Adorno, Hegel, and Dialectic

1 I thank the referees and editors for their suggestions for improving the earlier draft of this paper.

Abstract

This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative (famously simplified as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’). Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradictions require reconciliation, but differs from Hegel on the nature of reconciliation. For Hegel, reconciliation unites differences into a whole; for Adorno, reconciled differences co-exist as differences. Finally, against Habermas who holds that Adorno cannot consistently criticize the enlightenment practice of critique, I show that Adorno can do so consistently because of how he reshapes Hegelian dialectic.

Keywords:

• Adorno
• critical theory
• dialectic
• enlightenment
• Habermas
• Hegel
• nature

Notes

1 I thank the referees and editors for their suggestions for improving the earlier draft of this paper.

²For frequently quoted works I use these abbreviations. DA: Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment/Dialektik der Aufklärung; EL: Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic/Enzyklopädie I; ND: Adorno, Negative Dialectics/Negative Dialektik; PhG: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit/Phänomenologie des Geistes; WL: Hegel, Science of Logic/Wissenschaft der Logik. For Hegel's works, I give either paragraph number (when available) followed after a comma by English pagination, or English pagination followed after a slash by German. Translations are occasionally amended without special notice.

³Adorno's complaint that Hegel annexes what is other to thought into the self-same thinking subject has affinities with many later twentieth-century French critiques of Hegel – e.g. Derrida, Glas; Irigaray, ‘ … the eternal irony of the community … ’ in Speculum. Judith Butler defends Hegel against these kinds of critique by arguing that when the subject expands through the encounter with what is other to it, that subject becomes other than it initially was (see Butler, Subjects of Desire). Presumably Adorno would reply that this becoming-other remains merely expansion for purpose of dominating the other.

⁴Alternative accounts of Adorno's ambivalent relation to Hegel are given by Baumann, ‘Adorno, Hegel’; Bernstein, ‘Negative Dialectic as Fate’; Finlayson, ‘Normativity and Metaphysics’; Macdonald, ‘The Wounder Will Heal’; O'Connor, ‘Adorno's Reconception’.

⁵Of course, Adorno engages critically with other dimensions of Hegel's thought too, notably his view of world history as a necessary progression and his concept of spirit as a unity in which individual subjects participate. But those engagements can be seen as part and parcel of Adorno's response to the dialectic – after all, Adorno criticizes Hegel on these matters in his book Negative Dialectic, thus in the overarching context of re-thinking dialectic. What Adorno above all rejects in Hegel's philosophy of history is his belief that the course of world history is progressive, against which Adorno insists that every historical progression so far has engendered a concomitant regression – that is, that enlightenment has always been subject to dialectic. Thus dialectic remains central to Adorno's response to Hegel on history. Regarding the concept of spirit, Adorno fears that it subordinates individuals to the whole at an intellectual level, prefiguring the totalitarian social trends of the twentieth century (see, e.g. ND 307-8/302-3). This fear stems from Adorno's broader concern to rescue what is individual and unique from coverage by universal concepts, a concern that in turn reflects his critique of Hegel's use of dialectic to subordinate the individual to the universal. So, again, Adorno's critical engagement with Hegel on spirit ties back to the central issue of dialectic.

⁶Adorno might say that given an incoherent social world it is better to reflect those incoherences in thought than mask them with a falsely coherent system, as per his slogan ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’ (Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen) (Minima Moralia, 39). Yet to censure the modern social world for its incoherence – as wrong or false – Adorno must accept coherence as an ideal, which makes it an apposite standard for assessing his work.

⁷In taking the categories to organize the world as well as our thought, I am opposing the influential ‘non-metaphysical’ line of recent Hegel interpretation, championed inter alia by Pippin, Hegel's Idealism, and Pinkard, Hegel's Dialectic. With others who defend metaphysical interpretations (e.g. Beiser, German Idealism; Wartenberg, ‘Hegel's Idealism’), I believe that the non-metaphysical readings diverge unduly from the often metaphysical letter of Hegel's texts, such as the passages that I quote here.

⁸Talk of a ‘mind-independent’ world simplifies, because for Hegel the world necessarily develops into and so cannot exist independently of mind. But, for Hegel, the world is not mind-dependent in the way that it is for Kant, for whom the (empirical) world receives its organizing structure from mind. For Hegel, the world has its own organizing structure, not imparted by mind; the tensions within that structure propel the world to develop, through the realm of nature, into mind. The world necessarily becomes mind, but it does not necessarily derive its structure from mind. Although simplified, then, talk of ‘mind-independence’ picks out this important difference between Hegel and Kant.

⁹The caricature goes back to Marx and his teacher Hans Chalybäus; see Gustav E. Mueller, ‘The Hegel Legend’, 304.

¹⁰We might object to Adorno that if our thought is driven by nature to the extent that he claims, then surely what we need to acknowledge is that we cannot ever achieve either objectivity or the freedom to decide how to respond to our inner nature's promptings. But that is an issue for another paper.

¹¹Here Adorno diverges from Nietzsche, contrary to Habermas's claim that Adorno is very largely a Nietzschean (Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, 121). Nietzsche maintains in his 1873 essay ‘On Truth and Lying in an Non-Moral Sense’ that all conceptualization of things under universals is a fabrication enabling us to cope with a fundamentally chaotic world (see Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 139–53). In contrast, for Adorno, classification enables practical mastery by giving knowledge of the intelligible forms that things really do embody.

¹²Adorno's example is that we progress in knowing about capitalism not by defining it (as, say, ‘a system of production for profit’) but by building up a set of concepts capturing the elements that have coalesced historically to compose this system: free labour, the separation of households from workplaces, accounting, a rationalistic legal system, etc. (ND 166/168).