Speculation, Dialectic and Critique: Hegel and Critical Theory in Germany After 1945

doi:10.1017/hgl.2017.
10 Hegel Bulletin, page 1 of 22

The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2017
Speculation, Dialectic and Critique: Hegel and

Critical Theory in Germany after 1945
Cat Moir
Abstract
This article challenges the restrictive association of critical theory with the Frankfurt
School by exploring the differential reception of Hegel by German critical thinkers
on both sides of the Iron Curtain after 1945. In the West, Theodor Adorno held
Hegelian identity thinking partly responsible for the atrocities of National Socialism.
Meanwhile in the East, Ernst Bloch turned Hegel into a weapon against the commu-
nist regime. The difference between Adorno and Blochs positions is shown to turn
on the relationship between speculation, dialectics and critique. Whereas for Adorno
Hegelian speculation was the root of dangerous identity thinking, Bloch saw the
repression of speculative thought as a cornerstone of totalitarianism. However, it is
argued that ultimately Bloch and Adorno were united in their reception of Hegel by
a shared understanding that the goal of critical theory, namely the transformation of
the social totality, could not be achieved without utopian speculation.
Introduction
In 1937, Max Horkheimer, then Director of the Institute for Social Research
at the University of Frankfurt, wrote an essay fundamentally challenging
conventional understandings of theory and its practical relationship to society.
Traditional theory, Horkheimer argued, was primarily concerned with unifying
facts in an abstract system of explanation. Its basic requirement, Horkheimer
claimed, was the absence of superfluous elements, and the demand that all the
parts should intermesh thoroughly and without friction (Horkheimer 2002: 190).
While this model might work adequately for natural science, according to
Horkheimer it was unable to account for the contradictions and tensions that
characterize human societies. In other words, traditional theory was divorced
from the real conditions of lived life. Horkheimer did not deny that under
present social circumstances traditional theory had a real usefulness; yet he
nevertheless believed it did nothing to further the interests of any important
large sector of society in the present age (Horkheimer 2002: 206). As an
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Speculation, Dialectic, Critique
alternative, Horkheimer proposed a critical theory aimed at the emancipation

and alteration of society as a whole (Horkheimer 2002: 206). Horkheimers
distinctive vision in this essay would come to define the mission of the so-called
Frankfurt School of critical theory in the twentieth century.
Central to the Frankfurt School project was its engagement with Hegel,
whose thought the Schools key representatives believed exemplified traditional
theory in important respects. By postulating the absolute spirit as the most real
thing of all, Horkheimer argued, Hegel had managed to erase contradiction
within his idealist system; however, that did nothing to address the facts of
conflict and difference in social life (Horkheimer 2002: 204). [C]onfronted with
the persisting contradictions in human existence and with the impotence of
individuals in the face of situations they have themselves brought about, what
Horkheimer called the Hegelian solution of postulating a universal reason
that had already adequately evolved itself and is identical with all that happens
was socially impotent (204).
For critical thinkers outside the Frankfurt School, however, Hegel played a
somewhat different role. In the communist East, Ernst Bloch mobilized Hegel,
against an increasingly dogmatic Soviet Marxism, in the interest of social critique
(Bloch 1962). This paper compares Blochs Hegel reception in the GDR context
with that of Adorno in post-war West Germany. It argues that the interpretation
of Hegel is a useful parameter for mapping the intellectual history of critical
theory beyond the confines of the Frankfurt School. The first part situates
Blochs Hegel reception in the context of debates in the GDR. It demonstrates
how Bloch deployed Hegels philosophy in a struggle against precisely the kind of
totalizing ideology for which Adorno would later hold it responsible. The second
part examines Adornos Hegel reception in the context of thought after
Auschwitz, highlighting the grounds for his focus on Hegelian idealism as
a harbinger of totalitarian ideologies. The third part considers whether the
criticisms of Hegel we find in Bloch and Adorno are fair, and identifies a shared
debt to Hegel beyond apparent divergences. The paper concludes by reflecting
on what this story can tell us about the constellation of Hegel, the Frankfurt
School and the broader project of critical theory.
I. Ernst Bloch and the Hegel debate in the GDR
Hegel was an important influence on Blochs philosophy from the very

beginning; nevertheless, his Hegelianism increased in significance over time. Peter
Zudeick (1985: 97) identifies a noticeable increase in Hegels importance between
the first and second editions of Spirit of Utopia (Bloch 2000). Meanwhile, if Jrgen
Habermass (1960) review of The Principle of Hope (195455) is to be believed, then
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at that time Bloch still owed a greater philosophical debt to Schelling than he did
to Hegel.1 The fact that Blochs final work, Experimentum Mundi (Bloch 1975),
is effectively an ambitious reflection on Hegelian conceptual realism appears to
support the thesis of Hegels increasing importance for his thought.
It was in SubjektObjekt. Erluterungen zu Hegel (Bloch 1962 [1949]) that
Bloch developed his reception of Hegel most comprehensively.2 The book made
waves when it was published in the GDR in 1951, above all for its claim
heretical in East Germanythat Hegels thought was unfulfilled by Marxism
(Bloch 1962: 12). In the GDR context, in which bourgeois philosophy was
seen as complicit in the historical oppression of the working classes, Blochs
fidelity to Hegel would vex the architects of Soviet domination.
In the early days of Soviet occupation, Hegel was perceived as an ally in
East Germany. The journalist and later member of the SED Central Committee
Alexander Abusch expressed this sentiment in an article written in 1946, in which
he said that contemporary socialists felt themselves to be the appointed heirs
of German humanism, among whose representatives Abusch named Kant,
Fichte and Hegel (Abusch 1962: 8). Meanwhile, the future East German
Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Anton Ackermann, wrote in the Deutsche
Volkszeitung on 5 February 1946 that the aim of a practical socialism was to make
the intellectual demands of humanists like Hegel into the demands of the people
(Cited in Warnke 2000: 197). However, it was not long before the contrary stance
became dogma. In 1946, in the journal Neue Welt, a member of the Soviet
Military Administration, Wassili Stepanow, argued that although Hegels
revitalisation of dialectical thinking had been revolutionary, he had used it for
conservative purposes (Stepanow 1946: 5). For support, Stepanow looked to
none other than Stalin, whose Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938) had
been distributed en masse in the East since 1945. There, the Soviet dictator
argued that Hegel had contributed to the rise of fascism by offering a
philosophical justification for German nationalism and chauvinism.
A year later, at a philosophy conference in Moscow, Stalins propaganda
chief Andrei Shdanow argued that in light of the leaders position, the problem
of Hegel [had] long since been solved (Shdanow 1951: 104). Once the text of
Shdanows intervention was published in German in 1947, party functionaries
such as Gerhard Harig, representative for philosophy on the SED Central
Committee, called on it to argue that Hegelei represented a form of revisionism
(Hegelei was a pejorative term meaning Hegeling around, which ironically
enough was invented by Schopenhauer to criticize young Hegelians like Marx)
(see also Warnke 2000: 198). A year later, at the SEDs first cultural congress,
Otto Grotewohl presented Stalins two-faced Hegel as the official party
interpretation: the originator of the progressive dialectical method, who
nevertheless espoused a reactionary political philosophy (Grotewohl 1948: 4).
3
Writing on the political implications of reading Hegel in the GDR, Camilla

Warnke (2000: 198) has argued that the entrenchment of the anti-Hegel position
between 1946 and 1948 reflected the abandonment of hope for an independent
German path to socialism. The question of whether Hegel was a progressive
or reactionary thinker was a proxy, Warnke argues, for that of whether the
philosophy of this new society would be allowed to draw on its specific cultural
tradition, or whether it would be wholly determined by Moscow. In these early
years, taking a position on Hegel came to signal ones allegiance or otherwise to
Soviet orthodoxy and control.
It was in this atmosphere that in 1949 Bloch returned from exile in the United
States to take up the Chair in Philosophy at the University of Leipzig. In an
interview with the party newspaper Neues Deutschland in August that year, he
declared himself full of enthusiasm for the project of building a socialist utopia on
German soil (Zudeick 1985: 180). The honeymoon period did not last long. Blochs
choice to teach classical German philosophy in Leipzig was highly politicized in a
context in which philosophy had become an ideological battleground. Within
academic circles Bloch quickly became known as a Hegelian, practically a
swearword in that climate (180). The appearance of SubjektObjekt in 1951 did little
to dispel this impression. Considering the official GDR line on Hegel, Blochs book
could only be read as a provocation: he explicitly disputed that studying Hegel
constituted Hegelei as Harig had claimed (Bloch 1962: 12). In light of the foregoing
discussion, Blochs denial that Hegels work was at an end, which he called an
ideological pretence, could only be interpreted as a round criticism of those who
would see the problem of Hegel and what it stood for long since solved (12).
Blochs central argument in SubjektObjekt was that speculative reason,
which looks beyond the merely empirical to what connects apparently discrete
phenomena, was a critical weapon against totalitarianism. In the Critique of Pure
Reason (CPR BXXV), Kant had defined speculative reason as reason applied
beyond the boundaries of experience.3 The first usefulness of his critique,
Kant argued, was that it teaches us never to venture beyond these boundaries
or if we do, not to call what we find there knowledge (BXXV). For Hegel,
however, the very concepts through which we know the world were themselves
speculative constructs. When in the Science of Logic (SL 21.18) Hegel refers to the
concept as thought in general, as universal, as against the particularity of the
things vaguely parading in their multitudinousness before indeterminate intuition
and representation, he highlights that concepts themselves are not reducible to
any specific instance and are thus not empirically available, but are only derived
or constructed on the speculative basis of seeing in multiple particulars
something that remains always the same.
Hegel thus sought to rehabilitate speculation as the science of universals.
Yet according to Hegel, universals were not mere products of transcendental
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subjectivity, operations of thought to which phenomena conform. He saw natural

laws and natural kinds as evidence that realism about universals was a compelling
metaphysical position (see EL 21Z, 5253; Stern 2009: 26). If we are to believe
what natural science tells us when it says that objects will always fall under gravity,
or that human intercourse will always result in the birth of a human child, then
we must take seriously the proposition that the speculative structure of the
concept does accurately reflect a real logic in the world. As such, Hegel argued,
it is reasonable for us to assume that we can know the absolute through concepts.
Marx and Engels followed Kant in dismissing Hegelian speculation as a
mystery. For them, what was most real were not abstract ideas, but the existence
of real individuals and their historical activity. Where speculation ends, they
argued in The German Ideology, where real life starts, there consequently begins
real, positive science (MECW 5: 37). By the time Bloch published SubjektObjekt,
the Marxian rejection of speculation had become a matter of dogma in the
GDR; his avowal of speculative thinking thus cut directly against the grain of
official doctrine.
For Bloch, Hegelian speculation was an important critical tool for two main
reasons. First, speculation as the positive moment of reason (Bloch 1962: 151)
demonstrated the ability of human thought to go beyond the merely empirical,
in other words to transgress the status quo. Thought and its dialectic is the
highest human power of production, he claimed, and even though dialectical
thinking must be based on facts, according to Bloch it does not remain with
them as mere sensory contents (Bloch 1962: 11011). This capacity of thought
to go beyond the merely given obviously spelled danger for a regime that, as the
reaction to Blochs Hegel book would demonstrate, increasingly sought to curb
all attempts at independent thinking.
Second, Bloch saw the transitivity between concepts and reality asserted
by Hegelian metaphysics as evidence of what he called the objectively real
possibility of utopia (Bloch 1986: 235). He saw the emergence of human
consciousness, with its dreams of a better life, as evidence that the world itself is
striving towards a state in which reconciliation between subject and object will be
achieved at the ontological level. Here again, however, the suggestion that utopia
had not in fact been achieved in the present undermined the official Soviet
narrative, according to which the establishment of communism represented the
de facto realisation of this historic dream. When Bloch argued in the preface to
the first edition that Hegel was the teacher of living movement in contrast to
dead being, and of a truth that was no static or completed fact, but the result of
a process that still had to be clarified and achieved, he effectively denied that
Soviet communism embodied a historically incontestable truth (1962: 12).
Even Blochs central criticism of Hegel in SubjektObjekt mobilized him
against a Marxism of dogma and stasis. Hegels dialectic, Bloch argued, is caught
5
in the circle of anamnesis as if under a spell, which prevents even the system of
development from remaining a system open to development (1962: 48081).
Only by accepting that both our knowledge of the world and the world itself are
as yet incomplete can we escape the spell of anamnesis and perceive the real
possibility of utopia in a yet-to-be-determined future.
SubjektObjekt did not immediately meet with harsh criticism. Only after
Stalins death in 1953 could an open debate about Hegel take place, and Bloch
now found himself on the wrong side of the party line. In June that year, against
the background of mass strikes and demonstrations in the GDR, the dissident
philosopher and editor of the Deutsche Zeitschrift fr Philosophie Wolfgang Harich
published an article that would ignite a second phase of the Hegel debate. Written
by Blochs colleague Rugard Otto Gropp, Professor of Marxism-Leninism at
Leipzig, the article sharply criticized Hegel in by now ad nauseam familiar terms
(Gropp 1954). Bloch responded in coded fashion, denouncing dogmatism and
stasis. Initially, however, the exchange was cordial enough to offer some hope
that the sectarianism of the past had been overcome. Gropp edited a Festschrift for
Blochs seventieth birthday in 1955, and Bloch was even awarded national prizes
for his work. However, the seeds sown in this mealy-mouthed exchange would
later bear bitter fruit for Bloch.
Much happened in 1956 that led to Bloch eventually becoming persona non
grata in the GDR. In February, commenting on the twentieth party congress
of the communist party, he criticized the suppression of free thought under the
personality cult. It was as if Marxism had become a closed doctrine under Stalin,
he argued, nothing more than a connection between quotations (Bloch 1970:
364). One month later, in his new capacity as Director of the Philosophy Section
of the East German Academy of Science, he convened a conference on the
problem of freedom in light of scientific socialism, which explicitly addressed
the issue of academic (un)freedom in East Germany (Zudeick 1985: 224). In
November that year, at an event marking 125 years since Hegels death, Bloch
expressed his opposition to the regime in the strongest terms yet. Just a month or
so earlier Soviet troops had violently quashed demands for freedom in Poland
and Hungary, and in his lecture, Hegel and the Violence of the System, Bloch
made it clear that he saw this brutality as of a piece with the same repression of
critical thought to which the anti-Hegel line belonged (Bloch 1969: 481500).
A truly Marxist philosophy must try to represent the world in its fullness and
crucial depth, not to create a still life out of four or five textual fruits or a
schoolmastery of sects and scientific catechisms. Red headmasters remote from
life, paper aesthetics remote from art, philosophizing remote from philosophy
will not help us, he insisted (495).
Needless to say the red headmasters did not take this lying down. Gropp
mounted a campaign against Bloch, exposing the supposedly parlous state of
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philosophy under his directorship at Leipzig. With Bloch accused of revisionism

by Party Chairman Walter Ulbricht, his students were openly harassed and his
publications blocked. In December 1957 Bloch was summoned before a tribunal
in which his Hegel speech was the central focus. Bloch was excoriated for having
developed an absolutely revisionist conception of Hegels system according
to which it must be judged differently from the way Engels had done so
(Bloch 1991). In particular Blochs claim that dialectical materialism needed to be
renewed met with sharp disapproval. Blochs philosophy was denounced as
un-Marxist, and he was declared unfit to teach.
It is hardly surprising, then, that when the Blochs were visiting West
Germany in 1961 and they heard the news that a wall had been erected overnight
in Berlin, they decided to seek asylum in the Federal Republic. In his inaugural
lecture as honorary Professor at the University of Tbingen, Bloch, now 76,
admitted that his hope in the GDR had been disappointed (Bloch 1998: 33945),
although he never gave up on his socialist ideals, and became something of a cult
figure among protesting students in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, unfettered by the
constraints of (self-)censorship, in Tbingen Blochs critique of the East became
more explicit. When Suhrkamp published a second edition of SubjektObjekt in
West Germany in 1962, Bloch claimed in the afterword that Hegel was not
currently popular in the East, despite the sentence in his Philosophy of Right according
to which the parliament has only the task of showing the people that they are ruled
correctly (1962: 14). Bloch expressly saw Western mistrust towards the closed,
humanity violating worldview as justified: how true these suspicions had come
faced with totalitarian lead, he said (14). He nevertheless held up the dynamism of
Hegelian dialectical thinking against the idea of false accomplishment on both sides
of the iron curtain (14). In Blochs view, Hegel remained relevant in the face of
our perpetual duty against incrustation everywhere, in order to maintain existence
in transition and fluidity (14). Hegel may have denied the future, according to
Bloch, but the future would not deny Hegel, since that future was loyal to the truth
that is not yet (14).
II. Theodor Adorno: Reading Hegel after Auschwitz
A year after the second edition of Blochs SubjektObjekt appeared in West

Germany, Adorno published his Hegel: Three Studies (1993 [1963]), a triptych of
essays intended, as he says in the preface, as preparation for a revised conception
of the dialectic (1993: xxxvi). The first essay, Aspects of Hegels Philosophy, is
based on a lecture Adorno delivered in November 1956 at an event in Frankfurt
commemorating 125 years since Hegels death; in other words, an analogous
event to the one in East Germany at which Bloch gave the lecture that
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contributed to his eventual exile. The second, The Experiential Content of

Hegels Philosophy, is an expanded version of a lecture Adorno gave to the
German Hegel Society meeting in Frankfurt in October 1958, and was first
printed in the Archiv fr Philosophie in 1959. The third and final essay, Skoteinos,
was written specifically for the Hegel studies. It is a meditation on what is
involved in reading Hegel which emerged from Adornos experience teaching
Hegels philosophy in his Frankfurt seminar.
A number of striking similarities connect Adornos project in his Hegel
studies with Blochs in SubjektObjekt. Just as Bloch defended Hegel against an
orthodox Marxism that sought either to write him off as either a proto-fascist or
an obsolete bourgeois thinker, Adornos stated aim in these Studies was to rescue
Hegel from both the positivists dismissal of him as unintelligible, and the
Soviet Marxists ideological version of the dialectic (Adorno 1993: 125, xx).
Adornos didactic orientation in his Skoteinos essay echoes Blochs approach in
SubjektObjekt, in which exegetical essays are supported by extensive quotations
from Hegels works.
Questions of the relation between language and thought which Hegels work
raises are central to both thinkers reflections. Adorno defended Hegels language
against the charge of obscurity levelled at him by his positivist critics. While he
admitted that philosophy should not succumb to confusion and destroy the very
possibility of its existence by grossly neglecting the demand for clarity, he
nevertheless identified this demand in its most puritanical form with a reified
consciousness that freezes objects into things in themselves so that they can be
available to science and praxis as things for others (Adorno 1993: 100). For
Adorno, Hegels language has the demeanour of the language of doctrine only
because Hegel himself had not critically reflected on the role of language in his
attempt to articulate the absolute (109).
Nevertheless, Adorno argues, Hegels dialectics were indeed an attempt to
escape the Cartesian ambition to conceive of dynamic processes as things
pinned down and photographable (1993: 100). The kind of linguistic clarity
required by the Cartesian paradigm, Adorno claimed, can be demanded of all
knowledge only when it has been determined that the objects under investigation
are free of all dynamic qualities that would cause them to elude the gaze that tries
to capture and hold them unambiguously (98). For Adorno, on the other hand
and he saw himself as united with Hegel in this respect (102)the task of all
philosophy was to attempt to express this dynamism, this resistance that objects
and indeed, above all, subjectsexercise in the face of languages inherent tendency
towards reification (100). As such, what positivists perceived as Hegels unclarity
must be understood according to Adorno as the result of a paradox inherent in all
philosophy: the need to say clearly something that is unclear; to respond to the
urgent demand that the expression fit the matter expressed precisely, even where
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the matter at hand for its part does not conform to the customary notion of what
can be indicated clearly (100). One is reminded strongly here of Blochs own essay
on Hegels language in SubjektObjekt. There, he defends Hegel against accusations
of obscurity in similar terms: Something dark that is expressed exactly as it is, is
quite different from something clear that is expressed darkly (Bloch 1962: 20).
Bloch and Adorno were thus both fundamentally opposed to watering down
Hegels philosophy (Bloch 1962: 12), and united in the conviction that instead what
was needed was to confront head on what Hegel revealed about the difficulties
inherent in all critical thought.
Bloch cast those difficulties primarily in terms of imagining a world in
which the Hegelian ideal of identitybetween subject and object, between the
brute fact of existence and the form that existence takeswould be achieved.
For Adorno, however, critical thought meant above all overcoming thoughts
will to identity, which we find first and foremost in the structure of concepts and
judgements. Adorno argued that language and the process of reification
were interlocked to the extent that the very form of the copula, the is,
pursues the aim of pinpointing its object (Adorno 1993: 100). Like Bloch,
Adorno criticized the primacy of Logos (21) in Hegels work, which he, too,
associated with a totalizing impulse. In Hegels philosophy, Adorno argued,
nothing is to be external to spirit, and it was the brutality of this coercion that
creates the semblance of reconciliation in the doctrine of an identity that has been
produced (20). For it was only the doctrine of the identity of subject and object
inherent in idealism, Adorno claimed, that gave Hegels dialectics the strength
of totality that performs the negative labourthe dissolution of individual
concepts, the reflection of the immediate and then the sublation of
reflection (10).
It was thoughts negative labour, however, that primarily interested
Adorno, for he saw in it the only means by which philosophy could even attempt
to do justice to the reality of the nonidentity of subject and object, concept and
thing, idea and society (Adorno 1993: 31). Just as a young Bloch had argued that
Kant must be allowed to burn through Hegel as the antidote to the latters
panlogism (Bloch 2000: 187), so too Adorno returned to Kant for the tools with
which to think the non-identical with and beyond Hegel. According to Adorno,
Hegel attempted to outdo Kant by dissolving anything not proper to
consciousness into a positing by the infinite subject (Adorno 1993: 11).
In Adornos view, however, Hegel had mistaken the thing in itself s resistance
to thought as an inconsistency in Kants philosophy (11, 13). Moreover, he had
failed to recognize that the Kantian discontinuities register the very moment of
non-identity that is an indispensable part of his own philosophy of identity (13).
Rescuing Hegel according to Adorno thus meant facing up to philosophy where
it is most painful and wresting truth from it where its untruth is obvious (125).
9
Against Hegels assertion in The Phenomenology of Spirit that the truth is the whole,
Adorno claimed that the whole is the untrue: the truth in Hegels untruth was
the thesis of totality itself , which for Adorno was allied with a principle of
domination in thought and society (87).
To be sure, Adorno was far from simply rejecting the speculative
moment of Hegels thought that Bloch valued so highly. Interestingly, when, in
the Aspects essay, Adorno too describes anamnesis as essential to Hegels
thought, it is in defence of the necessity of speculation to his method (1993: 3).
Indeed, Adorno claimed that the attempt to rescue the material substance
from its allegedly outmoded and arbitrary speculation would result in nothing
but positivism on the one hand and artificial intellectual history on the other
(3). However, while he shared Hegelsand Blochsemphasis on a speculative
identity between thought and being, Adorno denied that this identity is achieved
positively in actuality. Instead, he emphasized that thought tended violently to
impose identity on particular objects, including living human beings, suppressing
or ignoring their real differences in the process.
If Blochs critique of the totalizing tendency in Hegels thought
was dynamite in the GDR context, Adornos was no less so in West
Germany. Already in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, he and Max Horkheimer had
appealed to Hegelian dialectics to understand why humanity, instead of
entering into a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism
(2002 [1944]: xiv). In view of the trajectory of European civilization according
to which any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature
only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion, it seemed somewhat whimsical
to Adorno and Horkheimer to try to construe world history in terms of
categories such as freedom and justice, as Hegel had done (Adorno and
Horkheimer 2002: 9, 184). However, if in the Dialectic abstraction was the
levelling rule that reduced historically singular individual persons and things to
mere iterations of nature as the dominion of the stronger, in Three Studies
identificationthe assertion of subjectobject identitybecame the crucial
mechanism.
Although Adorno and Horkheimer acknowledged an implicit connection
between the dynamics of modern philosophy and the emergence of fascist
barbarism, the author of the Hegel studies still rejected any strong connection
between Hegelianism and fascism. In the Aspects essay, Adorno criticized the
fact that important thinkers in the West had lumped Hegel together with
German imperialism and fascism (Adorno 1993: 28). The excerpts these critics
pointed to in support of their claims, Adorno argued, could be explained by
Hegels consciousness of the essentially antagonistic character of civil society.
Adorno refers in particular to the passage in the Philosophy of Right where Hegel
writes that despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough, i.e. its own
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resources are insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of

a penurious rabble, and that this
inner dialectic of civil society thus drives itor at any rate
drives a specific civil societyto push beyond its own limits
and seek markets in other lands which are either deficient
in the goods it has over-produced, or else generally backward
in industry. (PR 246)
Far from seeing in passages such as this evidence of Hegels restorationist
tendencies, his apology for the status quo, or his cult of the stateaspects of
Hegels thought Jon Stewart (1996) would later refute as myths and legendsat
this point Adorno reads Hegel along Marxian lines as one who, having accepted
the liberal economic theory of capitalism, had no antidote for the fact that
poverty increases with social wealth and thus appealed to the state in
desperation as a seat of authority beyond this play of forces (Adorno 1993: 29).
By the time he published Negative Dialectics in 1966the revised concept of
the dialectic for which the Hegel book had been a preparationAdorno held
the Hegelian identifying mode of thinking partly responsible for the atrocities of
fascist and communist totalitarianisms (Adorno 2004: 147). Hegels hypostatiza-
tion of the mind, Adorno claimed, resembles the political parties which made
their appearance in the twentieth century, tolerating no other party beside them
the parties whose names grin in totalitarian states as allegories of the direct power
of the particular (Adorno 2004: 199). Rolf Tiedemann explains how Adorno saw
the danger of the death camps already implicit in the logic of the Hegelian
concept, which subsumes difference under the sign of identity:
The yellow patch that was imposed on Jews in Germany to
make them stand out from other Germans served as well to
make them indistinguishable from each other. Qualities specific
to an individual were meant to vanish behind the ethnic
identity he shared with the many. As a member of the Jewish
people he was reduced to a mere instance, an abstraction, in
whom concrete difference merged into indistinguishable
sameness. (Adorno 2003: xxi)
In short, Adorno saw Hegels doctrine of absolute spirit as apt for corruption by
fascism, even if it was also in Hegelian dialectics, namely in its negative moment, that
Adorno believed the only possibility for philosophy after Auschwitz resided.
The rise of fascism was already a central concern of Dialectic of Enlightenment;
however, the word Auschwitz and what it signified came to occupy a major place in
Adornos thought in the decade between 1956, when he gave the lecture on which
11
Aspects of Hegels Philosophy was based, and the publication of Negative Dialectics in
1966. Already in 1950 Adorno protested that in Germany reminding people of
Auschwitz was held to be the expression of a tedious resentment, yet it was not until
the late 1950s that he began to intervene decisively in public debates about dealing
with the past (Adorno 2003: xii). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a serious public
debate about the historical legacy of Nazism emerged in West Germany, against the
background of reparations payments, trials of a number of Nazi war criminals, and
increasing scrutiny of the mass reintegration of perpetrators into public life (Gassert
and Steinweis 2007: 6; Frei 2012). In November 1959, Adorno delivered the lecture
The Meaning of Working through the Past to a conference on education organized
by a German organization for JewishChristian cooperation. In it he rejected the
view, widespread in West Germany at the time, that National Socialism was a thing
of the past. He argued that the threat of fascism was still present because its causes
had not disappeared, and considered the survival of National Socialism within
democracy to be more potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist
tendencies against democracy (Adorno 2003: 4). When anti-Semitic graffiti was
daubed on the walls of a synagogue in Cologne a month later, it was clear for all to
see that the threat of fascism had not died in 1945.
The title of Adornos lecture in German Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung
der Vergangenheit? clearly recalls that of Immanuel Kants 1789 essay
Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklrung?, in which Kant had warned against
too optimistic an assessment of humanitys progress in political and moral matters.
Like Kant, Adorno emphasized the need for autonomy, arguing that Nazi atrocities
were only possible because mass psychological identification encourages individuals
to abdicate the responsibility to think for themselves and act according to their own
independent judgement. Against a model of working through the past as a process
of public memorialization and forgetting, Adorno argued that the past will have
been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been
eliminated (Adorno 2003: 18). Adorno already seems to have seen the dynamics of
identification as among those causes. The identification with power and collective
narcisissm that increased beyond measure under National Socialism were not
destroyed at all in 1945, he claimed, but continued to exist, and the threat of
fascism with them (10). To be sure, Adorno was far from seeing structures of
identification alone as sufficient to explain the appeal and persistence of fascist
tendencies: objective economic conditions that maintained individuals in a state of
dependence and political immaturity were also key. Nevertheless, in 1959 Adorno
had already incorporated the concept of identification into his explanation of the
Nazi past (13).
If Adorno never expressly mentioned Hegel in the 1959 essay, by the time
he published Negative Dialectics in 1966 the question of whether after Auschwitz
one can go on living had become the impulse for a decisive break with the
12
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Hegelian identifying mode of thinking (Tiedemann in Adorno 2003: xii; Adorno

2004: 147). It was a question he also addressed in the lecture Education after
Auschwitz, published in 1966, which, as Espen Hammer has argued, ought to be
read as a companion piece to The Meaning of Working through the Past
(Hammer 2013: 69). There, Adorno presents Auschwitz as a new categorical
imperative for thought, arguing that the experience of German fascism enjoins us
to organize society, and in particular the public education system, so that nothing
like the Holocaust should ever take place again. This argument is incorporated
into Negative Dialectics in a final section on metaphysics, where Adornos
association of Hegelian thought with Nazi genocide becomes explicit. Philosophy
in the Hegelian mould seemed impossible now, he argued, because actual events
have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be
reconciled with experience (Adorno 2004: 362). Auschwitz confirmed the
philosopheme of pure identity as death, Adorno claimed, drawing a direct
connection between the logic of the concept and the logic of genocide as that
of absolute integration (362).
Adornos insistence on the need to recalibrate thought to be attentive to the
non-identical now took on its full political import. Adorno rejected the Hegelian
thesis of the identity of identity and nonidentity, according to which Hegel held
the definite particular to be definable by the mind because its immanent
definition was to be nothing but the mind (Adorno 2004: 7). Without this
supposition Adorno claimed that according to Hegel, philosophy would be
incapable of knowing anything substantive or essential (7). However, for
Adorno, thought after Auschwitz must abandon this perspective, which had
proven to be allied with the logic of destruction. The matters of true
philosophical interest at this point in history, he argued, are those in which
Hegel expressed his disinterest, namely nonconceptuality, individuality, and
particularity (8). Thus Adorno came to disavow Hegel via his reception of Hegel
itself: in the context of working through the past in post-war Germany, he
insisted that the Hegelian identifying mode of thinking must be overcome.
III. Assessing the critical reception of Hegel
In an essay on Blochs Hegel reception published in 1965, Iring Fetscher argued

that every Hegel interpreter in the twentieth century embraces in the great
dialectician that which conforms to the conscious or unconscious purposes of
their own philosophy (Fetscher 1965: 83). They seek confirmation in Hegel, or
an impulse to think further, toning down whatever does not seem fit to serve one
or the other goal (83). For Fetscher, Blochs interpretation was superior to many
others in that it focused neither exclusively on the unhappy consciousness of the
13
early years, nor on the flat systematics of the Berlin scholar, but rather
represented Hegel in his full scope and complexity, with his contradictions
and shortcomings as well as with his depth and often startling modernity (84).
However, given that a number of scholars (Caysa 1992; Ottmann 1977) have
questioned the legitimacy of Blochs critique of Hegelian anamnesis, the question
is worth posing again: to what extent is Blochs interpretation of Hegel, measured
against Hegel himself, legitimate?
The same question can be put to Adorno, for whom Hegels weak point
was not anamnesis but rather that his logic denied real difference, making it
apt to justify violence against individuals. According to Stewart (1996: 2),
however, the association of Hegel with German fascism and, ultimately,
totalitarianism is in fact a myth, one of the many misconceptions and
caricatures whose cultivation has beset Hegel scholarship since the thinkers own
time. Given the work scholars have done to deconstruct the myths of Hegel as
either a totalitarian thinker or an apologist for nationalism, there is room here,
too, to ask whether the later Adorno makes too large a theoretical leap by
construing Hegels identity thinking as fertile philosophical ground for violent
domination.
Blochs critique of Hegel can perhaps best be described in terms Martin Jay
(1984: 220) has used to refer to Herbert Marcuses theory of memory:
anamnestic totalization. As Bloch put it in an interview with Michael Landmann,
the doctrine of anamnesis claims that we have knowledge only because we
formerly knew (Landmann 1975: 178). The problem is that this means there can
be no fundamentally new knowledge, no future knowledge. The soul merely
meets in reality now what it always already knew as idea (178). This results in a
circle within a circle, Bloch claims, the self-same circle within which, he argues,
Hegel was trapped under the spell of anamnesis (178).
The key passage for Blochs critique seems to be Section 808 of The
Phenomenology of Mind, in which Hegel discusses the goal of history, as Absolute
Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit finding its pathway in the
recollection [Erinnerung] of spiritual forms [Geister] as they are in themselves and
as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom (PhG 476).
According to Bloch, Hegels conclusion that spirit becomes absolute knowledge
in history through a process of recollection implies that the knowledge acquired
at the end of the process was always already known (Bloch 1962: 477).
Accordingly, there is no room for truly new knowledge in Hegel. However,
Blochs interpretation here is arguably one-sided. For is not Hegel here describing
something rather like a sociology of knowledge, whereby the knowledge
acquired by each successive generation is partially transmitted, and partially lost,
and in this gap new knowledge acquired? Hegel speaks of the end of each epoch
as a state in which Spirit leaves its external existence behind and gives its
14
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embodimentknowledge recorded in material or technological formover to

Recollection [Erinnerung] (PhG 476). After the spirit of one particular age is
engulfed in the night of its own self-consciousness, Hegel insists, its vanished
existence is conserved through recollection, and this superseded existence
the previous state, but born anew from the womb of knowledgeis the new
stage of existence, a new world, and a new embodiment or mode of Spirit (476).
He continues:
Here [spirit] has to begin all over again at its immediacy, as
freshly as before, and thence rise once more to the measure of
its stature, as if, for it, all that preceded were lost, and as if it
had learned nothing from the experience of the spirits that
preceded. But re-collection [Er-innerung] has conserved that
experience, and is the inner being, and, in fact, the higher form
of the substance. While, then, this phase of Spirit begins all
over again its formative development, apparently starting solely
from itself, yet at the same time it commences at a higher level.
The realm of spirits developed in this way, and assuming
definite shape in existence, constitutes a succession, where one
detaches and sets loose the other, and each takes over from its
predecessor the empire of the spiritual world. (PhG 476)
To be sure, one might object that there is nothing to guarantee that each
successive generation must begin at a higher level of knowledge than the one
before. Surely knowledge can go missing forever rather than being preserved
automatically for recollection by the next forms of spirit. From this perspective,
Hegels theory of recollection seems to allow too little room for aleatory losses
of knowledge through accident or catastrophe. However, on this reading it
appears as if Blochs objection to Hegelian anamnesis is rather overstated. I agree
with Remo Bodei in this respect, who has argued that, far from negating
the futureor future knowledgeas Bloch would have it, Hegel rather
claims that every new emerging epoch rises with a qualitative leap
whose outcome is not predictable in advance and requires a new philosophy
(Bodei 1975: 89).
Of course, the purpose of Blochs critique here was not only to highlight an
aspect of Hegels thought that had, he believed, until then largely been
overlooked. Rather, he was perhaps chiefly concerned to distinguish between
Hegelian anamnesis and his own concept of anagnorisis, which as Jay recognizes
meant that one could recognize figural traces of the future in the past, but the past
itself contained no archaic heritage of plenitude (Jay 1984: 238). According to
Bloch, while anamnesis provides the reassuring evidence of complete similarity,
anagnorisis is linked with reality by only a thin thread (Landmann 1975).
15
He continues: Anamnesis has an element of attenuation about it, it makes

everything a gigantic dj vu, as if everything had already been, nihil novi sub anamnesi.
But anagnorisis is a shock (178). I argue that Blochs distinction between his
own philosophy, which transcends anamnesis, and the previous history of
philosophy under its spell, must be read as the kind of rhetorical device
deployed frequently in the history of thought. Anamnesis functions here as a sign
under which Bloch presents a blind spot as common to all his predecessors,
which he can then dismiss in order to distinguish himself historically from
what went before. For Kant, speculative metaphysics played such a role; for
Heidegger it was forgetfulness of Being; for Adorno, identity thinking. By
classifying Hegel as a thinker of anamnesis, Bloch effectively distinguished his own
innovation, the ontological moment of the not-yet, from the tradition to which he
was indebted.
If, as we have seen, both Blochs avowal and critique of Hegel contained
potentially subversive aspects in the GDR context, Henning Ottmanns
assessment nevertheless indicates that Blochs Hegel interpretation was not
entirely devoid of the trace of orthodoxy. Ottmanns insight, according to which
Bloch distinguishes between Hegel as dialectician who writes a philosophy open
to the future, and as antiquarian who reduces history to a becomeness in
becoming (Ottmann 1977: 104), recalls the received distinction within Soviet
Marxism between the progressive value of Hegels dialectical method and the
regressive nature of his political philosophy. However, Adornos Hegel
interpretation also brings him into unfortunate proximity with the perspective
of a regime of which he was far more critical than Bloch. The connection
Adorno makes between Hegel and fascism puts him in the unlikely company
ofamong othersStalin, who, as we have seen above, peddled this
particular myth about Hegel in the interest of his own political control in the
Soviet Union.
Adornos critique of Hegelian identity thinking was also, at least in part, a
key component in the development of his own philosophy of non-identity. As
Weber Nicholsen and Shapiro have argued, Adorno differentiates himself from
Hegel most emphatically in relation to the concepts of identity and nonidentity
(Adorno 1993: xiv). According to Adorno in Negative Dialectics, the fundamental
result of Hegels substantive philosophizing was the primacy of the subject, or
in the famous phrase from the Introduction to his Logicthe identity of identity
and non-identity (Adorno 2004: 7). This was the speculative moment of
Hegelian logic, the moment in which the real difference between particulars is
reconciled in the concept. Seeing in this speculative moment of positive
identification the logic of the principle of equivalence that underlies both
capitalist exploitation and industrialized mass murder, Adorno, as Gillian Rose
has argued, sought to pedal back from speculative to dialectical thinking as the
16
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consistent sense of non-identity (Rose 2017: 5363). As Weber Nicholsen and

Shapiro elaborate,
Adornos own approach to standing Hegel on his head was to
argue precisely for the nonidentity of identity and non-
identity: subjectness and mind, in those very accomplishments
in which they have most recognized what is beyond or outside
them, must strain toward one further dimension of the
beyondness of this beyond, recognizing that it is really
beyondyet without thereby reducing themselves to slavish
heteronomy or self-effacement. (Adorno 2004: xv)
If Hegelian identity thinking really is imbued with a logic of domination that was
ultimately implicated in the Nazi death camps, then Adornos intention here
seems noble. However, two important questions present themselves: first, one
might legitimately ask whether and to what extent it is reasonable to hold Hegels
philosophy responsible for a genocide committed over a century after his death.
What concrete historical connections can be drawn, for instance, between the
mechanisms of Hegelian thought and the substance of Nazi ideology? Second,
given that, for Adorno, while we might be able to see through the identity
principle, we nevertheless cannot think without identifying, we might question
to what degree it is in fact possible to reduce speculative to dialectical thinking.
On the first point, Hubert Kiesewetter (1974) has demonstrated how,
beginning after the First World War, influential German academics and scholars
appealed to Hegels metaphysics to attack the liberal democracy of the Weimar
Republic, denigrate human rights, justify anti-Semitism, and promote an
authoritarian state that glorified power, militarism and the cult of the strong
leader. When such a state became reality in 1933, many of these same figures
people such as Julius Binder, Friedrich Blow, Carl August Emge, Gerhard
Dulckeit, Ernst Forsthoff, Hermann Glockner, Theodor Haering, Otto
Koelreuter, Karl Larenz and Max Wundtused Hegels political philosophy to
defend dictatorship, Nazi colonialism and racist laws. Yvonne Sherratt (2012: 27)
points out that Hitler himself had recourse to Hegelian arguments in some of his
speeches, and reiterates the well-known fact that the promotion of German
greatness in intellectual and cultural matters was a central aspect of both the
ideology of Nazism and its practical educational policy.
Yet while Kiesewetters and Sherratts studies do highlight certain historical
connections between right-Hegelianism and Nazism, they far from concusively
prove that the identifying gesture of idealist philosophy was integral to the logic
of Auschwitz. Arguably, however, such a proof is impossible, and it was certainly
far from Adornos intention to try to provide one. Rather, he aimed to draw our
attention critically to how the kind of thinking that depreciates a thingor
17
indeed a personto a mere sample of its kind or species is easily allied with all
sorts of violent oppression (Adorno 2004: 146). It is in this spirit that Adorno
argues that attention to the non-identical, to that historical singularity of lived
experience which escapes subsumption under the guise of identity precisely in its
material uniqueness, is such a socially and politically important philosophical act.
Nevertheless, the question of its possibility remains. If all philosophy, even
that which intends freedom, carries in its inalienably general elements the
unfreedom in which society prolongs its existence, how can philosophy survive
the identifying impulse (Adorno 2004: 48)? For Adorno the answer seems to
have been: only with great fragility and effort, and with no guarantees that it will
lead to what Hegel called freedom to the object (48). According to Adorno, this
goal has yet to be achieved, and until then the divergence between dialectics
as a method and substantial dialectics will go on (48). The principle of
dominion, he argued,
which antagonistically rends human society, is the same
principle which, spiritualized, causes the difference between
the concept and its subject matter; and that difference assumes
the logical form of contradiction because, measured by the
principle of dominion, whatever does not bow to its unity will
not appear as something different from and indifferent to the
principle, but as a violation of logic. (48)
Only when the principle of dominion has truly been overcomenot just at the
level of thoughtwill the work of negative dialectics have been achieved.
Howeverand here is the rubthis situation seems to demand a transforma-
tion of the totality that does indeed require speculative, rather than merely
dialectical, thinking in order to imagine its possibility and therefore motivate its
pursuit (Bloch 1988: 13).
In a conversation between Adorno and Bloch in 1964, the pair agreed that
it becomes necessary to think speculatively in the context of radical social
transformation. Their agreement becomes clear at a moment in the discussion
that touches on the possibility of proletarian revolution. Adorno finds himself
assuming the unexpected role of attorney for the positive, for if the prospect of
revolution, he concedes, cannot appear within ones grasp, then one basically
does not know at all what the actual reason for the totality is, why the entire
apparatus has been set in motion (Bloch 1988: 13). Here Adornos commitment
to the aim of critical theory brings him up against the limits of his relentless
negativity. He and Bloch agree that even Hegel fails to think possibility as more
than just a subjectivereflective category as Bloch puts it, which ultimately they
both recognize is necessary in order for the emancipation and alteration of
society as a whole to be able to take place (Horkheimer 2002: 208).
18
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Conclusion
Bloch and Adorno appealed to Hegel with their distinct brands of a critical
theory that aimed at the fundamental transformation of social conditions.
However, after 1945, as public intellectuals in two Germanies with very different
social structures, they emphasized different aspects of Hegels thought in pursuit
of this aim. In his study of Hegels reception in the GDR, Walther Zimmerli has
argued that whoever said the name Hegel in East Germany meant something
else, and significantly more (Zimmerli 1984: 62). In the GDR, being for Hegel,
as Bloch was, meant subscribing to a social and cultural vision that deviated from
that of the regime. Bloch appealed to the speculative moment of Hegelian
dialectics, which points to the identity between a concept and any particular
instance of it, in order to highlight that the concept of utopia had not been
realized in East Germany. His appeal to thoughts ability to transgress the
boundaries of what is, in order to imagine what might be, performed a critical
function in this context. As such Blochs recourse to Hegel illustrated the
violence involved in stifling speculation as a form of free thought.
Adorno sought to re-interpret Hegel in a Federal Republic that was slowly
beginning to come to terms with its Nazi past. His emphasis on the dangers
inherent in identity thinking was motivated primarily by the need to explain
Auschwitz as an event that imposed a new categorical imperative on human
beings. Adornos critique of Hegelian speculation was part of his attempt to
explain how the will to negate the particular had facilitated the administrative mass
murder of millions of human beings. For Bloch, as a citizen of East Germany,
whose national founding myth was one of anti-fascist resistance, the Nazi
genocide did not occupy such a central position, although he far from ignored the
question. Given the different historical circumstances in which they found
themselves during the 1950s, perhaps we can say that while for Bloch Hegels
thought was an instrument of critique, for Adorno especially it was its object.
Nevertheless, there is a way in which Hegel united these thinkers in their pursuit
of a critical theory: they both understood its goal as dependent on speculative thinking.
Contrary to William Maker, for whom critical theory was inherently non-utopian in
its pursuit of a science of freedom, I argue that the goal of critical theorythe
emancipation and alteration of society as a wholewas indeed utopian. To be sure,
Adorno saw Hegelianism when pushed to its logical conclusion as being at odds with
the project of social emancipation. Hegel made spirit into a social totality, Adorno
argued, in which identity was hypostatized as the primal form of ideology (Adorno
2004: 314, 148). To the extent that Adornos negative dialectics can be seen as the
culmination of the first generation of Frankfurt School thought, as both the Schools
critics (Marcus and Tar 1984: 12) and supporters (Mendieta 2005: 6) have claimed,
then the critique of Hegel was central to its project.
19
Both Bloch and Adorno followed Hegel, however, in seeing the ultimate
or total perspective characteristic of utopia implied in all critical thought. In the
1964 interview, Bloch explained this idea as follows: every criticism of
imperfection already without a doubt presupposes the conception of, and
longing for, a possible perfection (Bloch 1988: 16). Adornos claim that Bloch
comes close to the ontological proof of God here is not as much of a dismissal
as it might at first appear. Unless there were no trace of truth in this ontological
proof, Adorno claims, there could not only be no utopia but there could also not
be any thinking (16). However, if, as Bloch concedes, what was once called God
is thought of as not-yet existent, though really objectively possible, then thoughts
inherent speculative tendency to adumbrate a totality to which it has no empirical
access assumes a potentially emancipatory character. To be sure, Bloch and
Adorno disagreed on the scope and manner in which utopianism should be
promoted and pursuedonly via ruthless critique, or also via active imagination.
Yet to the extent that their common commitment to transforming society rested
on Hegelian premises, Hegel united their distinct brands of critical theory across
institutional and historical divides.
Cat Moir
University of Sydney, Australia
cat.moir@sydney.edu.au
Notes
1
The first edition of Spirit of Utopia was published in 1918, the second in 1923. Both editions
appear in Blochs German Gesamtausgabe, but the English translation is based on the 1923 edition.
2
The Hegel book was first published in Mexico in a Spanish translation by the migr writer
and activist Wenceslao Roces (SujetoObjeto. El pensamiento de Hegel, published in Mexico City by
the Fondo de Cultura Economica).
3
Abbreviations:
CPR = Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).
EL = Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic. Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zustze,
trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991).
MECW = Marx and Engels Collected Works Vols. 150 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2010).
PhG = Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie (Mineola: Dover, 2003).
PR = Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet, ed. A. W. Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
SL = Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. G. di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010).
20
Cat Moir
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doi:10.1017/hgl.2017.

10 Hegel Bulletin, page 1 of 22

Speculation, Dialectic and Critique: Hegel and

alternative, Horkheimer proposed a critical theory aimed at the emancipation

I. Ernst Bloch and the Hegel debate in the GDR

Hegel was an important influence on Blochs philosophy from the very

Writing on the political implications of reading Hegel in the GDR, Camilla

subjectivity, operations of thought to which phenomena conform. He saw natural

philosophy under his directorship at Leipzig. With Bloch accused of revisionism

II. Theodor Adorno: Reading Hegel after Auschwitz

A year after the second edition of Blochs SubjektObjekt appeared in West

contributed to his eventual exile. The second, The Experiential Content of

resources are insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of

Hegelian identifying mode of thinking (Tiedemann in Adorno 2003: xii; Adorno

III. Assessing the critical reception of Hegel

In an essay on Blochs Hegel reception published in 1965, Iring Fetscher argued

embodimentknowledge recorded in material or technological formover to

He continues: Anamnesis has an element of attenuation about it, it makes

consistent sense of non-identity (Rose 2017: 5363). As Weber Nicholsen and

Abusch, A. (1962), Kulturelle Probleme des sozialistischen Humanismus. Beitrge zur

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