Alison Stone
Adorno and logic might seem to be a combination as unpromising as Nietzsche and democracy, or Sartre and Hinduism. Adorno has no logic in the sense of a theory of valid forms of argument and inference. He is also deeply hostile to any attempt to formalize thinking because, he believes, formal thinking disguises the complexities and ambiguities inherent in any subject-matter, making it impossible to reflect on them (CM: 245–6).1 To encourage genuinely reflective thought, Adorno writes in a fragmentary and allusive style far removed from the logically formalized style of much twentieth-century analytic philosophy.
Yet Adorno does engage with an alternative tradition in logic which Kant and Hegel developed. Kant’s transcendental logic studies the basic concepts — such as reality and causality — by which (Kant thinks) we structure our experience. Hegel transformed this transcendental logic into dialectical logic. Hegel’s logic deeply influenced Adorno’s approach to the study of socio-historical phenomena, especially his account of how enlightenment turns into its opposite, myth. But Adorno also criticizes Hegel, transforming his dialectical logic into a negative dialectic. In its most general form, negative dialectics applies to relations between concepts and objects, or between what Adorno calls “identity thinking” and the “non-identical”.
To understand Adorno’s thinking about logic in this Kantian—Hegelian sense, we need to examine a cluster of concepts — those of negative dialectics, of concept and object, of identity and the non-identical — as well as Adorno’s concept of constellations which forms part of his account of negative dialectics. To make sense of these concepts, we must first reconstruct Kant’s and Hegel’s conceptions of logic.
In Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguishes between general and transcendental logic. General logic sets out the “rules of thought”, without “regard to . . . the objects to which the understanding may be directed”.2 That is, general logic is purely formal and describes rules for how one must think — regardless of what one is thinking about — if one’s thinking is to be valid. Thus general logic is what we ordinarily mean by logic.
By contrast, transcendental logic has meaning only within the framework of Kant’s transcendental idealism, or his view that we cannot know objects as they are in themselves, but only as they appear to us when subjected to the forms of representation that we necessarily bring to experience. These forms are (1) forms of “pure intuition” (space and time) by which we structure our sensory impressions, and (2) concepts of understanding by which we organize the disparate materials of sensation into structured objects that interrelate in orderly ways.3
For Kant, forms of enquiry are transcendental if they investigate the conceptual and intuitive conditions that we necessarily bring to experience. Transcendental logic tries to identify which concepts structure any thinking at all about objects (or any thinking in which we order the materials of sensation).4 These concepts are the “pure concepts of the understanding”, or the “categories”. They are “pure” because they are not derived from experience. Indeed, we need to employ these concepts to have any experience of objects at all.
So which concepts necessarily structure experience? For Kant, all concepts function to unify manifold impressions given in sensation; concepts are “functions of unity”.5 But judgements (such as “the rose is red”) also unify: they unite a subject (“rose”) with a predicate (“red”). Different kinds of judgement unite subjects and predicates in different ways: “the rose is red” unites them by affirming that the predicate belongs to the subject, while “the rose is not red” unites its terms by affirming that the predicate is “opposed to” the subject.6 In Aristotle’s logic — which was canonical in Kant’s day — there are twelve kinds of judgement: twelve different ways of uniting subjects with predicates. Kant claims that this indicates what the categories are.
Since judgements can unite subjects and predicates in twelve ways, and concepts also unify sensory materials, there must be twelve pure concepts, each corresponding to one kind of judgement. For instance, the category “reality” corresponds to affirmative judgements such as “the rose is red”, while the category “negation” corresponds to negative judgements such as “the rose is not red”. Other categories include unity and plurality, causality, necessity and impossibility.
Kant takes himself to have worked out the categories systematically, from a sound principle.7 But Hegel criticizes Kant for relying unquestioningly on Aristotelian logic. He holds that our basic categories must “be exhibited in their necessity, and . . . deduced”.8 Thus, Hegel accepts Kant’s view that we must actively structure our experience in terms of certain basic categories. But philosophers must work out what these categories are by deducing them.
What does this deduction involve? First, we must show that a particular category is necessary for any thought. Then we show that this category has limitations such that an additional category is needed to provide the only possible — or, at least, the best available — corrective to those limitations. But this new category also proves limited, such that yet another category is required — and so on until we have deduced a complete chain of categories. Hegel sets out this chain of categories, or “thought-determinations”, in his logic.
Unlike Kant, Hegel also thinks that logical categories are both forms of thought that organize our experience of objects, and basic structures or principles that organize things as they exist mind-independently. For example, causality is not just a category in terms of which we must think, but a basic principle that organizes all mind-independent things into causal relations.9 Indeed, it is because these basic principles organize all things that they constrain the shape of human thought and experience. Thus categories are not merely subjective forms of thought but “the truth, objectivity, and actual being of . . . things themselves. [They] resemble the platonic ideas . . . which exist in individual things as substantial genera”.10
Categories always follow one another according to higher-level logical structure, or a three-stage dialectical process.11 The three stages are: abstraction or understanding — where we begin with a certain category; dialectic — where this category generates or turns into its opposite; and the speculative stage — which reconciles the first two categories.
For instance, Hegel’s logic begins with the simplest category —being — then shows how being turns into nothingness because the category of being is so simple that being is entirely indeterminate and featureless.12 Then the two categories are reconciled in this way: since both are equally featureless, nothingness does not really differ in content from being. In that sense, nothingness turns back into being.13 But being and nothingness remain distinct because they prove to be the same from opposite starting-points: being goes from being to nothingness while nothingness goes from nothingness to being. It follows that being and nothingness are (1) distinct, but (2) interdependent, since each exists only inasmuch as the other constantly turns into it. Hegel concludes that this makes them aspects of a third category, becoming.14
This dialectical process regulates both the series of concepts with which we think and the metaphysical principles that govern reality. Thus Hegel transforms Kant’s logic into a dialectical logic by (1) trying to derive the categories according to this three-stage dialectical structure and (2) interpreting the categories as not merely subjective but also metaphysical principles. We may now see how Adorno draws on and criticizes Hegel’s logic.
Adorno often applies Hegel’s dialectical method to social phenomena. A notable example appears in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which claims that “enlightenment reverts to mythology” (DE, C: xvi; J: xviii). Here the enlightenment is subject to a dialectic whereby it turns into its opposite, myth.
By “enlightenment”, Simon Jarvis notes, Adorno and Horkheimer do not mean the eighteenth-century intellectual movement, but rather a gradual process that characterizes the whole course of human history, a process of “demythologizing, secularizing or disenchanting . . . mythical, religious, or magical representation[s] of the world”.15 For Adorno, humanity repeatedly distances itself from previous systems of thought by criticizing them for being merely mythical. This progression is fuelled by humanity’s desire to gain increased practical control over nature. Human beings have hoped that, by freeing themselves from mythical views of nature, and gaining greater insight into the real workings of nature, they could enhance their ability to intervene into these natural processes for their own benefit. The climax of this process has been the rise of modern science, which enables humanity to exercise unprecedented control over nature by representing nature as made up purely of extensive magnitudes that are understood using mathematics (DE, C: 24–5; J: 18–19).
Yet, the more human beings try to become enlightened by distancing their thought from myth, the more they fall back into mythic modes of thinking. This happens in many ways. For example, enlightenment thinkers try to avoid appealing to mythic beliefs — in gods, supernatural forces etc. — by sticking to the facts. These include the facts of how society is currently organized and the chain of historical events that led to society being organized in this way. But enlightenment thinkers cannot ask whether history could have been different, as this is not a simple factual matter. Their inability to ask whether things might have turned out differently conduces to an unthinking acceptance that current social arrangements are inevitable, a “fate” that no one can escape. And fatalism of this kind is a typically mythical form of belief.16
Underlying this dialectic whereby enlightenment reverts to myth is a dialectic whereby enlightenment reverts to nature. Enlightenment distances us from nature by positioning us as masters over — not parts of — nature and by enhancing our ability to use abstract concepts (DE, C: 13; J: 9). Nonetheless, we human beings remain partially natural since we each have an “inner nature” consisting of bodily impulses (DE, C: 39; J: 31). So part of the enlightenment goal is to make us masters of our own inner nature: to enable us to exercise self-control, to resist our own impulses, thereby freeing ourselves for dispassionate conceptual thought.
Human beings have sought to control nature in the hope that this control will enhance their ability to preserve themselves. The whole enlightenment effort to distance human beings from nature is fuelled by a natural desire for self-preservation. Thus, Adorno writes, “nature is reflected and persists” in thinking in so far as the latter serves as a “mechanism of compulsion”, i.e. of domination (DE, C: 39; J: 31). The more earnestly people pursue the enlightenment project, and try to distance themselves from nature, the more they submit to their natural impulses. Hence “human history, the history of the progressive mastery of nature, continues the unconscious history of nature” (ND: 355).
We see, then, both the dialectic whereby enlightenment inverts into myth just when it tries to separate itself from myth, and the dialectic whereby enlightened humanity submits to nature just when it tries to stand above nature. Likewise, for Hegel, being turned into nothingness just when it assumed the form of a distinct category. Adorno thinks that many other social phenomena are subject to a similar dialectic. Minima Moralia gives many examples: intellectuals who withdraw from society because they are critical of its calculating and commercial nature end up becoming sanctimonious and just as hard-hearted as those who are calculating (MM: 26). What counts today as healthy and well adjusted rests on a pathological level of repression, in contrast to which sick or eccentric people are actually “healing cells”. “Indiscriminate kindness to all [actually expresses] indifference and remoteness to each” (MM: 73; see also 62–3).
Adorno also seems to follow Hegel in hinting that the solution to the dialectic of enlightenment is a reconciliation between enlightenment and myth and, above all, between culture and nature. This latter reconciliation could take the form of a “remembrance of nature in the subject” (DE, C: 40; J: 32). If we could acknowledge, or “remember”, that our pursuit of enlightenment is driven by instincts, then we could begin to free ourselves from subjection to them. Recognizing that these impulses have a hold over us, we could then ask whether we think it right to pursue them or whether other goals are more desirable. In other words, we could deliberate about what values to adopt, thereby gaining some independence from impulses.
Yet the paradox is that we can truly free ourselves from our instincts only by acknowledging that our thinking depends on them in the first place, and by admitting that the enlightenment project has expressed and grown out of them. But perhaps Adorno is simply following Hegel’s idea that two opposed categories are reconciled by proving to be distinct but interdependent. By acknowledging that our thinking is not separate from but depends on — grows out of — nature, we truly distinguish ourselves from nature for the first time, whereas if we insist that our thinking is separate from nature, it remains driven by the impulses whose influence we are refusing to recognize.
However, Adorno’s faithfulness to Hegel should not be overstated. A first obvious difference is that Adorno is studying dialectical processes within the historical and social world, not within basic categories. So when he suggests solutions to these dialectical processes, such as the reconciliation of nature and culture, he sees these solutions only as possibilities that humanity might — but may well never — realize in practice.
There are two further differences between these models of reconciliation. In Hegel, reconciliation occurs whenever a second category proves to be essentially the same as the first; its difference from the first is relatively superficial (e.g. being and nothingness). Culture and nature become reconciled when modern scientific and philosophical modes of enquiry establish nature as essentially rational.17 Hegel therefore implies that when human beings use reason to control and transform natural things, they do no wrong but are actually helping nature to realize its inner rational essence.18
Adorno would object that Hegel disguises the fact that domination over nature does wrong nature. So his reconciliation of nature and culture takes a different form. We must acknowledge that our thinking depends on and grows out of impulses that are not wholly rational and cannot be understood exhaustively in rational terms. Even if nature and instincts can be partly understood through reason, they always have an additional non-rational aspect that resists understanding. Thus, by recognizing that our thinking depends on instinct, we see that thinking depends on a nature that differs irreducibly from rational thought (and which, therefore, is damaged when it is moulded in line with human reasoning).
A final difference between Hegel and Adorno is that Hegel thinks two items are reconciled when they prove to be interdependent. Just as being and nothingness depend on one another, reason depends on the nature out of which it grows while nature depends on the rational principles that structure it. For his part, however, Adorno stresses that culture, rationality and enlightenment depend on nature to a greater extent than nature depends on reason. He encapsulates this point by speaking of the “primacy [Vorrang] of the object” (i.e. nature) over thinking (ND: 192): any thinking, reasoning subject is always a particular object (a particular body, brain and set of impulses), but not all objects are reasoning subjects. Although objects have an intelligible structure, and in that respect depend on reason, they also have a non-rational element and so do not wholly depend on reason. By contrast, reasoning activity does wholly depend on objects.
These three points show how Adorno transforms Hegel’s dialectics into a “negative” dialectics. Hegel’s dialectics is positive because it reconciles two opposed items by showing that the second is essentially the same as the first (e.g. nature is rational, like culture) and that the first and second items depend on one another. Adorno’s dialectics is negative because: (1) it suggests only possible — not actual — forms of reconciliation; and because reconciliation occurs when a first thing (e.g. culture) that tries to separate itself from and to dominate something else (e.g. nature) acknowledges both (2) that the other thing is irreducibly different from it,19 and (3) that it depends on that other thing to a greater degree than the other depends on it.
Why does Adorno say that this dialectics is negative whereas Hegel’s is positive? He does so because (from (2) above), two items are reconciled when they remain, and are acknowledged to remain, different from one another — to be not the same as, but the negation of, one another. “Dialectics” as Adorno practises it, “is the consistent sense of non-identity” (ND: 5). In its most general form, his negative dialectics obtains between concepts and objects. So, to better understand negative dialectics, we need to look at his ideas about relations between concepts and objects.
Concepts are such that they each apply to many different things: for example, the concept “dog” applies to all those things that are dogs. Thus, each concept grasps the things to which it applies as instances of a universal. If I conceive something as a dog, then I understand it as an instance of the universal kind “dog”. Adorno therefore says that conceptual thinking is both (1) classificatory thinking (which says “what [kind] something falls under, what it exemplifies” (ND: 149)) and (2) identity thinking. Why “identity” thinking?
When I conceptualize something as an instance of a kind, I see it as identical to all other instances of the same kind. This means that conceptual thinking gives me no knowledge about what is unique in a thing, for example, about what is special about this dog as distinct from all other dogs. Having no access to what is unique, conceptual thinking sees it only as an instance of a kind. In that sense, one “identifies” things with the universal kinds under which one takes them to fall.
However, it is possible in principle to recognize that things are never simply identical to these kinds (or to the other instances of a given kind) but always have a unique side as well. Adorno does not assert that things are wholly unique. He believes that things can be brought under concepts. But falling under concepts is not all there is to things. Each thing is also unique; this aspect of things is the “non-identical” element in them – that element by virtue of which things are identical neither to the kinds they embody nor to other instances of those kinds.20
Adorno criticizes identity thinking for disguising the fact that things have a unique side, and — this is an ethical objection — for being linked to domination. This link itself has at least two aspects. First, when we conceptualize things, we dominate them in thought. Because conceptual thinking suggests that things are merely instances of universal kinds, and because we can understand universal kinds using concepts, conceptual thinking suggests that things are reducible to what we can understand of them. Conceptual thinking portrays things as lying wholly within the reach of our intellects.
Secondly, the whole purpose of conceptual thinking is to enable us practically to dominate the things that we have conceptually mastered. We began to conceptualize things — and have sought to do so ever more accurately and ever less mythically — so that we can grasp how things work and can intervene in their workings in ways that promote human self-preservation. So “any conceptual thought . . . is a kind of instrument and to that extent a form of mastery”.21 Even seemingly disinterested forms of enquiry such as mathematics belong within the project of science, which inherently aims to dominate nature.
Adorno holds, then, that things always have a non-identical element in addition to their universal side. But what is this non-identical element? Medieval philosophers held that what makes things unique is their haeccitas, or “thisness” — a property that makes each of them this individual thing that it is. The notion of haeccitas, though, seems not to solve, but only to mark the site of, the problem of what makes each thing this thing that it is. An alternative approach to uniqueness — adopted by Hegel in his Encyclopedia Logic — states that a thing’s uniqueness consists in its distinctive way of instantiating a universal kind. A thing cannot instantiate a universal unless it does so in some particular way, and this way of instantiating a universal is what makes each thing a “singular individual”. Here, how a thing instantiates a universal cannot be captured by mere reference to that universal.22
However, Adorno does not adopt Hegel’s view: for he insists that he is not giving us a general concept, or definition, of non-identity or singular individuality (ND: 136). To give a concept of singularity would be to treat singularity itself as a universal kind that is instantiated by all things in so far as they have a singular side. To this Adorno objects that “as soon as we reflect upon the single . . . individual as an individual, in the form of a universal concept — as soon as we cease to mean only the present existence of this particular person [or thing] — we have already turned it into a universal” (CM: 251). But if the individual in its singularity is treated as an instance of the universal kind “singular individuality”, then we forget that the singular side of things is, precisely, what makes them more than mere embodiments of universals (even of the universal kind “singular individuality”).
Since Adorno’s references to the non-identical in things do not provide, or rely on, any general definition of non-identity or singular individuality, what status do these references have? Perhaps he believes that we can gain immediate access to a thing in its uniqueness by approaching it solely through our senses. But Adorno is well aware that this view — that we can “grasp what constitutes the unique essence of the thing as an individual only if [we do] not use concepts in knowing that individual”23 — was forcefully criticized by Hegel, who calls this view “sense-certainty” in his Phenomenology of Spirit.
Against sense-certainty, Hegel argues that to know something we must be able to pick it out.24 At the very least, we must refer to a thing as “this”, or as what is “here and now”, or as “what I mean”. Since even “this”, “here”, “now” and “I” are universal concepts that can refer to any number of things or people, one is still using concepts to try to know things. But these concepts cannot pick out the particular thing that I claim to know. Hegel concludes that knowledge of particular individual things cannot be obtained without concepts, but that we need finer-grained concepts than merely “this”, “here”, etc.
Adorno agrees with Hegel that objects cannot be known “immediately” (i.e. through the senses alone); we cannot apprehend objects without “mediating” them through concepts (ND: 186). This seems to leave Adorno in a dilemma. He wants us to recognize that things have a non-identical element without conceptualizing that element in universal terms, yet he denies that we can know anything without conceptualizing it. To solve this dilemma, Adorno sees the concept of the non-identical as a limit-concept. This concept does not give us any positive knowledge about things. It simply indicates the place where conceptual understanding encounters limits, or a side of things that concepts do not cover. But the concept of the non-identical also indicates that we cannot know anything about this side of things just because our concepts cannot cover it. Thus, it is possible, using concepts, to recognize that conceptual understanding is limited, and specifically that concepts are not adequate to the non-identical element in things.
By recognizing the limits of conceptual thought, we could bring about a reconciliation between concepts and objects. This would involve: (1) the recognition (using concepts) that concepts depend on objects to a greater extent than objects depend on concepts (CM: 249–50). Objects depend on concepts because they always have a conceptually intelligible form. But objects also remain independent of concepts in respect of their non-identical side. In contrast, concepts depend entirely on objects: they arise only in so far as there are already objects that we seek to understand, and they also depend on objects of a particular kind — human brains and bodies. (2) Reconciliation would also involve the recognition (specifically using the limit-concept of the non-identical) that objects are never reducible to our concepts of them because objects always retain a non-identical element. (Indeed, it is because of this non-identical element that objects only ever depend on concepts partially and not to the same extent as concepts depend on objects.)
If concept and object were reconciled in this way, then their relation would have assumed a negatively dialectical form. The relation is dialectical in that the formerly antagonistic relation of concepts to objects would have been overcome (an antagonism manifested in our efforts to dominate and wholly understand things using concepts). It is negatively, rather than positively, dialectical because in the reconciled state objects would remain, and be acknowledged to remain, irreducibly different from — not the same as — concepts. So: “Reconciliation would release the nonidentical, . . . [and would] be the remembrance of the many [i.e. of items that are different from one another] as no longer inimical” (ND: 6).
However, there are obstacles to recognizing the limits of conceptual thought and bringing about a reconciliation. Whenever we recognize that a concept is limited, we shall inevitably try to produce a new, improved, concept to overcome this limit. This is where Adorno introduces the concept of constellations.
For Adorno, once we recognize that our concepts are limited, we shall try to produce improved concepts to overcome those limits. This is inevitable because concepts enable us to control things practically by giving us accurate knowledge about them and about how they work. Thus, whenever a particular concept proves to give us incomplete knowledge about things — saying only “what something falls under . . . and what, accordingly, it is not itself” (ND: 53) — we shall try to produce a better concept that will give us fuller knowledge about things and enable us to dominate them better. Since this concept will prove limited in turn (as all concepts are inherently limited), we shall produce yet another concept, itself limited as well — and eventually we shall end up with a large range of concepts.
Adorno’s claim that we inevitably strive to extend our concepts when they prove limited is indebted, again, to Hegel. In his Phenomenology, Hegel argues that when the concepts “this”, “here” etc. prove to give us no knowledge of particular things, we must turn to richer concepts (e.g. “dog”, “desk”) that can do so. Moreover, Hegel argues that to grasp a thing as particular we must conceptualize it using a range of these relatively rich concepts. To pick out a particular dog, I must classify it not merely as a dog but also as light brown, friendly, excitable, middle-aged etc. Since no one thing has exactly the same range of characteristics as any other, we can grasp a thing in its uniqueness by using a range of concepts to specify the complete set of characteristics unique to that thing.
Adorno’s idea of constellations may sound similar to Hegel’s idea that we can grasp the uniqueness of a thing by using a range of concepts: Adorno suggests that the range of concepts that are gathered around a thing “illuminates” or gives insight into that thing. “Setting [concepts] in constellation . . . illuminates what is specific to the thing, to which the classificatory procedure is indifferent” (ND: 162). And since he expands on this point with the metaphor of unlocking something by using a combination of numbers rather than one single number (ibid.: 163), this suggests that he endorses Hegel’s view.
But Adorno’s constellations are unlike Hegel’s ranges of concepts for two reasons. First, Hegel thinks that a range of concepts enables us to know an object qua singular because an object’s singularity consists in its embodiment of a unique range of universals. But, again, because Adorno refuses to define singularity, he cannot accept Hegel’s definition that the uniqueness of things consists in their embodying distinctive ranges of universals. Secondly, Hegel’s definition implies that objects can be exhaustively understood if we use a rich enough palette of concepts. But Adorno insists that there are inherent, inescapable limits to conceptual understanding. He speaks of the “unavoidable insufficiency” of “thought” (ND: 5): for him all thought is unavoidably limited on account of being conceptual.
Yet the idea that constellations of concepts can illuminate a thing qua unique suggests that only single concepts are inherently limited, but that groups of concepts are not, or not necessarily. To be consistent, Adorno must admit that constellations too can only ever give us partial, non-exhaustive, insight into things qua unique. The problem then becomes how constellations can illuminate the non-identical element in things while illuminating it only partially. Introducing a second sense of “constellation”, Adorno suggests that each object is itself a constellation of different past relations with other objects, all of which have shaped it.25 On this account, an object is a constellation of historical processes, and a constellation of concepts is a range of concepts, each of which grasps one of the various historical relations that has left its mark on the object. Taken together, these concepts “gather around” the unique history of the object where this history makes the object the unique thing that it is.
In contrast to Hegel’s ranges of concepts, Adorno’s constellations capture the particular historical relations that have shaped an object, rather than whatever universal kinds the object may embody. And a constellation of concepts can only ever capture some of these relations. This is because the history of the relations and influences that affect an object continues for at least as long as that object exists. These ongoing relations and influences do not merely add to an object’s history; they also make it possible to see further aspects of its past history, not previously appreciable. So no constellation of concepts can anticipate all the future influences and relations that will mark an object; and no constellation can grasp all the relations that have previously affected the object because many of these cannot be recognized in advance of the further unfolding of the object’s history. Constellations, then, can never completely understand their objects.
When we construct constellations, we assume that objects are historically produced, and we use concepts to assemble narratives about aspects of these histories. This approach applies both to understanding human-made cultural and social artefacts, and to understanding natural things, in so far as these are all products of cosmic, geological, chemical, evolutionary and other kinds of processes. An example of this approach to an object (a cultural object in this case) is Hannah Arendt’s “historical account of the ‘elements’ which ‘crystallized’ into totalitarianism”.26 Arendt sees totalitarianism as a constellation of elements which include Western imperialism and the “collapse of Western moral standards”, modern anti-Semitism, and economic, industrial and social changes that left people in a rootless, alienated, condition.27 Arendt’s account of totalitarianism gathers together a plurality of concepts; each grasps one of these various elements (only some, not all, of the factors shaping totalitarianism).
There are at least two potential objections to Adorno’s second account of constellations. First, it presupposes a definition of singularity — namely that an object’s singularity consists in the total set of historical interactions that has marked it. Even so, this definition implies that no object can ever be exhaustively understood, because the history of each object is constantly ongoing. But this brings us to the second objection: it seems that constellations can never exhaustively grasp an object because of the nature of objects, specifically the fact that their histories — which make them the particular objects they are — are unfinished, ever ongoing. Concepts are incomplete because their objects are incomplete, embroiled in processes such that many aspects of their past histories are simply not available to be grasped.
Thus, Adorno’s second idea of constellations is in some tension with both his reluctance to define singularity and his tendency to stress that concepts are limited in regard to objects (rather than stressing that concepts are limited because objects are incomplete). Despite these tensions, the second idea of constellations is promising. It opens up the prospect that constellations may reveal something about the singularity of objects without relying on the false assumption that concepts can exhaust objects.
This chapter has introduced two important aspects of Adorno’s thinking about dialectical logic. On the one hand, Adorno describes the dialectical process whereby enlightenment and culture revert to their opposites, myth and nature, just when they try to separate themselves from myth and nature. On the other hand, he offers a model of how concepts and objects could be reconciled and enter into a negatively dialectical relationship which acknowledges that concepts depend on objects that differ irreducibly from concepts.
Moreover, enlightenment and culture become subject to this dialectic because their reversion to their opposites manifests the relationship in which they actually stand to myth and nature. They may deny their dependence upon myth and nature, but since that dependence actually exists it must manifest itself, and it will do so all the more in proportion as it is denied. Just as Freud thought repressed sexual desires must manifest themselves in the form of pathologies such as hysteria, Adorno thinks the asymmetrical relationship between concepts and objects, enlightenment and myth, culture and nature must manifest itself. It can do either benignly —when acknowledged — or destructively, when denied.
This reveals something else. Enlightenment and culture — and, more generally, concepts — stand to myth and nature — more generally, to objects — in a negatively dialectical relationship whereby the former depend asymmetrically upon the latter. Previously I suggested that concepts and objects would enter into a negatively dialectical relationship only if they were reconciled. But in fact, if concepts and objects were reconciled, we would be acknowledging the negatively dialectical relationship in which concepts and objects already stand to one another. This is a relationship whereby concepts depend on, but can never exhaustively understand, objects — a relationship that has been denied with the disastrous consequence that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant” (DE, C: 3; J: 1).
From this we see that Adorno’s thinking about dialectics forms a coherent whole which revolves around his conception of the negative dialectics of concept and object. So, while he has no logic in the formal sense, near the centre of his thought are reflections on a range of topics: the concept/object relation, the limits of conceptual thinking, and the nature of dialectics. These topics do belong under the heading of logic in the expanded sense that Adorno inherits from Kant and Hegel. Adorno and logic may be an unlikely combination, but it is a surprisingly fruitful one.28
1. In places I have modified quotations from translations of Adorno’s works.
2. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1929), 93.
3. This position is idealist in the sense that it claims that we can know things only as we represent or form “ideas” about them, and not as they are in themselves.
4. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 95–6.
5. Ibid., 105.
6. Ibid., 108.
7. Ibid., 114.
8. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic (1991), 84. Ståle Finke also offers an account of Hegel’s logic in this volume (Chapter 5).
9. Ibid., 227–30.
10. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, vol. 1 (1970), 200. One might object that Kant does see the categories as objective both in the sense that they are necessary for any thinking whatever and that they structure objects as we experience them. But Hegel argues that this makes objectivity depend on something merely subjective. See also Encyclopedia Logic, 81–6.
11. Ibid., 125–33.
12. Ibid., 136–9.
13. Ibid., 139.
14. Ibid., 141.
15. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (1998), 24.
16. Here I am expanding on an argument made in Jarvis, Adorno, 25–6. See also DE, C: 27; J: 20–1.
17. See my Petrified Intelligence: Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy (2004), chapter 3.
18. See John Passmore, “Attitudes to Nature”, Environmental Ethics (1995), 135.
19. Adorno and Horkheimer do say that “myth is already enlightenment” (DE, C: xvi; J: xviii). Mythic thought already tries to understand nature with a view to controlling it, albeit in defective ways (e.g. by seeing nature as peopled by gods whose moods can be influenced through rituals and sacrifices). But if Adorno seems to follow Hegel when he claims that enlightenment need not — and cannot — separate itself from myth, he also believes that mythic thought is in part magical thought, and that magical thought draws on “mimesis” (DE, C: 9–11; J: 6–7). Mimesis is a non-rational, instinctual behaviour in which one imitates another organism or object (e.g. trying to harm someone by harming a doll that resembles him). This mimetic element is entirely non-rational, and because myth always has this non-rational aspect, it also remains irreducibly distinct from enlightenment rationality.
20. Indeed, Adorno objects to mass production on the grounds that it erases the singularity that is, or should be, proper to things.
21. J. Gordon Finlayson, “Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable”, Journal of European Philosophy 10 (1) (2002), 4, emphasis added.
22. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 240–41.
23. Robert Stern, Hegel and the Phenomenology of Spirit (2002), 45.
24. Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989), 119.
25. On the difference between these two conceptions of constellations, see Michael Rosen, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (1982), 167–8. Adorno derives this second account of constellations from Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1977).
26. Quoted by Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (1994), 64. Like Adorno, Arendt derived this understanding of constellations from Benjamin.
27. Ibid., 65.
28. I am grateful to Fabian Freyenhagen for his helpful comments on an earlier draft.