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Critique.
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Max Blechman
Only the critical idea that unleashes the force stored up in its own object is fruitful;
fruitful both for the object, by helping it to come into its own, and against it,
That the subjective conscience will "with good reason" consider objective morality
most hostile to itself?this word ofHegel's looks like a philosophical slip of the pen.
all to pass through a thousand doorways, but precisely the self that desires and
demands, the not yet implanted postulated world of its a priori is the system's
finest fruit and sole purpose, and therefore Kant ultimately stands above Hegel as
as
surely psyche above pneuma, Self above Pan, ethics above Encyclopedia, and
the moral nominalism of the End above the still half cosmological realism ofHegel's
world-idea.
?Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia
Utopia, "to let Kant burn through Hegel," might best serve to high
light what is at stake in the project of negative dialectics. Indeed,
Adorno may be interpreted as this strategy over for himself
taking
when, in an essay from 1965, he states: "The book, Bloch's first, bear
ing all his later work within it, seemed to me to be one prolonged re
bellion against the renunciation within that extends even into
thought
its purely formal character. ... I do not believe I have ever written
munity of minds."3
This core Hegelian insight, hermetically outlined in the preface
of Phenomenology, is taken up by Adorno as the "system's finest fruit
and sole purpose," to borrow Bloch's phrase. Yet this Hegelian pur
pose, even as it transforms the transcendental basis of the practical in
1) Against the limits set by Kant, the abstractions of formalism, and with
The reciprocal movement carried in the motif, from Kant to Hegel and
from Hegel to Kant, moving "forward and backward at the same time"8
like the thematic articulations of Beethoven's music, reconfigures the
clusively given."12
The Kant-through-Hegel motif may be specified further: inHegel,
cepts, but also its inhumanity."16 Or again, the Hegelian survey steeps
the Idea in the particular only "to reduce it to a through-station, and
finally comes all too quickly to terms with suffering and death for the
sake of a reconciliation occurring merely in reflection."17
It is awinding pathway that Adorno opens through Kant and Hegel.
For he seeks to maintain with Hegel, and against the self-sufficient
being themselves alone and not moments of the whole" will inevitably
"break down with the power of the whole."18 Yet with Kantian auton
ity."23 InAdorno's view, the Phenomenology pulls the carpet from under
supposed removal from the real, in the moral cognition that would,
as it were, be to the objective to which it is
heterogeneous sociality
inextricably bound. Yet genuine, critical insight into the untruth of
opposition that Kant had brought to a fever pitch with the notion of
conscience. This is, however, "the utterly impossible thing, because it
a even
presupposes standpoint removed, though by a hair's breadth,
from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any
possible
knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold
good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion
and indigence which it seeks to escape."27
In light of this aporia, the double-edged method of the Phenome
ject and object, the ultimate assumption of which still enabled Hegel to
conceal the antagonistic demands of observation and interpretation."29
Yet when we consider Adorno's
qualified retrieval of the Hegelian
model?that the morality of thought "should be at every moment both
within things and outside them"30?we are thrown back to the aporia
all over again. How are we to understand this moral consciousness,
this simultaneity of historical inscription and transcendence? How are
we to grasp a
morality of thought that lies "in a procedure that is nei
ther entrenched nor detached, neither blind nor proce
empty"31?a
dure, we may add, that is neither nor recognizably
strictly Hegelian
Kantian?
nothing inherent to the relation itself, that deepens the chasm between
the historical and the Utopian while endowing the latter with the tenor
of an abstraction, with a likeness to "mere phantoms of the brain."36
The question, however, is not to think within the limits placed on
the Kantian transcendental idea, as ifmorality in thought were to con
sist in ascending to the principles of the unconditioned. Rather, criti
cal theory redirects its gaze, from within extant objectivity, to the as
universality, Utopia."38
torically prevail is inverted. "Critical thought, which does not call a halt
particular, the definite, is inextricable from his idea; his "less" than
himself in comparison with the free humanity, the humanitas his idea
coterminous with
the hegemonic domination of bourgeois civilization.
The point of morality in thought is not to take "its directive, beyond
the real states of affairs, from the highly formal sense of belonging to
oneself."50 chasm in the idea of the individual,
The the alienation of
the happiness and dignity of the species to which the individual be
ticity that reveals at once the historical debt and the parti pris of his
own moral thinking, Adorno states:
sharp verdict
on Hegel could hardly be more lucid:
into being until realized reason has left the reason of the uni
particular
versal behind. The sense of the wrong by the concept of the uni
implied
versal, a sense which chides, would deserve his respect because
Hegel
of the universality of wrong itself.56
thing inherent in the mind, the one authentic dignity it has received in its
separation from the body. This dignity is the mind's negative reminder
of its physical aspect; its capability of that aspect in the only source of
whatever the mind can have.^
hope
ing it that it is not yet itself. Which is another way of saying that the
damage is incurring
the universal is inextricable from the damage it
is itself suffering. The more the objective universal monopolizes the
means for maintaining the myth of its identity, the less moral insight
has any lease on a space that would, as itwere, allow it to manifest its
rial, no 'ought' could issue from reason."64 This means that at the heart
of the genuinely rational, at the core of morality in thought, there is a
material urge?an experience of an "ought" that breaks out from the
limits of dominant sociality. It is precisely this experience that marks
the starting-point of any genuine critical theory. The "recourse to the
material" Adorno is here emphasizing is incomprehensible simply
in the terms of extant forms of sociality or their latest forms of self
ety that exists."66 At the end of the day, it is not only as consciousness
of wrong but also as presentiment of a sociality that is not yet and
paler and more desultory," to the point that today it "survives only
It is as if this process were simultaneously caught in the
negatively."77
progressive detachment of form from life?in the estrangement of
form in a power that acts over and against life?only to instill thereby
a negative awareness of its original ends, as well as the resistance that
would uphold them. Indeed, if, for Adorno, "the concept of metaphys
ics has been transformed to its innermost core,"78 is it not because today
"the possibility of metaphysical experience is akin to the possibility
of freedom . .
. one that has torn the bonds advertised as salutary"?79
As seen, Adorno does not hesitate to speak of natural law when
he thinks the perseverance of amorality that undermines its own pet
rifaction. m In a the of materialism so as to include
sense, restructuring
metaphysica naturalis already opens this door. Once spiritual need is
recognized
as material need?once moral aversion to injustice is seen
as an extension of the natural aversion to physical pain?the whole
of collective self-transformation is placed on the axis of a
"ought"
self-constituting dignity in human nature, as ifwithout this grounding,
there could be no to be had or to be measured. Awareness of
morality
the factum of conscience?"the awareness that the sphere of right action
does not coincide with mere rationality, that it has an 'addendum'"?
thus underscores a reason that contains within itself the in
practical
of an unyielding, rebellious nature.81
telligence
Clearly, Bloch encouraged Adorno to think the "specific materi
alism" of his morality under the sign of natural law and to revalue
as a of modern
"utopian-conscience-and-knowledge" mainspring
resistance.82Far from indexing extant institutions and ideology, Bloch
Notes
8. Ibid., 136.
9. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. Jephcott (London: Verso,
1978), 50.
17. Ibid.
19. Ibid. The parallel with Bloch is striking. As Pierre Bouretz puts it, "To
answer the question of human the of the world; to displace
meaning by reality
conscience's thirst for the infinite by the rationality of to assuage
things; finally,
the dissatisfaction of the moral subject in the experience of evil by means of a con
figures of the human spirit." See his Temoins du Futur: Philosophic et Messianisme
and member of society. The science of the good life is a science, then,
melancholy
because "wrong life cannot be lived (Minima Moralia, s. 18)?or in Bloch's
rightly"
terms, because after what is false has fallen away can what is genuine live"
"only
(Spirit of Utopia, 238). Indeed, the extant social that conditions moral
ontology
as melancholic contradiction to why moral is
thought points directly philosophy
possible only from the of Which leaves untouched the
standpoint redemption.
question: how is such is, what are the conditions of pos
philosophy possible?that
31. Ibid.
36. Adorno insists that the Kantian block on the refers to histor
intelligible
ical as opposed to
ontological conditions. The severance of experience into nou
37. Ibid.
(Ernst Bloch, Messianisme et Utopie, 249). We may note that this led both Bloch and
Adorno to Schelling's conception of the urge: "And thus, from the bottom stage
on, we see nature follow its inmost, most hidden desire to keep rising and advanc
in its urge, until at last it has attracted the highest essentiality, the pure spiri
ing
tuality itself, and has made it its own" (F.W. Schelling, Die Waltalter, ed. M. Schroter
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid.
49. Adorno, 20.
Hegel,
50. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. K. Tarnowsky and
F. Will (Evanston, 111.:Northwestern University Press, 1973), 115.
51. Ibid., 65.
Hegel, 101.
54. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 153.
55. Ibid.
60. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 242.
64. Ibid., 243.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 408.
70. Problems 9.
Adorno, ofMoral Philosophy,
71. Ibid., 103.
72. Ibid., 123.
73. Ibid., 151. See also Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 385, where Kant's critique
of the ontological is shown to have the "must" of human self-transcendence
proof
as its in the same as Beethoven's Kantian to Joy.
guiding principle, spirit Hymn
74. Kant, "The Universal Problem of Pure Reason," Critique of Pure Reason,
12.
75. Ernst Bloch, Atheism inChristianity: The Religion of theExodus and theKing
dom, trans. J. T. Swann (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), 264.
behind the English, American, and French traditions of dissent, in which natural
83. Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human trans. D. Schmidt (Cam
Dignity,
Mass.: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1986), 192.
bridge,
84. Ibid., 206.