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What is the negative dialectic?

Adorno’s reevaluation of Hegel
Terry Pinkard
©Terry Pinkard 2014
(for a conference in Pamplona, Spain: “Nature and Law: Ancient and Modern
Perspectives”, June 5-6 2014)
DRAFT
For on the one hand, we have in history ingredients and natural
conditions which are remote from the conceptual world – i.e. all
kinds of human arbitrariness and external necessity. On the other
hand, we set up against this the thought of a higher necessity, an
eternal justice and love, the absolute and ultimate end which is
truth in and for itself. In contrast to natural being, this second,
opposite pole is based on abstract elements, on the freedom and
necessity of the concept. This opposition contains many interesting
features; it comes to our notice once again in the Idea of world
history. Our present aim is to show how this opposition is resolved
in and for itself in world-history.
— Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History

Every doctrine of natural law leads to antinomies, but the idea of

natural law critically maintains the untruth of positive law.
—Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik, p. 305.

The subjecting of man to law is a problem in politics which I liken

to that of the squaring of the circle in geometry. Solve this problem
well, and the government based on your solution will be good and
free from abuses. But until then you may rest assured that,
wherever you think you are establishing the rule of law, it is men
who will do the ruling.”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Considerations on The Government of
Poland

Adorno was an admirer of Hegel’s dialectic. He was also a practitioner of dialectic.

However, it is not at all clear, however, if the dialectic he practiced was the same or
even similar to Hegel’s dialectic. Mere citation of texts is not enough to decide that
issue. There are many of Adorno’s texts one could cite which would draw Adorno
close to Hegelian dialectic and just as many which would show there to be a huge
break between them. The issue will have to be interpretive. How do we make sense of
what Adorno says about dialectic?
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Adorno’s thought on the whole is determined by what looks like it may be a

massive contradiction at its heart. Adorno is some sort of holist, so he believes that
one cannot understand social life – or even more generally, knowledge and
subjectivity – without understanding how the distinct elements function in the
whole. Yet he also seems to think that any attempt to be systematic in philosophy
necessarily ends up falsifying what it studies since it necessarily must try to cram too
many individualities into a premade system. So it seems, for Adorno, we must be
systematic and anti-systematic at the same time. We must be both holists and radical
particularists. Like any good dialectician, he wants to mitigate those contradictions
without opting for only one side of them, and that much sounds vaguely, even if still
very abstractly, Hegelian. However, if nothing else, what he calls his “negative
dialectic” is supposed to contrast with Hegel’s own proclaimed “affirmative” dialectic.
What is it?

********

There are two versions of Hegel’s dialectic to which Adorno officially responds.
First, there is that of the Logic (which Adorno compares to Beethoven’s music).1 The
structure of the Logic is something like the following. Hegel’s Logic describes itself as
delineating the basics of intelligibility itself, or, more colloquially put, of “making
sense” of things. To do that, it also claims that to make sense of things, it must also
“make sense of making sense.”2 Simplifying Hegel’s discussion quite a bit, we could
say that in order to make sense of things, we must make judgments about them that
fall into, roughly, two categories, which Hegel called, for better or worse, those of
“Being” and those of “Essence.” In judgments of “Being” (in which we are concerned
with individual existing things), we make assertions about things by pointing them
out (“That one over there.”), classifying them (“This is blue.), making generalizations
about them (“American Robins live on average 1.7 years”) or counting them.
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Those kinds of judgments must be distinguished from judgments like “The tie only
looks green in the store but is blue in normal sunlight” and “Deficiency in vitamin D
may cause cognitive impairment in older adults,” in which we explain things by
appeal to some underlying condition that is not immediately apparent in the mere
observation of them. The underlying condition explains how the appearance is the
way it is. Hegel calls these judgments of “Essence.” If judgments of “Being” are
responses to questions such as “What’s that?” or “How many are there of them?”,
judgments of “Essence” are responses to questions like “Why did that happen?” (As in
“Why did the tie look blue in the store and green outside?”)
Not only do we engage in these types of judging activities, we also make judgments
abut whether we have really made sense at all when we do so. We typically do that in
judgments such as “What you just said does not follow from your premises,” or “This
makes no sense within the current standards of physics.” (These judgments represent
what Hegel calls “the Concept.”) “What is this and how many of them are there?” is
typically answered in one way that makes sense of things, whereas “Why does it look
that way?” or “Why did that happen?” are typically answered in another way. “How
does that follow?” is typically answered in neither of those two ways.
Now, Hegel does not represent these three ways of talking about things in the
rather loose way in which they have just been presented here. He claims that the
contours of each are determined by some necessary – that is, “logical” – moves whose
necessity arises out of the need to deal with contradictions that emerge in making
those kind of judgments. Those contradictions emerge from the overarching claims
(themselves supposedly developed in the course of the dialectic) that these judgments
express intelligible thoughts about things. Dialectic proper appears when reason
extends its claims to those about the “unconditioned,” that is, the “absolute.”
Ordinary claims about things such as robins or judgments of appearances (ties
seeming to be green in the store) do not on their own raise any dialectical issues unless
they are extrapolated to an unconditional status (to some more general claim, such as
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“Things never are what they appear to be,” or, to use one of Hegel’s examples, Thales’
claim not just that “Things are pretty wet all the time,” but that “Everything is
water.”). Hegel’s rather dramatic claim is, of course, that at that level, something like
antinomies develop among the kinds of claims we make about everything from
qualitative determinateness to assertions of human rights, and that philosophy must
find a way to come to terms with the ensuing dialectic among concepts.3
To take one example: In judgments of “Being,” we grasp the intelligibility (however
small) of something by contrasting it with something else. (“No, not that one! That
one!”) The thing with which the contrast is made thus explains, in the most minimal
sense, which particular one is being judged. (“The red one, not the green one.”) To
the extent that the story would end there (as it does in normal everyday conversation),
there would be the threat of an infinite regress of sorts – of the x which is what it is in
contrast with y, which is what it is in contrast to z, etc. – or of a self-enclosed loop of
reference or invocation of some kind of “givenness” (“Which is the red one? Not the
green one. But which is the green one? Not the red one.”)
Moreover, these types of judging activities supposedly generate each other and are
not merely added onto each other (as I just loosely presented then here). “Being”
supposedly generates “Essence” as the resolution of the tensions and contradictions in
its own way of judging individuals, and “Essence” supposedly generates “Concept” in
the same way. Moreover, at the end of the story the “concept” itself (as “Idea,” the
“unity of objectivity and subjectivity”) is required to give an account of how it makes
sense of itself as having made sense of things and of itself. In thinking about things
and in thinking about thinking, thinking – more concretely, thinking agents
occupying a particular place in social space – gives an account of itself as giving that
type of account. It is thought’s capacity to make these judgments by being just the
kind of activity that exercises those powers, that is, which is what it is by bringing
itself under the concept of itself. Hegel called that the “absolute Idea,” which expresses
the “true infinity” of concepts inasmuch as it expresses the self-bounding nature of the
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normative.4 It is affirmative in that the dialectic ends with its own account of how it
gives all those accounts and why that shape of accounts was necessary.
Adorno is very clear that he does not think that the dialectic ever ends, and there
must therefore be some kind of mistake in Hegel’s reasoning. Adorno famously
identifies the mistake as lying in what he diagnoses as “identity thinking.” Because it
is so fundamental to his philosophy, Adorno’s conception of identity-thinking has
attracted a good deal of attention in the commentary on his work. 5 It is often
attributed to Adorno that identity-thinking consists in believing that in characterizing
an object, one thinks one has exhaustively characterized it, but since the object is
always “more” than its characterizations, identity-thinking necessarily mischaracterizes
objects. That would attribute too lean a thesis to Adorno (which at its limits would
also reduce to triviality, as if one were saying that in asserting that a ball is white, one
thought one had asserted everything that could be said of the ball, which is clearly
false).
The concept of “identity thought” itself has an obvious and long history in the
development of and commentary on German idealism, and it may be better to locate
Adorno’s ideas there. Schelling proposed his system as that of absolute identity, which
Hegel famously and sarcastically referred to as the “night in which all cows are black.”
One of Schelling’s core ideas was that if we were to find a place for human
subjectivity in nature, then our concept of nature would have to be enlarged from the
concept of nature that was at home in post-Newtonian physics. To do that, however,
required us to come to terms with the idea that nature has an ideal structure (partially
expressed in the mathematical formulae of physics), but that the causal structure of
the cosmos seems on first glance not to have a place for any kind of determination by
idealities. (Numbers are not physical things, so they cannot enter into causal relations,
but they seem to govern the nature of those relations). Schelling’s audacious proposal
was something like this: The original being of things is itself an infinite ideality (an
“identity”) that destabilizes itself (into “non-identity”) and then pushes itself back into
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a restabilization of itself (an “indifference point”) by virtue of generating new

structures out of itself. From the forces of heat and combustion, the original
“identity” then pushes itself further apart into energy and matter, which then
stabilizes around the idea of a cosmos of things held together by universal gravitation.
The dynamic of the original identity of the world seeking to re-establish that identity
by stabilizing around an indifference point (for example, of energy and matter) pushes
itself ever onward to a world of magnetism and electricity, then to chemical
relatednesss and the creation of new substances, and then to life and finally to that of
reflective subjectivity itself. In such reflective subjectivity, the universe comes to be
conscious of its own activities, and the final “indifference point” is reached. This final
indifference point is the divine itself thinking about its own creation from out of its
nature, and with it, the story ends.
There are lots of things that can be said of Schelling’s philosophy of absolute
identity, but what is crucial here is not merely Adorno’s straightforward rejection of it
but his more controversial assertion that something like it underlines much modern
thought.6 Schelling’s system, as Hegel was one of the first to point out, presents itself
as tracing out a series of non-empirical, metaphysical forces that push on to new
indifference points until the one force resolves itself into the unity of nature and
subjectivity (which defies all conceptual articulation). Among Hegel’s objections was
that there was no logic to Schelling’s dynamic, just a series of inspired conjectures
about how various realms of nature might be thought in a “just so” way to interact,
and for Adorno, that objection is more or less correct. 7 Anything like Schelling’s
system may look as if it has a dynamic in it, but it really rules out dialectic. Schelling
may claim that the world moves along its indifference points, but it is merely
following forces – although, to be sure, metaphysical forces – that guide it.
Extrapolating from Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s “identity-thinking,” Adorno
claims that any system that takes itself to have shown the conditions of the possibility
of some mode of thought or action and at least stakes the claim to have settled the
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matter is an instance of “identity-thinking.” For Schelling, the end is necessarily there

in the beginning, even if there must be a development in time for it to be achieved.
The final end of self-conscious subjectivity is something supposedly presupposed in
the very concepts of matter and energy themselves as they work themselves out in
terms of the dynamic of “indifference points.” Identity-thinking takes itself to have
provided the categories that all experience or all thought must presuppose, or towards
which it is developing.
It is that concept of “presupposing” that Adorno is arguing against, which has to do
with both the first the second of the versions of Hegelian dialectic to which Adorno
responds. In the second version, that of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel operates
with a conception of dialectic about which it is controversial to claim that it is the
same as that with which he works in the Logic. Adorno seems inclined to take the side
of those who think that it is different. On that view, in the Phenomenology Hegel
shows how different shapes of consciousness and shapes of spirit embody very
different conceptions of what counts as unconditionally required of agents and what
counts as unconditionally authoritative. 8 As a shape of consciousness or spirit
develops its sense of what it requires of itself, it comes to live out the basic
contradictions that emerge within those requirements, and when it finally becomes
clear that there is no way to sidestep those tensions or to finesse them, it necessarily
loses faith in itself. As the people within that shape come to discover that they can no
longer be those people – no longer be a “people” defined by a certain very basic set of
commitments – that shape of life begins to disintegrate, and at the end of that
development, the successors pick up the fragments that still work, put them into a
new shape and further develop it. (The German for that process is Aufhebung.) Hegel
thought that this process of development and dissolution had a certain logic to itself.
The endpoint of such a development would thus be a shape of spirit, a form of life, in
which the tensions and contradictions at work do not bring the house down with
them. It would be a world where things have become fully intelligible.
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As far as Adorno is concerned, both versions of Hegel’s dialectic suffer from

“identity-thinking.” Both of them, on Adorno’s reading, argue that there must arrive a
point in history where the presuppositions of what came before are fully manifested
and developed, and the dialectic therefore comes to a stop. What is wrong in that
position has to do with a feature that Adorno claims to find is deficient in both
versions, that of the necessity of “finitude” and “contingency” in our conceptions of
ourselves and our world. (It is here that Adorno is completely on board with
Heidegger, although he would be loathe to admit it.) Ultimately, the “thoughts”
about which we are speaking are the thoughts of individual thinkers within the
individual social contexts in which they move. The historicity (to use a Heideggerian
term) of subjectivity means that it is always defined on all sides by its contrast with
other ways of thinking and living. It is “finite” in the Hegelian sense in that its own
intelligibility depends on its contrast with something other than it. (“Modernity”
itself is what it is only in contrast to the “medieval” and the “early modern,” and
ultimately in possible contrast with its indeterminate future.) All modes of thinking
are constrained by the thinker’s past, the thinkers are absorbed in the requirements of
thought in their day, and they project themselves into a future that will stand in
contrast to them (as their “negation”).9
Hegel thought that in its historical development, reason has been pushed to seek
the unconditioned – what he and Schelling started calling “the absolute” – and it has
discerned that the only genuinely unconditioned has turned out to be itself, that is, to
be reason constituting its own sole tribunal.10 As being what it is by virtue of bringing
itself under the concept of itself, reason is self-bounding, and therefore in Hegel’s
terms, “infinite,” at least in the sense that nothing external to reason can set its
normative bounds. If (and it is a big “if”) there are no things in themselves – or if this
claim is taken in the precise sense that it makes no sense to conceive of things that are
in principle eternally beyond our capacity to think about them – then reason itself is
the absolute as the “self-bounding.”
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This is exactly what Adorno rejects. If one had to put Adorno’s opposition into a
slogan, it would be that Adorno endorses a dialectic of “finitude” in opposition to
Hegel’s dialectic of “infinity.” For Adorno, reason finds itself always and already under
normative constraints not of its own making and therefore external to reason, even if
it never finds itself confronted by anything like a Kantian conception of a thing in
itself that in principle cannot be rendered intelligible by reason. “Identity-thinking”
assumes that reason is infinite, but non-identity-thought assumes it is finite. In
keeping with that view, Adorno’s arguments for “non-identity” thinking are not
themselves systematic but rather proceed more on a case by case basis.11 By looking at
history, music, and everyday examples, Adorno seeks to undermine any confidence
that one ever could achieve such a self-ratifying theory. He shies away from offering
any purportedly conclusive, a priori argument for why it is not possible.
This raises an obvious question for Adorno: If that is non-identity thinking, why
does he not simply say that what he is doing is hermeneutics? That is, that all we can
have is the “view from here,” an account from where we are at this time, this place,
which as the temporal horizon moves itself changes? Or perhaps even something more
Heideggerian, that all we have is a temporal horizon where the edges always outrun
our grasp? Adorno’s answer would have to be, even if it goes a bit unclearly: In
distinction from the more phenomenological and hermeneutical approaches, he favors
a dialectical approach. Put very roughly, that would mean that the “view from here”
always contains deep-seated tensions if not outright contradictions, and social life
within those horizons is therefore under a kind of self-imposed push to resolve those
tensions. Whatever form the resolution takes, it generates new tensions that
themselves demand new resolutions, and the negative dialectic thus continues
indefinitely. Negative dialectic, in contrast to hermeneutics, does not seek to merely
elucidate the here and now (or the past) but instead seeks to find what tensions are at
work that push to a new, progressive resolution. The “view from here” is never self-
sufficient on its own (with which Heidegger would agree) but it always contains some
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set of contradictions or at least tensions that are pushing it to go beyond its current
configuration.12
The problem that Adorno sees with dialectic is straightforward: The experience of
Nazism. No doubt, it was the tensions in the form of the life that seemed to press for
the Nazi regime to resolve them, but the resolution was imaginary in the worst sense
– it was just an evil, destructive fantasy – and it was hardly progressive. The purpose
of a dialectical theory is to comprehend the rational kernel in the irrational
surroundings, but in the case of Nazism, the entire surroundings seemed to be
irrational. Moreover, any transcendental theory of agency would be of no help since
it would have to be so general as to be neutral to the regime – from that point of view,
Nazis also have intentions and act on them – or, even worse, it would falsely
comprehend the circumstances in which such a form of life grew up. Some more
determinate but still philosophically sophisticated comprehension of the nature of
agency as it is socially and historically embedded would be required. For Adorno,
genuine agency is something that is socially and historically achieved. Full and equal
mutual recognition among agents, rather than inequality of recognition, is not a
condition of the possibility of agency but itself a historical achievement indexed to
specific kinds of intellectual and social conditions.
A quick contrast illustrates Adorno’s point. Fichte argued that comprehending
subjectivity (as the “I”) necessarily required comprehending how something other to
subjectivity – the objects of experience, the “not-I” – were required for there to be an
adequate self-consciousness. Subjectivity presupposed a robust objectivity. However,
this in turn showed, so Fichte argued, that this objectivity presupposed a structure of
mutual recognition among subjects. The way in which objects, as it were, give us
reason to judge them one way rather than another is not possible unless agents are
equally recognizing each other as entitled to give and ask for reasons. Hegel
incorporated these broad Fichtean claims into his own view but denied that full and
equal mutual recognition was a condition of the possibility of agency. His counter-
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argument was that fully reciprocal and equal recognition was itself a historical and
social achievement, not a condition of the possibility of all agency. (This contrast
shows up in debates about the supposed priority of the “second-person point of view”
in contemporary ethical theory.)
Adorno accepted that Hegelian move and thereby distinguished himself from all the
various transcendental projects circulating particularly in German philosophy.
However, so Adorno claims, Hegel ultimately himself ends up in “identity-thinking”
since he still conceived of his project and carried it out as a “transcendental” theory.13
On Adorno’s reading, the Hegelian “absolute” is thus to be taken as the condition of
the possibility of all that is, and, on Adorno’s grounds, that takes it out of the running
for our considerations. As “transcendental” philosophers, both Fichte and Hegel are
false starts. What Adorno accepts in Hegel’s view is the idea that mutual recognition
is a social and historical achievement, and what he discards is what he takes to be the
Hegelian conception of an “absolute” that is supposed to be the condition of the
possibility of that achievement.
Where Adorno, on his own account, genuinely departs from Hegel is, he takes it, in
his somewhat idiosyncratic concept of mimesis. (The idea is one of the most discussed
in commentary on Adorno, and commentators have taken very different stances on
what he means by it.14) The word itself indicates “imitation,” and Adorno often parses
it with the German word for imitation (Nachahmung). Adorno takes mimesis both as
a concept spanning psychological development and the metaphysics of agency. In
terms of psychology, it indicates the way we are brought into normative social space
in part by an inborn desire to imitate the world of agents around us.15 As we become
more fully initiated into social space – that is, come to be agents in a more proper
sense – we attempt to imitate the moves that belong to us given our particular points
we occupy in social space (we behave as “one does” in that space, as a friend, flaneur,
professor, assistant, etc. in light of our own particular proclivities and styles, and we
do that by imitating in an extended sense the paradigm ways those moves are made).
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The child imitates the adult and other children, but what she imitates is the
normative but embedded behavior (sitting like this, assuming that pose, standing like
that, etc.) of others in a particular setting. There is always therefore a disconnect, if
not outright tension, between performance and competence in such situations. Even
when the norms are fully in view by all, the individuality and idiosyncratic style of
agents means that the norm will appear in behavior in differently shaded ways. Norm
and fact rarely match up exactly. This is the sociological and psychological status of
mimesis. However, it is hardly dialectical. It simply posits “states” and “conditions”
interacting with each other in various ways.
The more important aspect of mimesis for Adorno lies in its explanation of agency
and the “negativity” involved in agency.16 He takes over from Hegel the view that any
such social, political, cultural or moral setting has a structure to itself in terms of
which kinds of commitments are basic – even “absolute” – for it such that those core
norms form the central cases around which mimesis operates. Adorno also translates a
Hegelian idea into his own conception of mimesis. In the past, we took these core
norms – the “absolute” – to be natural, and we thus took imitating nature to be our
highest goal. Likewise, we took art at its best to be an imitation of nature. Art, as it
were, showed us the nature we aspired to imitate. However, in modern life, as nature
became disenchanted, we thus lost the “absolute” which we had tried to imitate.17
What we were left with was only each other, so the “absolute” to which we aspired to
imitate became more and more the positive, factual behavior of all around us.
Likewise, art at its best ceased to be the imitation of nature. But what did it now
imitate?
To put Adorno’s reply into Hegelian terms: We now imitate the “absolute,” which
we can take here as a shorthand for a reconciled world in which we are able to make
sense of ourselves. However, we inevitably fail at this because of our own finitude and
the fact that in trying to imitate such an “absolute” we make that absolute into a
moving target since we make ourselves into moving targets. As we comprehend the
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“absolute,” we unearth the tensions within it, we find that it actually offers no real
reconciliation, and the dialectic begins again. Likewise, art now imitates not a natural
order but a minded, historical and social order, and, like the moving order it seeks to
imitate, it took is always on the move.
Now, on the one hand, this might be seeming to read too much Hegel into Adorno.
Since Adorno reads Hegel as a philosopher of “totality” and thus “identity,” he thinks
that any assertion of a Hegelian “absolute” has to imply that some basic antinomies
are being resolved by denying them rather than letting them have their proper place.
Nonetheless, Adorno usually also claims that we must be guided by some view of the
whole in locating the basic concepts at work in our practices (such as “individual,”
“agent,” “society,” etc.) even if we must take care not to “subsume,” as he calls it, such
conceptions (such as that of “individual agent”) under concepts such as “the state” in
such a way that “the state” would supposedly make the concept of “the individual
agent” intelligible and exhaust its content. Something like that would be the case only
if the dialectic came to a stop, which for Adorno would be a theoretical failure and an
ethical catastrophe.
However, in a number of places, Adorno’s own words seem to making exactly the
Hegelian point. He says, for example:

To sum it up in a rather bolder way, an achieved

identity, in other words, the elimination of conflict, the
reconciliation of all those who are opposed to one
another because their interests are irreconcilable, an
achieved identity does not mean the identity of all as
subsumed beneath a totality, a concept, an integrated
society. A truly achieved identity would have to be the
consciousness of non-identity, or, more accurately
perhaps, it would have to be the creation of a reconciled
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non-identity, much as we find in the utopia conceived by

Hölderlin, though to a degree that has been exaggerated
by the current state of research in Hölderlin studies.18

That is, the orientation the dialectic gives us is, at least in its general structure,
guided by the concept of a world in which we have achieved some way of making
sense of what we are doing and who we are such the conflicts of that world need not
be senseless and just “given” (and therefore merely “positive”). A truly reconciled
world would have a social structure that carves out room for individuality and rational
action without becoming overly administered and therefore smothering individuality.
It would be a world that would meet Rousseau’s conception of a general will with
regard to which the individual surrenders everything yet remains as free and
independent as he would have been in the state of nature. (This is, as it were,
Rousseau’s general statement of “dialectic.”) Such a world functions as an orienting
ideal, yet because of human finitude (that is, negative dialectic), it necessarily remains
always out of reach. But that just is Hegel’s conceptual absolute. As Hegel puts it in
his Logic:

On account of the freedom that the concept has achieved

within itself, the Idea also has the hardest opposition
within itself; its rest consists in the security and certainty
with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes
that opposition and in which it comes together with
itself within itself.19

A dialectic that was only negative would be that of the bad infinite – one thing after
another, ad infinitum – but the true dialectic grasps the principle of the infinite series
and is thus not a bad but an “affirmative” dialectic.20 It does not stop the dialectic
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from proceeding and pronounce an end to it, as Adorno sometimes seems to think
Hegel claims. Rather, it comprehends the principle of the conceptual movement itself.
Indeed, Adorno’s practice for evaluating various achievements and failures of
identity appeals to something like the Hegelian absolute as creating and overcoming
the hard oppositions within itself. Adorno says as much in different places; for
example: “Every doctrine of natural law leads to antinomies, but the idea of natural
law critically maintains the untruth of positive law.” 21 Without that moment of
dialectic, human life could not make itself better. It could merely become different.
However, this rests on a conception that is only contentiously congruent with
Adorno’s work. Without the idea of an infinite end at work in history, so Hegel
argued, we could not make sense of history. Such an infinite end, moreover, had to be
itself an achievement, that is, to emerge as such an infinite end and not as
presupposed by all the activities leading up to it. A finite end is an end that can be
achieved by doing something specific, and when it explains all the actions taken to
accomplish it within itself. The end of drinking a glass of water is fully exhausted by
drinking the glass of water, and the act of drinking a glass of water is distinguished by
the way it is delimited from other finite ends. Infinite ends, on the other hand, are
never exhausted by the actions that manifest them. There can in principle be an
infinite – or at least large enough – number of finite ends. (Commonplace arguments
about consumerism note that there is no intrinsic limit to how much one can want
and how much one can get except those set by the contingent conditions of human
life.) However, an infinite end is not something that can be achieved in any one
action but which can be manifested by various actions.22 (Happiness, on something
like Aristotle’s conception of it, would be an infinite end, such that many different
actions can be manifestations of it, no action can exhaust it, and, as Aristotle
characterizes it, it is self-sufficient and thus requires nothing else.23) An infinite end is
not something that can be on a check-list, such that, having achieved it, one can
check it off and proceed to the next one.
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Hegel claims at least in several places that there is such an infinite end at work in
history that has to do with an idea of “eternal justice,” which, so it has emerged in
modern life, is really about the conditions of freedom. 24 It has moved from a
conception of justice as lying in the natural or divine order to that of a conception of
justice as lying within a humanly constructed order, and that movement has been
driven by the way in which such conceptions of an organic natural or divine orders
have undermined themselves and pushed us to a conception of a social order whose
justice is not set in advance in the cosmos but rather on the social conditions in which
the equal freedom of agents can be actualized.
Although this would be contentious as an interpretation of Adorno’s thought, it
nonetheless seems to be the place to which his conception of negative dialectic impels
itself. In doing so, this reading of the matter also has to reject a widespread and
common conception of what it means to be in possession of concept and to accept
instead a more Hegelian view. On the commonplace view nowadays, possession of a
concept means that one can use a word in the appropriate way – that is, a concept is
something like a rule, and if one has mastered the rule and its application, then one is
in full possession of the concept. Thus, if one can use the word, “moral,” or “red,” or
“action” in comprehensible English (or whatever other language) in a publically
approvable way, one possesses the concept. On that view, there can be, of course,
expert users of concepts – only the lawyer can tell if you’ve really signed something
called a contract – but even in those cases, if one knows how to apply a given
concept-rule in the appropriate speech situations, one possesses the concept fully.
Hegel holds, on the other hand, that at least for some concepts – those involving
what he calls speculative thought, that is, the basic concepts that make up the
shadowy world of the “unconditioned” – there can be publically validated uses of the
concept that are incomplete or not yet fully developed uses. In those cases, one can
use the word but not in the full sense which only emerges at points in the future
where it is more developed. The concepts that fill out the speculative realm can be
 17

refined by being developed in ways that bring out implications and features that are
not present in the original use, implications that only show up as the concepts are
developed in practice.
Paradigmatic for this kind of development is the way in which the key concepts
relating to the essence of agency itself are developed in history. The original use of a
concept for something having to do with the “unconditioned” is our conception of
the object “in itself.” As this conception of the object “in itself” develops in history, its
internal tensions – even its contradictions – become more evident as the pressures
such tensions put on self-conscious individuals and communities becomes less
tolerable. As that happens, the concept itself comes up for grabs, and as it comes up
for more contested use and development – as it becomes “posited” in Hegel’s language
– it comes to have features not originally there in its original usage but which build
on and modify that usage.
The existent public criteria for possessing a concept and mastering it therefore do
not exhaust its meaning. (In this way, Hegel departs from our contemporary
orthodoxy.) As these concepts develop historically, we sharpen and distill our grasp on
the world they purport to disclose. The refinement of a concept “in itself” shows up
as a refinement of our grasp of the authoritative nature of things, and, in Hegel’s
terms, therefore as a developmental grasp of the “absolute.”25
For Hegel, this is all the more striking in manifestations of infinite ends. To give an
all too abbreviated example: For the ancient Greeks, justice involved a parceling out
of goods and punishments according to a set of principles that were eternal because
they were part of the very fabric of the world itself. However, as Greek life developed,
it became obvious that this conception of justice – embodied in the ways in which
each Greek used the word in a publically appropriate way – was riddled with deep
tensions and maybe even contradictions. Sophocles’ Antigone put on display the way
in which such a use of “justice,” as it were, could make no sense of the relation
between divine and human law. Antigone and Creon both seemed to be in the right
 18

about their absolute duties, and both were pressed into a form of fanaticism about
their conflicting claims, with Creon coming off in the end as a principled but
ultimately unsympathetic tyrant. The breakdown of the classical conception of justice
forced a development of the concept itself such that for some of us moderns, for
whom justice is a feature of the ordering of the social–political world and not the
cosmos, it can often seem like Antigone and Creon are simply one-sided stiff-necked
people whose own personal rigidities brings their own calamities down upon
themselves.26 Likewise, within modern conceptions, it is also tempting to want to
make Antigone into a forerunner of a modern civil rights or resistance movement
heroine. Both views are, besides being unhistorical, wrong.
Hegel thought, not without reason, that he had demonstrated that history itself
embodied several different and developing conceptions of agency. He moreover
thought, in a profoundly wrong way, that “Oriental” life was embedded in a
conception of agency as, more or less, that of merely rule-following. Thus, his
mythical “Orientals” lacked the conceptual tools necessary for perfecting their
concepts. Even if his claims to the effect that this characterizes China, India, Japan
and Africa are so wide of the mark that they warrant little discussion, his views on
what a conception of agency as consisting in rule-following is itself of interest.27 If
agency were merely rule-following, then there could be no progress in the deeper
sense of developing our concepts in a deeper and more nearly perfect manner. We
could tinker with the rules, drop some of them, rephrase some of them, even codify
them in certain ways, but we could not get better at developing our comprehension of
what the reality the concept was trying to express “in itself.” The “negativity” inherent
in the use of concepts itself only emerges as these shapes of life break down in light of
the strains that the contradictions involved in living out such a conception put on
those who inhabit that shape of life. (As Hegel realized, to make this work, he had to
show that such negativity is built into the structure of reason itself, and for that he
needed a Logic. But that is another story.)
 19

Likewise, the Greek conception of agency understood that being an agent involved
locating oneself in a natural world pervaded by a sense of divine order in which if
each agent acts in accord with the requirements of his or her “office” or “function” in
the overall order, then the result is a spontaneous harmony and therefore a thing of
beauty. The breakdown of this type of meaning, or so goes Hegel’s account,
supposedly leads to modern conceptions of agency as the way he and Adorno both
understand it: As a social and historical achievement on the part of the self-conscious
primates we are.28
The details of Hegel’s account of history are another matter, but the overall point is
that the “infinite end” at work in such history is that of such self-conscious primates
seeking to comprehend themselves and turning themselves into agents of various
types. As they come to comprehend agency and change their concept of it, they
change the nature of the agency doing the comprehending itself. They come, that is,
to a better, maybe even deeper understanding of the concepts they were originally
using. It is a crucial part of Hegel’s thesis that the idea of “eternal justice” which he
thinks is there at the heart of such agency develops eventually out of the organic shape
it took in Greece into the concept of agency as having always been free. What agency
was “in itself” only itself showed up in the historical conditions under which we
developed the concept of agency itself. Or, as we might put it, Antigone’s concern
with “eternal justice” historically developed into a concern with the actualization of
freedom. Of course, that requires much more argument than has been given here.
Admittedly, left at this level, it just remains hand-waving. As Hegel realized and as he
tried to carry the project out in his lectures, much more detail has to be supplied.
Adorno also has a conception, or so it seems, of such an infinite end, and it is not
exactly the same as Hegel’s. For him, it seems to be happiness, perhaps understood in
the Aristotelian fashion of “flourishing” as the best version of the person you are. As
he puts it in relation to Beethoven: “Irresistible in the young Beethoven’s music is the
expression of the possibility that all might be well.” 29 And, again in reference to
 20

Beethoven’s sonata, Les Adieux: “The clatter of horses’ hooves moving away into the
distance carries a greater guarantee of hope than the four Gospels.” 30 For him,
happiness-as-flourishing would include freedom and justice as moments of itself.31
There may not be that much of a gap between him and Hegel on this point, but that
too would require longer discussion.
The big gap is between Adorno’s conception of negative dialectic and the
affirmative dialectic he thinks he finds in Hegel which he thinks condemns Hegel to
“identity thought.” Yet Adorno’s own conception of the negativity of the dialectic
pushes him to something identical to the Hegelian conception of an infinite end.
What then divides him from the Hegelian dialectic? It is, of course, his related views
that, first, Hegel’s rather bourgeois account of modern life – a system of rationally
derived rights, duties, and the goods of the bourgeois family, the not yet fully
marketized civil society of the late eighteenth century, and the nineteenth century
nation-state – is simply flat out incapable of comprehending anything like the horrors
of the twentieth century; and, second, that Hegel’s dialectic should have ruled out the
regress to a fully rule-following conception of social life and agency that seems to have
taken over in what Adorno describes as the “administered life” of modernity. (Hegel,
in his own misguided way, thought such a regress had been put out of play in the
Greek victory over the Asiatic despotism of the Persians.) If Hegel’s dialectic were
true, so Adorno seems to be saying, the “administered life” could not have the hold
on subjectivity it now has. To be sure, Hegel did not think that all movement in
history was progress, and he certainly thought that there could be, as it were,
backward moves in history that resulted in less rational circumstances. (He even
thought he was living in such a period.) But if Hegel’s dialectic in history traces the
way certain very basic, authoritative modes of comprehension break down, then how
could what had broken down repair itself again and replace its more rational
replacement? Or does Hegel’s view simply collapse into a kind of Kantian moralistic
 21

critique, forever measuring practices by how well they live up to the demands of pure
practical reason?
Adorno gives more or less negative answers to all these questions. For him, Hegel’s
dialectic falls apart in light of the twentieth century, and for Adorno, in light of its
failure and living in its successor, the administered world, resistance takes the form of
practices that do not assimilate well to being rule-governed. Thus, for Adorno, art –
taken roughly in a Kantian sense of judgment that is without a concept and therefore
a matter of formality – becomes the privileged sphere of such resistance. 32 Yet
Adorno’s own way of putting it remains Hegelian. He seems to think that Hegel was
correct for the nineteenth century, but that what has happened since his day is exactly
the kind of “breakdown of meaning” that Hegel himself put on display in works such
as the Phenomenology.33 On that account, bourgeois life turned out not to be so livable
on its own terms, and as its terms for its own self-comprehension began to lose their
grip, it passed over into a new, administered shape of life for which the categories of
nineteenth century bourgeois life were now false – in the sense that the ground-level
ideals necessarily and actually at work in the contemporary order rule out the
bourgeois ideals, show them to be false in that sense). However, that means that even
where he is criticizing Hegel, he is still surreptitiously using the Hegelian dialectic. If
nothing else, Adorno’s search for the “the negative” to the rule-following paradigm of
agency is surreptitiously Hegelian.34
The more Hegelian reply to Adorno’s Hegel is that Adorno’s Hegel turned out to
be a false start on the way to a reconciled world in much the same way that Hegel
thought that both Charlemagne and Barbarossa’s empires were false starts on the way
to a common European civilization. Although those empires looked impressive at the
time, their flaws were too many and too deep to sustain themselves.35 For Hegel, what
had characterized European history since the breakdown of the ancient Greek shape
of life – which internally legitimated itself by a standard of beauty – was the ongoing
threat of nihilism. Left without an aesthetic underpinning, it vacillated between
 22

legitimation through the outright seizure of power to a kind of stultified legal system
of merely positive rules, all the while trying to pass parts of itself off as divine in
origin. The fear of senselessness seized Greece’s Roman successors, and it kept rising
to the surface from time to time in European history when for Europeans “as it were,
a universal feeling of the nothingness of their conditions coursed through the
world.”36 The crusades, the witch burnings, and later the extreme frivolity and vanity
of the ancien régime were Hegel’s favorite examples of the way that kind of anxiety
continued to irrationally bubble up in European life. He also thought that his own
philosophical system had provided enough a way of comprehending the place of
agency – or “spirit” – in the natural world and a comprehension of the way modern
institutions were structured to satisfy the human desire to believe that somehow, all
the tragedies included, it all makes a kind of sense. Hegel developed a view on how it
does all make sense, even though such a shape of life incorporates the practical
inevitability of tragedies in life.37 In Hegel’s system, there can be no one overarching
good that rules out the tensions at work in the shadowy realm of the concepts that, all
in all, make up our most basic comprehension of what it is to be a substance and what
it is to be a subject (an agent).38
It does not take much effort to see, along with Adorno, all the things that Hegel did
not anticipate. Hegel himself at best only dimly saw how the role of mass movements
in political life and culture from the mid-nineteenth century to the present were to
reshape everything. Revolutions, dictatorships, fascism and democratic reform all had
roots in types of such movements. He thought the French Revolution, rather than
presaging a new period of mass movement in politics, was a one-off event, the perfect
storm resulting from a failed authoritarian regime identified with an authoritarian,
anti–progressive church totally out of step with the times, all coming to confrontation
with a mix of economic failure, Rousseauian calls for emancipation and French
utilitarianism, the whole pot stirred together by a Romanic and Mediterranean set of
passions. On the other hand, by the end of his life Hegel did seem to think that
 23

impact of the concept of individualism in political life seemed to be preventing the

whole idea of the nation-state, taken to be a realization of freedom and on which he
had invested so much, from ever getting enough of a grip on life to actually work.39
Moreover, the idea that the state itself could patch this up with sufficiently aggressive
policies contradicted his explicit views on the state. In fact, the idea that life in the
state could somehow be equivalent to ethical life on its own, so he thought, expressed
exactly the wrong idea.40 However, he also only dimly at best foresaw the destructive
force that mass movements operating in a nation-state striving to identify ethical life
with itself and itself only would represent.
Near the end of his life, Hegel received a note from a student, Christian Weisse,
which contained the following remark:

You yourself, honored teacher, once orally indicated to

me that you were totally convinced of the necessity of
further progress and newer embodiments of the world-
spirit, which would go further than the completed
embodiment of science that you yourself had brought
about. But you were not able to give me any further
account of this.41

We do not have Hegel’s own reply to this student’s request for a clarification. We do,
however, have the Hegelian tools to give such a reply. What I have tried to do here is
outline what the reply might be and to show that the negative dialectic is best
understood as part of Hegel’s idealist dialectic. Like so many others, Adorno finds
Hegel waiting at the end of the road, knowing he would arrive there.
 24

1
For example: “With no less stringency the paradox of the tour de force in
Beethoven’s work could be presented: that out of nothing something develops, the
aesthetically incarnate test of the first steps of Hegel’s logic.” Adorno, T. W., G.
Adorno, et al. (1997). Aesthetic theory. Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota
Press., p.107; or, in Adorno, T. W. and R. Tiedemann (1998). Beethoven : the
philosophy of music : fragments and texts. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University
Press., where he says that Beethoven’s music is Hegelian philosophy but is more true.
(p. 14)
2
Moore, A. W. (2012). The evolution of modern metaphysics : making sense of things.
New York, Cambridge University Press.; in his recent work on Hegel’s Logic, Robert
Pippin has put this to use in a way that Moore does not in interpreting Hegel. cite
3
For a version of this interpretation of dialectic: Pinkard, T. (2012). Hegel's
Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life, Oxford University Press. See
also Robert Pippin, “Brandom on Hegel on Negation,” (unpublished paper)
4
For example, see Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen
Wissenschaften I. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp., §214: “Die Idee kann als die Vernunft
(dies ist die eigentliche philosophische Bedeutung für Vernunft), ferner als Subjekt-
Objekt, als die Einheit des Ideellen und Reellen, des Endlichen und Unendlichen, der Seele
und des Leibs, als die Möglichkeit, die ihre Wirklichkeit an ihr selbst hat, als das, dessen
Natur nur als existierend begriffen werden kann usf., gefaßt werden, weil in ihr alle
Verhältnisse des Verstandes, aber in ihrer unendlichen Rückkehr und Identität in sich
enthalten sind. ” [“The Idea may be grasped as reason; (and this is the genuine
philosophical meaning of reason), further as subject-object… because the Idea contains all
the relations of the intellect, but contains them in their infinite self-return and identity-
within-themselves.”]
5
Here is one version: “It is, rather, identity thinking which attempts to control
experience by the deployment of rules that have authority in advance of what we
contingently face in reality.” O'Connor, Brian (2012-11-12). ADORNO (The
Routledge Philosophers) (Kindle Location 2299). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
O'Connor, B. (2013). Adorno. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, Routledge. (p. 144).
Taylor and Francis. And: “The category of nonidentity seems to be another name for
 25

the notion of excluded otherness, the retrieval of which is an essential feature of post-
structuralist theory.” Ibid.(p. 194). Taylor and Francis. In his glossary for the book,
O’Connor also characterizes “identity” for Adorno in the following way: “A
misunderstanding of the relationship between subject and object in which the
concepts or systems of concepts of a subject (person, philosopher, scientist, etc.) are
taken to be identical with the object.”
6
“Inhaltliches Philosophieren seit Schelling war begründet in der Identitätsthese. Nur
wenn der Inbegriff des Seienden, schließlich Seiendes selbst, Moment des Geistes, auf
Subjektivität reduzierbar; nur wenn Sache und Begriff im Höheren des Geistes
identisch sind, ließ nach dem Fichteschen Axiom, das Apriori sei zugleich das
Aposteriori, sich prozedieren. Das geschichtliche Urteil über die Identitätsthese aber
fährt auch Heidegger in die Konzeption. Seiner phänomenologischen Maxime, der
Gedanke habe dem sich zu beugen, was ihm sich gibt oder am Ende »schickt« – als ob
der Gedanke nicht die Bedingungen solcher Schickung durchdringen könnte –, ist
die Möglichkeit der Konstruktion tabu, des spekulativen Begriffs, die verwachsen war
mit der Identitätsthese. Schon die Husserlsche Phänomenologie laborierte daran, daß
sie unter der Parole »Zu den Sachen« über die Erkenntnistheorie hinaus wollte.”
Adorno, T. W. and R. Tiedemann (1997). Negative Dialektik ; Jargon der
Eigentlichkeit. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag., GS 6, 85 - 86
7
“One side [of Schelling’s views] leads nature up to the subject, and the other leads
the “I” up to the object. However, [Schelling’s program] could only be carried out in a
logical manner, for the latter contains pure thoughts; it is the logical approach that
Schelling never achieves in the presentation of his views and in his own
development.” Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der
Philosophie III. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp., p. 435.
8
Thus, in ¶440 of the Phenomenology, Hegel distinguishes shapes of spirit and of
consciousness, noting that from that point onward in the book (after the introduction
of the chapter on “Spirit” that “Spirit is the ethical life of a people insofar as it is the
immediate truth; it is the individual who is a world… However, these shapes
distinguish themselves from the preceding in that they are real spirits, genuine
actualities, and, instead of being shapes merely of consciousness, they are shapes of a
world.”
9
Adorno takes over the general idea of negation from Hegel’s dialectic, but he puts it
to different use. For Hegel, “negation” is the stand-in for that provides the contrast to
something else and makes the contrast intelligible. Thus, “being” has its intelligibility
in its contrast with “nothing,” but “nothing” remains unintelligible on its own until it
is integrated into a concept of “coming-to-be.” Likewise, “something” contrasts with
its “other” (something else) ad infinitum, and the “appearance” is the negation of the
“essence” and vice versa. “Negation” thus is the general stand-in for all those
conditions which set the boundaries for thought but which themselves seem to be
 26

simply given, to have no intelligibility on their own. Dialectic is deriving the

intelligibility of these seemingly given conditions into intelligible conditions.
10
The phrase about reason being its own Gerichtshof is, of course, not Hegel’s but
Kant’s in the Critique of Pure Reason.
11
In this respect, Adorno’s procedure is more like that of Wittgenstein in the
Investigations. Wittgenstein seeks to undermine through a series of examples the faith
one might have in resolving certain key philosophical issues. This affinity has been
drawn out by Demmerling, C. (1994). Sprache und Verdinglichung : Wittgenstein,
Adorno und das Projekt einer kritischen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp..
12
Adorno’s dialectical position is thus to be contrasted with the “hetero” position of
the postmodernists, who think that there is no “push,” but merely contingent
difference at work.
13
Adorno, T. W. (1993). Hegel : three studies. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press., pp.
18-19. “There is no question of whether Hegel was a transcendental analytic
philosopher like Kant. One could show in detail how Hegel, as Kant’s critic, sought
to do justice to Kant’s intentions by going beyond the Critique of Pure Reason, just as
Fichte’s Science of knowledge had pushed the limits of Kant’s concept of the pure. The
Hegelian categories, and especially the category of spirit, fall within the domain of
transcendental constituents.”
14
Bernstein, J. M. (2001). Adorno : disenchantment and ethics. Cambridge, U.K. ;
New York, Cambridge University Press. takes it to be something along the lines of
material as opposed to formal inference (“If it can be demonstrated that there can be
structures of order and inference that are themselves sensible and material, and the
categorial duality between concept and intuition can be challenged and defeated and a
portion of the inferential powers of a concept can be located in its enlarged
material/intuitional, mimetic moment.” 285). Hammer, E. (2006). Adorno and the
political. London; New York, NY, Routledge. takes it to be the following: “What
Adorno calls mimesis is a pre-conceptual, pre-reflective impact of the world from
outside the realm of thought.”148. Brian O’Connor (O'Connor, B. (2013). Adorno.
Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, Routledge.) takes it this way: “…the qualities Adorno
ascribes to mimesis — adjustment towards the object, accommodation, absorption.”
171” Raymond Geuss (Geuss, R. (2005). Outside Ethics. Princeton, N.J., Princeton
University Press.) takes it this way: “…the natural mimetic impulse, our desire to
make ourselves an imitation of the world. This is most fully expressed in the work of
art, which is this a promise of utopian happiness.” p. 61
15
See the discussion in Kukla, R. and M. N. Lance (2009). 'Yo!' and 'lo!' : the
pragmatic topography of the space of reasons. Cambridge, Mass. ; London, Harvard
University Press. where they flesh out the pragmatics of Louis Althusser’s concept of
“interpellation.”
16
“Stumbling along behind its reification, the subject limits that reification by means
 27

of the mimetic vestige, the plenipotentiary of an undamaged life in the midst of

mutilated life, which subverts the subject to ideology. The inextricability of reification
and mimesis defines the aporia of artistic expression.” Adorno, T. W., G. Adorno, et
al. (1997). Aesthetic theory. Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press., 117
17
“Modernity” is for Adorno a characterization of a certain kind of self-consciousness,
not per se a temporal moment in historical development. Merely being at the end of a
story does not make something “modern.” Adorno notes: “Das Moderne ist wirklich
unmodern geworden. Modernität ist eine qualitative Kategorie, keine
chronologische.“ Adorno, T. W. and R. Tiedemann (1997). Minima Moralia :
Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag., GS
4, 249.
18
Adorno, T. W. and R. Tiedemann (2006). History and freedom : lectures 1964-1965.
Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, Polity., p. 55. Just before that, he says: “Only an actually
achieved identity would lead to the reconciliation of opposing interests – and not simply
the comforting thought that the quintessence of all conflicts would, by making life
possible, permit something like reconciliation among all mankind, namely their
continued existence. And never can reconciliation be the merely asserted reconciliation
brought about by the violence towards everything subsumed under it.”
19
“…die Idee hat um der Freiheit willen, die der Begriff in ihr erreicht, auch den
härtesten Gegensatz in sich; ihre Ruhe besteht in der Sicherheit und Gewißheit, womit
sie ihn ewig erzeugt und ewig überwindet und in ihm mit sich selbst zusammengeht.”
Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Wissenschaft der Logik II. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp., p.
468
20
One can imagine a Hegelian objecting that Adorno’s negative dialectic is only a
form of the “bad infinite,” an endless succession of one thing after another. As
Wittgenstein put it: “The reasoning that leads to an infinite regress is to be given up not
‘because in this way we can never reach the goal’, but because here there is no goal; so it
makes no sense to say ‘we can never each it.’ ” Wittgenstein, L., G. E. M. Anscombe, et
al. (1967). Zettel. Oxford,, Blackwell., #693. However, for Hegel, the affirmative infinite
is just the bad infinite grasped in its principle. Thus, the differential and integral calculus
grasps the infinite convergence on a quantity in terms of the formula that allows one to
integrate as small as one pleases. Adorno’s conception of the negative dialectic at least
permits him to do that in a very abstract way. Hegel explicitly makes the point that the
affirmative infinite is merely the bad infinite conceptually comprehended: Hegel, G. W.
F. (1969). Wissenschaft der Logik I. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp., “So ist beides, das
Endliche und das Unendliche, diese Bewegung, zu sich durch seine Negation
zurückzukehren; sie sind nur als Vermittlung in sich, und das Affirmative beider
enthält die Negation beider und ist die Negation der Negation. - Sie sind so Resultat,
hiermit nicht das, was sie in der Bestimmung ihres Anfangs sind; - nicht das Endliche
ein Dasein seinerseits und das Unendliche ein Dasein oder Ansichsein jenseits des
 28

Daseins, d. i. des als endlich bestimmten. Gegen die Einheit des Endlichen und
Unendlichen sträubt sich der Verstand nur darum so sehr, weil er die Schranke und
das Endliche wie das Ansichsein als perennierend voraussetzt; damit übersieht er die
Negation beider, die im unendlichen Progresse faktisch vorhanden ist, wie ebenso,
daß sie darin nur als Momente eines Ganzen vorkommen und daß sie nur vermittels
ihres Gegenteils, aber wesentlich ebenso vermittels des Aufhebens ihres Gegenteils
hervortreten.” p. 162.
21
Adorno, T. W. (1966). Negative Dialektik. (Frankfurt a.M.), Suhrkamp., 303;
Adorno, T. W. (1983). Negative dialectics. New York, Continuum., 310. [Führt jede
inhaltlich ausgeführte, positive Lehre vom Naturrecht auf Antinomien, so bewahrt
dessen Idee dennoch kritisch die Unwahrheit positiven Rechts. Heute ist es das in die
Realität zurücküber- setzte und dort die Herrschaft vermehrende verdinglichte
Bewußtsein. GS 6, 305]
22
This draws on the discussion of infinite ends in Rödl, S. (2007). Self-consciousness.
Cambridge, Mass. ; London, Harvard University Press.
23
Sebastian Rödl suggests that health is also an infinite end. There are many things one
can do to maintain or promote one’s health, but health is not something one achieves,
then no longer wants it. Ibid.
24
“For on the one hand, we have in history ingredients and natural conditions which are
remote from the conceptual world – i.e. all kinds of human arbitrariness and external
necessity. On the other hand, we set up against this the thought of a higher necessity, an
eternal justice and love, the absolute and ultimate end which is truth in and for itself. In
contrast to natural being, this second, opposite pole is based on abstract elements, on the
freedom and necessity of the concept. This opposition contains many interesting
features; it comes to our notice once again in the Idea of world history. Our present aim
is to show how this opposition is resolved in and for itself in world-history.” Hegel, G.
W. F. (1975). Lectures on the philosophy of world history : introduction, reason in
history. Cambridge Eng. ; New York, Cambridge University Press., p. 26. (translation
altered); Hegel, G. W. F., J. Hoffmeister, et al. (1968). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie
der Weltgeschichte. Hamburg, F. Meiner., pp. 26-27.
25
This Hegelian point is also not the same thing as the contemporary discussions of
rule-skepticism in light of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following. It is not about the
way in which a finite set of behaviors cannot disclose an absolute understanding of what
the rule requires.
26
This is Stephen Houlgate’s reading: Houlgate, S. (2007). Hegel's Theory of
Tragedy. Hegel and the Arts. S. Houlgate. Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University
Press: 146-178. See my “Tragedy with and without Religion.”
27
One caveat should be made here. Hegel’s racist antipathy to Africans meant that he
thought that they were only barely rule-followers at all. There is simply no way of
making Hegel’s treatment of Africa palatable.
 29

28
I have tried give this a little more substance in Pinkard, T. (2012). Hegel's
Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life, Oxford University Press..
29
Adorno, Adorno, T. W. and R. Tiedemann (1998). Beethoven : the philosophy of
music : fragments and texts. Stanford, Calif., Stanford University Press., p. 306.
30
Adorno, ibid., p. 174.
31
It is another matter for another discussion, but this seems to be one of the factors
driving Adorno’s discussion of freedom. If freedom is giving the rules to oneself (as in
Kantian self-legislation), then in the “administered society” the place to look for
freedom is not in the rules at all but in the places where the rules cannot work. Thus,
Adorno seems to play with the idea that genuine freedom has to do with that element
in action which he just calls the “supplement” (das Hinzutretende), which is like, but
not equivalent to, an organic impulse to achieve something. How that is supposed to
work and whether Adorno’s use of it is successful would require another, longer
discussion. See Martin Shuster’s discussion in Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno,
German Idealism and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
32
Robert Pippin conjectures that this way of putting things is, for Adorno, the typical
“bourgeois” or Kantian way of seeking freedom and self-sufficiency. He has also
argued that Adorno’s interpretation of Kant is very flawed – he conflates causal and
practical necessity, and he remains nonetheless strangely committed to a Kantian
picture without fully realizing how that picture itself drives one more toward a
Hegelian conception. See Robert Pippin, “Negative Ethics: Adorno on the Falseness
of Bourgeois Life” in Pippin, R. B. (2005). The persistence of subjectivity : on the
Kantian aftermath. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press., pp. 98-120.
33
See the aside in Adorno, T. W. and R. Tiedemann (2006). History and freedom :
lectures 1964-1965. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA, Polity., p. 73-74, where he says
that of people today that what they call “their own selves belong not to them but that
they are… what might be called he negative imprint of the universal… in contrast to
the still happy, individualist times of he late nineteenth century.”
34
See R. B. Pippin’s attempt to provide the Hegelian account of this breakdown in
Pippin, R. B. and ebrary Inc. (2014). After the beautiful : Hegel and the philosophy
of pictorial modernism.. Pippin thinks that Adorno’s conception of modern art rests
on something like a Kantian distinction between sensibility and intellect. This takes
Adorno to be focusing on art as paradigmatic of a conception of agency that is not
modeled on rule-following. [??] [What   does   it   mean   to   say   that   artworks   are  
bearers   of   truth,   etc.   in   AtB,   does   that   have   a   place   in   Adorno?   Adorno’s   worry  
that  our  time  grasped  in  thought  is  consistent  but  senseless?]  
35
From Hegel, G. W. F. (1956). The philosophy of history. New York, Dover
Publications.: “Such was the state of the Frank Empire — that first consolidation of
Christianity into a political form proceeding from itself, the Roman empire having
been swallowed up by Christianity. The constitution just described looks excellent; it
 30

introduced a firm military organization and provided for the administration of justice
within the empire. Yet after Charlemagne’s death it proved itself utterly powerless —
externally defenseless against the invasions of the Normans, Hungarians, and Arabs,
and internally inefficient in resisting lawlessness, spoliation, and oppression of every
kind. Thus we see, side by side with an excellent constitution, the most deplorable
condition of things, and therefore confusion in all directions.” AND: “In the brilliant
period of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, individuals of commanding character sustained
the dignity of the throne; sovereigns like Frederick Barbarossa, in whom the imperial
power manifested itself in its greatest majesty, and who by his personal qualities
succeeded in attaching the subject princes to his interests. Yet brilliant as the history
of the Hohenstaufen dynasty may appear, and stirring as might have been the contest
with the Church, the former presents on the whole nothing more than the tragedy of
this house itself, and the latter had no important result in the sphere of Spirit.”
36
“Es ist durch die Welt gleichsam ein allgemeines Gefühl der Nichtigkeit ihres
Zustandes gegangen.” Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der
Geschichte. Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp., p. 449.
37
Terry Pinkard, “Tragedy with and without religion”, forthcoming in Joshua Billings
and Miriam Leonard (eds.), Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity (Oxford University Press).
38
It is obviously a major question about how to distinguish those basic concepts from
others. Hegel’s own answer was in part to construct his Science of Logic to show how,
starting from the ground zero of intelligibility, certain concepts are forced on us by
the dialectic induced by the contradictions they pose.
39
“Each particularization appears as a privilege, but there is supposed to be equality. In
terms of this principle, no government is possible. This collision, this knot of this
problem stands before history, and it is history which has to loosen the knot.” Hegel, G.
W. F. (2005). Die Philosophie der Geschichte: Vorlesungsmitschrift Heimann
(Winter 1830/1831). Munich, Fink Verlag.p. 231.
40
In his “Orientalist” fashion, Hegel thought (wrongly) that China represented the
danger of identifying ethical life with the state. Of China, Hegel said disparagingly that
“there can be nothing more ethical (sittlicher) than the Chinese empire.” Ibid., p. 72. In
fact, to its detriment, “China is nothing but a state,” and thus has no room for difference
within itself. Hegel, G. W. F. (1969). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte.
Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp., p. 201. “wenn China ganz Staat ist, so ist das indische
politische Wesen nur ein Volk, kein Staat.”
41
Hegel, G. W. F. and J. Hoffmeister (1961). Briefe von und an Hegel. Hamburg,,
Felix Meiner., vol. 3, p. 261, #603, Weisse to Hegel, July 11, 1829.