MA Social and Political Thought The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory (939M1) 50655

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, and the Political

This essay attempts to cover some of the most prominent ways in which Adorno specifically addresses,
particularly in his philosophy of negative dialectics, political problems and issues. The aim is not to give a
fully developed argument which unfolds throughout the essay, ending with a particular conclusion; instead, I
have divided the essay into four distinct, self-contained sections, each tackling a single topic by reading one
(or more) of Adorno's texts. The essay then takes the form of a kind of juxtaposition, which tries to open up
the difficult question of Adorno's politics, shining light on it from different directions. This approach will
hopefully best illustrate the somewhat paradoxical view I wish to express: that Adorno does not have a
politics, but that this lack is politically motivated.

'Adorno the apolitical' is, of course, how Adorno has traditionally been interpreted, but the recent academic
trend seems to be increasingly revisionist on this, seeking to portray Adorno rather as an eminently political
thinker. My reading attempts a kind of reconciliation (although my sympathies lie more with the original
interpretation): Adorno's lack of a politics is not a failure of his philosophy, an omission, by which we can
criticise Adorno for a lack of engagement1; rather, it is a calculated aversion to what passes for politics, and
indeed that is the whole point of Adorno's enterprise: as he begins his introduction to Negative Dialectics,
since the time for philosophy's realization has passed, the proper response is to consciously return to
philosophy, to critically interrogate it, in reading the missed revolution as the political failure of the
philosophical itself2. Yet one cannot turn this back around and argue that Adorno is simply political, that in
the edifice of his philosophy there is already a political programme contained within, which only required a
new vigorous interpretation or re-reading to free. Adorno's legacy as a political thinker is as a sceptic of
politics, and his philosophy is supposed to instil a critical self-awareness within the consciousness of the
more (conventionally) politically minded, but is limited in what it can tell him to think. But Adorno's philosophy
needs to retain the hope of a changed world in order to function, but it is not really as if Adorno had more
than a hope that such a thing would ever come to pass3.

Espen Hammer writes, for instance, that the core of Adorno's efforts politically considered was to think and

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act such that the space of the political is liberated from the grasp of identity, with this meaning the criticism
above all of the limitation of the field of politics to the management of social positivity. I think this is a very
good summary. But he is careful to balance his conclusion, admitting that Adorno's negativism is unhelpful
when it comes to analyzing the conscious decision-making processes that must be part of any collective
political project4. It is with this qualification that I want to avoid reading explicit political concerns into
everything Adorno says, especially given his hostility to the possibility of immediacy in politics. To give one
prominent example, on the issue of Adorno's confrontations with the student movement of the late 1960s,
considering that this has previously always been taken as an instance of Adorno's reluctance to engage
politically can we really counter this perception today by saying that this is really Adorno at his most
political? Marianne Tettlebaum argues that Adorno's refusal to acquiesce in the face of the students'
demands was itself a form of political resistance, an individual denial of the logic of force, going on to say
that given the current political climate in the West, where the use of force has become synonymous with
realizing freedom, Adorno's example is especially relevant5. This seems to me to go beyond the bounds of
what one can seriously maintain as 'political', even as we can readily acknowledge that 'the political' goes
much further than interventions within social positivity, as it is reduced to meaning merely something like
'taking a position'.

These are the deep controversies involved in this discussion, which I hope helps to explain the cautious and
non-committal format of the essay.

Adorno's scepticism of the possibility of directly changing the objective conditions of society, with his belief in
the irresistible logic of the administered society, meant he placed an extra emphasis on the subjective side, if
it can be so called: the importance of influencing the attitudes of the general public. For Adorno, the
immediate overriding concern as a scholar an educator was education. This is, I want to argue, Adorno at
his most liberal Adorno; but, that it is also Adorno at his most political.

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In 'Education after Auschwitz', Adorno introduces his central demand of education: Every debate about the
ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz6. This
has to be read as applying to the subjective attitudes of people, the remnants of the psychological causes of
fascism that were not dealt with in the defeat and downfall of the Nazi regime7. Adorno suggests two
educational remedies: firstly, he strongly emphasises psychological development in early childhood,
obviously concentrating on schooling, but also stresses the need for 'general enlightenment' amongst the
population, occurring throughout ones's life.

He gives examples of the brooding authoritarian potential within childhood, beginning at school. Adorno
looks at 'Initiation rites' (I think with the playground in mind) that fetish the group as such, perpetuating the
blind identification of the collective. This is done by inflict[ing] physical pain often unbearable pain upon a
person as the price that must be paid in order to consider oneself a member, one of the collective. Such
practices might be seen as a direct anticipation of Nationalist Socialist acts of violence8. Adorno believes
this is part of a much wider sphere animated by another ideal, that plays a considerable role in traditional
education: the ideal of being hard. Adorno is unflinching in condemning this: This educational ideal of
hardness, in which many may believe without reflecting about it, is utterly wrong. The idea that virility
consists in the maximum degree of endurance long ago became a screen-image for masochism that, as
psychology has demonstrated, aligns itself all too easily with sadism. Being hard, the vaunted quality
education should inculcate, means absolute indifference toward pain as such9.

Adorno then moves on to consider general problems within the culture. He is concerned with two related
phenomena in particular. First is what he calls the 'manipulative character', distinguished by a rage for
organization and an overvalued realism. This is easily identified as the psychological counterpart to the
systemic impetus of instrumental reason. The manipulative character is obsessed by the desire of doing
things [Dinge zu tun], indifferent to the content of such action, making a cult of action, activity, of so-called
efficiency as such, which reappears in the advertising image of the active person10. The general formula for
the manipulative character is that [p]eople of such a nature have, as it were, assimilated themselves to
things - reminding us of Adorno's thoughts on reification meaning that they also have to assimilate others
to things11. This is intrinsically linked to technocratic consciousness, the fetishization of technology as such.
Adorno believes such an obsessive personality trait described a deficient libidinal relationship to other
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persons. The possible educational remedies he suggested included the commission of educational
television programmes, mobile 'educational groups' who would tour the country with convoys of volunteers,
discussions, what we would call today life-long learning courses, and supplementary instructions for adults.

These phenomena - the manipulated character, the fetishization of technology, both components of reified
consciousness are all caused by the general character of bourgeois society, which I suppose it is the final
and most fundamental aim of education to mitigate: that of bourgeois coldness. This coldness is based in the
very structure of society itself: society is based on the pursuit of one's own interests against the interests of
everyone else. This is the basic principle behind the totalitarian horrors of Nazi Germany, and given the
Dialectic of Enlightenment supposition, for instance, that Nazi Germany and America are grounded in the
same 'state capitalist' economic base12 represents a sure warning for the future of all Western nations:
Every person today, without exception, feels too little loved, because every person cannot love. This inability
to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that
something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people13.
This, for Adorno, resulted in the mere silence that confronted the terror. What the world needs, in its lack of
warmth, is love but to preach love today is only to mock the victims of coldness: the exhortation to love
contradictory, since love is immediate can only provide an ideological cover-up of the real futility of
genuine love. As Adorno says, love cannot be summoned in professionally mediated relations like that of
teacher and student14.

But what then does the educator really do, if the main aliment lies within the objective structure of society?
Adorno's proposed measures cannot address this fundamental problem, and he is open in admitting that the
potential for a return to barbarism always remains while society itself does not change. But I think it is wrong
to thereby portray Adorno as unremittingly pessimistic on this; his belief in education is not just a secondbest option. Rather, I think we should read Adorno's thoughts on education as betraying his core belief in
enlightenment per se, that increasing levels of education can make for a more informed general public,
increasing the chances that the formal democratic structures set up in West Germany will function through a
renewed democratization of the culture of the population itself. Adorno asserts that the only education that
has any sense at all is an education toward critical self-reflection15, and by this he can only really be
referring to the project of Kantian autonomy or political maturity. Where Adorno is sceptical of 'democratic'
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mediums like television, or the transformative potential of the 'public sphere', it is because he is unconvinced
that the democratic 'groundwork' exists in public culture for these to function as they should. Adorno is
convinced that democratic leaders must treat people as subjects (capable of rational self-reflection) rather
than as objects (to be manipulated). His insistence on the individual's political awareness and responsibility
reflects the importance Adorno attributes to critique in the functioning of democracy, and Adorno argues that
critique and the prerequisite of democracy, political maturity, belong together16

Education is, then, the closest thing Adorno gets to a politics. This is the controversial belief I have come to,
which I think has a certain support in Adorno's own personal commitment to the university.

II

In his 1965 lecture series on Negative Dialectics, Adorno quotes a Freudian remark to illustrate his own
approach to the philosophical project: Whereas Freud remarks in a magnificent passage in the Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis that psychoanalysis is concerned with 'the dregs of the phenomenal world', we
might say that in its own approach philosophy generally finds its object precisely in what it denies itself: the
dregs of the concept, in other words, in what is not itself concept17. This Freudian view, a recapitulation of
the views Adorno already outlined in his inaugural lecture thirty years earlier (where he refers to the 'refuse
of the physical world'18), is the key to unravelling Adorno's radically original model of philosophy as
interpretation, a weapon designed to disarm the dominant tradition of philosophical logic19. The core principle
of this logic, we might surmise, is its claim to identity; that is, of the identity of concept and object, that the
concept is always adequate to its object. The object is always more than the concept, and Adorno's
philosophy is arguably geared more toward fidelity to the object than anything else.

Adorno's philosophical efforts, which he sees as the undoing of the failed enterprise of identity logic, sees
him consumed primarily with the critique of Hegel. In the sixth lecture of the series on 'negative dialectics',
Adorno uses a specific movement of Hegel's Science of Logic - the most important text dealing with
philosophical identity20 - as a heightened, particularly guilty example of the kind of swindle that the
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philosophy of identity has tried to pull. Adorno remained concerned throughout his career with rescuing the
'dregs of the concept', not simply in order to do justice to the fullness of the object that the concept seems to
disregard, but in the further belief that it is precisely in this remainder, in the refuse, that the illuminating truth
of the object can be found.

Adorno is interested here in the dialectic of Being, and the movement by which Hegel attempts to show the
identity of Being and Nothing. Adorno begins with Hegels attempt to show21 - constituting the basic offending
thesis that 'being' is indifferent to the concept 'being' and the thing 'being'. This formulation comes about
through a process of abstraction that Hegel seeks to detail in the Logic; the abstraction the product of a
progressive movement of determining. The paradoxical end result of this determination is the complete
abstraction of the concept out from all content, emptying it: what Adorno calls the empirical nullity of the
concept22. The dialectical consequence is that each progressive determining of the concept, the leap of
abstraction, is also simultaneously a regressive step out of determination. Being, in its full determination,
becomes the indeterminate: it is determined as indeterminate23.

Thus Being = Nothing24. But Adorno is adamant that Being does not equal Nothing, far from it. Adorno
argues that Hegel's transition here is actually smuggled through in a subtle linguistic nuance, a slippage in
the language: the rigorous logical process only 'works' through a kind of Freudian slip that no one is
supposed to notice. Adorno explains that Hegel begins by talking of the indeterminate, but goes on
imperceptibly to replace it with indeterminateness. Adorno argues that in 'the indeterminate', there is no
distinction between concept and thing: because there has been no determination the distinction between the
determinant, namely the category, and the thing, does not emerge and thus it might be said to possess
both25. However when Hegel substitutes 'indeterminateness', the absence of determinateness as such
takes the place of what is undetermined, and the linguistic move from 'the indeterminate', the term that
denotes what is underlying, to indeterminateness is itself the turn to the concept26.

The 'indeterminate' contains a genuine moment of indecision in its relation to the given, but this gets washed
away in indifference with the purely conceptual self-identity of 'indeterminateness'. To be equal with Nothing,
Being has to be conceived as purely conceptual: Hegel as Idealist, achieving identity by dispatching the
memory of the object. Adorno is making a materialist intervention: identitarian reason is the sin of Idealism.
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(This is materialist because, in Adorno's view, materialism rejects the concept of an inherently meaningful
reality as this could only be justified by appeal to some metaphysical conception of the nature of reality)27

What is the political relevance of this? Well, in this one moment, it is possible to read most if not all of
Adorno's philosophical critique of politics. I cannot pretend to be exhaustive on this. But I want to suggest
one pattern of argument that I am interested in, in which we might see Adorno's position here as analogous
to that advanced by Karl Marx in his critique of Hegel's doctrine of the state. In Adorno's reading of the
Science of Logic that Hegel achieves identity through the abstracting out of material content, propagating
the idea of the autonomous movement of concept, forgetting the given has, I think, certain unavoidable
parallels with Marx's earlier Feuerbachian critique.

I will give a summary of Marx's argument: In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel according to Marx achieves
identity through a conflation of the concept and the given (of the 'real' and the 'rational'), in a two-stage move
that inverts the relation between subject and predicate. In the first stage, Marx accuses Hegel of reducing
being to thought: the realm of positivity, of sheer empirical facts, is in effect denied the status of genuine
reality because it is viewed solely in terms of the immanent movement of the concept (of the Hegelian
Absolute)28. The concept takes the role of the subject, meaning the Idea is taken as the real and the state is
seen as the mere embodiment of the Idea.

The second accompanying stage of Marx's critique concerns the politics of Hegel's state. As identity thinking
results in an uncritical idealism, where the real is simply taken as identical to the rational, as its product or
manifestation, it also equally entails an uncritical positivism, whereby the rational is already assumed to
exist as the real, and the currently existing socio-political conditions are thus given legitimation29. This is the
source of the conservative, or apologetic, character of Hegel's political philosophy. Marx writes that the
political narrative Hegel provides in the Philosophy of Right is really in contradiction to the logical structure at
work: so, instead of the movement from the family and civil society towards the state, as it is presented, the
actual movement is one from the state towards society: what are, in reality, the preconditions of the state,
appear as the effects of the state's own self-development, as 'objectifications' of it30.

I now want to suggest, in this Marxian vein, a reading in which Adorno's critique of Hegelian identity thinking
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is seen (at least in part) as pursuing something similar to Marx's dual charges of uncritical idealism and
uncritical positivism, albeit in a different context. Adorno's attempt to break open such identity with a
negative dialectics, to prevent the closure of the system, highlighting contradiction and opposition within
society instead of seeking reconciliation in the concept, can be read as both a return to a critical idealism
and, in a certain attenuated sense, to a critical positivism.

We can see this in Adorno's claim that concept and object are non-identical in two ways, in his concept of
contradiction: the concept is always less than, but also always more than, the object.

The point of saying that the concept is less than the object, as I interpret it, is that the concept misidentifies
the object, meaning for our purposes that it thereby cannot understand what is really happening in the world:
it misrepresents existing socio-economic conditions. As we have seen Adorno claim, it is within the dregs of
the concept that the object can be found. When the concept subsumes a series of characteristics, it achieves
identity by taking what is common what is equivalent in each, and necessarily ignoring all that is
dissimilar. This logic leads us directly to Adorno's explanatory reading of two separate issues: firstly, of
Auschwitz and the Holocaust, and secondly, of reification.

Adorno reading of Auschwitz contains many disparate elements, but one of the most striking of his
comments is his claim that it the disaster succeeded in robbing the victims of their individuality. It was the
genus, the species, the Jew as such, that perished: That in the concentration camp it was no longer an
individual who died, but a specimen.... Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death31

This is also the way to read Adorno's critique of reification, which in its spirit is crucially removed from
Lukacs's overtly Marxist reading. In the latter interpretation, stemming mostly to Marx's analysis of the
fetishism of commodities, Lukacs remained fundamentally concerned with the alienated objectification of
subjectivity, the reduction of a fluid process into a dead thing. For Adorno meanwhile and here his debt to
Nietzsche on the origin of exchange was evident reification meant precisely the suppression of
heterogeneity in the name of identity32. Adorno's usage of reification, although still engaged in a Marxian
concern with the dominance of the exchange principle, of exchange-value over use-value, means therefore a
rather savage critique of Marxism and its treatment of nature. Adorno , interested in otherness in general,
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was opposed to the reification inherent in the logic of single-minded industrial production as such, in the way
that it would reify the natural world into quantitatively fungible fields for human control and manipulation. In a
early essay 'On Natural History', Adorno was already quite scathing of the orthodox Marxian privileging of
history over nature as the realm of freedom, preferring to play nature off against history or society and vice
versa chiasmically.

These two examples illustrate how the idea that the concept is less than the object, can point to what Adorno
calls contradictions in reality itself in other words, contradictions which split the object itself. The model for
this is the fact that we live in an antagonistic society, and further, a society that exists by virtue of its
antagonism or contradiction: a society based on the profit motive33. This is, if you like, a concern with the
positive, the really existing essence, as opposed to an 'uncritical positivism'

But as Adorno also remarks, the reverse side of this non-identity of concept and object in contradiction, that
the concept is always more than the object, must mean a surplus of normative potential within the concept,
as the object could be said to fail the concept. To illustrate such a non-identity, he uses the example of
'freedom': it cannot be said to be simply the unity of the characteristics of all the individuals who can be
defined as free today, which in liberal-bourgeois society would have a basis in a formal freedom within a
given constitution. Rather, the concept of 'freedom' contains a pointer to something that goes well beyond
those specific freedoms, without our necessarily realizing what this additional element amounts to34. And
Adorno seems to put this model into action elsewhere in his writings35. This is an example of an idealism at
work against (uncritical) idealism

III

During the turbulent times of the late 1960s, and of the confrontations between the authorities and student
activists, Adorno was often accused of political quietism. On one infamous occasion, in August 1969, a group
of female students publicly humiliated Adorno during one of his lectures, protesting his refusal to renounce
his decision to call the police when student activists occupied the Institute for Social Research. Adorno's
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response came in the form of two essays, 'Resignation', published in 1969, and 'Marginalia to Theory and
Practice'.

In his own defence, Adorno insisted not simply that critical thought remained indispensable for any effective
practical resistance, but that thought is today more practical than practice. Adorno recalls an incident where
a student's room was smashed and his wall scrawled with graffiti because he preferred to work rather than
join in actions (at least this is how Adorno remembers it), and castigates the perpetrators in a typical
dialectical reversal: The thinking denigrated by actionists apparently demands of them too much undue
effort: it requires too much work, is too practical36. Adorno's charge here initially takes two forms, both of
which are linked to his essential conviction in the impossibility of praxis today, at least as it has been
traditionally understood37. He firstly recounts the history of praxis, warning the actionists that they put the
effectiveness of praxis in jeopardy if they forget its essential contradictory character, meaning its roots in
labour. Secondly, building upon this insight, Adorno emphasises the need for critical thought to throw light on
such contradictions the 'fallen', compromised nature of praxis in the hope of something better: by
exposing the lie of praxis, its impossibility, one points beyond it, one keeps the possibility of a genuine praxis
open, and so in this sense, thought today is more 'practical' than practice.

Adorno treats the division of theory and practice in particular as the result of the historical spilt between
physical and intellectual labour, but all praxis arises from labour. Adorno traces back the possibility of praxis
to the emergence of a certain level of socio-historical development, where labour no longer wanted to
merely reproduce life directly but to produce its conditions, with this obviously resulting in a clash with those
having an overriding interest in the already existing conditions. Adorno claims that this origin in labour means
praxis carries the baggage of an element of unfreedom, that of its Freudian struggle against the pleasure
principle for the sake of one's own self-preservation. Adorno warns that contemporary actionism (Adorno's
pet term for those who fetishize action for its own sake) has to function through a repression of this memory,
namely that the longing for freedom is closely related to the aversion to praxis: praxis was the reaction to
deprivation and this still disfigures praxis even when it wants to do away with deprivation38. Yet as Adorno
mentions explicitly elsewhere39, the issue today is not the doing-away of deprivation, since the productive
forces are already developed enough. The issue is rather at least as I interpret it the increasingly
excessive importance of technical or instrumental reason in achieving system integration within
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contemporary capitalism: action as means is legitimized as such, and the goal of overcoming deprivation
falls from sight. This is related to Adorno's lament over the dominance of the exchange principle, whereby
the capitalist economy, geared solely toward the realization of surplus-value in exchange, is indifferent to
meeting the needs of the most deprived.

Next Adorno engages again in a dialectical reversal, looking at the relationship between 'means' and 'ends'.
He sees that today, the means become the end, and the end becomes the means. Adorno implicates the
'actionists' in perpetuating the logic of the rationalized society they are fighting against just as the society
fetishizes 'busyness' for its own sake, so do those of a revolutionary disposition who fetishize 'doing
something' even when nothing can be done. Adorno claims that a sure sign of praxis becoming such an
ideology is when the question 'what is to be done?' becomes an automatic reflex to every critical thought
before it is fully expressed, let alone comprehended. It recalls the gesture of someone demanding your
papers40. This problem is closely related to the question of organisation too an institution set up to fulfil a
role, realize an end state, becomes important in-and-of-itself: one must show loyalty to the cause: praxis
obscures its own present impossibility with the opiate of collectivity.... More implicit and therefore all the more
powerful is the commandment: you must sign41. This appears to be Adorno's primary argument for the
impossibility of praxis, that it is trapped within this bad infinity. He chooses to call the dialectic hopeless,
that through praxis alone is it possible to escape the captivating spell praxis imposes on people42. This is
the most important aspect of the reversal, means becoming hypostatized as ends43.

Given this, it is theory or critical thought as such that is charged with the task of being practical. This
seems somewhat counter-intuitive, and I do not believe Adorno is really claiming that theory is practical initself, unmediated (when he claims that thought is already a form of praxis, he seems to be arguing against
what he calls the ideology of the purity of thought, the nave idea that the real world has no influence upon,
does not colour, thought. Obviously thinking itself does not change the objective character of the world). The
emphasis is rather on thought as negativity, as resistance, not as intervention within the realm of positivity.
Adorno writes both that theory is the guarantor of freedom in the midst of unfreedom and, forthrightly, that
whoever thinks, offers resistance44

This is the first level of what should really be described as Adorno's two-tiered analysis. It is crucial to not
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misunderstanding Adorno to realise that the dissonance between means and ends, the reactionary nature of
existing praxis and the blunted hope for a praxis informed by theory in the future, is all an objectification of
the contradictions running deep within society itself. This is the first-tier. But Adorno still holds fast to the
need for the unity of theory and praxis, the dialectical interrelation between means and ends, and does not
renounce each for the sake of the other. This is the second-tier of analysis, which critical thought today is
supposed to point to, to leave a space for, changing circumstances in the future45. It is only through this
splitting-up of Adorno's argument that one can make sense of his comments, whereby he ends the same
essay on the impossibility of praxis and the autonomy of theory by insisting that theory must come from
praxis, in a spontaneous emergence. Praxis appears in theory as a blindspot, as that which cannot be
prescribed by it. The point is that the unity of theory and practice is wrong, undialectical, if it is asserted as
simply existing, as a programmatic obligation for anyone who would engage in either. The unity requires
struggle.

As Adorno asserts that the unity of theory and practice stems from the unity of subject and object, so does
Adorno's critique of Lukacs subject-object of history apply equally to the Hungarian's accompanying activist
strain46: the unity of theory and practice that takes place in thought is identity thinking writ large, as the
unexamined idealist strain of Hegelian thought carried into Marxism. The proper materialist response, if it can
be phrased as such, is to perpetrate and exaggerate the distance between theory and practice, to expose
the lie of their identity with non-identity thinking, in order to keep rational identity within the realm of the
possible47.

IV

Without an understanding of the impact Auschwitz had on Adorno, the philosophy of negative dialectics is
nigh incomprehensible. This is felt most acutely in his mediations on metaphysics, toward the end of
Negative Dialectics. For Adorno, Auschwitz spells the end of metaphysics: the optimism of Hegel's story of
the frantic self-development or fulfilment of Geist through his philosophy of History is disproved in the face of
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the Holocaust. Metaphysical speculation, as it had been practised since Plato and Aristotle, becomes
grotesque in this light. To try and make sense of what happened, to come to terms with it, rationalise it,
seems to Adorno a recondite insult to its victims48.

Of course, Adorno does not really believe in metaphysics anyway. He is a proper post-Kantian, and seems to
have accepted the results of Kant's dialectic that knowledge cannot transcend the experiential conditions of
objecthood wholesale when it comes to the possibility of thinking God or the soul. But Adorno is also a
Hegelian, and metaphysics has always been social, and it is in sense that Auschwitz disproves metaphysics,
as we can see that it is (no longer) compatible with the course of human history. The power of metaphysical
experience itself shows the corruption of the discipline of metaphysics as purely a priori speculation: the a
priori is wrenched down from on high by the experience it was supposed to account for.

But the point is not just that Auschwitz disproves the claim of metaphysics, but that Auschwitz represents the
historical realization of aspirations inherent in the metaphysical tradition itself. Adorno identifies the following
characteristics of the metaphysics: that it celebrates the immutable and non-temporal at the expense of the
transient and temporal, that it is essentially affirmative of the world (for instance, in the the theological
problem of evil; it asserts that the existence of evil and chaos in the empirical world is compatible with the
existence of a rational and moral order in the suprasensible realm), and, of course, that it subordinates to its
conceptions of totality the particularity of human experience and suffering, as well as the concrete material
world. The concentration camp is the culmination of these tendencies it becomes a world unto itself, a
closed totality beyond the exigencies of historical time; it subordinates the individual, and every individuating
feature of the individual, to the universality of the genus or race; and it assumes a radical immanence,
shutting down the possibility of thought escaping in transcendence as it prevents inmates from escaping the
camp walls.

Despite this, Adorno believes we would be the worse off in dropping the metaphysical. He believes this
because metaphysics still holds a claim for transcendence from the false totality of modern life, and sense
that 'this cannot be all'. But this possibility of transcendence comes in a dialectical form: the irrationality, in a
sense, of postulating a beyond that we cannot 'grasp with both hands', amounts to an escape from the crude
reduction of reason to its instrumental-functional conception; yet, the metaphysical cannot abandon reason, it
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cannot be conceived as a purely immediate receptivity, as this is ruled out by the 'fallen' human being, mired
in the real-material world. This experience must still contain a constitutive intellectual element49.

Adorno does not outline a theory of metaphysical experience, but he does make some further remarks on
what it might entail. What I want to emphasise is the way that the chance of metaphysical experience evokes
some conception of moral responsibility in the subject. Adorno insists that the experience of negativity of
death and radical evil, and indeed also of the utter loss of meaning which he thinks characterizes ordinary life
in the rationalized social world brings out a 'metaphysical need'. The link between metaphysics and
morality comes in Adorno's grounding of metaphysical transcendence in the experience of suffering.
Metaphysical experience generates a demand that suffering be resisted and a less violent social world
created.50 This metaphysics creates an 'illusion' of a changed world, not the belief that such is actually
happening or going to happen: the value of this supposed metaphysical experience lies in negation from
what exists, it must place the hope of a reconciliation with the object in the imitation of transcendence
beyond the object51.

This ties us in with what has been described as Adorno's 'negative moral philosophy'. By this, Adorno takes
the step of beginning his moral philosophy with the statement that a moral philosophy is today impossible,
since the modern social world is radically evil. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly52. Again, Auschwitz is the
model for the whole of society: one both cannot live rightly, because of the guilt context of evil society, in its
cold pursuit of self-interest, indifferent to the needs of other; but neither can one live, since life becomes
uniform and regimented, as people react to external systematic imperatives (and internal repression) rather
than exercise a capacity for proper self-determination53.

Given this negativism, how can Adorno want us to act? Does he have an ethics at all? He retains a belief in
the morality of thought, undoubtedly. But it is interesting for us that what Adorno does insist on in, terms of
ethics of right living, is a refusal to take part. His 'negative prescriptions' centre around what I am interpreting
here as a negative freedom, a belief in the limited remaining value in living an independent life from others,
avoiding determination by society as much as one can. Adorno believes in the rather modest ideal of
empathy with others, but solidarity with a group in a collective political struggle is ruled out. Adorno thinks
that such struggle would really betray the cause it fought for, it being tainted with the evil of existing society.
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And Adorno is adamant that true freedom has to be grounded in public freedom, that the good life is
ultimately meaningless unless it is institutionalized in the good society abstract, formal ideals amount to
little if they are not shared in social practices, in Sittlichkeit. But, still, the hollow model of the isolated
intellectual is the best we can expect.

Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics Continuum, 1973
Adorno, Theodor W. Metaphysics Polity, 2001
Adorno, Theodor W. 'The Actuality of Philosophy' in The Adorno Reader
Adorno, Theodor W. 'Messages in a Bottle', New Left Review
Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia Verso, 2005
Adorno, Theodor W. 'Education after Auschwitz', in Critical Models
Adorno, Theodor W. 'Resignation', in Critical Models
Adorno, Theodor W. 'Marginalia to Theory and Practice', in Critical Models
Adorno, Theodor W. Critical Models Columbia University Press, 2005
Adorno, Theodor W. Lectures on Negative Dialectics Polity, 2008
Agamben, Giorgio Remnants of Auschwitz: the Witness and the Archive Zone Books, 2005
Colletti, Lucio 'Introduction', Karl Marx Early Writings Penguin, 1974
Cook, Deborah Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts Acumen, 2008
Finlayson, James Gordon 'Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable', European Journal of Philosophy
Gibson, Nigel & Rubin, Andrew (ed.) Adorno: A Critical Reader Blackwell, 2002
Hammer, Espen Adorno and the Political Routledge, 2006
Hammer, Espen 'Adorno and extreme evil', Philosophy and Social Criticism (Vol. 26 No.4)
Hegel, G.W.F Science of Logic George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1969
Held, David Introduction to Critical Theory Polity 2004
Honneth, Axel Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory (2009), Columbia
Huhn, Tom (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Adorno Cambridge, 2004
Inwood, Michael A Hegel Dictionary Blackwell, 1992
Jarvis, Simon Adorno: A Critical Introduction Polity, 1998
Jay, Martin Adorno Fontana, 1984
O' Connor, Brian (ed.) The Adorno Reader Blackwell, 2004
Rose, Gillian The Melancholy Science Macmillan Press, 1978
Therborn, Goran 'The Frankfurt School', in Western Marxism: a Critical Reader, New Left Books 1977
Thompson, Alex Adorno: A Guide for the Perplexed Continuum, 2006

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1 This has been the standard Marxist view, for instance Perry Anderson's Considerations on Western Marxism and
Goran Therborn, in his essay on 'The Frankfurt School'. For a summary, see David Held's 'A reply to Marxist
critics', Introduction to Critical Theory, p.354-364
2 Adorno famously wrote that Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it
was missed. But this is a failure of philosophy too, as Adorno goes on: Having broken its pledge to be as one with
reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself. Negative Dialectics, p.3 See
also the treatment of this topic in Alex Thompson, Adorno: A Guide to the Perplexed
3 We can look at the very last fragment of Minima Moralia, 'Finale', where Adorno writes Knowledge has no light
but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique but adds But beside the
demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters
4 Hammer goes on to add of Adorno that At worst his politics may amount to a form of subjectivist anarchism that
fails to take into account the communal dimension of political struggle and the essential difference between
sovereign aesthetic or philosophical meaning and the more down-to-earth process of committing oneself to genuine
political decisions and policies (Adorno and the Political, p.179
5 Marianne Tettlebaum, 'Political Philosophy', Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts, p.134
6 'Education after Auschwitz', Critical Models (CM) p.191
7 This is the aspect of fascism that Adorno concentrates on, given that the possibility of changing the social conditions
responsible for fascism is minimal. Thus it is entirely false to charge Adorno with giving a purely psychological
account of fascism, as for example in Goran Therborn, 'The Frankfurt School'
8 CM, p.197
9 Ibid., p.197-8
10 Ibid., p.198
11 Ibid., p.199
12 Discussed in Russell Berman, 'Adorno's Politics' (Adorno: A Critical Reader).
13 CM, p.201
14 Ibid., p.202
15 CM p.193
16 Quoted by Marianne Tettlebaum, 'Political Philosophy', Key Concepts
17 LND p.63
18 'The Actuality of Philosophy', The Adorno Reader p.32
19 Take the following quote from 'The Actuality of Philosophy' to illustrate 'philosophy as interpretation': Authentic
philosophic interpretation does not meet up with a fixed meaning which already lies behind the question, but lights it
up suddenly and momentarily, and consumes it at the same time... Interpretation of the unintentional through a
juxtaposition of the real by the power of such interpretation is the programme to which the materialist procedure
does all the more justice, the more it distances itself from every 'meaning' of its objects and the less it relates itself to
an implicit, quasi-religious meaning
20 LND p.60
21 In the Objective Logic, Book One (The Doctrine of Being), the section on Quality or determinateness, chapter 1. In
A.V. Miller's translation of the Science of Logic, Adorno's critique refers to pages 98-99
22 LND p.60
23 But it is this very indeterminateness which constitutes its determinateness; for indeterminateness is opposed to
determinateness; hence as so opposed it is itself determinate or the negative, and the pure, quite abstract negative. It
is this indeterminateness or abstract negation which thus has being present within it, which reflection, both outer and
inner, enunciates when it equates it with nothing, declares it to be an empty product of thought, to be nothing.
(Science of Logic, p.99)
24 This is not the entirety of Hegel's argument, of course. Being and Nothing are identical, but are at the same time
distinct, because they prove to be the same but from opposite 'starting points': being goes from being to nothingness,
while nothingness goes from nothingness to being. To 'capture' this relationship, that both are distinct but
interdependent, Hegel concludes by making them aspects of a third category, Becoming. See the entry for 'Being,
Nothing and Becoming' in Michael Inwood's A Hegel Dictionary
25 LND p.61
26 LND p.61
27 Editors Introduction to 'The Actuality of Philosophy', in The Adorno Reader
28 This argument follows Lucio Colletti, 'Introduction' p.19
29 Lucio Colletti p.20. Colletti tells us that Marx uses the phrases uncritical idealism and uncritical positivism in
the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts
30 Colletti p.32
31 'Mediations on Metaphysics: After Auschwitz' in The Adorno Reader
32 Martin Jay Adorno, p.68
33 Adorno adds that This profit motive which divides society and potentially tears it apart is also the factor by means
of which society reproduces its own existence. It is would adding that this reproduction of the conditions of
existence is, in fact, the naturalistic cause that Adorno attributes to identity thinking. He comments that in both cases
of contradiction in reality and in the concept we are dealing with the principle of mastery, the mastery of

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nature, which spreads its influence, which continues in the mastery of men by other men and which finds its mental
reflex in the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is
introduced to it or that it encounters into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of
influence. (all LND, p.9)
LND p.7
This seems to be Adorno's method in 'Freedom as they know it', one of Adorno's previously unpublished fragments
from Minima Moralia (published now as 'Messages in a Bottle', New Left Review). Adorno refers there, in a
persuasively simple way, to the objective spirit of language, where German and English reserve the word 'free'
for things and services which cost nothing. This is supposed to bear witness to the unfreedom posited in the
exchange relationship itself.
'Marginalia to Theory and Praxis', Critical Models p.263
By this I mean the way in which 'praxis' has, more often or not, been equated with the practices of
Leninist/Trotskyist vanguardist organisations. This issue has been commented on by various authors: David Held
describes Adorno, and Critical Theory in general, as having an explicit hostility to Leninist forms of organization,
where Leninist vanguard organizations were looked upon critically because it was thought they reproduced a
chronic division of labour, bureaucracy and authoritarian leadership (Introduction to Critical Theory, p.360). Espen
Hammer adds simply that Adorno is profoundly unsympathetic towards the classical Marxist problem of
organization (Adorno and the Political, p.33)
CM p.262
For Adorno, the forces of production have already developed to the point where it would be possible to organize
the world in such a way that there would no longer be any want and hence deprivation and pressure. He is
unequivocal: this would be immediately possible now (LND p.48)
CM p.276
CM p.276
CM p.262
But we can note the reverse of this equation the way in which Adorno discusses the refraction of theory through
the archbourgeois primacy of pure practical reason, that is, reason devoid of [an] object. This emphasis on ends
above all else the Kantian 'treat everyone as an ends and never merely as means' can only mean that pure
practical reason can have no end(s). When all that one can see is the end, one cannot see anything else, and one ends
up seeing nothing. This can be formulated as the end becoming the means: it is left to praxis to reinstitute (the
primacy of) the object. Adorno writes: The primacy of the object must be respected by praxis; this was first noted
by the idealist Hegel's critique of Kant's ethics of conscience. And that praxis rightly understood is what the object
wants: praxis follows the object's neediness (CM p.265)
CM p.263
I notice that Adorno tends to use thought in the contexts of what I have called here the first-tier analysis, reserving
theory for the second-tier. This is interesting, not simply because it supports what I am saying: it allows one to
speculate on whether by theory Adorno can mean Marxist science, or something like it, rather than philosophy as
such. It could be a useful researching into the role negative dialectics would have, if any at all, if the much vaunted
unity of theory and practice was ever achieved.
Adorno draws the parallel between theory-practice and subject-object at the beginning of the essay, the very first
sentence being: A simple consideration of history demonstrates just how much the question of theory and praxis
depends on the question of subject and object. p.259. The idea that Adorno's essay on theory and praxis can be read
as a critique of Lukacs is advanced in Henry W. Pickford 'The Dialectic of Theory and Praxis: On Late Adorno',
Adorno: A Critical Reader
See the helpful table on the difference between identity thinking, non-identity (negative dialectics) and rational
identity, in David Held, p.215
Although as we have seen, Adorno remains a paradoxical position on Auschwitz. On the one hand, to speak about
Auschwitz is to give a voice to the unspeakable, yet to ignore it risks the possibility that it may happen again.
Giorgio Agamben sums up Adorno's position, with a spotlight on his thoughts on death, in Remnants of Auschwitz:
The Witness and the Archive, p.80-81
In his lecture on the concept of intellectual experience, Adorno touches on these issues. He lectures that Thinking
that is rigorously disciplined from the outset is just as incapable of engaging in philosophy as undisciplined
thinking. He adds that We might also say that speculative ratio, the kind of ratio that goes beyond the conceptual
order of an already owned, positive given, necessarily possesses an irrational element in that it offends against the
secure knowledge it already has. There is no rationality without this intrinsic element of irrationality LND p.78
Espen Hammer, 'Metaphysics', Key Concepts p.72
Drawing on Adorno's idea of mimesis, which he borrows from Walter Benjamin
'Refuge for the homeless', Minima Moralia, p.39
Fabian Freyenhagen, 'Moral Philosophy', p.101