History and Freedom: Lectures 1964-1965

by Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann (Editor)

Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factors that prevented him from identifying a definitive plan for the future course of history was his feelings of solidarity with the victims and losers. As for the future, the course of events was to remain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to a Hölderlin-like openness. This trace of the messianic has what he called the colour of the concrete as opposed to mere abstract possibility. Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on the road leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. The second of these was concerned with the topics of history and freedom. In terms of content, these lectures represented an early version of the chapters in Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant and Hegel. In formal terms, these were improvised lectures that permit us to glimpse a philosophical work in progress. The text published here gives us an overview of all the themes and motifs of Adorno's philosophy of history: the key notion of the domination of nature, his criticism of the existentialist concept of a historicity without history and, finally, his opposition to the traditional idea of truth as something permanent, unchanging and ahistorical.

Genres: Philosophy, History, Nonfiction, Theory, 20th Century, Politics

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

Reviews

[s · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dense, seems impossible to fully unpack, but very illuminating. Two big threads for me: (1) making Kant and Hegel intelligible + going beyond them by critiquing their view of human freedom and the will, and (2) stitching psychoanalysis in through the concept of the superego and its relation to history. Sort of like a (massive, satisfying) fleshing out of the Benjamin essay on the philosophy of history, an essay that I consider absolutely foundational.

[Oliver · Rating 5 out of 5]

Over the course of 28 lectures, Adorno sets himself the task of steering a dialectically fecund passage between the Scylla of Hegel’s (arguably) teleological, idealist historiography, and the Charybdis of rejecting a meaning or sense in history altogether. Much of it is worked out in complex dialogue with the former, through which Adorno’s notoriously complicated relationship to Hegel—admiring his profoundly dialectical, critical impulse but resenting spirit’s tendency to lapse into “identity-thinking”—finds its footing.

“the crucial contribution to a theory of history is to be found in the idea that mankind preserves itself not despite all the irrationalities and conflicts, but by virtue of them”

Hegel attempts to think “the unity of unity and discontinuity” that is History (what Adorno calls “the problem of the philosophy of history”) in much the same way that he discovers the “identity of identity and non-identity” characteristic of the concept, relation, and ultimately identity itself. Adorno sees in this, akin to the Benjaminian “permanence of catastrophe”, a way of understanding History as a “negative unity” of its internal diremptions and disruptions, or put more abstractly, the identity of identity’s continuous self-laceration and subjugation.

Among other things, what nonetheless differentiates this view from Benjamin’s is Adorno’s positive, dialectical spin, that what a philosophy of history actually recognises is the utopian residue that undermines the immediate appearance of a nightmarish and closed historical totality. Adorno’s interpretation of Hegel’s Weltgeist along these lines interpellates the endless trail of particular conflicts under “the principle of antagonism”, which recognises that universal history exists not in spite of the continuum of estrangement and rupture, but precisely because of it: in other words, “the positive is the quintessence of all negativities.” What we call ‘nature’ is only the permanence of this transient condition.

“The more identity is postulated by the spirit that dominates, the more injustice is meted out to the non-identical. Injustice is passed down to the non-identical, feeding its resistance”

It is at this zenith of heady praise for Hegel’s efforts where, as is characteristic of Adorno’s chiasmatic way of thinking, his immanent critique finds its genesis. Where Hegel’s concept of spirit falls short of its object, where it succumbs to identity-thinking, failing to be “sufficiently dialectical”, it serves the “no less obdurate particular interest of the totality” and cannot mediate between its potential critical negativity and the actual domination of nature. Spirit, for Adorno, errs when it takes itself for the Absolute, running into contradictions in a way not unlike the differentiated shapes of consciousness within the Phenomenology. Basically, what we have here is a development of The Dialectic of Enlightenment into more explicitly Hegelian territory, where the real is rational and spirit is, at least on Adorno’s reading, the procrustean integration of the particular into universality. The discontents of unreflective reason manifest in the discontents of unreflective spirit.

I’m generally quite suspicious of these attempts to accuse Hegel’s thought of harbouring authoritarian contours at large, but Adorno’s critique is actually much more nuanced than others. For starters, his problem with Hegel’s Weltgeist is not that it justifies injustice but that it poses the risk of lapsing into uncritically allying with the forces of the prevailing universal; strictly according to the standards of his immanent critique, Adorno only ever accuses Hegel of not being Hegelian enough. He grants that, whilst Hegel accepts that history’s rationality must be posed with reference to its agent, grounding reason in the material reality through which it moves, he has a tendency to forget that reason is not absolute but rather only a mode of behaviour. It takes self-reflection—reason reflexively applied to itself—to steel it against “mythological” thinking.

I will say, however, that I’m not especially convinced that this tendency is intrinsic to the concept of spirit. Whilst the preface to the philosophy of right bares the scars of self-forgetting, is not self-reflection as the realisation of the limit internal to thought (the self’s becoming through estrangement in its other) precisely what Hegel elevates to the very highest stage of spirit — absolute knowing?

“A human being who is not mindful at every moment of the potential for extreme horror at the present time must be so bemused by the veil of ideology that he might just as well stop thinking at all”

Nevertheless, Adorno suggests that, if we wish to attune ourselves to a self-reflective corrective of historical thinking, we must trade the vantage point of history’s victors for those they trample underfoot, realizing that we are always history’s “potential victims”. By holding more consciously the tension between those who pay the price for the “principle of antagonism” and those who benefit as the propagators of the emergent totality, we can, as Adorno puts it, “rise above the spell” (the “spell” being “the subjective form of the world spirit”).

For the universal (absolute) to reign unchallenged, it must isolate itself from its necessarily dialectical, reciprocal entanglement in the particular (finite) — it is in this ossification of the relationship between the two that Adorno locates the workings of reification, and consequently, ideology. The kernel of truth in the dogmatic elevation of the universal over the particular is that this is does, in fact, reflect the prevailing order of things; ideology only enters the picture when it postulates this contingent state of affairs as a positive, eternal reality.

Although I would resist the caricature of Adorno as an incorrigible, grumbling pessimist, he certainly harbours no illusions about reification, recognising that the abstracting, “false consciousness” entailed by the exchange relation—which sees (particular) value as an inherent quality of the commodity, rather than an index of a (universal) social process—is a necessary psychic structure for its maintenance and reproduction. Not even concerted resistance to the administrated world can evade the influence of ideology; indeed, without dialectically sensitive attention to the reflexive relationship between universal and particular, rebellion is condemned to collaborate in “weaving the web of disaster”

“The emptier of meaning existing reality appears today, the greater the pressure or the desire to interpret it and to have done with this meaninglessness. The light that is kindled in the phenomena as they fragment, disintegrate and fly apart is the only source of hope that can set philosophy alight: for philosophy… is the Stygian darkness that sets out to unveil meaning”

Nonetheless, the greatest betrayal of Adorno’s legacy would be to relinquish oneself to a nihilistic fatalism in the face of so-called “total reification” and its suffocating ideological expressions. If there is one thing he truly, desperately seeks in the eyes of his students, it’s the will and the means to realise that the ‘given’, far from exhausting praxis, actually discloses utopian possibilities when subjected to philosophical interpretation. This is, perhaps, his most explicitly Hegelian position, a way of thinking stretching beyond the objects of consciousness.

In this appeal we see the germs of how Adorno takes up the question of freedom, which occupies him in the later lectures. In much the same way that “wrong life cannot be lived rightly”, as we are told in Minima Moralia, genuine private freedom cannot exist under conditions of general unfreedom. The forces and relations of production necessitate that even the most seemingly unfettered individual existence is actually strictly delimited by the unfree realm in which it operates. This is why Adorno takes such issue with any philosophy determined to erect an irrefragable, unassailable freedom of the individual, for it only serves the forces of repression with a pretext to exonerate their role in domination.

For instance, any good “historical materialist” will relate to my deep personal suspicion towards any stubborn language of “moral responsibility”, insisting that it operates beyond the influence of time and space: “you were endowed with absolute freedom to not commit the crime. Conditions have nothing to do with it!”. I would, therefore, entirely agree with Adorno when he says that “action is free if it is related transparently to the freedom of society as a whole”, forbidding us from merely deploying identity thinking to presuppose freedom where none exists.

“the concept of spontaneity, which might be described as the organ or medium of freedom, refuses to obey the logic of non-contradiction, and is instead a unity of mutually contradictory elements”

Along these lines, Adorno performs a wonderful Jamesonian ideological critique upon Kant’s Third Antimony, drawing out the contradiction in its political unconscious between the newfound bourgeois pursuit of freedom from the mores and institutions of the ancien regime, and a trepidation towards the Pandora's box of consequences that might flow from such a “universal” emancipation of the will. Rather than holding onto this contradiction and exploring its truth value, Kant flees from it, rejecting both options as an extreme overstep of reason’s jurisdiction.

Adorno goes on to dress down Kant’s moral theory which, by holding onto the classical Greek distinction between the passions of the heart and the reason of the mind, cannot account for the righteous indignation that Adorno calls the “true primal phenomenon of moral behaviour”. Moreover, he charges Kant with ultimately, and rather ironically, reviving the stifling dogmatism he had sought to unmask and demolish with his “What is Enlightenment?”, erecting blind obeisance towards the moral law in its place.

“because all bourgeois revolutions merely make official or de jure something that already existed de facto, they all have an element of illusion, of ideology, about them”

We can’t, however, entirely lay the blame for this at Kant’s feet, for as a spokesperson for the ascendant bourgeoisie he simply expressed the contradictions of the society in which their ideals floundered and mutated. The promise of true universality could never be realised without an exception, an exception that, by design, itself ensured that universality would never actually come to pass. Of course, this exception largely refers to the proletariat, whose acquisition of pure moral and material universality would be tantamount to the abolition of the bourgeoisie. It is for this reason that identity thinking is of existential importance for the maintenance of bourgeois rule: of course we’re free, of course we’re just, of course we’re humane.

Adorno covers so much ground over the course of these lectures with such an unparalleled dexterity that every single page is somehow more compelling than the last. It leads me to believe that the lecture really is the consummate form to facilitate the uniquely playful seriousness typical of dialectical thinking. The time constraints provoke an urgency to penetrate to the heart of the matter without excess dithering, whilst at the same time, it admits a more conversational tenor, free to explore strands of thought as they emerge. Adorno could not be more comfortable in this mode, and it really shows. How lucky, then, that we have so much of his lecture material both transcribed and translated! Now onto Introduction to Dialectics…

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Er hat recht