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Espen Hammer

Minding the world

Adornos critique of idealism

Abstract Against Jrgen Habermas view that Adornos thinking is characterized by a commitment to a philosophy of consciousness, and that
therefore the only alternative to identitarian reason is to appeal to an
intuitive competence operating beyond the range of conceptual thought, it
is arged (1) that Adorno conceptualizes the modern epistemic subject (the
subject of a philosophy of consciousness) as based on a reification, and (2)
that he denies the possibility of a concept-transcendent (foundationalist)
constraint on judgments. In seeking to demonstrate against versions of
subjective idealism and foundationalism how thought can be responsive to
a non-identical (mind-independent) reality, Adorno defends an intersubjectivist and historicist view of knowledge according to which the operative and
yet anamnetic aspiration of knowledge is to know reflectively the object as
it is in itself. The conclusion is that although Adorno questions the modern
(Kantian) stress on epistemic autonomy, he does not take leave of modernity
in the sense ascribed to him by Habermas.
Key words

Adorno epistemology Habermas idealism modernity

Probably the most important reason why Jrgen Habermas in the 1970s
started to recommend a linguistic turn of the Frankfurt school of critical social theory, was his sense that the intellectual efforts of Theodor
W. Adorno, his teacher and the most influential representative of critical theory in the first two decades after the Second World War, had ended
in a philosophical cul-de-sac. According to Habermas highly influential
judgment, Adornos radical critique of reason demonstrates the exhaustion of a historically dominating paradigm of thought, namely the socalled philosophy of consciousness (Bewusstseinsphilosophie).1 Since
Adorno proves unable to disentangle himself from the implications and
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 26 no 1 pp. 7192
Copyright 2000 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1)
premises of this paradigm, his aporetic conclusions suggest malgr lui
that the notion of reason should be reconceptualized: it is best described,
he argues, not by the vocabulary of a philosophy of consciousness, but
in terms of linguistic functions and their corresponding validity-claims.
Viewed from the perspective of his own development, Habermas
recounting of Adornos achievements has several obvious virtues.
Among other things, it offers a categorical explanation of some of the
difficulties that appear in his reconstruction of Adorno, and it suggests
an alternative framework (his own) that may escape the problems
Adorno seems to face. I shall not be concerned here with the unfolding
of the theory of communicative reason, which has dramatically changed
the research and identity of critical theory. Rather I am interested in
questioning some of the claims I find tendentious in Habermas reconstruction of Adorno, and in particular the following.
Habermas understands Adornos epistemology as revolving around
a representationalist model of the mind, where consciousness is roughly
conceived along Cartesian lines, thus arguing that the possibility of any
cognitive relation to the world resides in mental representations occurring in individual minds. On this model, the entities in the world become
objects of knowledge and obtain significance through their representations as subjective states, or in terms of synthesizing or linguistic activities projected onto the world, and the mind is conceptualized as
disengaged from its historical, social and linguistic environment and
posited as an origin or first. According to Habermas, in attempting to
criticize the picture of reason which seems to evolve from a philosophy
of consciousness the famous instrumental rationality, which takes
cognitive-instrumental self-maintenance as its sole criterion of correctness the only alternative Adorno is forced to propose is a form of
irrationalism whereby human receptivity is being held susceptible to the
impact of a reality that is supposed to be entirely independent of, or
outside, the sphere of the conceptual, and which therefore cancels the
project of autonomous self-reassurance that the idealist tradition from
Kant and the German idealists to Habermas takes to be characteristic of
modernity. From positing the mind as an origin, which, since it potentially fails to account for a rational constraint from outside the autonomous exercise of thought and judgment, risks an insulation of thought
from the ordinary world of empirical events, Adorno simply adopts a
version of the Myth of the Given and commits himself to an unconditioned (metaphysically realist) correspondence between mind and world.
By comparing Adornos reflections on epistemology to John
McDowells recent attempt to show, by drawing on Kant and Hegel, how
we can have both rational constraint from the world and spontaneity all
the way out, I shall be suggesting that Adorno precisely seeks to extricate himself from the vascillation, described by Habermas, between, on

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Hammer: Adornos critique of idealism
the one hand, some version of subjective idealism and, on the other
hand, foundationalism. For Adorno and McDowell, the relationship
between subject and object, between the mind and its world, is fundamentally shaped by our participation in shared linguistic activities and
practices; and neither is the subject ahistorical in the sense of Bewusstseinsphilosophie, nor can thoughts have an objective bearing on the
world apart from their linkages to intuitions that already have conceptual content. Despite fascinating and highly revealing similarities
between the two positions, however, Adorno and McDowell sharply
divide on the question concerning the attainability of objective experience. For McDowells absolute idealism, there is, apart from the possibility of empirical falsehood, no distance between thought and world,
whereas for Adorno, such a position can have only the status of being
at best a cognitive ideal (or utopia): then due to socially created distortions and reifications, thought, at least in our present-day society, tends
to refuse its actual dependence on rational linkages between it and a
mind-independent world a point which for Adorno explains why epistemology in its ideological form usually falls back on either subjective
idealism or foundationalism (both positions fail to account for the
rational impact of independent reality). My conclusion will be that
Habermas, in reading Adorno, mistakes a contingent distance between
thought and world, one which can be criticized rationally with a view
to regaining the world, for a metaphysical and necessary one; but by
doing so, he ironically remains a representative of precisely that identitarian thinking which Adorno aims to overcome.

I
The basis for Habermas critique of Adorno is in large part drawn from
a reading of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max
Horkheimer and published in 1947.2 As Habermas describes it, the
Dialectic of Enlightenment is a philosophical response to current events,
as well as a farewell to a progressivist understanding of history (in particular the more orthodox Marxism which the Frankfurt school had
been defending in the early 1930s). In view of their perception of the rise
of fascism, Stalinism, monopoly capitalism and the American culture
industry, Horkheimer and Adorno deem it necessary to explain why the
progressive forces of modernity have seemingly failed, and they do so by
constructing an astonishing narrative of the rise and corruption of
reason and subjectivity from the dawn of man until their own day. As
Habermas points out, inspired by Max Webers theory of rationalization
and Georg Lukcss related conception of reification, they characterize
modern thought as having an increasingly disenchanted view of the

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1)
world. As opposed to the objective reason of earlier times, which
(although it rightly was criticized by the Enlightenment) saw the ultimate purposes of life as part of the fabric of the world, and thus the
description of fact and the affirmation of norms as not sharply distinguished, modern agents have to a large extent proven incapable of
recasting reason in terms other than the calculation of efficient means to
given ends. Since ends in their view cannot be justified categorically by
appealing to how the world is, but are relative to the arbitrary preferences of each individual, Horkheimer and Adorno call the disenchanted
reason of moderns subjective reason. The dominance of subjective
reason has meant an enormous increase in scientific knowledge, prediction and control, but at the expense of anti-realistically reducing knowledge-claims to a function of the procedures and instruments according
to which knowledge is produced, as well as reducing art and morality
to a matter of subjective conviction.
In their encompassing historico-philosophical narrative, Horkheimer and Adorno further argue that the process of disenchantment
can be read off from the earliest documents of Western civilization. For
example, in their interpretation of Homers Odyssey, which Habermas
discusses extensively, they claim that the primeval history of the autonomous subject, mans liberation from the powers of nature, takes place
through domination over external nature. The mastery of external
nature as well as the concomitant stripping off of all anthropomorphic
projections and the differentiation of natural processes from language
and norms presupposes, however, that the impulses of inner nature,
the psyche, must be sacrificed. Thus, in obeying the imperative of selfpreservation, the subject, as in Freuds economy of suppression, increasingly suffers from a split between the self-identical ego and its
unconscious other a split which Adorno, as we shall see, reads off
from Kants strict separations between the transcendental and the
empirical subject. As both a condition for the liberation from nature
and, in modernity, a tragic forgetfulness of the subjects partaking in
nature, the domination over external and internal nature is a highly
ambivalent process. While being dependent on domination for its possibility, the autonomous subject is at the same time threatened by the
coercion it has to impose on its inner nature. Hence under the condition
of modernity, the subject, according to Adorno, has become entirely
opaque to itself.
Whatever the merits and value of such a speculative and bleak view
of history might be, I find Habermas reconstruction of the account
offered in the Dialectic of Enlightenment of the anthropological genesis
of the subject to be relatively undisputable. What strike me as incorrect
(and yet instructive) are the philosophical consequences he infers from
this picture and ascribes to Adorno in particular. Before I critically start

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Hammer: Adornos critique of idealism
addressing his interpretation, let me summarize the claims he makes in
four steps.
(1) The first concerns language. Since reason is taken to be instrumental, it follows for Habermas that language in Adornos view, rather
than being a vehicle of truth and representation, cannot be conceptualized other than as a mere instrument of domination. In what Adorno calls
identitarian thinking, which roughly should be understood as an instrumentalist or pragmatist attitude to linguistic practices, the basic imperative of self-preservation turns the use of language, viewed genealogically,
into a strategy of survival, thus linking his theory of language with that
of Nietzsche in works such as On Truth and Falsity in an Extra-Moral
Sense.3 The subject employs language in order successfully to reduce
complexity and control the environment, and it does so in Habermas
reading of Adorno by subsuming a particular (or set of particulars) under
generic terms or class terms, thus effecting a synthesis between particular
and universal that ultimately fails to express what is proper to the particular as such. Indeed, predication itself, by reducing the determinations
of the particular that the logical subject denotes to the universal determination implied by the predicate-term, distorts and mystifies the particular
by omitting its differentia specifica and imputing to it a higher-order
reality of which it knows nothing. On this view, language, or at least
simple predicative (affirmative) sentences, makes us prone to disregard the
infinite potential for experience and intuition that is proper to this particular object, or what Adorno would call the non-identical.
(2) Entailed by the notion that reason is instrumental and hence that
thought, by employing language in an instrumental manner, necessarily
distorts the object, is that intuition or experience becomes unable to constrain thought rationally; hence the distinction between validity (or
truth) and power, as in Nietzsches picture of rationality, gets obliterated.
With this move, however, Adorno undermines or implicitly denies the
conditions under which his own propositions (or any) can claim validity; consequently, his (and Horkheimers) arguments imply a performative contradiction, which, if correct, necessarily entails that at least one
of their premises is false. As Habermas argues, If they do not want to
renounce the effect of a final unmasking and still want to continue with
critique, they will have to leave at least one rational criterion intact for
their explanation of the corruption of all criteria. In the face of this
paradox, self-referential critique loses its orientation.4 According to
Habermas, although Adorno is in fact aware of the performative contradiction he commits himself to, rather than seeking to escape it, he
accepts it as a condition of philosophical thought, thus claiming,
astonishingly, that philosophical reflection, given this model, by its very
nature is self-refuting. Now Habermas thinks that there is a way out of
the paradox he finds in Adorno. If one concedes that reason should be

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1)
viewed more abstractly, namely as a matter of rational argument, where
rational argument is linked to the specific types of validity-claims made
in the respective languages of science, morality and art-criticism, modernity does not have to be viewed as sliding into a self-destructive dialectic of enlightenment. It can equally well be regarded in terms of the
intensified unfolding of communicative rationality in each of the three
spheres of cultural modernity (science, morality, art-criticism). In his
view, Adorno, however, tends to see in the achievements of cultural modernity nothing but the disenchanted quest for technical utility, metaethical scepticism and entertainment.
(3) In the light of the second point, since philosophical or critical
reflection itself ultimately becomes a self-negating practice, Adorno, in
attempting to establish an alternative model of reason, finally invokes an
intuitive competence which operates beyond the grasp or range of conceptual thought. What Adorno calls mimesis or a mimetic impulse is
according to Habermas a pre-conceptual, pre-reflective impact of the
world from outside the realm of thought something about which he
can speak only as he would about a piece of uncomprehended nature.5
Indeed, by emphasizing its ineffability, Habermas compares the appeal to
mimesis with elements of Judaeo-Christian mysticism.6 So for Habermas,
the introduction of mimesis opens a gap in Adornos thought between
that whereof we can speak, but only ideologically, since identitarian
thinking only classifies its object (as opposed to identifying it in its differentia specifica), and that whereof we cannot speak, but only mimetically relate to, which would be the world as it is in itself, apart from the
distortions of instrumental reason.7 According to this reading, only
modernist art-practices (as described by Adorno in the Aesthetic Theory)
are able to give expression mimetically to nature as it is in itself, and
philosophy intentionally retrogresses to gesticulation, thereby renouncing its cognitive claims.8 But by surrendering reason to art, Adorno disengages himself, Habermas argues, from the enlightenment quest for
self-reassurance (interpreted in the Kantian tradition in terms of selfdetermination) and allies himself, against his express intentions, with the
spokesmen of the counter-enlightenment, Nietzsche and Heidegger, who
both recommend, again according to Habermas interpretation, that we
debunk self-reassurance understood as autonomy and adopt something
radically different (will to power, Being).9 Whereas Nietzsche, he suggests, denies from the outset the very possibility (and desirability) of
reconstructing reason in terms other than the sheer non-cognitive will to
power, thus reducing all normative and theoretical claims to validity
(which in Habermas opinion can be shown to have a cognitive value) to
the expressive power of judgments of taste for which no rational validityclaims can be made, Adorno equally reduces reason simply to the level
of non-cognitive domination and instrumental control. Correspondingly,

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Hammer: Adornos critique of idealism
whereas Nietzsche rejects the ideal of autonomy (and the very notion of
acting and thinking according to principles that are chosen on rational
grounds) as being nihilistic and incapable of generating new values,
Adorno refuses to accept a vision of freedom as consisting in a potentially
reflective responsiveness to putative norms of reason, first, because it
ideologically misrepresents the actual dependence of the individual upon
his or her society, and, second, because autonomy itself is just one more
expression of the universal struggle for self-preservation that is explanatory of reasons complete fusion with power.
(4) To be sure, it is not hard to sympathize with Habermas opinion
that if this is Adornos position, then critical theory, if theorized as a critical and intellectual engagement with modernity and its philosophical
and historical presuppositions, gets thrown into jeopardy. The lesson he
thinks should be learnt is that Adorno, even when he seeks to criticize
it, philosophizes according to an outmoded and incoherent paradigm of
thinking, namely the philosophy of consciousness, which needs to be
replaced by a philosophy of language and intersubjectivity. Although
Habermas includes a huge number of discrepant families of theories
(ranging from Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Husserl to contemporary positions in the philosophies of mind and language) under the heading
philosophy of consciousness, he seems to be claiming that for a conception to belong to such a paradigm, it has to satisfy at least four basic
conditions: (1) that consciousness, or at least the self-relation of the individual knowing subject, should (and can) serve as a foundation or underived ground for epistemology; (2) that linguistic meaning is either
identical with or the product of mental acts or representations; (3) that
the only attitude a subject can have to the world is an objectivating one
(it can represent states of affairs or intervene in the world as the totality of states of affairs); and (4) that representations and actions are
actualizations of a basic striving for self-preservation.10 On Habermas
interpretation, Adornos supposed vascillation between the notion of
identitarian thinking, on the one hand, as pervasive, and a radical,
almost utopian, non-conceptual conception of mimetic impulses, on the
other, ought to be understood as evidence of his incapacity to liberate
himself from a philosophy of consciousness: he simply could not
conceive of an alternative to identitarian thinking other than an antihumanist vocabulary of a pure and unrecognizable singularity beyond
the dialectical range of linguistic reflection and negation.

II
Habermas reconstruction calls for critical scrutiny. The first and most
general problem with it is that it entirely fails to take into account the

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1)
dialectical nature of Adornos thought. Rather than offering a single
narrative or description of the modern agents reasoning (reason is
instrumental; therefore all thinking is identitarian), Adorno constructs
two conflicting and yet mutually engaging and enforcing lines of narrative: one roughly coinciding with Habermas reading of the Dialectic of
Enlightenment (the Naturgeschichte of Adornos early writings), and the
other, forgotten or repressed by Habermas, focused on historicity and
finitude, a normative, though not non-actual, complement to the first.
Without the second account, the first would be impossible (or at least
incoherent), then no critical perspective would be available, which
would entail the undetectability of identitarian thinking. On the other
hand, without the first account, the second would become ideological:
it would represent the subject in a kind of status gratie without the necessary as well as superfluous level of reification that characterizes presentday society. Only in conjunction, by displaying the tension between
them, do the two stories make sense; for only thus do they represent the
actual conflicts of reality.
Consequently, when Habermas tells us that Adorno should be
viewed as a representative of philosophy of consciousness, he correctly
represents Adorno as claiming that the epistemic subject under the condition of modernity typically denies its historicity, its dependence on
socially mediated categories of thought, and its partaking in nature and
all this to such an extent that these determinations, as in Kants construction of the transcendental subject, become true of the subject; hence
it is in this sense not wholly inappropriate to hold that Adorno belongs
to the tradition of ahistorical, individualistic conceptions of the epistemic subject (the tradition, as Habermas suggests, from Descartes to
Husserl). On the other hand, however, by disregarding how the epistemic subject is equally, and as a conscious correction or determinate
negation of Bewusstseinsphilosophie, constructed as socially, historically and intersubjectively mediated in Adorno, Habermas misses how
the first narrative, while correctly representing a false or degenerate form
of subjectivity, is not identical with a full account of the normative presuppositions of knowledge, and is therefore one-sided or false in a dialectical sense. As Adorno puts it, the radical separation of subject and
object which philosophically is taken for granted by the philosophers of
consciousness, is
. . . both real and illusory. True, because in the cognitive realm it serves to
express the real separation, the dichotomy of the human condition, a coercive development. False, because the resulting separation must not be
hypostatized, not magically transformed into an invariant.11

Adorno concretizes the need to resist such a hypostatization by arguing

that neither subject nor object can be conceptualized as fixed and given

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Hammer: Adornos critique of idealism
prior to the historical processes that mediate them, i.e. in abstraction
from the forms of sociality within which we judge and think. Viewed
from this perspective, the purported subject of subjective idealism (or
philosophy of consciousness) is not ahistorical, self-identical and transcendental, but a historically changing and historical figure (Gestalt).12
Since Adorno views this second narrative as false without correction
from the first, there is, as opposed to Habermas work, no unconditioned
embrace in his writings of a full-fledged view of intersubjectivity,
however, and therefore no theory of intersubjectivity to be reconstructed. My point against Habermas is accordingly not to claim that
Adorno is a philosopher of intersubjectivity in Habermas nondialectical sense. Adorno is not claiming that intersubjectivity can be analyzed
as radically separate from social domination and mastery over nature,
but that processes of communication and mutual recognition, on the one
hand, and domination, on the other hand, must be viewed as intertwined
and entangled. To hypostatize intersubjectivity would be tantamount to
an idealist fixation of precisely that separation between society and
nature which Adorno wants to criticize. Hence Adorno philosophizes off
of the tension between the two paradigms, without ever affirming one
pole over the other. Another, more dialectical, way of stating this point
would be to argue that Adorno has a negative conception of a full intersubjectivity; it is not positively available as a given dimension of human
life (as Habermas seems to think), but as both normatively relevant for
epistemology and to a limited extent existing (however repressed, marginalized and fragmented), it represents a subversive potential within the
culture of modernity. It is not simply a non-existing concept in Adornos
theory. This is not to say, though, that Adorno never positively defends
a conception of intersubjectivity (for example: My ego is truly an
abstraction and not the basic experience which Husserl takes it to be. . . .
In it, intersubjectivity is presupposed not only as a contingent and
pure possibility, but as the actual condition of egoity, without which the
concentration on my ego would be impossible.13); my basic point at
this juncture is simply to note that Habermas is wrong in siding Adorno
with the philosophers of consciousness: then it is precisely their positions
he wants to correct and criticize not by abstractly negating their claims,
as Habermas does, but by showing how their truth-claims match up with
the practices of agents in a false society, i.e. a society dominated by
reification.
So, on the one hand, the central explicans for the possibility of a
subject to relate objectively to the world is not given a priori, as a
capacity to confer significance on or synthesizing a given content;
rather, as in the late Wittgenstein, participation in society, in the normativity sustained by social practices, in socially enforced structures of
material inference, explains how conditions of knowledge in general

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Philosophy & Social Criticism 26 (1)
become possible. The subject internalizes and learns to master these
practices through its process of maturation into a full member of
society, where the criterion of full membership essentially entails the
ability to employ its natural language. Conditions of knowledge are
therefore empirically existent (accounted for in terms of shared practices and orientations, rather than a priori rules or categories), yet they
perform the function, roughly, of the transcendental categories in Kant,
namely to provide a normatively structured relationship between mind
and world; in other words, collapsing the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical does not entail a naturalistic obliteration
of normativity.
On the other hand, however, in a society where relationships
between human beings are dominated by the logic of exchange,
Adornos claim is that the communal network of practices by which
rational linkages between concepts are made possible gets reified,
which essentially means that agents increasingly deny the particularity
of the particular in favour of an exchangeable item. Such a denial is
most appropriately seen as a process of abstraction: the individual
speakers complicated dependency on the community, the numerous
ways in which one needs to inherit and exemplify ones own participation in communal practices for meaning and normativity to be possible, becomes hypostasized and eventually represented as an abstract
and universal structure, detached from its dependency on the level of
immediate engagement in lived practices.14 The transcendental subject,
whether in Kant, Fichte or Husserl, is precisely such a representation:
hence its truth and falsity.
As I mentioned, Adorno draws a distinction between necessary and
superfluous reification. Concept-formation presupposes a capacity for
abstraction, and so does the very capacity to form a unified, autonomous
ego; hence Adorno, who in the preface to Negative Dialectics announces
that one should use the strength of the subject to break through the
fallacy of constitutive subjectivity (ND, p. xx), would undoubtedly
resist what one today might call poststructuralist attempts to undermine
the legitimacy of such structures.15 The problem at issue for a negative
dialectic is rather to confront and criticize the false identity between the
universal and the particular which evolves from an increasing lack of
ability to acknowledge the communal and non-subjective constraints on
meaning the fact that meaning and normativity can never be sustained
in isolation from intersubjective acts of recognition: then to be able to
say that something is a specific object, that a word x means x, or that
a judgment is appropriate, does not presuppose a determinate rule, provided, for example, by a mental representation or by a category in the
Kantian sense, but is made possible by an essentially practical orientation within a community.

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III
On the Habermasian interpretation, the point of introducing the concept
of mimesis is to escape the confinement imposed on thought by the
prevalence of identitarian thinking (the form of thinking which denies
expression and communal dependency in favour of monological closure,
system and regimentation). The claim which motivates such a move is
that identitarian thinking, or subjective idealism (its philosophical and
ideological counterpart), fails to show how thought can bear on, and be
rationally responsive to, a mind-independent reality, that is, a reality
which, in Adornos jargon, is nonidentical to the mind. In identitarian
thinking, the autonomy of thought, or spontaneity, is not constrained
(or does not allow itself to be constrained) by anything outside thought
itself; spontaneity operates without friction. There is no truth-conferring
moment of confrontation, one might say, with mind-independent evidence. As a form of arrogant anthropocentrism, Adornos idealtypische
subjective idealism only allows itself to be constrained from within,
monologically, and in accordance, basically, with the (proclaimed)
unconditionally valid propositions of formal logic. Hence the purported
identity between thought and object is in the end radically destructive of
the object as it is apart from these acts of linguistic mastery and domination. The price of identity, one could argue, is the loss of the object
itself, and ultimately, subjective idealism is by Adorno seen as a kind of
devouring rage against all that is different from the self:
Idealism most explicitly in Fichte gives unconscious sway to the ideology that the not-I, lautrui, and finally all that reminds us of nature is inferior, so the unity of the self-preserving thought may devour it without
misgivings. (ND, pp. 223)

Adornos attacks on subjective idealism are essentially directed against

the belief that spontaneity, or the autonomy of thought (its freedom to
construct reflectively and obey its own putative norms), on this account
is sufficiently constrained (or allows itself to be constrained) by anything
outside thought itself; it is not a denial of the capacity for autonomous
reflection. Although Adorno, like Kant (in the essay What is Enlightenment?), would be worried about the extent to which people actually
exercise their capacity for self-reflection (especially in contemporary
Western societies, where according to Adorno the ubiquitous culture
industry demands that No independent thinking must be expected from
the audience: the product prescribes every reaction [DE, p. 137]), as well
as their commitment to it, he would not deny, again like Kant, that for
something to be a thought, it needs to be indexed to an agent who is
reflectively aware of it as his or her thought, and who is able to place it
within what Sellars called a space of reasons.16

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According to Adorno, without thought-external friction, our
thoughts would be lacking content and therefore be empty. Since an
empty thought ultimately would not be conceivable as a thought at all,
the appeal to the need for external friction becomes an argument about
how thought makes sense qua thought. Then by its very nature, human
thought is intentional: To think means to think something (ND, p. 34).
In virtue of our capacity to experience the world (and thus to direct our
thoughts towards a potentially recalcitrant world), thought therefore
contains a cognitive or representational content: it can be objectively
true or false. Hence subjective idealism, in Adornos view, by failing to
grant thought content, fundamentally misrepresents what it means to
have a thought:
When thinking follows its law of motion unconsciously, it turns against its
own sense, against what has been thought, against that which calls a halt
to the flight of subjective intentions. The dictates of its autarky condemn
our thinking to emptiness. (ND, p. 149)

Interestingly, in Mind and World, John McDowell, while drawing

attention to Kants dictum that thoughts without content are empty,
employs exactly the same argument against coherentism, which essentially holds that human beliefs can be rationally constrained only by
other beliefs. While potentially reducing the world, although causally
relevant for experience, to a noumenal substratum on which we project
our linguistic constructions, coherentism, to the extent that it fails to
grant thought content, misconstrues what it means to have a thought.17
Furthermore, as McDowell suggests, a natural response to the worry
about external friction or constraint is to argue that for thought to
respond to a mind-independent world means for it to respond to something that is outside the space of concepts to bare presences or bits of
the given that would serve as the ultimate ground of judgments. The
problem, however, with a foundationalist view of this kind, is that bare
presences can never serve as reasons for thought, but at best as what
McDowell calls exculpations. As in the typical picture of a causally
given, the presence would simply be a blind force that thinking could
not be responsible or accountable for. In the absence of some other
source of normativity, the bare presence could be neither a necessary nor
a sufficient reason for a given judgment of experience. As Kant puts it,
intuitions without concepts are blind.
Again, Adorno, who throughout his work denies all appeals to
immediacy as potentially ideological, agrees with McDowell:
There is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within. (ND, p. 140)

And in another crucial passage, he argues that:

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Mediation of the object means that it must not be statically, dogmatically
hypostatized but can be known only as it entwines with subjectivity. (ND,
p. 186)

According to Habermas interpretation, Adorno, by taking mimesis to

be a non-conceptual susceptibility to impacts from the world, ends up
committing himself to a form of transcendental realism: but then the
world precisely does not rationally constrain thought; and hence empirical judgments stand in danger of being rationally unjustifiable in fact,
empirical content would be made impossible. As Kant famously argues,
transcendental realism implies empirical idealism, an unbridgeable gap
between thought and reality. For Adorno, such a position is untenable
not only because, like subjective idealism, it denies precisely those features in terms of which it would be possible to respond rationally to the
world, but also because one of its consequences is that it would undermine the spontaneity of the subject. In Adornos view, Heideggers ontology, for him the philosophical modernist successor of subjective
idealism, performs exactly such a positing of the object as foundational.
Having done that, however, Heidegger is forced to welcome, as he
apparently does in his late essays, especially On Time and Being with its
tropology of the gift and its invocations of pure passivity, the implication that the subject gets reduced to pure receptivity, a conclusion
which for moral and political reasons is completely unacceptable to
Adorno.18 As he puts it:
The illusion of taking direct hold of the Many would be a mimetic regression, as much a recoil into mythology, into the horror of the diffuse, as the
thinking of the One, the imitation of blind nature by repressing it, ends at
the opposite pole in mythical dominion. The self-reflection of enlightenment
is not its revocation. (ND, p. 158)

Moreover, as Hegel demonstrates in the opening chapter of the

Phenomenology of Spirit, since the act of positing would be an act of
consciousness, it would in the end simply amount to another misconceived attempt to escape from the preponderance of the subject. It
would revert philosophy to the ideology of a positive, existent identity
of word and thing (ND, p. 53). So when Habermas writes that
Adornos appeal to the concept of mimesis brings him shockingly close
to Heideggers recollection of Being, he entirely disregards that Adorno
never meant to claim that the activity of mimetic appropriation can take
place in the total absence of conceptual discrimination.19 As he argues,
the mimetic element, however threatened by the abstractive achievements of subjective reason, cannot vanish completely if the process [of
Enlightenment E. H.] is not to annul itself (ND, p. 45). What
happens, rather, as the mimetic element gets liberated from magic, the
domain where according to the Dialectic of Enlightenment it first

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started to be employed rationally, is that it blends with the rational one
(ibid.). I am not denying, of course, that the concept of mimesis is
notoriously difficult to come to grasp with within the Adornian oeuvre.
The epistemological thrust of it is to re-conceptualize the Kantian
notion of intuition in terms of an imitative disposition of a self toward
the object. Rather than being appropriated by being brought under a
universal, the subject relates non-violently to the object by likening
itself to it, by exploring what Adorno calls the affinities between its own
concepts and that for which they stand. It is, however, not developed
theoretically, and hence commentators, in trying to interpret its
meaning, can at best extrapolate from other lines of argument within
his work or simply leave it relatively unexplained. The only point I want
to suggest, however, is that mimesis, in order to make sense, must be
understood in conjunction with conceptuality, as a reinscription of
Kants distinction between concepts and intuitions.
In order to escape the seemingly inevitable vascillation between subjective idealism (coherentism) and foundationalism, both McDowell and
Adorno argue that it is necessary to look for a view that is able to
combine the idea that the world rationally constrains our beliefs (against
subjective idealism/coherentism) with the idea that spontaneity reaches
all the way out to the object (against foundationalism). The thinker they
both believe has come closest to formulating such a view is Kant. For
Kant, our capacity to represent the world objectively in thinking and
judging (thoughts capacity to have representational content) is essentially conditional upon a necessary interplay or cooperation between
receptivity and spontaneity. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. . . . Only through their union can
knowledge arise.20 The moral of this passage, as Adorno and McDowell read it, is that receptivity, in order to relate experience to a mindindependent world, must be conceived of not only as essentially passive
(as in both subjective idealism/coherentism and foundationalism), but
also as imbued with conceptual content (i.e. capacities that genuinely
belong to spontaneity): for only if receptivity is saddled with conceptual
content can intuitions be thought of as reasons and hence be capable of
rationally constraining the application of concepts in judgments.
Furthermore both authors agree that Kant was wrong in tending to
hypostatize the opposition between thoughts and intuitions. Just as a
thought that does not relate to actual intutions is empty, or simply an
exercise of formal logic, an intution that is only formal and does not
embody some form of semantic content, is epistemically void.
On the other hand, this form of idealism does not imply, as Hegel
has often been taken to hold, that spontaneity creates the content of
experience. That would be tantamount to an idealist denial not only of
the mutual irreducibility of concepts and intuitions, but also of the
mind-independence of the world the objectivity of truth. The point

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they both want to emphasize is rather that intuitions are able to constrain thought rationally because as states or occurrences they draw
upon conceptual capacities in receptivity. Even in very simple and seemingly immediate judgments for example, judgments involving colourconcepts it is necessary to employ a network of background concepts
and discriminatory capacities.
We should now be in a position to acknowledge that both subjective idealism/coherentism and foundationalism, as Adorno and McDowell construe them, tend in drawing their pictures of how our experience
of the world is possible precisely to deny or repress those intelligible
features in terms of which we are able to respond rationally to it. In order
for thought to be constrained by mind-independent evidence, intuitions
need to be able to serve as reasons; but for that to be possible, they must
have conceptual content, for otherwise thought would not be rationally
answerable. But this means that the conceptual, as McDowell puts it, is
unbounded: there can be no evidentiary givenness outside the conceptual. Now this is the point where Adornos reflections on Kant align
themselves with Hegel and the post-Kantian idealists, for whom the
noumena, or the Absolute, should not be described, as Adorno points
out in a crucial passage in the Negative Dialectics, in terms of a model
that would let it correspond to an immediate consciousness i.e. an
intellectual intuition, or what Kant sometimes calls an intellectus archetypus: then this would imply that Kants block, his denial of metaphysical experience, would be dehistoricized and turned into an abstract
negation of the possibility of transcendence.21 The Absolute, as Hegel
argued, is not an (for finite humans) essentially and metaphysically
unknowable noumenal realm; rather, in what Hegel characterizes as
absolute knowledge, the state of reconciliation between consciousness
and its object, there is a mutuality between what one can meaningfully
think, and what can really be the case a mutuality that excludes priority on either side. As McDowell recently has emphasized, such a position might justifiably be called absolute idealism.
Absolute idealism, according to which there is no layer of evidentiary givenness waiting to be organized, no schemes waiting to organize
it, no anchorage points from words or ideas to things, no worlds constructed by a subjective apparatus and distinct from things as they are,
no reified subjectivity separable from the activity by which individuals
involve themselves as knowers and willers in the world, returns thought
to the world to the world of the ordinary, the everyday; and it offers
the kind of epistemological peace that Adorno, no doubt influenced by
Hegels absolute idealism, calls reconciliation:
Reconciliation would release the nonidentical, would rid it of coercion; it
would open the road to the multiplicity of different things and strip dialectics of its power over them. Reconcilement would be the thought of the

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many as no longer inimical, a thought that is anathema to subjective reason.
(ND, p. 6)

Is Adorno then, like McDowell, an absolute idealist? Yes and no. Yes,
because his cognitive ideal fits my description of absolute idealism: the
Absolute is not, as Habermas interprets him, metaphysically beyond the
range of language and subjectivity. Negative Dialectics is not a work of
transcendental realism; it does not revert to a heavily ontologized notion
of the thing in itself, which would have left thought hopelessly oscillating between a totality that can be conceived only in quasi-theological
terms and an absolutized skepticism. Rather, it acknowledges, against
the identitarian thinking of subjective idealism and foundationalism,
that there are indeed rational linkages between us and the world which
make objective judgments possible: the thought aims at the thing itself
(ND, p. 205); and it allows, secondly, the object what Adorno calls a
preponderance: the object is mind-independent, it escapes the confinement imagery that threatens subjective idealism, thus preserving the
materialistic moment he aims for against identitarian thinking, yet it is
not posited abstractly, as in foundationalism, but is a moment in dialectics not beyond dialectics, but articulated in dialectics (ND, p. 184).
On the other hand, the answer is no: as opposed to McDowell, Adorno
does not endorse absolute idealism as a correct description of the
relationship between consciousness and the world under all conditions,
i.e. universally; rather, the harmony between thought and world as envisaged in absolute idealism is regarded at best as an exceptional achievement the, as it were, utopia of thought.
Utopia would be above identity [or subjective idealism E. H.] and above
contradiction [or skeptical realism E. H.]; it would be a togetherness of
diversity. (ND, p. 150)

By representing absolute idealism as a universally true theory, McDowells position inevitably becomes ideological: it falsely sustains the
impression that thought does not, skeptically, impose its own forms
upon the object, and that in our ordinary encounters with the world,
there truly is a truth-conferring moment of confrontation with mindindependent evidence. By defending Kants distinction between appearance and thing in itself (but without metaphysically hypostatizing it),
Adorno, faithful to the idea that a negative dialectic ought to remind us
that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder
(ND, p. 5), broaches the idea that subjective idealism may indeed offer
a more correct representation of our actual epistemic practices than
absolute idealism, even though its claims correspond to a model of consciousness as reified, and although he then has to accept that our actual
experience of the world may simply be a reflection of the operations of

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the subjective apparatus through which the world we experience by
hypothesis is constructed.
Consequently, from Adornos perspective, both Habermas and
McDowell disregard the essential tension between identitarian thinking
and absolute idealism within which a critique of reification gains its
sense of purpose and normativity: Habermas, by repressing, in his
interpretation of Adorno, the subjects dependency on the contingencies
of commonality, history and concrete practices, and by reducing Adorno
to an identitarian, monological thinker who is thus incapable of escaping the vascillation between subjective idealism and foundationalism;
McDowell, by illegitimately isolating epistemology from social and historical conditions, i.e. from considerations concerning reification and its
effects.
The final question that I would like to raise is how Adorno conceptualizes this tension. Does he commit himself to the view that epistemic
reconciliation in the sense just outlined would presuppose an entirely
different social space, or would he somehow be prepared to concede that
the possibility of reconciliation should be viewed as a moment, however
repressed, within our actual practices? If he opts for the first alternative,
it is difficult, even though the metaphysical interpretation of the utopia
problem has been refuted, not to agree with Habermas that social critique of reification would make very little sense. However, as I shall
suggest, Adorno argues that a non-appropriative form of experience,
what he calls metaphysical experience, is, although not in a pure form,
indeed available not only in and through art, as Habermas argues, but
in certain extraordinary encounters with the world of the ordinary.

IV
Adornos notion of metaphysical experience, however obscurely
expounded in Negative Dialectics, is best understood as a contemporary
version of Hegels dialectical conception of experience in the Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel, a formation of consciousness undergoes a genuinely dialectical experience when it comes to see or learn that a given
conceptual determination of objects in general is inadequate as a condition for objectively, i.e. apperceptively, experiencing those objects.22
Dialectical experience engenders therefore a sense of loss or despair at
having to acknowledge that the experience of the object no longer can be
accounted for in terms of hitherto implicitly accepted determinations, but
that there in fact is a radical discrepancy between ones own self-determining activity and the object. Reason finds itself as limited and finite. As
Adorno defines it, the aim of a negative dialectic is not to follow Hegel in
offering a new and ultimately final universal determination of objecthood

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that once and for all will escape all contingency and establish absolute
knowledge (he rejects the principled identification of identity and nonidentity), but to hold on to that which inaugurated the need for a new
conceptual determination, namely the notion of dialectical experience
itself, which is the experience of particularity as being resistant to our
working universal conception of objecthood. In responding to Habermas
claim that Adorno fails to offer a rational standard or norm according to
which the critique of reason may proceed, the answer consists therefore
in appealing to the experience of the fact that the concept does not
exhaust the thing conceived (ND, p. 5).
Like Hegels process of internalization (Er-innerung) in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Adornos fundamental concern is anamnetic. What are
the conditions for experiencing transcendence, that which is not part of
the total structure of appearance? We know from the discussion so far
that such an experience will necessarily have to have a determinate
content. Adorno must therefore reject views such as those of his mentor,
Walter Benjamin, according to which there is a metaphysical gap between
language and the world. In Benjamins reflections on language, which so
strongly influenced at least the early Adorno, the gap between language
and world is seen as the result of a fall from a God-inspired language of
names.23 The fall is conceived to be a linguistic event, a perpetual act of
forgetting, whereby proper names, originally grounded in Gods presence,
but bestowed by man on a mute creation, degenerate into arbitrary signs,
having no fundamentum in re. Language, constructed on the basis of
predicative sentences, while becoming a means of communication, thus
ceases to be an immediate expression of the things themselves. In the infinite progress/regress of a homogeneous, empty time (the natural history
expounded in the preface to Benjamins Origin of the German Tragic
Drama and picked up by the early Adorno in his essay On Natural
History), reconciliation between man and nature, language and the
world, can occur, if at all, only as a theological event, an extraordinary
suspension of the ordinary world of das Immergleiche, for which the
autonomous subject can never be held accountable.
According to the Adorno of the late works, the strong Benjaminian
incommensurability between the proper of the proper name and the universal determination of the predication should therefore be softened and
dialectically reinscribed as mutually irreducible, yet internally related
dimensions of language itself. Language contains an expressive element
which mimetically reveals the particularity of the object, thus highlighting what Adorno calls an elective affinity between the knower and the
known, and it contains a communicative element which reifies the
meaning of the utterance by transforming it into an exchangeable item.24
While a central thesis of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is that the
process of rationalization means that the communicative dimension has

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come to dominate over the expressive, the actual tension between the
two can never be entirely quenched in favour of a complete domination
of reified language, of purely discursive thinking, absolute literalness; if
so, then cognition would have become impossible.
If this moment [the expressive or mimetic element of knowledge E. H.]
were extinguished altogether, it would be flatly incomprehensible that a
subject can know an object. (ND, p. 45)

As opposed to Habermas interpretation, Adorno is here denying that

language could ever be completely identitarian. On the other hand, as
we have seen, an experience purged of all conceptuality, a pure intuition
such as Benjamins famous but deeply problematic Urvernehmen, would
not rationally constrain our judgments. The concept of experience is in
other words antinomical: it is essentially composed of two dialectical
moments, one of which is universal (conceptual reification), the other of
which is particular (mimetic appropriation). A metaphysical experience
would let us experience this antinomy as an antinomy. In such an experience, which Adorno attempts in a Proustian-Platonic fashion to realize
in the happiness . . . promised by village names (ND, p. 373), the particularity of the object is promised in the concept itself, thus creating a
melancholy sense of loss in the face of that something which is so close
and yet unattainable.
To the child it is self-evident that what delights him in his favorite village
is found only there, there alone and nowhere else. He is mistaken; but his
mistake creates the model of experience, of a concept that will end up as
the concept of the thing itself, not a poor projection. (ND, p. 373)

Adornos conception of language is aporetic. It acknowledges that our

response to the world is necessarily open-ended and unsatisfiable.
Although language aims for it, there can be no absolute identification of
the object; rather, the search for such an absolute identification is from
an Adornian perspective itself an inhuman attempt to disengage linguistic practices from their historical and social embodiment, to speak
outside our actual language games, i.e. outside the conditions under
which words have meaning. However, acknowledging finitude and disappointment, as we do in noting the childs mistake in the quote above,
must not be confused with the belief that our words have necessarily
failed. Habermas skeptical interpretation of Adorno, which interprets
the aporetic nature of language as a necessary failure of language, a
failure entailed by a metaphysical gap between language and world,
refuses to recognize that failure is possible only in cases about which one
can justifiably say that it should have been otherwise. For Adorno, the
task of philosophy is not to refute skepticism but to show the actual cost
of repudiating ordinary language practices and their concomitant

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reliance on subjective qualifications and expression. Acknowledging finitude means to resist the skeptical temptation to repress languages
reliance on social practice, to resist the drive to reify meaning, while at
the same time realizing that the possibility of responding to the world
as it is as all it can ever be is not a priori withdrawn from the logic
of social practices and hence not from critique from a materialist standpoint. If Adornos philosophy calls for something like a transfiguration
of our form of life, it would have to be from within as a completion
of the project of enlightenment, as it were and not by anything; it
would be an acknowledgment of finitude, not an escape.

Conclusion
The interpretation of Adornos epistemology sketched out in this article
is not conclusively established, and it certainly does not add up to a satisfactory representation of the full range of his arguments; but it ought to
suggest, I believe, that the move away from Adornos vision of critical
theory on the grounds that it is committed to a philosophy of consciousness, and that it leads the critique of identitarian thinking into an
impasse, is misguided. Adorno radically questions the modern project of
autonomy, but neither implicitly nor explicitly does he take leave of
modernity in the Habermasian sense, i.e. by adopting the view that the
subject receives its epistemic norms and principles from a perspective or
source that metaphysically transcends the full grasp of a purportedly
autonomous subjectivity.
University of Essex, Department of Philosophy, Colchester, UK

PSC

Notes
1 Arguably, it would not be off the mark to suggest that Habermas interpretation of Adorno has established a kind of negative orthodoxy: it has made
research on Adornos philosophical claims seem less promising than the
analysis of his cultural, sociological and aesthetic writings. Habermas
assessment of Adornos commitment to a philosophy of consciousness is
shared by a substantive number of prominent commentators, among them
Benhabib (1986), Honneth (1991) and Wellmer (1991).
2 The two major sources of Habermas critique of Adorno are Habermas
(1984) and Habermas (1987). Scattered remarks are to be found in other
works, in particular Habermas (1991). Adorno and Horkheimer (1972) is
hereafter referred to as DE and Adorno (1973a) as ND.

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3
4
5
6
7

8
9

10
11
12
13
14
15
16

17
18
19
20
21
22

23
24

Nietzsche (1979).
Habermas (1987: 1267).
Habermas (1984: 382).
ibid.: 383.
In Habermas (1991: 23), it is claimed that Adornos norm of knowledge
(Erkenntnisideal) is intuitionistic, based on the appeal to a kind of passive
seeing prior to language (einen intuitionistischen Erkenntnisideal des
sprachlosen Sehenlassens).
Habermas (1984: 385).
In addition to Habermas (1987), Pippin (1991) provides a very useful
overview of the development of the notion that modernity as philosophical
ideal can essentially be characterized in terms of the quest for comprehensive self-reassurance.
Habermas (1984: 387) and Habermas (1992: 448).
Adorno (1982: 4989).
Adorno (1973b: 333).
Adorno (1972: 231).
Adorno (1973a: 1856): Without any relation to an empirical consciousness, to the living I, there would be no transcendental, purely mental
consciousness.
Adorno (1973a: 181): Abstraction is the subjects essence. This is why going
back to what it is not must impress the subject as external and violent.
Typically, Adorno offers a definition of thoughts autonomy in terms of the
strong notion of resistance. See Adorno (1973a: 19): Thought as such,
before all particular contents, is an act of negation, of resistance to that
which is forced upon it.
McDowell (1994: 4).
Heidegger (1972).
Habermas (1984: 385).
Kant (1929: A51/B75).
Adorno (1973a: 140).
Hegel (1977: 53): In consciousness one thing exists for another, i.e.
consciousness regularly contains the determinateness of the moment of
knowledge; at the same time, this other is to consciousness not merely for
it, but is also outside of this relationship, or exists in itself: the moment of
truth. Thus in what consciousness affirms from within itself as being-initself or the True we have the standard which consciousness itself sets up
by which to measure what it knows.
Benjamin (1991).
Adorno (1984: 164).

PSC

Bibliography
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