Adorno, Theodor - Negative Dialectics - 2 - Concept & Categories.pdf - Negativ Dialectics - MKTK

Negative Dialectics

Part II. Negative Dialectics: Concept and Categories

Indissolubility of the Something 139-140

No being [Sein] without existents [Seiendes]. The Something as the necessary substrate

of the concept in thinking, also that of being, is the utmost abstraction – not to be

abolished by any further thought-process – of what is substantive, which is not identical

with thought; without the Something, formal logic cannot be thought. It is not to be

purified of its metalogical rudiment.*1* That substantive which the form of what is at

large [Ueberhaupt] in thought would like to shake off, the supposition of its absolute

form, is illusionary. Constitutive to what is substantive [Sachhaltiges] for the form is

above all the substantial experience of what is substantive. Correlatively, the pure

concept, the function of thought, is not to be radically separated at the subjective counter-

pole from the existent “I”. The prôtou pseudos [Greek: proto-falsity] of idealism since

Fichte was that the movement of the abstraction would permit the discarding of what is

abstracted from. It is eliminated from thought, exiled from the latter’s home domain, not

annihilated in itself; the belief in this is magical. Thinking without what is thought would

countermand its own concept and that which is thought indicates in advance the existents,

which were supposed to be posited in the first place by absolute thinking: a simple

hosteron proteron [Greek: what is after is what is before]. This would remain offensive to

the logic of non-contradictoriness; solely dialectics can comprehend it in the self-critique

of the concept. It is objectively caused by epistemology, by the content of what is

discussed in the critique of reason, and for that reason survives the downfall of idealism,

which culminated in it. The thought leads to the moment of idealism, which is contrary to

this; it does not permit itself to be dissolved back into the thought. The Kantian

conception still permitted dichotomies such as that between form and content, subject and

object, without being put off by the mutual mediatedness [Vermittelheit] of the opposing

pairs; it did not notice its dialectical essence, the contradiction implied in its meaning. It

was Heidegger’s teacher Husserl who so sharpened the idea of a priori-ty that, against his

will as much as Heidegger’s, the dialectic of the eidê [Greek: form, kind] was to be

derived from its own claim. 1 If dialectics has however become inescapable, then it cannot

remain glued to its principle like ontology and transcendental philosophy, as a pivotal

structure, however modifiable. The critique of ontology does not aim at any other

ontology, nor even at one which is non-ontological. Otherwise it would merely posit an

Other as what is simply and purely first; this time not the absolute identity, being, the

concept, but the non-identical, the existent, facticity. Therein it would hypostasize the

concept of the non-conceptual and treat it counter to what it means. Foundational

philosophy, prôtê philosophia [Greek: originary philosophy] necessarily carries the

primacy of the concept with itself; what withholds itself from it, also departs from the

form of a philosophizing allegedly based on a foundation. Philosophy could remain

pacified by the thought of the transcendental apperception, or even by being, so long as

those concepts were identical with the thought, that it thinks. If such identity is dismissed

in principle, then it drags down the tranquillity of the concept as something ultimate in its

fall. Because the fundamental character of every general concept dissolves before the

determinate existent, philosophy may no longer hope for totality.

Necessity of the Substantive 140-142

In the Critique of Pure Reason, sensation occupied the place of the indissolubly ontic as

the something. However sensation has no sort of preeminence of cognitive dignity before

any other real existent. Its “my”, accidental to its transcendental analysis and tied to ontic

conditions, is mistaken for a legal claim by the experience which is entangled in its

reflection-hierarchy, nearest to itself; as if what any particular human consciousness

presumed as the ultimate were really an ultimate in itself, as if every other particular

human and limited consciousness could not claim the same privilege for its sensations. If

the form however, the transcendental subject, is supposed to strictly require sensation in

order to function and thus to judge accurately, then it would be quasi ontologically

attached not only to the pure apperception but just as much to its counter-pole, to its

matter. This ought to shatter the entire doctrine of the subjective constitution, to which,

following Kant, matter cannot be traced back. The idea of something immutable,

identical to itself, would also thereby collapse. It is derived from the domination of the

concept, which wished to be constant towards its content, precisely its “matter”, and for

that reason is blind to such. Sensations, the Kantian matter, without which the forms

could not even be imagined, which are therefore the conditions of the possibility of

cognition in their own right, have the character of that which is transient. The non-

conceptual, inalienable from the concept, disavows its being-in-itself and transforms it.

The concept of the non-conceptual cannot pause by itself, in epistemology; this

necessitates the substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit] of philosophy. Whenever it was master of

itself, it dealt with the historically existent as its object, not first in Schelling and Hegel,

but contre coeur [French: against its own will] already in Plato, who baptized the existent

as the non-existent and yet wrote a doctrine of the state, in which eternal ideas are closely

tied to empirical determinations such as the exchange of equivalents and the division of

labor. Today it has become customary to make the academic distinction between a

regular, proper philosophy, which would deal with the highest concepts, even if they

deny their conceptuality, and a merely genetic, extra-philosophical relation to society,

whose notorious prototypes would be the sociology of knowledge and the critique of

ideology. The distinction is as unfounded as the need for regular philosophy is for its part

suspect. It is not merely that by belatedly trumpeting its purity, it turns away from

everything in which it once had its substance. Rather the philosophical analysis strikes

immanently, in what is innermost to the presumably pure concepts and their truth-

content, into that which is ontic, before which the claim of purity shudders and, with

arrogant mien, cedes to the particular sciences. The smallest ontic residuum in the

concepts, which regular philosophy stirs in vain, compels it to reflectively include what is

existent there [Daseiende] in itself, instead of making do with its mere concept and

believing itself to be safe there from what it means. Philosophical thinking has for its

content neither the remainder after the cancellation of space and time, nor general

findings about what is spatio-temporal. It crystallizes in the particular, in what is

determined in space and time. The concept of the existent pure and simple is merely the

shadow of the false one of being.

Peephole Metaphysics 142-144

Wherever an absolute first is taught, there is always talk of something inferior, something

absolutely heterogenous to it, as its logical correlate; prima philosophia [Latin: originary

philosophy] and dualism go together. In order to escape this, fundamental ontology must

try to keep its first at a distance from determination. What was first for Kant, the

synthetic unity of the apperception, suffered the same fate. To him every determination of

the object is an investment of subjectivity in non-qualitative multiplicity, irregardless of

the fact that the determining acts, which count for him as spontaneous achievements of

transcendental logic, also model themselves [sich anbilden] on a moment which they

themselves are not; irregardless of the fact that what is to be synthesized does so only by

requiring and permitting this last out of itself. The active determination is not something

purely subjective, and that is why the triumph of the sovereign subject, which dictates

laws to nature, is hollow. Because however in truth subject and object do not firmly

oppose one another, as in the Kantian outline, but penetrate each other reciprocally, the

degradation of the thing to something chaotically abstract by Kant also affects the power

which is supposed to form it. The bane which the subject exerts becomes just as much

one over the subject; both pursue the Hegelian fury of disappearance. In the categorical

achievement it expended and impoverished itself; in order to be able to determine, to

articulate what opposes it, so that it would become the Kantian object, it must dilute itself

to the mere generality for the sake of the objective validity of that determination,

amputate it from itself no less than from the object of cognition, so that this would be

reduced to its concept according to program. The objectivating subject shrinks down into

a point of abstract reason, finally into the logical non-contradictoriness, which for its part

has no meaning independent of the determinate object. The absolute first necessarily

remains as indeterminate as its opposite; no investigation of what is concretely precedent

reveals the unity of what is abstractly antithetical. Rather the rigid dichotomical structure

crumbles by virtue of the determinations of each pole as the moment of its own opposite.

The dualism is already given in the philosophical thought and as inescapable, as the

process by which it becomes false in thought. Mediation is merely the most general, itself

inadequate expression for this. – If however the claim of the subject that it is the first,

which surreptitiously inspired ontology, is cashiered, then what is secondary according to

the schema of traditional philosophy is no longer secondary, in a double sense

subordinate. Its denigration was the flip side of the triviality that everything existent

would be colored by the observer, its group or species. In truth the cognition of the

moment of subjective mediation into what is objective implies the critique of the notion

of a glance into the pure in-itself, which, forgotten, lurks behind that triviality. Western

metaphysics was, except for heretics, peephole metaphysics. The subject – itself only a

limited moment – was locked for all eternity in itself, as punishment for its deification. It

gazes into the darkened heavens, in which the star of the idea or that of being would

arise, as through the embrasures of a tower. It is precisely the wall around the subject

however which throws the shadow of what is thingly [Dinghaften] over everything which

it conjures, which subjective philosophy powerlessly combats again. Whatever of

experience may be carried along in the word being, is expressible only in configurations

of existents, not by the allergy against such; otherwise the content of philosophy becomes

the impoverished result of a process of subtraction, no different from the erstwhile

Cartesian certainty of the subject, the thinking substance. One cannot see out. What

would be beyond, appears only in the materials and categories within. That is where the

truth and untruth of the Kantian philosophy would step out of each other. It is true, in that

it destroys the illusion of the immediate knowledge of the absolute; untrue, in that it

describes this absolute with a model, that would correspond to an immediate

consciousness, were it merely the intellectus archetypus [Latin: archetypal intellect]. The

demonstration of this untruth is the truth of post-Kantian idealism; this latter however is

in turn untrue in its equation of subjectively mediated truth to the subject, as if its pure

concept were being itself.

Non-contradictoriness not Hypostasizable 144-146

These sorts of considerations seem to give rise to a paradox. Subjectivity, thinking itself,

would not be explained by itself but rather by the factical, especially by society; but the

objectivity of cognition in turn could not be without thinking, subjectivity. Such a

paradox originates from the Cartesian norm that the explanation ought to ground what

comes later, or at least logically later, in what comes earlier. The norm is no longer

binding [verbindlich]. According to its measure the dialectical matter-at-hand

[Sachverhalt] would be the simple logical contradiction. But the matter-at-hand is not to

be explained according to a hierarchical ordering schemata, called up from outside.

Otherwise the explanatory attempt presupposes the explanation, which it first needs to

find; presupposing non-contradictoriness, the subjective thought-principle, as inherent to

what is thought, to the object. In certain respects dialectical logic is more positivistic than

the positivism which condemns it: it respects the object which is to be thought as thought,

even there, where it does not follow the rules of thought. Its analysis is tangential to the

rules of thought. Thought need not remain content with its own juridicality

[Gesetzlichkeit]; it has the capacity to think against itself, without sacrificing itself; were

a definition of dialectics possible, this might be one worth suggesting. The armature of

thinking need not remain ingrown to it; it reaches far enough to see through the totality of

its logical claim as delusion. What is seemingly unbearable about this, that subjectivity

would presuppose the factical, but objectivity the subject, is unbearable only to such

delusion, to the hypostasis of the relationship of cause and effect, of the subjective

principle which the experience of the object does not mesh with. The dialectic, as a

philosophical mode of procedure, is the attempt to unravel the knot of that which is

paradoxical with the oldest medium of the Enlightenment, the ruse [List: cunning]. It is

no accident that the paradox was the bowdlerized form of dialectics since Kierkegaard.

Dialectical reason follows the impulse to transcend the natural context and its delusion,

which perpetuates itself in the subjective compulsion of logical rules, without imposing

its rule on it: without sacrifice and revenge. Even its own essence is something which has

come to be and as transient as antagonistic society. To be sure antagonism is no more

limited to society than suffering. So little as dialectics is to be extended to nature as a

universal explanatory principle, so little nevertheless are two kinds of truth to be

maintained next to each other, the dialectical one inside society and one indifferent

towards it. The separation of social and extra-social being, oriented to the

compartmentalization of the sciences, deceptively veils the fact that blind natural-

rootedness perpetuates itself in heteronomous history. 2 Nothing leads out of the

dialectical context of immanence than it itself. Dialectics meditates critically on itself,

reflects on its own movement; otherwise Kant’s legal claim against Hegel would never

expire. Such a dialectics is negative. Its idea names the difference from Hegel. Identity

and positivity coincided in the latter; the inclusion of everything non-identical and

objective in the subjectivity, which is expanded and exalted to the absolute Spirit, is

supposed to achieve the reconciliation. On the other hand the power of the whole which

is effective in every particular determination is not only its negation but also the negative,

the untrue. The philosophy of the absolute, total subject is particular.*2* The reversibility

of the identity-thesis, which is inherent in this, counteracts its intellectual principle. If the

existent is to be totally deduced from the Spirit, then the latter would be doomed to

become similar to the mere existent, which it meant to contradict: otherwise the Spirit

and the existent would not harmonize. Precisely the insatiable identity-principle

perpetuates the antagonism by means of the suppression of what is contradictory. What

tolerates nothing that would not be like itself, thwarts the reconciliation for which it

mistakes itself. The act of violence of making something the same reproduces the

contradiction which it stamps out.

Relationship to Left Hegelianism 146-147

First Karl Korsch and later the functionaries of Diamat have objected that the turn to non-

identity would be, due to its immanent-critical and theoretical character, an insignificant

nuance of neo-Hegelianism or of the historically obsolete Hegelian Left; as if the Marxist

critique of philosophy had dispensed with this, while at the same time the East cannot do

without a statutory Marxist philosophy. The demand for the unity of theory and praxis

has irresistibly debased the former to a mere underling, eliminating from it what it was

supposed to have achieved in that unity. The practical visa-stamp demanded from all

theory became the stamp of the censor. In the famed unity of theory-praxis, the former

was vanquished and the latter became non-conceptual, a piece of the politics which it was

supposed to lead beyond; delivered over to power. The liquidation of theory by

dogmatization and the ban on thinking contributed to bad praxis; that theory should win

back its independence is the interest of praxis itself. The relationship of both moments to

each other is not settled for once and for all, but changes historically. Today, since the

hegemonic bustle cripples and denigrates theory, theory testifies in all its powerlessness

against the former by its mere existence. That is why it is legitimate and hated; without it,

the praxis which constantly wishes to change things could not itself be changed. Whoever

scolds theory as anachronistic, obeys the topos of dismissing as outmoded what was

thwarted and remains painful. Therein precisely the course of the world is reconfirmed,

which it is the very idea of theory not to obey, and the theoretical target is missed, even

when it is successfully abolished, whether positivistically or by power-decree. The rage at

the recollection of a theory which carries its own weight is by the way not far removed

from the short-windedness of intellectual customs on the western side. The fear of

epigonality and of the academic odor that clings to every reprise of motives codified in

the philosophy of history has long led the various schools to advertise themselves as

something which has never yet existed. Precisely that strengthens the fatal continuity of

what already exists. So dubious however a procedure is, which insists all the more loudly

on Ur-experiences the quicker its categories are delivered from the social mechanism, so

little too are thoughts to be equated with what they originate from; this habit is equally a

piece of origin-philosophy. Whoever struggles against forgetting, only indeed against the

Adorno, Theodor - Negative Dialectics - 2 - Concept & Categories.pdf

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