Adorno, Theodor - Negative Dialectics - 3a - Models Freedom.pdf - Negativ Dialectics - MKTK

Negative Dialectics

Part III. Models. Freedom: Metacritique of Practical Reason

“False Problem” [Scheinproblem] 211-213

The talk of false problems once wished to prevent, for the purposes of enlightenment, the

unquestioned authority of dogmas to set the course of considerations, whose decisions

would be impossible precisely to the thinking to which they were submitted. There is an

echo of this in the pejorative use of the word scholastic. For some time however false

problems are no longer presumed to be those which ridicule rational judgements and

rational interests, but those which use concepts not clearly defined. A semantic taboo

strangles substantive questions, as if they were only questions of meaning; the

preliminary consideration degenerates into the ban on consideration altogether. The

ground-rules of methods modeled without further ado on the current ones of exact

science regulate what may be thought, no matter how urgent the matter; approved modes

of procedure, the means, win primacy over what is to be cognized, the ends. Experiences

which conflict with the explicit signs assigned to them are given a dressing-down. The

difficulties which they cause are laid solely to lax pre-scientific nomenclature. – Whether

the will would be free, is so relevant as the recalcitrance of the termini towards the

desiderata of simply and clearly stating what they mean. Since justice and punishment,

finally the possibility of what the tradition of philosophy has throughout called morality

or ethics, depends on the answer, the intellectual need is not to be talked out of the naïve

question as a false problem. The self-righteous tidiness of thinking offers it a poor

substitute satisfaction. Nevertheless the semantic critique is not to be carelessly ignored.

The urgency of a question cannot compel any answer, insofar as no true one is to be

obtained; still less however can the fallible need, even the desperate one, indicate the

direction of the answer. The objects under discussion are to be reflected upon, not by

judging them as an existent or a not-existent, but by absorbing into their own

determination the impossibility of making them tangibly thingly [dingfest], as much as

the necessity to think them. This is attempted in the antinomy chapter of the Critique of

Pure Reason and in great swathes of the Critique of Practical Reason, with the express

intent or without it; admittedly Kant did not totally avoid therein the dogmatic usage,

which he, like Hume, upbraids in other traditional concepts. He settled the conflict

between facticity – “nature” – and what is necessary to thought – the intelligible world –

in dichotomical fashion. If however the will or freedom cannot be pointed out as

something existent, then this does not at all exclude, after the analogy to simple

predialectical epistemology, individual impulses or individual experiences from being

synthesized under concepts to which no naturalistic substrate corresponds, which

however similarly reduce those impulses or experiences to a common denominator,

comparable to how the Kantian “object” does to its appearances. According to its model,

the will would be the lawful [gesetzmaessige] unity of all impulses, which prove

themselves to be simultaneously spontaneous and rationally determined, as distinct from

the natural causality in whose framework it in any case remains: no sequence of acts of

will outside of the causal nexus. Freedom would be the word for the possibility of those

impulses. But the snap epistemological answer is not adequate. The question as to

whether the will would be free or not, compels an either/or, just as dubious as conclusive,

which the concept of the will as the lawful [gesetzmaessiges] unity of its impulses glosses

over indifferently. And above all the monadological structure of will and freedom is

tacitly assumed, as in the model of conceptual construction oriented to subjective

immanence-philosophy. The simplest of things contradicts it: mediated through what

analytic psychology calls the “reality check”, countless moments of externalized, indeed

social reality go along together with the decisions designated by will and freedom; if the

concept of what rationally accords in the will is supposed to say anything at all, then it

refers to this, however stubbornly Kant may dispute this. What lends the immanence-

philosophical determination of those concepts their elegance and their autarky is, in truth,

in view of the factual decisions, whereby the question as to whether they are free or

unfree can be asked, an abstraction; what it leaves over of what is psychological, is

scanty in contrast to the real complexion of inner and outer. Nothing is to be read out of

this impoverished, chemical extract, which might predicate freedom or its opposite. Put

more strictly and at the same time more Kantian still, the empirical subject which makes

those decisions – and only an empirical one can make them, the transcendental pure “I

think” would not be capable of any impulse – is itself a moment of the spatio-temporal

“external” world and has no ontological priority before it; that is why the attempt to

localize the question of free will in it failed. It drew the line between what is intelligible

and what is empirical in the midst of empiricism. That much is true in the thesis of the

false problem. As soon as the question of free will shrinks into that of the decision of

every individual, dissolving this out of its context and that which is individuated

[Individuum] out of society, it hews to the deception of absolute pure being-in-itself:

delimited subjective experience usurps the dignity of what is most certain of all. The

substrate of the alternative has something fictive about it. The presumed subject, which is

existing-in-itself, is in itself mediated by that which it separates itself from, by the context

of all subjects. Through the mediation it becomes itself what, according to its

consciousness of freedom, it does not wish to be, heteronomous. Even where unfreedom

is positively assumed, its conditions, as those of an immanently closed psychic causality,

are sought in the split-off individuated, which is essentially nothing split-off of the sort. If

not even the individual can find the matter-at-hand of freedom in itself, just as little may

the theorem of the determination of the naïve feeling of caprice be simply extinguished

post festum; the doctrine of psychological determinism was carried out only in a late

phase.

Interest in Freedom Split 213-215

Since the seventeenth century great philosophy has deemed freedom to be its most

characteristic interest; under the unexpressed mandate of the bourgeois class, to

transparently ground it. That interest however is antagonistic in itself. It goes against the

old oppression and promotes the new one, which lies hidden in the rational principle

itself. A common formulation is sought for freedom and oppression: the former is ceded

to rationality, which delimits it, and removed from empiricism, in which one does not

wish to see it realized at all. The dichotomy is also related to advancing scientization. The

class is allied to it, insofar as it encourages production, and must fear it, as soon as it

infringes upon the belief that their freedom, already resigned to sheer inwardness, would

be existent. This is what really stands behind the doctrine of the antinomies. Already in

Kant and later in the idealists the idea of freedom appeared in opposition to specific

scientific research, particularly psychology. Their objects were banished by Kant into the

realm of unfreedom; positive science is supposed to have its place underneath speculation

– in Kant: underneath the doctrine of the noumena. With the waning of the speculative

power and the correlative development of the particular sciences, the opposition

sharpened to an extreme. The particular sciences paid for this with hidebound pettiness,

philosophy with non-committal emptiness. The more the particular sciences confiscated

of its content – as psychology did to the genesis of the character, over which even Kant

made wild guesses – the more embarrassingly do philosophemes on the freedom of the

will degenerate into declamations. If the particular sciences seek ever more nomothetism

[Gesetzmaessigkeit]; if they are thereby, before any fundamental views, driven to the

party of determinism, then philosophy increasingly becomes the storehouse of pre-

scientific, apologetic intuitions of freedom. The antinomics of freedom in Kant, just like

the dialectics of freedom in Hegel, form an essential philosophical moment; after them

academic philosophy, at least, swore by the idol of a higher realm beyond empiricism.

The intelligible freedom of individuals is praised, so that one can hold the empirical ones

even more ruthlessly accountable, to better curb them by the prospect of a metaphysically

justified punishment. The alliance of the doctrine of freedom and repressive praxis

distances philosophy ever further from genuine insight into the freedom and unfreedom

of living beings. It approximates, anachronistically, that faded sublimity which Hegel

diagnosed as the misery of philosophy. Because however the particular science – that of

criminal justice is exemplary – cannot handle the question concerning freedom and must

reveal its own incompetence, it seeks assistance precisely from the philosophy which

through its bad and abstract opposition to scientivism cannot provide such assistance.

Where science hopes for the decision on what it finds irresolvable from philosophy, it

receives from the latter only the solace of the humdrum world-view. In it individual

scientists orient then themselves according to taste and, one must fear, according to their

own psychological drive-structure. The relationship to the complex of freedom and

determinism is delivered helter-skelter over to irrationality, oscillating between

inconclusive, more or less empirical specific findings and dogmatic generalities.

Ultimately the attitude to that complex becomes dependent on political affiliation or the

power recognized at the moment. Reflections on freedom and determinism sound archaic,

as if dating from the early epoch of the revolutionary bourgeoisie. But that freedom

grows obsolete, without being realized, is not to be accepted as a fatality; resistance must

explain this. Not the least of the reasons why the idea of freedom lost its power over

human beings is that it was conceived of so abstractly-subjectively in advance, that the

objective social tendency could bury it without difficulty.

Freedom, Determinism, Identity 215-217

The indifference towards freedom, its concept and the thing itself, is caused by the

integration of society, which the subjects experience as if it were irresistible. Their

interest in being cared for has crippled the one in a freedom which they fear as

defenselessness. The very mention of freedom, just like the appeal to it, already rings

hollow. That is what an intransigent nominalism adjusts itself to. The fact that it relegates

the objective antinomies, in keeping with the logical canon, into the realm of false

problems, has for its part a social function: to conceal contradictions through denial. By

holding on to data or their contemporary heirs, protocol statements, consciousness is

disburdened of what would contradict that which is external. According to the rules of

that ideology, only the modes of conduct of human beings in various situations would

need to be described and classified; any talk of the will or freedom would be conceptual

fetishism. All determinations of the I ought thereby, as behaviorism in fact planned, to be

simply translated back into modes of reaction and individual reactions, which could then

be nailed down. What is left out of consideration is that what is nailed down produces

new qualities in contrast to the reflexes, out of which the former may have originated.

The positivists unconsciously obey the dogma of the preeminence of the first, which their

metaphysical archenemies entertained: “What is specifically most revered is what is most

ancient, the sworn witness is however the most honored of all.” 1 In Aristoteles it is

mythos; what survives of it in straight out anti-mythologists is the conception that

everything which is would be reducible to what it once was. In the like for like of their

quantifying methods there is as little room for the self-producing other as the bane of

destiny. What however has been objectified in human beings out of their reflexes and

against these, character or will, the potential organ of freedom, also undermines this last.

For it embodies the dominating principle, to which humanity progressively submits.

Identity of the self and self-alienation accompany each other from the very beginning;

that is why the concept of self-alienation is badly romantic. The condition of freedom,

identity is immediately at the same time the principle of determinism. The will is, insofar

as human beings objectify themselves into character. Thereby they become, towards

themselves – whatever that may be – something externalized, according to the model of

the external world of things, subjugated to causality. – Moreover the positivistic concept

of the “reaction”, purely descriptive by its own intent, presupposes incomparably more

than what it confesses: passive dependence on each given situation. What is spirited away

a priori is the reciprocal influence of subject and object, spontaneity is already excluded

by the method, in unison with the ideology of adjustment, which breaks human beings,

ready to serve the course of the world, once more of the habit of that moment. If there

remained only passive reactions, then there would remain, in the terminology of older

philosophy, only receptivity: no thinking would be possible. If there is will only through

consciousness, then consciousness is indeed, correlatively, also only where there is will.

Self-preservation for its part demands, in its history, more than the conditioned reflex and

thereby prepares for what it finally steps beyond. Therein it presumably resembles the

biological individual [Individuum], which stipulates the form of its reflexes; the reflexes

could scarcely be without any moment of unity. It reinforces itself as the self of self-

preservation; freedom opens itself to the latter as its historically-become difference from

the reflexes.

Freedom and Organized Society 217-221

Without any thought of freedom, organized society could scarcely be theoretically

grounded. It would then once again cut short freedom. Both can be demonstrated in the

Hobbesian construction of the state-contract. A factical, thorough-going determinism

would sanction, in opposition to the determinist Hobbes, the bellum omnium contra

omnes [Latin: war of all against all]; every criterion of treatment would fall asunder, if

everyone were equally predetermined and blind. The perspective of something at an

extremity is outlined; as to whether, in the demand for freedom for the sake of the

possibility of living together, a paralogism lies hidden: freedom must be real, so that there

would not be horror. But rather there is horror, because there is not yet any freedom. The

reflection on the question concerning will and freedom does not abolish the question, but

turns it into one from the philosophy of history: why did the theses, “The will is free”,

and, “The will is unfree”, become an antinomy? Kant did not overlook the fact that this

reflection originated historically, and expressly founded the revolutionary claim of his

own moral philosophy on its delay: “One saw human beings bound to laws by their duty,

it did not however occur to anyone, that they would be subject only to their own and

nevertheless universal legislation, and that they would only be bound to act according to

their own yet generally legislated will, according to the purpose of nature.” 2 By no means

however did it occur to him, as to whether freedom itself, to him an eternal idea, could be

a historical essence; not merely as a concept but rather according to its experience-

content. Entire epochs, entire societies lacked the concept of freedom as much as the

thing. To ascribe this to them as an objective in-itself even where it was thoroughly

concealed from human beings, would conflict with the Kantian principle of the

transcendental, which is supposed to be founded in the subjective consciousness, and

would be untenable to the degree that the presumed consciousness totally lacked any sort

of living being at all. Hence no doubt Kant’s tenacious effort to demonstrate the moral

consciousness as something ubiquitous, existent even in what is radically evil. Otherwise

he would have had to reject, in the appropriate phases and societies in which there is no

freedom, along with the character of rationally-endowed beings also that of humanity; the

follower of Rousseau could scarcely have found comfort in that. Before that which is

individuated in the modern sense formed, something self-evident for Kant, which is not

meant simply as the biological individual being but as what is first constituted as a unity

by the self-reflection, 3 the Hegelian “self-consciousness”, it is anachronistic to speak of

freedom, of the real kind as much as the demand for such. Freedom, to be established in

its full dimensions solely under social conditions of an unfettered plenitude of goods,

could on the other hand also be totally extinguished, perhaps without a trace. The trouble

is not that free human beings act radically evil, as is being done far beyond any measure

imaginable to Kant, but that there is not yet a world in which they, and this flashes in

Brecht, would no longer need to be evil. Evil would be therefore their own unfreedom:

what happens which is evil, would come from the latter. Society determines individuals,

even according to their immanent genesis, as what they are; their freedom or unfreedom

is not what is primary, as this appears under the veil of the principium individuationis

[Latin: individuating principle]. For even the insight into its dependence is obscured to

subjective consciousness by the ego, as Schopenhauer explained by the mythos of the veil

of Maya. The individuation-principle, the law of particularization to which the

universality of reason in individuals is tied, insulates this tendentially from the contexts

which surround it and promotes thereby the flattering confidence in the autarky of the

subject. Its epitome is contrasted under the name of the freedom to the totality which

restricts individuality. The principium individuationis is however by no means that which

is metaphysically ultimate and unalterable, and therefore also not freedom; this is rather a

moment in a double sense: not isolatable but imbricated, and for the time being always

only a moment of spontaneity, a historical intersection blocked under contemporary

conditions. As little as the independence of the individuated, inappropriately emphasized

by liberal ideology, prevails, so little is its utterly real separation from society to be

denied, which that ideology wrongly interprets. At times the individuated has opposed

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