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Abstract
This paper provides a criticial interpretation of the theme, point, and methodological status of Adorno’s so‐called negative dialectic. The theme at issue, ‘non‐identity’, comes in several varieties; and the point of Adorno’s dialectic, namely reconciliation, is multifaceted. Exploration of those topics shows that negative dialectic seques into substantive doctrines, including a version of transcendentalism and a claim about deformation. The peculiar methodological status of negative dialectic explains that adumbration. In the appraisive register, my principal contentions include these: Adorno’s transcendentalism makes some sense of the aforementioned deformation claim; and negative dialectic qua method avoids mystery and metaphysical excess.
Notes
∗ Several anonymous referees helped to improve this paper. My thanks also to Peter Dews, Fabian Freyenhagen, and Timo Juetten, none of whom should be construed as holding my views.
1 Recent work on Adorno upon which I shall draw includes the books by Bernstein (Citation2001), O’Connor (Citation2004), and Cook (Citation2004). However, and as will become evident, what follows does not attempt anything like a full engagement with those works.
2 I shall focus upon ND’s Introduction and second part. The latter’s title is ‘Negative Dialektik. Begrif fund Kategorien’. The Begriff is negative dialectic. The Kategorien are notions, such as ‘the transcendental’ and the concept of dialectic itself, that are to ‘retained as well as qualitatively altered’ (ND xx; cf. LND 62f., 101,121). I give no special attention to ND’s last part. For that part comprises ‘models’ of negative dialectic; and those models intertwine negative dialectic with its results (q.v. §4 below) especially tightly. I shall draw freely upon Adorno’s lecture courses. Those courses somewhat relax Adorno’s heterodox style and his suspicion of what he calls (H 98) the Klarheitsideal. On that ideal, and for an argument that treatments of Adorno can and even should overrule that suspicion, see Joll, Citation2009.
3 In Adorno and Hegel alike – and Adorno inherits the notions of universal, particular, and mediation from Hegel – ‘mediation’ translates Vermittlung (a term that Ashton’s ND renders as ‘transmission’), ‘universal’ das Allgemeine, and ‘particular’ das Besondere. But Hegel also uses Partikular for ‘particular’.
4 §3 treats non‐identity. §4 considers how Adorno’s dialectic is negative in a sense beyond that of involving items that somehow oppose or negate each other. One sees here that that my short list of ‘fundamentals’ excludes features important to negative dialectic. But one has to start somewhere (compare LND 25). More problematic is Adorno’s claim that dialectic lacks a foundation (ND xix; Grundlage), that it ‘cannot be maintained as a structure that will stay basic no matter how it is modified’ (ND 136). §4 tries to both to diffuse and to explain that point.
5 The modality (‘can all be …’) suggests a point that Adorno, who at one point glosses mediation as ‘entanglement in context’ (ND 106), would seem to accept. To wit: what counts as a universal or a particular will vary with context or interest.
6 The presupposition here is that everything is (or can be – see the previous note) either a universal or a particular.
7 ‘Dialectic is the consistent consciousness of nonidentity [Nichtidentität].’
8 ‘[T]he continuing irreconcilability of subject and object […] constitutes the theme of dialectical criticism.’
9 §3 considers how objective mediation might go awry. Some statements (ND 6, 312; LND 16, 165) suggest that, anyway, mismediation by universals of particulars is more important for Adorno than the mismediation of universals by particulars.
10 §2.1 fleshes out the idea of inadequacy, albeit in a restricted context. Adorno also says (ND, part 2, passim; LND 7f) that universals can ‘contradict’ particulars.
11 Can the author of Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie consistently hold, or be imputed, epistemological opinions? Adorno rejected epistemology because he identified it with first philosophy (see §2.3). Yet it is unclear that Adorno’s first‐philosophical sense of epistemology encompasses all that plausibly counts as theory of knowledge. For presumably Adorno would not so indict his own view that to know is to identify. His position may be that his views about knowledge escape (first‐philosophical) epistemology because they are conceived, as first‐philosophical ideas are not, as historically relative. Certainly he held a difficult doctrine whereby truth has a ‘temporal core’ (see for example M 45). Adorno’s ideas about knowledge in utopia may seem to accord with such a doctrine. But §3.1 will suggest that those ideas comprise an account, although a minimal one, of genuine knowledge.
12 For reading 1, see: Osborne, Citation1989: pp. 27f.; Macdonald, Citation2000: pp. 135f. (but note that ‘particularity thesis’ is my term). Jay Bernstein, from whom I take reading 2, construes the density thesis as a qualified version of conceptualism that betters the unqualified version by recognizing the density of experience. See Bernstein, Citation2001: pp. 294ff. and Citation2002: pp. 220–2ff. One might count as a third reading an inflection – a radicalization – of the first reading. I have in mind the view that the Adornian non‐identical is something ineffable. Finlayson, Citation2002 is a developed version of such a view.
13 For the new reading, see Hammer, Citation2000 and Bernstein, Citation2001: pp. 266ff. For the received reading see Habermas, Citation1987: pp. 106–119ff. and Wellmer, Citation1991: pp. 4–6, 70f. See also Finlayson, Citation2002 (which accepts the reading but is fairly sympathetic to Adorno) and Cook, Citation2004: pp. 102f. (which defends the received reading and the idea it imputes). One should admit, I think, that the new reading is somewhat reconstructive. For Adorno does stress a kind of incommensurability between thought and its objects (see especially LND). Relatedly, he tends to confuse predication with identification (see esp. LND 8 and cf. Geuss Citation1975: pp. 172f. and Schnädelbach Citation2007: p. 159).
14 ‘Identity thinking says what something comes under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself’ (ND 149). ‘The moment of nonidentity in the identifying judgment is immediately understandable insofar as each individual object subsumed under a class has determinations not contained in the definition of the class’ (ND 150).
15 Some echoes: Wittgenstein (Citation1975: pp. 17–19) diagnosed a philosophical ‘craving for generality’; William James maintained that ‘something always escapes’ (Citation1987: p. 776).
16 A further argument (H 9, M 47–56, and 71, S 267) tries to use the idea of conceptual holism against first philosophy. Adorno’s notion of ‘constellation’ (on which one may see Stone, Citation2008) suggests such holism. But I am unclear about the details of Adorno’s argument.
17 Loux (Citation2002: p. 9 and Ch. 7) uses the epithet ‘conceptual schemers’ to refer to Quine, Putnam, and Rorty. See also Goodman (Citation1984: p. 36): ‘Now as we thus make constellations by picking out and putting together certain stars rather than others, so we make stars by drawing certain boundaries rather than others. Nothing dictates whether the sky shall be marked off into constellations or other objects. We have to make what we find, be it the Great Dipper, Sirius, food, fuel, or a stereo system.’
18 Vogel, Citation1996: p. 262; Rosen, Citation1982: pp. 104f. Adorno himself has this worry about Kant. Note further that the ‘scheme’ at issue extends from concepts to other interests or orientations: to our sociality and our animality.
19 Habermas (Citation1992: pp. 3–51 and passim) defines post‐metaphysical thinking as thinking that eschews both any strong form of naturalism and Platonistic commitments. (McDowell’s Mind and World uses the notion of ‘bald naturalism’ to characterize the type of strong naturalism that is at issue here.) Habermas holds that, by dint of his remaining within ‘the philosophy of consciousness’, Adorno is still metaphysical. Hammer, Citation2000 analyses the imputed paradigm and denies that Adorno fits it.
20 On ‘late capitalism’, see Cook Citation2004: pp. 11–17. For the view about how animality affects our thinking, see: SO 504; DE 26f., 187–9; MM §79; Adorno, Citation1984. Freud considerably influences Adorno’s thoughts on self‐preservation.
21 As is scientism, construed as the view that ‘all knowledge can potentially be converted to science’ (Adorno, Citation1991: p. 8). Adorno rejects that view thus: ‘The object of undiminished experience is more objective [than] the indeterminate substrate of reductionism’ (CM 250; cf. esp. KCPR 25 and ME 15).
22 Arguably, indeed, ‘Adorno’s philosophy is best seen as an inflection of Weber’s analysis of disenchantment and societal rationalization’ (Bernstein, Citation2001: p. 30).
23 See DE 20 and, for instance, AT 4, MM 239, and ND 11 and 161.
24 One glimpses here that Adorno ‘refunctions’ ontology too. ‘Ontology is to be concretely and historically radicalized’ (Adorno, Citation1984: p. 121). For Adorno’s attack on (un‐refunctioned) ontology as first philosophy, see especially ME 8 and 19.
25 Since Adorno deems ‘enlightenment’ ‘a restricted reason’ (ND 317; see also esp. CM 148ff.), the deformation claim does not indict reason as such. Still: Adorno’s anti‐Platonism – his Hegelianism, Marxism, and even (see LND, passim) empiricism – commits him to denying any reality, or at least efficacy, to a reason lacking all actualization. This may be why he speaks of his allegiance to enlightenment as a ‘petitio principii’ (DE xvi). Yet Adorno believes that a reason more worthy of the name has some actuality (see §3.2). To that extent, the charge that Adorno attacks the very reason that his attack employs (see esp. Habermas, Citation1987: pp. 119ff. and 1984: pp. 384–6) is awry. Bernstein (Citation2001: pp. 266f.) and O’Connor (Citation2004: pp. 165–70), inter alios, provide similar rebuttals to Habermas’s charge.
26 ‘Exchange’ (Tausch) in Adorno abbreviates ‘the exchange relationship’ (Tauschverhält) or ‘exchange process’ (Tauschvorgang). In what follows, I mean to improve upon what I regard as the best extant accounts of the Adorno–Lukács relation, namely those provided by Habermas (Citation1984: Ch. 4) and Cook (Citation2004: pp. 39–49).
27 That Adorno accepts the ideas of mystery and fetishism is evident (ND 140, 178, 315; ME 37ff.; MM 239; H 126; S 270). However, some of his uses of ‘reification’ (Verdinglichung) impute what I (and Cook – see Citation2004: p. 45) call commodification. See, for instance, MM 228ff.
28 I have corrected a typographical error in Lukács, Citation1922.
29 Habermas uses the phrase ‘rationalisation‐as‐reification’ (Citation1984: p. 339) to impute broadly the same idea(s) to Lukács.
30 See, e.g., Habermas, Citation1984: p. 355. Adorno, too, takes Lukács this way (see the next note).
31 True, Adorno does not use ‘reification’ and cognates to mean reifying rationalization. Sometimes, indeed, he seems to reject even that latter idea. First, he faults Lukács’s doctrine of reification for idealism (ND 191f.). But one can retain Lukácsian reifying rationalization, even in an ontological version, while limiting the dependence reality has on thought. The same stretch of ND seemingly downplays the importance of reification. But close reading suggests that Adorno does not downplay Lukácsian reification (reifying rationalization). Finally: Lukács takes exchange as model and cause of reification, whereas Adorno traces deformation to thought. But Adorno connects exchange very closely to thought. On that point, see what follows in the main text. See also: IS 15f., 31, 64f.; S 270; KCPR 174. See additionally – on the admittedly strange idea that society influences what there is not only through concepts but somehow as, or analogously to, a concept – IS 32 and 37.
32 KCPR 176, DE 167, MM 69f., and ND 56 make comparable claims.
33 ‘The reconciled condition would not be the philosophical imperialism of annexing the alien. Instead, its happiness would lie in the fact that the alien, in the proximity it is granted, remains what is distant and different, beyond the heterogeneous and beyond that which is one’s own’ (ND 191; see also ND 10).
34 ‘The formulation “negative dialectic” offends against tradition. As early as Plato, dialectic intended to produce something positive through the intellectual means of negation; the figure of a “negation of negation” came to name this succinctly. This book would like to free dialectics from such affirmativity without reducing its determinacy’ (ND xix). On the contrasts that Adorno perceives between his dialectic and Hegel’s, see esp. H and LND. Sherratt (Citation2002) argues that Adorno’s dialectic is positive in that it involves normative models of knowledge and of the self. I do not quite disagree. But the present section argues that Adorno’s account of such a reconciled state is minimal.
35 See ND 51, 124, 277. Adorno (ND 207) likens his prohibition to ‘the theological ban on images’. The Marxian idea of utopia has always understood itself as the reappropriation of ‘alienated’ religious hopes. But Benjamin influences Adorno here too.
36 If not in name; only ND 147–51 uses the term rationale Identität.
37 Adorno does seem to hold that art, or more precisely philosophical interpretation of some modernist art, can anticipate a better world to a greater degree than can philosophy alone. See esp. AT 73, 132, 227 and, for commentary, Osborne, Citation1989.
38 Adorno does impart two further, minimal, points. (1) Reconciliation involves the satisfaction of basic needs (ND 303f., MM 155f., AT 33). (2) Social reconciliation would involve the absence of reification (commodification, reifying rationalization) and the transformation of commodity exchange (ND 146f.).
39 ‘Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen’ (MM 39 / GS4 43). On this conception, and on the ethical dimension to Adorno’s thought more generally, see, in the first instance, Freyenhagen, Citation2008.
40 This is the sense (see n. 4 above) in which dialectic ‘cannot be maintained as a structure that will stay basic no matter how it is modified’.
41 In claiming (1976: p. 9) that ‘dialectics does not accede to the criterion of the definition but instead criticises it’, Adorno intends also the idea that dialectic identifies forms of non‐identity and thus, in various ways, reveals deficiencies to definitions. See also ND 141.
42 ND 164f. compares dialectic to Weber’s procedure with ideal types. A comparison of dialectic with the ‘exemplary method’ (ND xx) is harder to understand. The reference appears to be to the ‘exemplary analysis’ (ME 119) represented by Husserl’s method of eidetic variation.
43 ‘[C]ontradictoriness is a category of reflection, the cognitive confrontation of concept and thing’ (ND 144). ‘Dialectics lies in things, but it could not exist without the consciousness that reflects it – no more than it can evaporate into that consciousness’ (ND 205).
44 Moot here are Adorno’s transcendentalism and just what forms of teleology (if any) he ends up endorsing. A final point about the methodological status of negative dialectic concerns its historical contingency. With Marx, Adorno holds that the realization of utopia would be the realization and even the supersession of philosophy. ‘Philosophy […] lives on because the moment to realize it was missed’ (ND 3). ‘The right state of things would be free of it’ (ND 11; see also ND 6).