Margherita Tonon
Both Theodor W. Adorno and Hans-Georg Gadamer, from within their respective philosophical traditions, acknowledge Hegel as an essential reference point for their original philosophies. In particular, Hegel’s notion of dialectics is of crucial importance for the development of both Adorno’s and Gadamer’s influential philosophical method. Yet this is not simply a passive reception of Hegelian teaching, but rather a transformation of the central tenet of its philosophy, that is, dialectics. The present contribution carries out an analysis of the manner in which dialectics is reappropriated and transformed by the two philosophers, highlighting the surprising similarities in method and content, as well as the parallel yet distinct outcomes. Hence, this chapter specifically examines Adorno’s and Gadamer’s writings on Hegel, collected respectively in the volumes Hegel: Three Studies (Adorno 1993) and Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies (Gadamer 1976).
If hermeneutics and critical theory can be seen as legitimate successors of Hegel’s dialectical tradition, it is precisely thanks to the efforts of Adorno and Gadamer, who, in a cultural climate by and large hostile to the work of German philosophy, productively engaged with its legacy, not only in a scholastic manner, but also by confronting it with and in the present. Coming to terms with Hegel means not only preserving his doctrine, but addressing its contemporary relevance. With this in mind, both Adorno’s and Gadamer’s reappraisals of Hegel’s philosophy take the form of a drawing out of Hegelian dialectics what is implicit in its own premises. This constitutes a carrying forward of dialectics to its true vocation, which is that of a negative-critical form of dialectics, or perhaps its transformation into hermeneutics.
Adorno opens his essay “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy,” the first essay in the aforementioned Hegel: Three Studies, by asking the inverse question of Croce’s interrogation, that is, the question as to what the present means when confronted with Hegel (Adorno 1993, 1). This means that, in Adorno’s eyes, Hegel’s philosophy is still alive and well, and can in fact serve as the magnifying glass through which one can interpret the present. The truth and falsity of Hegel’s philosophy emerges, according to Adorno, in the face of such a confrontation.
The interpretative method that Adorno utilizes is that of decoding the untruth of Hegel’s philosophy in order to retrieve its truth precisely in the analysis of such moments. He does so by unearthing the sedimented meaning behind Hegel’s concepts and by showing that the experience that corresponds to such a concept, in fact, contradicts their idealist formulation. As we will see, Adorno explicates such a method in relation to his critique of Hegel’s doctrine of the state; however, underlying his entire critique of Hegel’s idealism is, first and foremost, the concept of spirit.
Adorno stresses that Hegel’s concept of spirit is not opposed to materiality, but develops out of it a relation with the material world, as production and deed. Hegel rightly identified the work of spirit with human labor, as is shown in the moments and figures in his Phenomenology of Spirit (Adorno 1993, 24), as well as in the language and expressions that Hegel utilizes. In fact, labor is precisely what binds together spirit and the isolated empirical subject, in that the individual depends on the labor of other individuals, and society on the deeds of its members. Hence, social labor constitutes the moment of the universality of spirit, insofar as labor is something organized and rational. This analysis makes apparent that spirit is nothing other than society, as what mediates the isolated moments of empirical reality and manifests itself in each of these moments. In this respect, Adorno reminds us that society is a concept as much as spirit, insofar as it is both abstract, and “the most real thing of all” (Adorno 1993, 20) thanks to the equivalence of social labor.
However, for Adorno, Hegel remains bound to the idealistic thesis and conceals the connection of its notion of spirit with physical labor, while privileging the experience of abstract intellectual labor. By shaping an ideological concept of labor that is deprived of its ties with nature, it is possible for Hegel to transfigure labor into spirit, and to think of spirit as a totality, which expels or assimilates all that is alien to it.
That said, Adorno maintains that precisely such false identification of spirit with a totality reveals a truth, by pointing the finger at the system-like quality of the world created by the mediation of social labor: it is impossible to step out of such a world into another unmediated one. By conceiving itself as absolute system, spirit reflects the systematic quality of the society, which is the product of social labor. Such society presents itself as a totality with no outer alternative, a system out of which it is impossible to step (Adorno 1993, 25–26).1
By carrying out such an analysis of the genesis of Hegel’s concept of spirit, Adorno unearths its connection with a material moment and thus challenges its interpretation as an absolute overarching principle. Adorno shows that the idea of totality, which is mirrored in the organization of society, is both illegitimate (because it is based on the denial of spirit’s connection with its other, i.e., nature) and illuminating, insofar as it denounces the violence and coercion of a society governed by the productive and organized rationality of social labor, as the principle of production.
Thus, Adorno claims that the truth of Hegel’s philosophy is to be found by decoding its untruth. According to Adorno, Hegel’s doctrine of the state, outlined in the Philosophy of Right, is a perfect example of such an interpretative reversal: in its patent untruth and inadequacy, it precisely reveals the irrationality and unacceptable quality of the reality that, on paper, it is supposed to justify. Adorno clarifies his method by affirming that
nowhere does that philosophy come closer to the truth about its own substratum, society, than where it turns into nonsense when confronted with it. Hegel’s philosophy is indeed essentially negative: critique.
(Adorno 1993, 30)
Rather than quickly dismissing Hegel’s doctrine of the state as a forerunner of German imperialism and totalitarianism, Adorno reads it as a critique and denunciation of the contradictions of civil society. By introducing the artificial and rigid structure of the state as the only way of reconciling the forces of civil society, Hegel in fact indicates their irredeemable and intolerable antagonism, which cannot resolve itself by its own self-movement. Thus, Hegel’s doctrine of the state, in its untruth, in fact reveals its truth, insofar as it sheds light on the contradiction between its claims to rationality, and the reality of the conflicting interests of civil society. As Adorno has it:
the locus of Hegel’s truth is not outside the system; rather, it is as inherent in the system as his untruth. For this untruth is none other than the untruth of the system of the society that constitutes the substratum of his philosophy.
(Adorno 1993, 32)
Even more interestingly, Hegel’s surreptitious reconciliation by means of the state highlights the demand that the world should be good and rational (Adorno 1993, 30). Yet Hegel fulfills such a demand by way of a philosophical tour de force, whereby dialectics is suspended, lest it extend beyond what exists and negates the idealistic identity principle (hereby realized in the state). Yet, according to Adorno, it is only in following dialectics beyond what exists, that is, in abandoning all pretension toward the reconciliation of reality and what is rational, that such a demand for reconciliation can be fulfilled. This amounts to embracing dialectics’ negativity, that is, the nonidentity of subject and object, idea and thing, reason and society. Such a “negative” turn leads us decisively beyond Hegel’s own doctrine, in the direction of Adorno’s own original reformulation of dialectics.
In order to lay bare dialectics’ negativity, in his essay entitled “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” Adorno undertakes an examination of each moment of Hegel’s philosophy in terms of the experience contained therein. By doing so, Adorno intends to underscore the contradiction between the idealist doctrine and its experiential content (Adorno 1993, 53). This groundwork allows Adorno to set in motion the new concept of dialectics, by showing that such a concept emerges out of Hegel’s philosophy, and is in fact implicitly contained therein. Adorno argues that Hegel himself in the Phenomenology of Spirit equates experience with the movement of dialectics, yet he betrays the intrinsic negativity of dialectics by turning it into a justification of the real. Hence, if Hegel’s dialectics is to stay true to itself, it must necessarily acknowledge and embrace its negativity. Adorno sets himself the task of restoring such negativity by demonstrating that “by no means does the experiential content of idealism simply coincide with its epistemological and metaphysical positions” (Adorno 1993, 61).
By examining the intellectual experience that the principle of contradiction expresses, that is, by closely investigating the work of the concept, Adorno sets out to demonstrate that nonidentity is precisely the driving force behind Hegel’s idealistic dialectics. While on the one hand concepts are pinned down and made identical with the thing they are supposed to disclose, on the other, they are set in motion precisely by the contradiction between their meaning and what they are supposed to encompass, yet fail to capture. This is because the concept, in order to stay true to its own meaning, that of grasping the thing, must take leave of its stability and change, giving rise to motion (Adorno 1993, 70 ff). Hegel himself was to a certain extent aware of this, yet ultimately gave in to an idealistic identity thesis.
According to Adorno, the experience of contradiction, that is, the experience of the alienation of subject and object and of the irrationality of the real is inscribed in the very structure of Hegel’s philosophy. Adorno remarks that Hegel substantiates such an experience through an immanent critique of logic:
He demonstrated that concept, judgment, and conclusion, unavoidable instruments for ascertaining through consciousness something that exists, always end up contradicting that existing thing; that all individual judgments, all individual concepts, all individual conclusions, are false by the criterion of an emphatic idea of truth.
(Adorno 1993, 76)
From this, Adorno works out that Hegel’s critique of reason reflects a critique of reality, or better, that “dialectical contradiction is experienced in the experience of society” (Adorno 1993, 78).
Even more radically, Adorno interprets the experience of society that is reflected in the dialectical contradiction, not simply as that of a society riven by contradictions, but of an antagonistic totality. That is to say, society has become a totality precisely in virtue of its contradictions, which are hardened and preserved in it. As such, the only way out of this false totality is not via Hegel’s surreptitious reconciliation of the state, but is rather to be achieved only by enduring contradictions to the end. Adorno writes:
Either the totality comes into its own by becoming reconciled, that is, it abolishes its contradictory quality by enduring its contradictions to the end, and ceases to be a totality; or what is old and false will continue on until the catastrophe occurs. As something contradictory, society as a whole moves beyond itself.
(Adorno 1993, 79)
Hence, in order to live up to its own vocation, dialectics must resist the realist drift that turns Hegel’s dialectics into an apologetics of what exists. The analysis of the experiential content of Hegel’s philosophy that Adorno carries out demonstrates that such content is at odds with the idealist doctrine: the Hegelian claim to the rationality of the real contradicts the experience of reality as an antagonistic totality. Precisely such a betrayal of experience voids a positive form of dialectics of any cognitive power, insofar as experience is understood as the very ground of his philosophy. Because the whole to which Hegel appeals is not a true whole but rather a false one (i.e., the antagonistic totality), Hegel’s claim to disclose the particular is also to be regarded as illegitimate and thus a positive form of dialectics is incapable of grasping the real. The truth of Hegel’s philosophy, as we have already seen, expresses itself instead through its falsity: Hegel’s illegitimate appeal to the whole correctly reflects the fact that a totally integrated society is indeed experienced as a system, albeit not a rational and reconciled one. In a dialectical reversal, Adorno defines such a whole as “the totality of the negative” (Adorno 1993, 87).
Hence, the purpose of Adorno’s confrontation with Hegel is to show the necessity of a negative, critical form of dialectics. In fact, the move away from idealism is already implicit in Hegel’s own philosophy and appears to be inevitable when confronted with the content of experience that dialectics purports to grasp. Hegel’s dialectics, however, is not abandoned by Adorno as incorrect and obsolete, but instead shows its contemporary relevance precisely in its untruth, insofar as it mirrors and denounces the untruth of the present, while simultaneously putting forward a demand for a right and just world. Yet, it is by rejecting reconciliation and “enduring its contradictions to the end” (Adorno 1993, 79) that dialectics, in its negative form, can come closer to the possibility of reconciliation. For Adorno, only by living negativity to its utmost consequences can the whole truth ever be realized.
Albeit coming from a different tradition, Gadamer, similarly to Adorno, sets himself the task of defending the contemporary relevance and the philosophical significance of the dialectical method. Gadamer appreciates the fact that the dialectical method does not reduce philosophy to scientific research, but acknowledges philosophy’s essential feature of “incorporat(ing) within itself the anticipation of the whole” (Gadamer 1976, 3). Such “anticipation of the whole,” which is expressed by dialectical thinking, nourishes our desire to know and is embedded in our linguistic experience. Hence, Gadamer’s hermeneutical method, which is carried out in the movement of lived and shared dialogue, both bears the hallmarks of Platonic dialectics, and is also profoundly influenced by speculative Hegelian dialectics, insofar as it embraces the same aspiration toward the entirety of truth. Yet Gadamer’s hermeneutics cannot be simply reduced to the Platonic or the Hegelian formulation of dialectics, insofar as it both relinquishes its connection to Plato’s logic and abandons the Hegelian synthetic systematic impulse.2 Therefore, not unlike Adorno, Gadamer elaborates an open form of dialectics, which is aware of its finitude yet is sustained by the aspiration of grasping truth in its entirety.
Gadamer’s account of Hegelian dialectics is developed by reconnecting it with the dialectics of the ancients and by formulating a critique in the light of such a confrontation. However, such an effort should not be understood as Gadamer’s attempt to bring Hegel’s dialectics back to a more authentic formulation, but rather as his attempt to bring dialectics forward, toward its transformation into hermeneutics. Similarly to Adorno, this transformation amounts to drawing out what is latent in Hegel’s dialectics, that is to say, realizing its true vocation. Thus, Gadamer investigates the miscarried attempts on the part of Hegelian dialectics to overcome modernity’s model of reason, by acknowledging the weight of objectivity and the role and function of negativity in shaping experience and knowledge. According to Gadamer, even in failure there lies a truth that is worth rescuing and that provides precious ground for transforming dialectics into hermeneutics.
While Hegel’s dialectics has the merit, over against modern philosophy, of rescuing the moment of objectivity as essential to its own movement, Gadamer observes that the object, or the in-itself, still remains subjugated to the for-itself, that is, spirit. That is to say, the object in Hegel’s dialectics can never be separated from the knowing subject and only exists in the self-consciousness of the subject. In opposition to this, Gadamer remarks that in the dialectics of the ancients, the object, or being, had autonomy and priority over the knowing subject, in that the basis of all knowledge is found in the rational character of reality, and not in the subjectivity of self-consciousness. Both in Plato and Aristotle, being always comes before thinking. Even there where Hegel seems to come closer to the ancients, namely, with his notion of spirit, which recalls Aristotelian nous, Gadamer reminds us that the ancients never prioritized thought over being, as idealism does, and that nous is not to be understood primarily as a rational activity, but rather as being, that is, what has the source of movement in itself. Hence, Gadamer affirms that, despite its attempt to acknowledge the role of objectivity, Hegel’s dialectics still remains governed by the law of self-consciousness, and for this reason he defines Hegel’s dialectics as a “splendid monologue” (Gadamer 1976, 7) that is carried out solely within subjectivity.
Gadamer argues that the scientific rigor of Hegel’s dialectics, whereby each stage finds its justification within the absolute system, derives precisely from Descartes’ idea of method; whereas Socratic/Platonic dialectics finds its justification in the practice of dialogue, where two or more interlocutors come to a shared understanding, and thus it cannot guarantee the same level of scientific justification as Hegelian method. These considerations bring us to the heart of Hegel’s dialectics and to the crucial difference between Hegel’s brand of dialectics and the Platonic kind, that is to say, the role and function of negativity.
For Hegel, the moment of negativity is a necessary step toward the reinstating of a positive: the heightening of the contradiction delivers a higher truth through the Aufhebung. Instead, for Platonic dialectics, despite Hegel’s best efforts to appropriate it as a forerunner of his own method, negativity and contradiction are not a stepping stone toward the acquisition of something positive, but are instead inherent to thought itself, as the pathos tón logón (Gadamer 1976, 24). According to Plato, negativity, or the entanglement in contradiction, is inherent to the experience of thinking, but, as happens in Socratic dialogue, it can have the productive significance of perplexing and nurturing further discussion. Negativity, for Plato, has authentic philosophical significance insofar as, by perplexing us, it overturns preconceptions and motivates the search for the true relationship of things to one another. However, the moment of negativity for Plato is nothing but a preliminary study, or a propaedeutic to actual knowing. For Hegel, instead, the activity of philosophizing consists precisely in such pushing the contradictions to their limits:
For Hegel the point of dialectic is that precisely by pushing a position to the point of self-contradiction it makes possible the transition to a higher truth which unites the sides of that contradiction: the power of spirit lies in synthesis as the mediation of all contradictions.
(Gadamer 1976, 105)
Negativity and contradiction, rather than simply functioning as a critique of old prejudices and an incitement to further knowledge (as in the Socratic method), are actually engaged in the production of new knowledge and in attaining a higher truth through the process that in Hegel’s dialectics goes under the name Aufhebung. Hence, for Gadamer, the two understandings of negativity are too different to simply interpret Platonic dialectics as a prefiguration of Hegelian model.
While Gadamer is adamant in combating any assimilation of Platonic dialectics to the Hegelian model, he takes the Greek sense of negativity as coming to the aid of Hegelian dialectic in order to counter its compulsion toward totality and absolute knowledge. Gadamer maintains that, in spite of the Hegelian emphasis on Aufhebung, the moment of negativity in Hegelian dialectics contains a tension between the speculative meaning and the Greek meaning. As Gadamer puts it:
“Dialectical” may be said on the one hand to characterize the viewpoint of reason, which is able to perceive both the unity of the whole and the whole of the unity in all oppositions and contradictions. But, on the other hand, dialectic, corresponding to the meaning of the word in antiquity, is also thought of as the heightening of all contradictions to a “fixed” point of irresolvable contradictoriness.
(Gadamer 1976, 110)
Thus, if on the one hand negativity is a function of the constitution of scientific knowledge, on the other, it points toward a heightening of the contradiction to the point that it can no longer be untangled. This ambivalence, according to Gadamer, is reflected in the fact that in expounding his model of dialectics, Hegel distinguishes between the speculative moment, or positive-reasonable moment, and the dialectical moment. The latter, according to Gadamer, “refer(s) to the process character of philosophical demonstration, i.e., to the process of making explicit the contradictions which are implied and overcome in what is ‘positive reasonable’” (Gadamer 1976, 111). If the speculative moment refers to the ideal method, the dialectical moment refers to the experience that precedes the establishment of such an absolute method.
Similarly to Adorno, the unearthing of the link between dialectical negativity and experience is of fundamental importance to Gadamer’s reinterpretation of Hegelian dialectics: it is by drawing out the contradiction between Hegel’s notion of dialectics and the experience its purports to capture that Gadamer develops his critique and overcoming of Hegelian dialectics. As we will see, Gadamer’s critique does not amount to the abandonment of dialectics in favor of new philosophical methodology, but to bringing dialectics forward by fulfilling what is implicit in its own premises. In order to do so, Gadamer’s appeal to the point of view of experience as expressed in negativity is fundamental, insofar as experience is the only entry point that, in Gadamer’s view, allows us to criticize Hegel’s system.
It is in Truth and Method that Gadamer brings to fruition his project of bringing dialectics forward toward its true realization in and as hermeneutics. An essential step in such a transformation of dialectics is Gadamer’s examination of the structure of experience. While both Hegel and Gadamer agree that experience has a dialectical structure, they fundamentally diverge on the conclusions they draw from such a premise.
Gadamer remarks that Hegel defines experience as “skepticism in action” (Gadamer 1975, 348), that is to say, as experience of negation where the falsity of one concept is overcome in a new true content. This implies a reversal of consciousness, by which the certainty of oneself in the unity with a content is called into question, and consciousness finds itself in relation to what is alien and different, hence the definition of experience as dialectical. For Hegel, knowledge is constituted in this migrating of consciousness from one content to another. In such a process, it is necessary that self-knowledge overcome every experience of alterity, resulting in the complete identity of subject and object. Such an identity represents the culmination of experience in absolute knowledge and amounts to, for Hegel at least, the consummation of experience in science (Gadamer 1975, 349).
While Gadamer accepts Hegel’s description of experience as the expansion of consciousness into uncharted territories, he denies that such a process could ever culminate in absolute knowledge. On the contrary, experience and science are quite opposed, insofar as the truth of experience does not to come to rest in knowledge, but opens up to further experience. In Gadamer’s own words: “The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself” (Gadamer 1975, 349).
Disentangled from scientific ambition, experience is properly understood as a structure that belongs to the historical nature of the human being. Negativity lies at the core of such a definition of experience, because one learns through disappointment, and it is precisely in the encounter with what is not quite what one thought, that one remains open to new experience. In contrast to Hegel, the culmination of dialectical negativity as perfectly experienced amounts to the becoming aware of one’s own finitude and historicity. Hence, for Gadamer, insofar as it reproduces the structure of human experience, the true essence of dialectics lies in fostering the moment of negativity rather than the overcoming of such a moment in positive scientific knowledge.
Gadamer had started his investigation and critique of Hegelian dialectics with an evaluation of its relation to the dialectics of the ancients. Now, in highlighting dialectics’ essential connection to negativity, he intends to bring dialectics forward toward its transformation into hermeneutics. However, the link to the ancients still remains vital to such a transformation, insofar as Gadamer sees ancient dialectics as properly acknowledging such a moment of negativity. Specifically, while paying tribute to the seminal importance of Aristotle’s definition of experience as individual, process-like, and negative (Gadamer 1975, 346 ff), Gadamer turns to the model of Platonic dialogue as embodying a relationship of reciprocity between the self and its other, or the logical structure of openness (Gadamer 1975, 356) that is proper to an experience that is mindful of its own negativity. In particular, Gadamer emphasizes that, precisely because of such negativity, “the structure of the question is present in all experience” (Gadamer 1975, 356). It is when we are faced with something different from what we thought was the case, that we ask ourselves new questions and remain open to new experiences. Understood thusly, knowledge is dialectical from the start, remaining open to considering its other and conceiving possibilities as possibilities (Gadamer 1975, 359). Dialectic finds its authentic realization in a dialogue where the participants are not interested in prevailing but rather in letting themselves be led by the subject matter of what is said. In such way, what emerges is the truth of the logos, which transcends the interlocutors. Because of this, dialectics is “the art of forming concepts through working out the common meaning” (Gadamer 1975, 361).
While Plato is undoubtedly Gadamer’s point of reference in his transformation of dialectics into hermeneutics, Gadamer identifies and recovers a failed dialogical moment in Hegel’s own dialectical method:
To elaborate the totality of the determinations of thought, which was the aim of Hegel’s logic, is as it were the attempt to comprehend within the great monologue of modern “method” the continuum of meaning that is realized in every particular instance of dialogue.
(Gadamer 1975, 362–363)
Despite its ambition to render fluid the abstract determinations of thought, Hegelian reason remains monological, and the only way it can get out of such a monologue is by “transforming the concept into the meaningful power of the word that questions and answers” (Gadamer 1975, 363). Hence, for Gadamer, if dialectics is to stay true to itself, it must recover the linguistic origin of the concept. However, once again, such a step does not mean leaving Hegel behind, but instead its very possibility is inherent in Hegel’s logic itself, as Gadamer demonstrates in his essay “The Idea of Hegel’s Logic” (Gadamer 1976, 75–99).
While Hegel speaks of the “logical instinct of language,” that is, language’s natural tendency toward logic, Gadamer aims to reverse such a relation, by showing that it is not so much language that needs to perfect itself in logic, but instead logical concepts must find their truth in the word, in their functioning within a living language. While Hegel is well aware of the problem of translating what is thought into pure thinking, he nonetheless presupposes that this problem is “supposed to be” overcome in absolute knowledge.3 For Gadamer, instead, our experience of thought and language is inescapably determined by our finitude. Hence, language is the horizon out of which thought emerges in order to be objectified into knowledge, and that to which it returns in order to be sheltered from such an objectification.
Gadamer interprets Hegel as acknowledging such a space beyond the total determination of the concept in logic, in the so-called dimension of “the logical.” Hence, he writes:
Specifically, Hegel’s logic indirectly points beyond itself, since Hegel’s turn of speech, “the logical,” of which he is so fond, indicates that the essential impossibility of completing the concept is acknowledged by him. “The logical” is not the quintessence or totality of all determinations of thought but the dimension which underlies all posited determinations of thought, just as a geometric continuum underlies all posited points.
(Gadamer 1976, 95)
According to Gadamer, Hegel is all too well aware of the impossibility of deducing the totality of logical concepts and the dimension of the logical, or “speculative” dimension (Gadamer 1976, 95), pointing precisely at the gap between our finite standpoint and the actualization of absolute knowledge. In particular, this ambiguity becomes evident in what Hegel calls the “speculative statement” as situated between the demand for determination and the retreat of thought into itself.4 That is to say, the “speculative statement” is characterized by a forward and backward movement, whereby it seeks dialectical explication and at the same brings dialectics to a halt. This is precisely what takes place in poetry and artworks, which, on the one hand, demand interpretation, and on the other, “consist in themselves.” However, for Gadamer, what is most important is the recognition that this is precisely what takes place in language, where the word seeks to objectify itself in well-defined meaning, but at the same time is linked to the continuum of all the other words and the contexts of their understanding. In a word, “the speculative statement points to an entirety of truth, without being this entirety or stating it” (Gadamer 1976, 96).
Thus, we can safely say that Gadamer sees in Hegel’s notion of dialectics the preconditions for its development into hermeneutics, that is to say, the attempt to take leave of the modern subjective paradigm, the pivotal role of negativity in shaping knowledge and experience, and an intimation of the linguistic origin of the concepts we use. Gadamer takes up the task of bringing these possibilities to their fulfillment in hermeneutics, by developing a finite, open-ended, conversation-based philosophical method. By migrating into hermeneutics, dialectics is not lost to it, but fundamentally shapes it.
From this brief excursus into Adorno’s and Gadamer’s reception and transformation of dialectics, it is possible to highlight some remarkable convergences of method and content, as well as important divergences.
With regard to method, both philosophers take Hegel’s dialectics to be a necessary point of reference for the development of their own respective methods. Because of this, Gadamer and Adorno set out not so much to overcome Hegel’s dialectics by leaving it behind, but rather to bring it to its own truth, that is, to bring what lies inherent in its premises to its conclusion. Hence, Adorno demonstrates that nonidentity is an integral part of the experience of the concept, and Gadamer shows that logic already forestalls the open structure of language. What is common to such a method is that they both see Hegel as having anticipated and yet failed to pursue dialectics’ necessary developments. Therefore, Hegel’s truth is paradigmatically to be found where its philosophy “goes wrong,” be it its inadequate political doctrine, or its failed attempt to overcome modern subjectivism. In this respect, both Adorno and Gadamer illustrate that the heart of Hegel’s philosophy, that is, its productive notion of negativity, is at odds with the experience that it is supposed to encapsulate. This allows them to argue for the need for dialectics to move beyond itself, out of its positive systematic formulation. Thus, Adorno demonstrates that beneath the experience of contradiction there lies the irreconcilable experience of an antagonistic totality, whose sole possibility of redemption is encountered by “enduring its contradictions to the end” (Adorno 1993, 79) and derives from this the necessity of a negative form of dialectics. In a similar vein, Gadamer retrieves, in the experience of contradiction, the experience of an inescapable finitude, which finds its proper articulation in the openness to new experiences and possibilities. From this, Gadamer obtains the definition of dialectics as essentially dialogical and the necessity of its transformation into hermeneutics.
Thus, both Gadamer and Adorno argue that, when confronted with experience, Hegel’s concept of dialectics is in need of being mobilized and brought forward. Dialectics is precisely brought forward in the direction of the increased centrality of the moment of negativity, that is, in the direction of a finite, shared, and open form of dialectics. Negativity is therefore at the center of both Adorno’s and Gadamer’s philosophical projects, yet the two philosophers articulate it in diametrically opposed directions, the one as a critique of the given, the other as awareness of finitude and openness to shared dialogue. In opposition to Adorno, Gadamer, by firmly grounding his reworked notion of dialectics in the concrete linguistic experience of dialogue, configures it essentially as an activity of understanding and interpretation, guided by goodwill and the desire to comprehend and come to an accord with one another. It is perhaps the abandonment of the oppositional-critical character of dialectics that marks Gadamer’s fundamental difference from Adorno’s negative dialectics, and makes it necessary for Gadamer to rebrand his method as hermeneutic: no longer critique, but rather understanding and interpretation in the shared and open-ended dialogical process.