Adorno and Schelling: How to ‘Turn Philosophical Thought Towards the Non-Identical’

¹Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 155; Negative Dialektik, 155.

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between Adorno and Schelling. It argues that Adorno resorted to Schellingian motifs (whether he acknowledged them or not, or acknowledged them only partially) to counteract the influence of Hegelian thought. In defending this thesis, I examine the various stages in the development of Adorno’s thought, beginning with two texts from the 1930s and concluding with Negative Dialectics and ‘Skoteinos’. This allows us to see that Adorno’s concern to discover a way of thinking that is capable of doing justice to the ‘non-identical’ was present throughout his philosophical career.

Keywords:

• Adorno
• Schelling
• Hegel
• identity-thinking
• non-identity thinking

Notes

¹Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 155; Negative Dialektik, 155.

²Letter from Marx to Feuerbach of 3 October 1843 (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 3: 349–50).

³Translators’ note: Where possible, we have cited standard English translations of the German texts cited by the author. However, in almost all cases we have modified the English translations extensively.

⁴Translators’ note: The German Verkehrtheit and its cognates denote not only ‘inversion’ and being ‘the wrong way round’, but also ‘perversity’ and ‘wrongness’. Hegel and Marx play on all of these meanings.

⁵We know that the expression ‘inverted world’ is used by Marx: ‘This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world’ (Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right’, 43). However, Marx borrowed the term from Saint-Simon: recognizing that ‘the nation has accepted the fundamental principle that the poor must be generous towards the rich’ and that, ‘in all sorts of occupations, it is the incapable who find themselves in charge of the capable’, Saint-Simon concluded that ‘current society really is the world inverted’ (Saint-Simon, Œuvres complètes, 3, 2123).

⁶Habermas, ‘Dialectical Idealism’, 84; ‘Dialektischer Idealismus’, 222.

⁷Schelling, Grounding, 194; Schelling, ‘Begründung’, 751.

⁸It is true that Hegel notes in the Remark to §3 of the Elements, that ‘the historical significance of origins, along with their historical demonstration and exposition, belongs to a different sphere from the philosophical view of the same origins and of the concept of the thing’; and also notes that the ‘purely historical endeavour […] bears no relation to philosophical consideration – unless, that is, development from historiographical grounds is confused with development from the concept’ (Hegel, Elements, 29, 30–1; Hegel, Werke, 7, 35, 37). Here, Hegel distinguishes between the historical and the speculative and posits their reciprocal heterogeneity; but he also asserts the superiority of the speculative over the historical, without this implying a reduction of the latter to the former. Unlike Adorno, we think that this position is nothing out of the ordinary for Hegel and is in keeping with his usual approach, at least in the work of his mature period (we leave open the question of whether this was already Hegel's position during the period of the Phenomenology of Spirit).