From Negative Dialectics

Theodore Adorno (1966)

The supramundane character of the Hegelian world spirit by Hegel, however, notably by the Hegel of Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Right, the historical objectivity that happened to come about is exalted into transcendence: 'This universal substance is not the mundane; the mundane impotently strives against it. No individual can get beyond this substance; he can differ from other individuals, but not from the popular spirit.'

The opposite of the 'mundane', the identity to which the particular entity is unidentically doomed, would thus be 'supramundane'. There is a grain of truth even to such ideology: the critic of his own popular spirit is also chained to what is commensurable to him, as long as mankind is splintered into nations. In the recent past the greatest, though mostly disparagingly garbed model of this has been the constellation between Karl Craws and Vienna. But to Hegel, as always when he meets with something contrary, things are not that dialectical. The individual, he goes on, 'may have more esprit than many others, but he cannot surpass the popular spirit. Les esprits are merely those who know about their people's spirit and know how to go by it.' With a malice that one cannot fail to hear in the use of the word esprit, the relationship is described far beneath the level of the Hegelian conception. 'To go by it' would be literally nothing but to adjust. Like one confessing compulsively, Hegel deciphers his previously taught affirmative identity as a continuing break and postulates the submission of the weak to the more powerful. Euphemisms such as that in Philosophy of History, that in the course of world history 'some individuals have been hurt',' are involuntary approaches to a sense of non-reconcilement, and the trumpet call 'Duty is the individual's liberation to substantial freedom - a common property of German thought, by the way - already defies distinction from its parody in the doctor scene from Büchner's Woyzeck.

What Hegel puts into philosophy's mouth is 'that no power surpasses that of the good, of God, and keeps him from prevailing; that God is borne out; that world history represents nothing but the plan of Providence. God rules the world; the content of his rule, the execution of his plan, is world history; to comprehend this plan is the philosophy of world history; and its premise is that the ideal is accomplished, that only that which is in line with the idea has reality." The world spirit seems to have worked in pretty cunning fashion when Hegel, as if to crown his edifying homily - to use Arnold Schönberg's phrase - apes Heidegger in advance: 'For reason is the perceiving of the divine work. The omnipotent thought has to abdicate and to make itself complaisant as mere perceiving.

To gild the heteronomy of the substantially universal, Hegel mobilises Greek conceptions this side of experienced individuality. In such passages he vaults all historic dialects and unhesitatingly proclaims that morality's form in Antiquity, the form which was first that of official Greek philosophy and then the one of German Gymnasien, is its true form: 'For the morality of the state is not the moralistic, reflected one in which one's own convictions hold sway; this is more accessible to the modern world, while the true morality of Antiquity has its roots in every man's stand by his duty.'

The objective spirit takes revenge on Hegel. As memorial orator of Spartanism he anticipates the jargon of intrinsicality by a hundred years, with the term 'stand by his duty'. He stoops to offering victims decorative comfort without touching on the substantiality of the condition whose victims they are. What spooks there, behind his superior declarations', had previously been petty cash in the bourgeois till of Schiller, in whose 'Song of the Bell' the pater families burned out of house and home is not only sent wandering, i. e. begging, but told to do it merrily, to boot; for a nation - said to be worthless otherwise - Schiller prescribes joy in committing its all to its honour. The terror of good cheer internalises thecontrainte sociale.

Such exaggeration is not a poetic luxury. The idealistic social pedagogue must do something extra, since without the performance of additional and irrational identification it would be all too flagrant that the universal robs the particular of what is being promised. Hegel associates the power of the universal with the aesthetically formal concept of greatness: 'These are a people's great men; they guide the people in accordance with the universal spirit. For us, the individualities disappear and are noteworthy only as those who realise the will of the popular spirit.' The blithely decreed disappearance of individualities - a negative which philosophy presumes to know as positive without any real change having occurred in it - is the equivalent of the continuing break. The power of the world spirit sabotages what a subsequent Hegelian passage extols in the individual: 'That he is in line with his substance is due to himself.'

And yet the phrasing of the dismissal touches on serious matters. The world spirit is said to be 'the spirit of the world as it explicates itself in human consciousness: men relate to it as individuals to the whole, which is their substance'. There Hegel is telling off the bourgeois conception of the individual, its vulgar nominalism. The very grimness with which a man clings to himself, as to the immediately sure and substantial, makes him an agent of the universal, and individuality a deceptive notion. On this, Hegel agreed with Schopenhauer; what he had over Schopenhauer was the insight that the abstract negation of individuality is not all there is to the dialectics of individuation and universality. The remaining objection, however - not just against Schopenhauer but against Hegel himself is that the individual, the necessary phenomenon of the essence, the objective tendency-, is right to turn againshaendency, since he confronts it with its externality and fallibility. This is implicit in Hegel's doctrine of the individual's substantiality 'by way of himself'. Yet instead of developing the doctrine, Hegel sticks to an abstract antithesis of universal and particular, an antithesis that ought to be unbearable to his own method.

Hegel siding with the universal

Opposed to such a separation of substantiality and individuality, as much as to a narrowly immediate consciousness, is the insight of Hegelian logic into the unity of the particular and the universal, a unity which sometimes strikes him as identity.

Particularity, however, as universality, is such an immanent relation in and for itself, not by way of transition; it is totality in itself and simple definition, essentially a principle. It has no other definition than the one posited by the universal itself and resulting from the universal, as follows. The particular is the universal itself, but it is the universal's difference from or relation to something else, what it seems to be on the outside; but there exists nothing else from which the particular might differ, nothing but the universal itself. When the universal is defined, it is the particular; definition makes the difference; it differs only from itself.

Immediately, then, the particular would be the universal, because it can find no definition of its particularity except by way of the universal only; without the universal, Hegel concludes in an ever-recurring mode, the particular is nothing. The modern history of the human spirit - and not that alone - has been an apologetic labour of Sisyphus: thinking away the negative side of the universal. The Kantian spirit still remembers it, as against necessity: Kanried to confine necessity to nature. The Hegelian critique of necessity is removed by legerdemain.

The consciousness of the spirit must form in the world; the material, the soil, of this realisation is nothing but the universal consciousness, the consciousness of a people. The consciousness contains and directs all of the people's purposes and interests; it makes up the people's rights, customs, religions. It is the substantial part of a people's spirit even if the individuals do not know it, even if it stands as a settled premise. It is like a necessity; the individual is raised in this atmosphere and knows of nothing else. Yet it is not merely education and a consequence of education; rather, this consciousness is developed by the individual himself, not taught to him: the individual has his being in that substance.

The Hegelian phrasing 'It is like a necessity' is very adequate to the preponderance of the universal; the 'like' - suggesting the merely metaphorical character of such a necessity - fleetingly touches on the semblance character of that which is the most real of things. Doubts whether necessity is good are promptly knocked down with the avowal that, rain or shine, necessity is freedom. The individual, Hegel tells us, 'has his being in that substance', in the universality which to him was still coinciding with the popular spirit. But its positivity itself is negative, and the more negative its bearing, the more positive it will be; unity gets worse as its seizure of plurality becomes more thorough. It has its praise bestowed on it by the victor, and even a spiritual victor will not do without his triumphal parade, without the ostentatious pretence that what is incessantly inflicted upon the many is the meaning of the world.

'It is the particular which fights each other to exhaustion, and a part of which is ruined. But it is precisely from struggle, from the fall of the particular, that the universal results. The universal is not disturbed.' It has not been disturbed to this day. And yet, according to Hegel, without the particular that defines it, as a thing detached from itself, there would be no universal either. There is only one way for Hegelian logic succinctly to identify a universal and an undefined particular, to equate cognition with the fact that the two poles are mediated; and that is for logic which Hegel also views as an a priori doctrine of general structures - not to deal with the particular as a particular at all. His logic deals only with particularity, which is already conceptual. Thus established, the logical primacy of the universal provides a fundament for the social and political primacy that Hegel is opting for.

This much should be granted to Hegel: not only particularity but the particular itself is unthinkable without the moment of the universal which differentiates the particular, puts its imprint on it, and in a sense is needed to make a particular of it. But the fact that dialectically one moment needs the other, the moment contradictorily opposed to it - this fact, as Hegel knew well but liked to forget on occasion, reduces neither moment to mi on. Stipulated otherwise would be the absolute, ontological validity of the logic of pure non-contradictoriness, which the dialectical demonstration of 'moments' had broken through; ultimately stipulated would be the position of an absolute First - the concept - with the fact said to be secondary because according to idealistic tradition it 'follows, from the concept. Of a particular, nothing can be predicated without definition and thus without universality, and yet this does not submerge the moment of something particular, something opaque, which that prediction refers to and is based upon. It is maintained within the constellation, else dialectics would end up hypostatising mediation without preserving the moments of immediacy, as Hegel prudently wished to do everywhere else.

Relapse into Platonism

The immanent critique of dialectics explodes Hegelian idealism. Cognition aims at the particular, not at the universal. It seeks its true object in the possible determination of the difference of that particular - even from the universal, which it criticises as none the less inalienable. But if the mediation of the universal by the particular and of the particular by the universal is reduced to the abstract normal form of mediation as such, the particular has to pay the price, down to its authoritarian dismissal in the material parts of the Hegelian system.

What man must do, what are the duties he has to fulfil to be virtuous, is easily told in a moral community - he has to do nothing other than is prescribed, expressed, and known to him in his circumstances. Probity is the universal that can be demanded of him, partly legally, partly morally. From the moral standpoint, however, it tends to appear as something subordinate, beyond which one ought to ask more of himself and of others; for the urge to be something particular is not contented by that which is in and for itself and universal. It is only in an exception that this urge will find the sense of intrinsicality.

If Hegel had carried the doctrine of the identity of universal and particular further, to a dialectic in the particular itself, the particular - which according to him is simply the mediated universal - would have been granted the same right as the universal. That he depreciates this right into a mere urge and psychologistically blackens the right of man as narcissism - like a Father chiding his son, 'Maybe you think you're something special' - this is not an individual lapse on the philosopher's part. Idealistically, there is no carrying out the dialectic of the particular which he envisions. Contrary to the Kantian chorismos, philosophy is not supposed to make itself at home in the universal as a doctrine of forms; it is to penetrate the content itself, rather, and this is why, in a grandiosely fatal petitio principii, reality is so arranged by philosophy that it will yield to the repressive identification with philosophy.

What is most true in Hegelian thinking, the sense of the particular without whose weight the concept of reality decays into a farce, leads to that which is most false. It removes the particular for which Hegel's philosophy is groping. The more insistently his concept strives for reality, the more benightedly is reality - the hic et nunc that should be cracked open as gilded nuts are cracked by children on a holiday - contaminated by him with the concept that covers it.

It is this very attitude of philosophy towards reality which the misconceptions affect, and so I come back to what I said before: that philosophy, because it means to fathom what is rational, means precisely therefore to grasp what is present and real, not to erect a Beyond said to be God knows where - or of which one can in fact say very well where it is, namely, in the error of empty, one-sided rationalising.... When reflection, feeling, or whatever form the subjective consciousness may take, regards the present as vain, when it goes beyond the present and knows better, it is likewise vain, and being real only in the present, it is nothing but vanity. Conversely, if the idea is taken to be no more than just an idea, a conception held as an opinion, philosophy affords the insight that nothing but the idea is a reality. What matters, then, is that in the semblance of the temporal and transitory we may know the substance which is immanent, and the eternal which is present.

So Platonic, of necessity, is the dialectician's language. He will not admit that, from the viewpoint of logic as well as of the philosophy of history, the universal contracts into the particular until the latter breaks loose from the abstract universality that has grown extraneous to it - while the universal he vindicates, as a higher objectivity, correlatively declines to a bad subjectivity, to the mean value of particularities. He who was set upon a transition of logic to time is now resigned to timeless logic.

Detemporalisation of time

The simple dichotomy of temporality and eternal amidst and despite the Hegelian conception of dialectics conforms to the primacy of the universal in Philosophy of History. Just as the general concept, the fruit of abstraction, is deemed above time ~ and just as the loss which the subsumed suffers by the process of abstraction is entered in the profit column, as a draft on eternity - so are history's allegedly supratemporal moments turned into positive. Hidden in them is the old evil, however. To agree to the perpetuation of the status quo is to discredit the protesting thought as ephemeral. Such an about-face into timelessness is not extraneous to Hegel's dialectics and philosophy of history. As his version of dialectics extends to time itself, time is ontologised, turned from a subjective form into a structure of being as such, itself eternal.

Based on this are Hegel's speculations which equate the absolute idea of totality with the passing of everything finite. His attempt to deduce time, as it were, and to eternalise it as permitting nothing outside it is as much in line with this conception as with absolute idealism, which can no more resign itself to the separation of time and logic than Kant could to the separation of visuality and intellect. There again, by the way, Hegel, Kant's critic, was Kant's executor. When Kanurns time, as the pure visual form and premise of everything temporal, into an a priori, time on its part is exempted from time." Subjective and objective idealism concur in this, for the basic stratum of both is the subject as a concept, devoid of its temporal content. Once again, as to Aristotle, theactus purus becomes that which does not move. The social partisanship of the idealists goes all the way down to the constituents of their systems. They glorify time as timeless, history as eternal - all for fear that history might begin.

For Hegel, the dialectic of time and temporality logically turns into a dialectic of time in itself. It offers the positivists their favoured point of attack. In fact, it would be bad scholasticism if dialectics were attributed to the formal concept of time, with every temporal content expurgated. In critical reflection, however, time is dialecticised as the internally mediated unity of form and content. Kant's transcendental aesthetics would have no answer to the objection that the purely formal character of time as a 'form of visuality', its 'emptiness', has itself no corresponding visuality whatever. Kantian time defies every possible conception and imagination: to conceive it, we always have to conceive something temporal along with it, something to read it off on, something that permits its passage or its so-called flow to be experienced. The fact is that the conception of pure time does require that very conceptual mediation the abstraction from all conceptions of time that can be carried out from which Kant, for the sake of systematics, the disjunction of sensibility and intellect, wished and needed to relieve the forms of visuality.

Absolute time as such, bereft of the last factual substrate that is and passes in it, would no longer be what time, according to Kant, must inalienably be: it would no longer be dynamic. There is no dynamics without that in which it occurs. Conversely, however, a factuality without its place in the time continuum is not conceivable either. Dialectics carries this reciprocity into the most formal realm: of the moments essential to that realm, and opposed to each other, not one is without the other. yet the reciprocity is not motivated by the pure form in itself that served to reveal it. A relationship of form and content has become the form itself. It is inalienably the form of a content - an extreme sublimation of the form-content dualism in detached and absolutised subjectivity.

An element of truth might even be squeezed out of Hegel's theory of time, provided one will not let logic produce time by itself, as he does; to be perceived in logic, instead, are coagulated time relations, as indicated variously, if cryptically, in Critique of Pure Reason, in the chapter on schematism in particular. Preserved likewise in the discursive Logic unmistakably in its conclusions - are time elements that were detemporalised as subjective thinking objectified them into pure legality; without such detemporalisation, on the other hand, time would not have been objectified at all. As cognition of an element, it would be compatible with Hegel to interpret the link between logic and time by going back to something which current positivistic science considers pre-logical in logic. For what Hegel calls synthesis is not simply the downright new quality leaping forth from definite negation; it is the return of what has been negated. Dialectical progress is always a recourse as well, to that which fell victim to the progressing concept; the concept's progressive concretion is its self-correction. The transition of logic to time would like, as far as consciousness is able, to make up to time for the wrongs done to it by logic - by the logic without which, on the other hand, time would not be.

Under this aspect, the Bergsonian duplication of the concept of time is a bit of dialectics unaware of itself. In the concept of le temps durée, of lived duration, Bergson tried theoretically to reconstruct the living experience of time, and thus its substantial element that had been sacrificed to the abstractions of philosophy and of causal-mechanical natural science. Even so, he did not convert to the dialectical concept any more than science did. More positivistically than he knew in his polemicising, he absolutised the dynamic element out of disgust with the rising reification of consciousness; he on his part made of it a form of consciousness, so to speak, a particular and privileged mode of cognition. He reified it, if you will, into a line of business. In isolation, the time of subjective experience along with its content comes to be as accidental and mediated as its subject, and therefore, compared with chronometric time, is always 'false' also. Sufficient to elucidate this is the triviality that, measured by clock time, subjective time experiences invite delusion, although there would be no clock time without the subjective time experience which the clock time objectives.

But the crass dichotomy of Bergson's two time's does register the historic dichotomy between living experience and the objectified and repetitive labour process; his brittle doctrine of time is an early precipitation of the objective social crisis in the sense of time. The irreconcilability of temps durée and temps espace is the wound of that split consciousness whose only unity lies in being split. The naturalistic interpretation of temps espace can no more master this than the hypostasis of . temps durée, in which the subject, flinching from reification, hopes in vain to preserve itself simply by being alive. The fact is that laughter according to Bergson, the restoration of life from its conventional hardening - has long become the conventions' weapon against uncomprehended life, against the traces of something natural that has not been quite domesticated.

Dialectics cut short by Hegel.

Hegel's transposition of the particular into particularity follows the practice of a society that tolerates the particular only as a category, a form of the supremacy of the universal. Marx designated this state of facts in a manner which Hegel could not foresee:

The dissolution of all products and activities into exchange values presupposes the dissolution of all fixed personal (historical) dependencies in production as well as the producers' universal dependence on each other. Every individual's production depends as much on the production of all others as the transformation of his product into food for himself has come to depend on the consumption of all others.... This mutual interdependence is expressed in the constant necessity of exchange, and in the exchange value as universal mediator. The economists put it this way: everyone pursues his private interest and thus unwillingly and unwittingly serves the private interests of all, the general interests. The joke is not that everyone's pursuit of his private interest will in effect serve the entirety of private interests, that is the general interest; from this abstract phrase it might as well be inferred that everyone mutually inhibits the pursuit of the others' interest, and that, instead of general affirmation, the result of this bellum omnium contra omnes will be general negation. The point is, rather, that the private interest itself is already a socially determined interest, one that can be pursued only on the terms laid down by society and by the means provided by society - hence an interest tied to the reproduction of those terms and means. It is the interest of private persons; but its content as well as the form and means of realisation are given by social conditions independent of them all.

Such negative supremacy of the concept makes clear why Hegel, its apologist, and Marx, its critic, concur in the notion that what Hegel calls the world spirit has a preponderance of being-in-itself - that it does not (as would be solely fitting for Hegel) have merely its objective substance in the individuals: 'The individuals are subsumed under social production, which exists as a doom outside them; but social production is not subsumed under the individuals who exercise it as their common capacity. The real chorismos obliges Hegel, much against his will, to remodel his thesis of the reality of the idea. The theory does not admit this, but there are unmistakable lines about it inPhilosophy of Right:

For the idea of the state one must not look to particular states or particular institutions; rather, the idea, this real God, must be contemplated by itself. Every state, although a man may call it bad according to the principles he holds, although he may find one or the other flaw in it, always contains the essential moments of its existence, especially if it is one of the developed states of our time. But because finding faults is easier than grasping the affirmative, one will easily fall into the error of letting specific sides make one forget the inner organism of the state itself.

The tenor of the whole work is to dispute away the contradiction between idea and reality; but if the idea 'must be contemplated by itself', not in 'particular states', and that in principle, with an encompassing structure in mind, this resurrects the contradiction. In keeping with it is the ominous line that finding faults is easier than grasping the affirmative; today this has become the clamour for 'constructive criticism', in other words, grovelling criticism. Because the identity of idea and reality is denied by reality, ascertaining that identity none the less calls, so to speak, for an obsequious special effort on the part of reason; the 'affirmative', the proof of positively accomplished reconciliation, is postulated, praised as a superior achievement of consciousness, because Hegel's pure eye witness does not suffice for such affirmation. The pressure which affirmation exerts on a balky reality acts tirelessly to strengthen the real pressure put upon the subject by the universal, its negation. The chasm between the two yawns the more visibly, the more concretely the subject is confronted with the thesis of the objective substantiality of morals.

In Hegel's late conception of education, this is described only as something hostile to the subject:

Absolutely defined, education is thus deliverance and the work on a higher deliverance, namely, the absolute point of transition to the infinitely subjective substantiality of morals, which is no longer immediate and natural but spiritual and likewise raised to the form of universality. In the subject, this deliverance is the toil of striving against mere subjectivity of conduct, against immediate desire, as well as against the subjective vanity of sensation and the arbitrariness of liking. That it is this toil accounts for part of the disfavour it encounters. But it is by this educational toil that subjective volition gains in itself the objectivity which alone makes it worthy and capable of being the reality of the idea.

Embroidering this is o mi dareis the Greek school maxim which Goethe - whom it fitted least of all - did not disdain to choose as a Hegelian-minded motto for his autobiography. Yet in trumpeting the truth about the identity it would like first to bring about, the classicist maxim admits its own untruth: literally that of birch-rod pedagogy, and metaphorically that of the unspeakable commandment to submit. Being immanently untrue, the maxim is unfit for the purpose entrusted to it; psychology, belittled by the great philosophy, knows more about that than philosophy knows. Brutality is reproduced by men against whom it is practised; the abused are not educated but repressed, rebarbarised. An insight of psychoanalysis - that civilisation's repressive mechanisms transform the libido into aggression against civilisation - cannot be extinguished any more. The man who has been educated by force will channel his aggressions by identifying with force, to pass it on and get rid of it; it is thus that subject and object are really identified according to the educational ideal of Hegel's philosophy of law. If a culture is no culture, it does not even want the people who are caught in its mill to be cultured.

In one of the most famous passages of Philosophy of Right, Hegel cites a line attributed to Pythagoras, to the effect that the best way morally to educate a son is to make him a citizen of a state with good laws, This calls for a judgment whether the state itself and its laws are actually good. but to Hegel, order is good a priori; it does not have to answer to those living under it. Ironically, this confirms his subsequent Aristotelian reminiscence that 'substantial unity is an absolute and motionless end in itself'. Motionless, the end stands in the dialectic that is supposed to produce it. It is thus devalued to an empty avowal that 'freedom comes to its supreme right' in the state; Hegel lapses into that insipid edification which he still despised in Phenomenology. He reiterates a cogitative cliché of Antiquity, from the stage at which philosophy's victorious Platonic-Aristotelian mainstream proclaimed its solidarity with the institutions, against their bases in the social process; all in all, mankind discovered society much later than the state, which is mediated as such but seems given and immediate to the governed.

Hegel's line 'Whatever man is he owes to the state', that most obvious hyperbole, carries on the antiquated confusion. What induced the thesis is that the 'motionlessness' he attributes to the general purpose might indeed be predicated of the institution, once it has hardened, but could not possibly be predicated of society, which is dynamic in essence. The dialectician confirms the state's prerogative to be above dialectics because - a matter he did not delude himself about - dialectics will drive men beyond bourgeois society. He does not put his trust in dialectics, does not look upon it as the force to cure itself, and disavows his own assurance that identity will produce itself in dialectics.

Extract from: Negative Dialectics, 1966, translated by E B Ashton, published by Routledge 1973