![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
‘Immanent criticism' has been discussed by philosophers of quite different persuasions, working in separate areas and in different traditions of philosophy. Almost all of them agree on roughly the same story about its origins: It is that Hegel invented immanent criticism, that Marx later developed it, and that the various members of the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno, refined it in various ways, and that they are all paradigmatic practitioners of immanent criticism. I call this the Continuity Thesis. There are four different claims that interest me. (i) Hegel is the originator of immanent criticism. (ii) Hegel's dialectical method is that of immanent criticism. (iii) Adorno practises immanent criticism and endorses the term as a description of his practice. (iv) Adorno's dialectical method is fundamentally Hegelian. In this article, I offer an account of immanent criticism, on the basis of which, I evaluate these four claims and argue that the Continuity Thesis should be rejected.
Notes
1 Many thanks are due to Brian O'Connor, Owen Hulatt, James Clarke, Henk de Berg, Henry Pickford, Iain Macdonald, James Furner, Matthew Wall, Natalia Baeza, Lorna Finlayson, Scott Aitken, and all the members of the audiences who attended talks I gave at the Universities of Sheffield, York, and Sussex in the UK and at John's Hopkins, and Vanderbilt Universities in the USA.
2What I say here about ‘immanent criticism’ applies to ‘immanent critique’.
3For some differing views on the question Marx's method, see the following: Lohmann, ‘Marx's Capital’, 354–72; Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination; and Furner, ‘Marx with Kant on Exploitation'; see, for example, Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia; de Boer, ‘Hegel's Conception of Immanent Critique'; Stahl, Immanente Kritik; Kauppinen, ‘Reason, Recognition, and Internal Critique’, 479–98; Bristow, Hegel and the Transformations; Jaeggi, ‘No individual can resist’, 76–78.
4This can mean both that Hegel invented the concept. Or it can mean that Hegel was the first to develop the concept. Whether either claim is true will dependent what is meant by ‘immanent criticism’ on which more below.
5‘Immanente Kritik’ in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 4, 1292.
6See Koselleck, Kritik und Krise, 87. See also the entry in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vol. 3, 660.
7Not all evaluative judgements are normative. For example, nothing follows about what ought to be done from evaluative judgements such as ‘The Bezier Apartments are the ugliest buildings in London', thought the judgement is evaluative, and arguably justified.
8The OED puts this down as a distinct, ancillary meaning of the term. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/44598?redirectedFrom=criticism#eid.
9Friedrich Schlegel, for example, argues that criticism is, and should be, essentially positive, in that it is an elevation and perfection of the work itself, and also claims that criticism eschews evaluative assessment, or ‘Beurteilung’. Schlegel, Kritische Ausgabe, 134.
10The practice of criticism varies according to domain, according to its object, and according to its purpose, so the fact that criticism is nearly always negative requires a topic-specific explanation. In some cases an explanation for why criticism is nearly always negative is more readily available than others.
11Axel Honneth sums up the widespread view, when he writes that ‘it is customary to suspect that any use of a transcendent standard forces one to adopt a perspective that is too alien, too external to the criticized object to be able to find any application within it'. Honneth, ‘The Possibility of a Disclosing Critique of Society, 117.
12Rahel Jaeggi gives a good example of this in her essay: ‘No individual can resist’, 76–77.
13In his Jena period 1802–3 Hegel edited with the help of Schelling the ‘Kritisches Journal der Philosophie', the first issue of which has an introduction ‘Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt, und ihr Verhältnis zum gegenwärtigen Zustand der Philosophie insbesondere'. However, to my mind this shows that the eschewal of the term ‘Kritik' as a philosophical term of art designating Hegel's method in his later work is deliberate, and all the more significant.
14Benjamin claims that ‘Schlegel freed the work from heteronomous aesthetic doctrines … by setting up a different criterion than the rule, namely ‘a certain determinate immanent configuration of the work itself'. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 71.
15Geuss talks in passing of ‘a strand of ethical thought that starts … with Socrates, threads its way through Hegel ideal of ‘internal criticism’ and culminates in Adorno'. Morality, Culture, and History, 75.
16Bubner, in Dialektik und Wissenschaft argues for such a reading of Hegel. Also Michael Rosen broadly supports the interpretation that Hegel's dialectic is immanent criticism, albeit, on his view ‘immanent critique is not so much a method as a commitment to take one's philosophical method from the exigencies of the particular critical situation'. See, for example, Rosen, Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism, 39. Rosen is critical of Bubner's interpretation for not acknowledging the weightiness of the metaphysical presuppositions behind the dialectic construed as immanent critique. See also Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia, 9.
17‘Das Aufheben stellt seine wahrhafte gedoppelte Bedeutung dar, welche wir an dem Negativen gesehen haben; es ist ein Negieren und ein Aufbewahren zugleich'. W3, 94.
18Hegel can be read as a Neo-Platonist. See O'Regan, The Heterodox Hegel.
19This feature of Hegel's method is also implicit in Forster's characterization, from which we started.
20These metaphors of circularity and ascent are captured in the image of an ‘upward spiral’ which is often used to depict Hegel's system. In reality even upwards spirals to do not complete themselves, so insofar as ascent and circularity are essential features of Hegel's dialectic it is in tension with itself. That said, this is a pictographical not a logical tension. See Aitken, ‘The Problem of the Criterion and Hegel's Model for Epistemic Infinitism', 379–87.
21In speculative (conceptual) thinking … the negative belongs to the content itself, and is the positive, both as the immanent movement and determination of the content, and as the whole of this process. Looked at as a result, what emerges from this process is the determinate negative, which is consequently a positive as well. (PS 36/W 7, 57)
22‘The individual for itself does not correspond to its concept and this limitedness of its existence constitutes its finitude and its demise' (W 8, 368).
23Retrospectively, each category negates or denies its predecessor, but also, as McTaggart rightly points out, prospectively each category affirms its successor as its complement. McTaggart, Studies in Hegel's Dialectic, 125.
24See, for example, Aristotle:
25O'Connor, Adorno, 46, 63. This is a good evidence, because in this introduction O'Connor, as an Adorno expert, is broadly representing the entire field of Adorno interpretation. J. M. Bernstein also contends that Adorno is a Hegelian, albeit not an orthodox Hegelian, but an ‘Hegelian after Hegel' who accepts ‘the rudiments of Hegelian idealism'. If by ‘rudiments' he means the dialectic and its component ideas, he belongs to the group of commentators I am criticizing. Bernstein, ‘Negative Dialectics as Fate', 19–20. Commentators who oppose the view that Adorno can help himself to Hegel's dialectic and its component ideas are few and far between, but include notably Michael Rosen and Natalia Baeza.
26Jaeggi, ‘No Individual can Resist', 75. This is not a new claim. Perry Anderson, for example, who says nothing original about Adorno, claims that, in spite of his critique of Objective Idealism, Adorno ‘explicitly based his major work on the procedures of the Phenomenology of Mind’. Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 62.
27Buchwalter, ‘Hegel, Adorno and the Concept of Transcendent Critique', 320. Buchwalter gives a typically perceptive account of the reasons behind what he thinks of as Adorno's transcendent criticism. However, he goes too far in my view, by arguing that both Adorno and Hegel are in the final analysis exponents of transcendent criticism. He basically attaches the label ‘transcendence’ to the fact that the standards of criticism, on which immanent criticism goes to work, are not yet fully realized in actuality.
28Adorno can be found straightforwardly endorsing the notion of ‘immanent criticism’ right up to the late 1960s, even after he has thoroughly analysed the problem the notion poses for his own critical theory. Iain MacDonald brought the following passages to my attention where Adorno endorses immanent criticism from 1962 and 1968. ‘Dialectics is not a third standpoint, but rather the attempt through immanent critique to develop philosophical standpoints beyond themselves and the despotism of a thinking based on standpoints'. Adorno ‘Why Still Philosophy’ in Adorno, Critical Models, 467. See also Adorno, ‘Spätkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft’ in GS 8, 579.
29Adorno, Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit, 68. See on this also Baumann, ‘Adorno, Hegel and the Concrete Universal', 73–94.
30HTS 82-3/GS 5, 320. As Henk de Berg pointed out to me this is probably a reference to something that Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have remarked: ‘God is on the side of the best artillery'. It is known that Hegel was an enthusiastic supporter of Napoleon, in the struggle against a politically fragmented, somewhat backward, semi-feudal Germany. Adorno in the Preface to ‘Dialektik der Aufklärung', explicitly links Napoleon with the affirmative role of philosophy and the oppressive, conquering force of the Enlightenment: ‘Die Philosophie, die im achtzehnten Jahrhundert […] der Infamie der Todesfurcht einflösste, ging unter Bonaparte schon zu ihr über’. See de Berg and Large, Modern German Thought, 322.
31ND 53/ GS 6, 62. For an illuminating discussion of the origins of the trope and its use in Hegel and Adorno, see Macdonald, ‘The Wounder Will Heal’, 132–9. In Minima Moralia, Adorno writes, that, on the contrary. ‘The existing cannot be overstepped except by means of a universal derived from the existing order itself'. MM150/ GS 4, 171.
32For example, AT 289: ‘The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination'.