although he concedes that Adorno’s conception of metaphysical experience is vulnerable to criticism, Hammer further argues that the alternative to it would be tantamount to accepting the view that life today is utterly meaningless and hopeless.
Ståle Finke addresses the thorny issue of the tension between ontology and epistemology in Adorno’s thought. This issue is especially difficult because, for Adorno, “reality” is very much a function of the ways in which we think about it. Although he adopts a materialist position, Adorno certainly recognizes that nature (and the world of objects generally) is always also socially mediated. Focusing first on Adorno’s extensive critique of Edmund Husserl, Finke shows that, among other things, Adorno targets his idea of subjectivity as pure intentionality and his idealist conception of objects. Like the objective world of which it is undeniably a part, the subject too is historically conditioned: it is both natural and social and, as such, invariably entangled in the things it tries to apprehend. But Adorno also criticizes the failure of Kant and Hegel to respect the weightiness, or preponderance, of objects in thought and experience. Although they both tried to come to grips with the “non-identical”, Kant and Hegel ended by adopting idealist positions that wrongly subsume particular objects under universal concepts. At the end of his essay, Finke offers an interesting account of the role of mimesis in Adorno’s work. According to Finke, by endorsing mimesis, Adorno attempts to make good on Husserl’s famous dictum: to the things themselves.
Fabian Freyenhagen illuminates Adorno’s non-traditional, negative moral philosophy. Since he views the existing world as radically evil, Adorno does not think it possible to live life rightly today. Freyenhagen considers Adorno’s reasons for thinking that right living is currently impossible; he then reviews Adorno’s criticisms of moral philosophies that claim to be able to underwrite right living by providing moral prescriptions, or by grounding morality on principles for generating moral duties, as in Kant’s categorical imperative. Following a nuanced account of Adorno’s critique of Kant, Freyenhagen proceeds to argue that Adorno does offer some ideas about how wrong life might be lived. At times, Adorno outlines ethical ideals based on his critique of our radically evil world, but he also offers negative prescriptions for living life today. In addition, Adorno advances what he calls a new categorical imperative: to live life in such a way that Auschwitz never happens again. Freyenhagen contrasts this new categorical imperative with Kant’s, and ends with further discussion about the character of Adorno’s negative and minimalist moral philosophy, paying particular attention to recent secondary literature with its conflicting accounts of the problem of normativity in Adorno’s work.
As Pauline Johnson remarks, Adorno seems irredeemably pessimistic about our current social predicament. In what Adorno calls the totally administered world of monopoly (or “late”) capitalism, society is fundamentally irrational because (among other things) it turns individuals into commensurable units of value that are traded as commodities on the “free” market, while exacerbating antagonisms between classes. Highlighting the concept of alienation in her discussion of Adorno’s social philosophy, Johnson explores his concerns about society’s intervention into virtually all aspects of human life, its manipulation and control of individuals, and its dehumanizing and levelling effects. If it was once a haven in this heartless world, the family no longer provides a sanctuary; the culture industry, which bolsters society’s economic and administrative functions, now usurps the family’s role as the primary agent of socialization. Searching amid the rubble of the administered world for signs of hope that wrong life might one day be lived rightly, Johnson thinks they may be found in the ambiguous needs that are expressed in the intimate sphere of human life. In an equally thought-provoking turn, she shows that a feminist politics which attempts to uncover the latent emancipatory potential in existing social institutions can both learn from Adorno’s analysis and supplement it with its critical and utopian energies.
Marianne Tettlebaum opens her essay on Adorno’s political philosophy by describing his personal experience of an early-morning house raid by the Gestapo. For Adorno, the relationship between the individual and the state continues to be extremely problematic. Individuals, who think of themselves as independent and autonomous, are now so abjectly dependent on the state and the economy for their survival that they tend to efface themselves as individuals. Moreover, prospects for reversing their subordination to state power have faded with the containment of revolutionary forces. And our nominal, or merely “formal”, democracies only worsen an already bad situation with their authoritarian tendencies, propaganda and suppression of criticism. As a result, the conditions that led to Auschwitz may well recur. Although Adorno’s call for critical reflection on our totally administered world — for theory rather than practice — has been condemned, Tettlebaum defends Adorno, explaining why he thought that reflection is the harbinger of a truly free and democratic society. Criticizing traditional ideas about freedom — Kant’s in particular —for their complicity in perpetuating unfreedom, Adorno contends (as Freyenhagen also notes) that only the essentially negative freedom of resistance to existing conditions is possible today. Indeed, Tettlebaum ends by discussing the role that education may play in preparing individuals to think critically about the world around them, thereby fostering political maturity.
Adorno is also well known for championing the role of art in developing a critical consciousness of society. At the same time, however, as Ross Wilson insightfully observes, Adorno problematizes the traditional categories of art and aesthetics when he questions whether aesthetics can stand alone as an independent area of philosophical enquiry, and challenges the category of art itself. Beginning with a historical gloss on Adorno’s aesthetic theory, Wilson describes his attempt to move beyond both Kant’s subjective aesthetics and Hegel’s objective aesthetics by showing that the subject is inextricably entwined with the object, or artwork. Given this entwinement, philosophers may play an important role in the interpretation of art as well. Wilson also addresses the contentious issue of socially critical tendencies in artworks. Rejecting Bertolt Brecht’s and Jean-Paul Sartre’s contention that art should serve explicitly political ends, Adorno believes that art is already indirectly critical of our contemporary predicament owing to its very existence as art, and to its refusal to succumb to the pressures of the capitalist marketplace. To be sure, art has an ideological dimension in so far as it legitimates existing conditions. But art also has a truth content when it points to conditions that transcend damaged life, to the prospect of a world that is no longer sullied by the antagonisms that rend society today.
Wilson’s essay is complemented by Robert W. Witkin’s evocative account of Adorno’s philosophy of culture. Contrasting pseudo-culture to a more emancipatory culture that fosters the spiritual dimension of human life, Witkin reveals that Adorno based this distinction on Georg Simmel’s views about objective culture and subjective culture. While all culture is entangled in material conditions, pseudo-culture differs from a culture that serves spiritual needs because it reinforces adaptation and conformity to these conditions by targeting regressive social and psychological tendencies in individuals. Moreover, because pseudo-culture does not develop dialectically from its elemental parts, it lacks a historical dimension that would nurture the human spirit. After remarking on Adorno’s adoption of Max Weber’s thesis that culture has succumbed to the disenchantment of the modern world, Witkin describes pseudo-culture as a fetishized, commodified culture that fails to participate in living relationships. He illustrates these ideas concretely by examining Adorno’s critique of an astrology column in The Los Angeles Times, and by contrasting popular music, which is geared to producing effects that make it marketable, with serious music. Finally, Witkin situates Adorno’s work in the context of other critiques of contemporary culture, while observing that his ideas about culture are themselves caught up in a historical dynamic which ceaselessly recasts and renews them.
Brian O’Connor examines Adorno’s challenge to Hegel’s idea of a progressive, universal history. Rather than simply rejecting this conception and asserting that history is discontinuous, Adorno tries to bring both ideas of history together, while holding them in dialectical tension, when he claims that history is characterized by constant disruptions. Following an engaging discussion of some of the problems with Adorno’s view of history, O’Connor goes on to show that Adorno also fashions an idea of progress. As negative as his idea of freedom, progress would consist in preventing or avoiding catastrophe by disrupting the domination of nature that has characterized much of human history. Associated with this idea of progress is Adorno’s idea of natural history, which sees human history as natural because it has been driven by survival instincts, and nature as historical to the extent that it is always also mediated by human beings. Although society continues to veer towards totalitarianism as it intervenes, with increasing efficiency, into every aspect of life in its ceaseless attempts to dominate nature, Adorno did not think that its historical trajectory was written in stone. As O’Connor argues, the direction of history can be changed by acting collectively to reconcile history and nature in such a way that the dualism of nature and history is finally overcome without summarily reducing one to the other.
Readers will discover that a single thread connects all the essays in this volume: Adorno engages with traditional philosophy — while challenging many of its central claims — to find ways to stem or reverse the damage done to life under late capitalism. In this respect, the contributors to this volume reveal that Adorno renews the philosophical tradition even as he radically contests and revises many of its premisses. Indeed, few philosophers have been as uncompromisingly critical as Adorno was. Since thought itself (including philosophical thought) is shaped and conditioned by an increasingly irrational society, Adorno develops a new mode of thinking to counter historical tendencies that appear to be leading rapidly to a dead end, in more than just a metaphorical sense. Non-identity thinking; metaphysical experiences of transcendence which foreshadow new forms of intimacy, maturity and social solidarity; unwavering resistance to forces of integration and domination; the resolute critique of damaged life — not just in philosophy and social theory, but in art and culture as well; the disruption of prevailing societal tendencies — all these represent prospects for averting catastrophe.