Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno

First published:Negative Dialektik, 1966 (English translation, 1973)

Type of Philosophy: Epistemology, metaphysics

Context

Theodor Adorno was one of the principal figures in the Frankfurt School of Marxist social philosophy that flourished between 1923 and 1970. Dismayed by the sudden rise of capitalism in Germany after World War I, the Frankfurt thinkers rejected both metaphysics and scientific rationalism in focusing on understanding how capitalism worked in modern society. The school’s founders included Max Horkheimer, director for a while of the movement’s Institute for Social Research and collaborator with Adorno on the important book Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1972).

The school soon abandoned class analysis in favor of the study of culture and authority, and although its members deplored the fragmentation of learning in the universities and attempted to fuse sociology and philosophy, they usually specialized themselves. Adorno, for example, was a brilliant musicologist and student of culture. Adorno’s Marxism was cooled by the events in Russia during the 1930’s and tempered by such non-Marxist influences as philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The institute relocated in the 1930’s to New York, where Horkheimer and Adorno continued writing despite Adorno’s deep antipathy to the United States. In 1950, Herbert Marcuse stayed on in the United States, but Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Frankfurt, Horkheimer as the university rector and Adorno as a chaired professor. They continued their own Western Marxist polemics and criticized the “culture industry,” but they also attacked the communist regimes to the east. Indeed, E. B. Ashton, translator of Negative Dialectics, describes the book as “an apologia for deviationism, a Marxist thinker’s explication of his inability to toe the lines laid down today for proper Marxist thinking.” The movement produced one substantial later thinker, Jürgen Habermas, but by 1969, Adorno was dead and the movement spent.

Negative Dialectics is an extraordinarily difficult work unless the reader is well versed in philosophy, especially German idealism of the last two centuries and the writings of Karl Marx. The usual problems of translating German metaphysics are greatly compounded by Adorno’s expecting from his readers a deep familiarity not only with Immanuel Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche but also with the later thinkers Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Georg Lukács. Finally, Adorno’s often paratactic style (his translator confesses that he at first judged Negative Dialektik “untranslatable”) concedes nothing to any reader and adds a layer of obliquity to an already dark text.

Adorno divides his four-hundred-page tome into a long introduction that he says “expounds the concept of philosophical experience.” This is followed by “Part 1: Relation to Ontology,” which is divided into “The Ontological Need” and “Being and Existence.” Part 2 consists of “Negative Dialectics: Concept and Categories,” and part 3, “Models,” has sections on “Freedom,” “World Spirit and Natural History,” and “Meditations on Metaphysics.” Adorno breaks down each of these sections into brief essays averaging a couple pages each, but the frequent difficulty in following the thread of his arguments from essay to essay appears in his translator’s admission that he found himself “translating entire pages without seeing how they led from the start of an argument to the conclusion.”

Negative Dialectics

Informing Negative Dialectics throughout is the linking of the subject-object dichotomy in Hegel’s idealism with the Enlightenment’s subjection of nature through reason, the theme of Adorno and Horkheimer’s early work Dialectic of Enlightenment. The contemptuous epithet “bourgeois idealism” suggests the complicity of society with science: The mind (subject) shapes nature (object) to produce what Adorno perceives as a monstrous technocracy that refutes Marx’s hope for a beneficent evolution in the “relations of productivity.”

Philosophy lives on, Adorno says in the introduction to his work, because it failed to achieve the mission Marx assigned it of changing the world. The old systems, or “conceptual shells,” linger like “relics,” and Hegel’s dialectic is due for an overhaul. Hegel’s idealism envisioned the objective world as somehow identical to, or constituted by, thought; but Adorno avers that “dialectics says no more . . . than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder,” and it is this remainder, the “untruth of identity,” that enables dialectics: “[Negative] [d]ialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity.” Negative dialectics reveals its affinity with Jacques Derrida’s celebrated notion of différance when Adorno asserts: “What we differentiate will appear divergent, dissonant, negative for just as long as the structure of our consciousness obliges it to strive for unity.” The philosophical materialism that Adorno strives to formulate through negative dialectics would destroy the subject’s stranglehold and free nature from the grip of reason.

Adorno concludes his introductory remarks by stating that he “is prepared for the attacks to which Negative Dialectics will expose him. He feels no rancor and does not begrudge the joy of those in either camp who will proclaim that they knew it all the time and now he was confessing.” Adorno anticipated these attacks resulting from remarks such as this:

In the East, the theoretical short circuit in the views of individuality has served as a pretext for collective oppression. The party, even if deluded or terrorized, is deemed a priori superior in judgment to each individual because of the number of its members. Yet the isolated individual unhampered by any ukase may at times perceive objectivities more clearly than the collective, which is no more than the ideology of its functionaries, anyway.

Existentialism and relativism get disposed of as summarily as Stalinism. Relativism is the “doctrinal embodiment” of bourgeois skepticism, which is “obtuse.” As for existentialism, the dogma of freedom of choice is “illusionary.”

Criticisms

In the chapters on “The Ontological Need” and “Being and Existence,” Adorno critiques philosophers Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, jabbing at Being and existentialism with caustic wit. The “need” he identifies is for a materialism that is not “shrouded in vapors.” Hegel’s idealism, embodied in the mind’s increasing control of nature, threatens the world with “the very calamity [technology] is supposed to protect us from.” Adorno’s contempt for Heidegger appears in references to “the corny tremolo of the phrase obliviousness of Being’” and to the existentialists’ “posturing as metaphysically homeless and nothingness-bound” as “ideology, an attempt to justify the very order that drives men to despair and threatens them with physical extinction.” Heidegger’s Being is an “aura without a light-giving star.” Heidegger’s account of the word “Being” implies transcendence, not “entwinement,” the appropriate understanding; and it abandons dialectics to achieve an immediacy beyond subject and object. Heidegger’s assertion of a Being without entity is hocus-pocus, and in ontologizing the ontic, he made something out of nothing. Adorno’s final verdict is brutal. Characterizing existentialism as a “Platonic prejudice” for power without Gorgias’s saving devotion to the ideal of justice, he says, “Of the eternal idea in which entity was to share . . . nothing remains but the naked affirmation of what is anyway—the affirmation of power.”

Only some idea can be given of the tortuous arguments in “Negative Dialectics: Concept and Categories,” which often have a theological cast to them, their burden being a scrutiny of Kant’s and Hegel’s views on the subject-object relationship. Kant represents Western “peephole metaphysics,” in which the pure “in-itself” peeps out. However, there is “no peeping out” from the object, says Adorno. In Hegel’s idealism, thought (the subject) somehow creates, or is identical to, matter (the object), and the perceived domination of matter by mind becomes in Adorno analogous to the dominance of individuals by an exploitative economic system:

When we criticize the barter principle as the identifying principle of thought, we want to realize the ideal of free and just barter. To date, this ideal is only a pretext.

To seek totality, or identity, is a false goal, for it is out of nonidentity that ideas can be “salvaged.” Dialectical thought—the negative dialectic—is the pursuit of nonidentity.

Responding to Lukács’s Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923; History and Class Consciousness, 1971), Adorno asserts in his brief note on “Objectivity and Reification” that dialectics cannot be reduced to reification and that the true cause of human suffering will be lost in the “lament over reification.” Reification is a secondary worry, for people’s woes issue from their social conditions, not from their perceptions of reality:

The meaningful times for whose return the early Lukács yearned were as much due to reification, to inhuman institutions, as he would later attest it only to the bourgeois age. Contemporary representations of medieval towns usually look as if an execution were just taking place to cheer the populace.

Models of Negative Dialectical Thought

Part 2 offers models of negative dialectical thinking. The essay “Freedom” becomes a dialogue with Kant on free will, a “metacritique” of Kant’s Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788; The Critique of Practical Reason, 1873). Kant taught that reason, working through its servant will, created reality, “untrammeled by the material,” in Adorno’s words. Adorno admits that freedom demands “full theoretical consciousness,” but, always attentive to the role of the object, insists that something more is needed, “something physical which consciousness does not exhaust,” and he finds this in the spontaneity that he identifies as the “part of action that differs from the pure consciousness.” In this spontaneity lies the arbitrariness that enables reason’s escape from the subject’s passivity. Adorno refers twice to the fact that in Kant’s ethics, “the dogmatic doctrine of free will is coupled with the urge to punish harshly, irrespective of empirical conditions,” a result that to Adorno reveals the repressiveness of Kant’s understanding of freedom as obedience. These reflections lead Adorno to what is always murkiest in his thinking: a sudden transition from metaphysics to ideology. Statements such as “In their inmost core, the theses of determinism and freedom coincide” and “surely it is only in a free society that the individuals would be [metaphysically] free” offer all the intuitive certainty of declarations about the mystery of the Holy Trinity.

Adorno’s Influence

The impact of Negative Dialectics cannot be assessed apart from a general consideration of Adorno’s influence. Many of his left-wing critics in the 1960’s judged that Adorno’s negative dialectics had fragmented the Frankfurt School’s original effort to construct a critical theory. One of his most sympathetic students, Martin Jay, admits that “a lengthy journey through the thicket of Adorno’s prose does give the impression of passing the same landmarks with uncomfortable frequency.” Even though Jay concedes that Adorno may have been an “ambitious failure,” he urges that he be given the benefit of the doubt.

In 1998, however, two substantial, largely favorable, and well-written studies of Adorno appeared: Simon Jarvis’s Adorno: A Critical Introduction and Eric L. Krakauer’s The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology. These penetrating commentaries reveal the power of Adorno’s works to stimulate minds decades after his death. Krakauer’s explication of the dialectic of technology draws heavily on Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, which contains ideas that were widely disseminated and could be sensed frequently in the polemics of the 1980’s and 1990’s. Among Adorno’s successors, Jürgen Habermas is a significant figure whose work was touched by Adorno.

Principal Ideas Advanced

•Negative dialectics, the pursuit of nonidentity, aims to dispel the illusion of the substantiality of thought.

•Negative dialectics rejects all transcendental elements and critiques the German tradition of idealism, with its concept of the world as constituted by thought.

•Martin Heidegger’s dogmas about Being are metaphysical sleight-of-hand.

•Immanuel Kant’s pronouncements on free will are subjectively repressive; spontaneity allows reason to escape from the subject’s passivity.

Bibliography

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute. New York: Free Press, 1977. Traces Theodor Adorno’s intellectual development and outlines his major theories. Emphasizes the influence of Walter Benjamin on his thought.

Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. Prismatic Thought: Theodor W. Adorno. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. A wide-ranging introduction to Adorno and his work, with emphasis on his aesthetic writings. Includes chapters providing biographical context on Adorno’s exile to the United States during World War II and his return to West Germany in the 1950’s, as well as on his writings on literature, mass culture, sociology and philosophy of art, and language. An epilogue summarizes Adorno’s place in contemporary criticism.

Huhn, Tom, and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds. The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997. Twelve essays exemplify a broad range of approaches to Adorno’s writings on aesthetics. Includes selective bibliographies of English translations of Adorno’s work and of articles and books in English on Adorno and his relation to critical theory.

Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. New York: Verso, 1990. Detailed readings of three major works by Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Negative Dialectic, and Aesthetic Theory, documenting their contributions to contemporary Marxism and exploring Adorno’s emphasis on late capitalism as a total system within the forms of culture.

Jameson, Fredric, ed. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971. Jameson’s first chapter, “T. W. Adorno, or, Historical Tropes,” analyzes Adorno’s dialectical method and pessimistic critique of modern culture, chiefly with reference to his Philosophy of Modern Music.

Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1998. Surveys the development of Adorno’s thought and sketches the intellectual and institutional contexts from which it emerged. Offers explications of Adorno’s work as a critic of society and culture, of his aesthetic theory, and of his work on epistemology and metaphysics.

Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984. A lucid introduction to Adorno’s work, beginning with his key images of the force field and his extension of Benjamin’s concept of constellation. These metaphors are then used to map five major areas of Adorno’s intellectual concerns: Marxism, aesthetic modernism, cultural conservatism, Judaism, and deconstructionism.

Krakauer, Eric L. The Disposition of the Subject: Reading Adorno’s Dialectic of Technology. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998. This work draws on Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment to explain the dialectic of technology.

Lichtheim, George. From Marx to Hegel. New York: Herder and Herder, 1971. Analyzes the German intellectual tradition and historical status of Marxism. His chapter on Adorno provides biographical and historical context and briefly surveys his major writings.

Lunn, Eugene. Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. A comparative study of the treatment of Marxism and modernism in the writings of four important theoreticians of Marxist aesthetics, focusing on the period from 1920 to 1950. Contains six useful bibliographies on Marxism; on modernism; on the Brecht-Lucács and Benjamin-Adorno debates; on works by or about each of the four authors; and a general listing of key works on German and European social, political, and cultural history.