ADORNO AND THE POSSIBILITY OF PRACTICAL REASON
By
Michael J. Reno

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Philosophy
2011

ABSTRACT
ADORNO AND THE POSSIBILITY OF PRACTICAL REASON
By
Michael J. Reno
The prevailing interpretation of Adorno's work claims that because of his methodological
negativity and his political pessimism he not only does not have a theory of practical reason, but
also cannot even conceive of the possibility of a rational answer to Kant's question “what should
I do?” Habermas, for example, interprets Adorno's work as engaging in the mere “ad-hoc
determinate negation” of what exists. In the main, Adorno is taken to have fallen into the trap of
a global skepticism regarding reason. On this interpretation Adorno seems to have given up on
the possibility of practical reason and what remains of the liberatory potential of the Western
Enlightenment. And, though he attempts to maintain a critical orientation toward social reality,
his account of reason cannot maintain this orientation consistently; his critical position depends
on the very reason that he criticizes and thus devolves into irrationalism, in the form of either a
messianic philosophy of history or a foundationalist account of mimesis.
I argue, instead, that Adorno's thought offers a conception of practical reason that avoids
these problems, and further allows for both descriptive and normative insights into contemporary
western liberal societies and the subjects who constitute and are constituted by such societies.
Adorno conceives of the problem of practical reason as the problem of its very possibility and
this takes the form of the possibility of experience. I argue that practical reason is possible in the
contemporary world as experience that involves the self-conscious engagement with memory
and imagination. Practical reason is possible insofar as experience in this sense is possible. Thus,
a conception of the practically oriented subject is also possible. Further, through the related

concepts of orientation, interpretation, and expression, I offer a way to conceive of the validity of
experience, though not in a way that offers criteria for deciding whether some expression is in
fact an expression of a valid interpretation and the result of the appropriate orientation to the
inquiry. I show, however, that this seeming inability is in fact an asset in thinking through actual
and potential responses to the irrationality of the contemporary world.

Copyright by
MICHAEL J RENO
2011

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following people for support and assistance throughout the
writing process: Richard Peterson, Richard and Nan Reno, Melissa Nelson, Shannon Proctor,
Kelin Emmett, Frederick Rauscher, Steve Esquith, and Marilyn Frye.

v

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTERS
Chapter 1 Introduction: Adorno and the Possibility of Practical Reason...................................1
Chapter 2 Kant, Freedom, and Progress.....................................................................................15
Chapter 3 Adorno's Critique of Kant's Conception of Freedom and Progress...........................46
Chapter 4 The Possibility of Practical Subjectivity....................................................................77
Chapter 5 Criticisms of Adorno and the Validity of Experience................................................144
Chapter 6 Practical Reason, Universality, and Resistance.........................................................190
BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................................200

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Chapter 1 Introduction: Adorno and the Possibility of Practical Reason
The prevailing interpretation of Adorno's work claims that because of his methodological
negativity and his political pessimism he not only does not have a theory of practical reason, but
also cannot even conceive of the possibility of a rational answer to Kant's question “what should
I do?” Habermas, for example, interprets Adorno's work as engaging in the mere “ad-hoc
determinate negation” of what exists. In the main, Adorno is taken to have fallen into the trap of
a global skepticism regarding reason. On this interpretation Adorno seems to have given up on
the possibility of practical reason and what remains of the liberatory potential of the Western
Enlightenment. And, though he attempts to maintain a critical orientation toward social reality,
his account of reason cannot maintain this orientation consistently; his critical position depends
on the very reason that he criticizes and thus devolves into irrationalism, in the form of either a
messianic philosophy of history or a foundationalist account of mimesis.
I argue, instead, that Adorno's thought offers a conception of practical reason that avoids
these problems, and further allows for both descriptive and normative insights into contemporary
western liberal societies and the subjects who constitute and are constituted by such societies.
Adorno conceives of the problem of practical reason as the problem of its very possibility and
this takes the form of the possibility of experience. I argue that practical reason is possible in the
contemporary world as experience that involves the self-conscious engagement with memory
and imagination. Practical reason is possible insofar as experience in this sense is possible. Thus,
a conception of the practically oriented subject is also possible. Further, through the related
concepts of orientation, interpretation, and expression, I offer a way to conceive of the validity of
experience, though not in a way that offers criteria for deciding whether some expression is in
fact an expression of a valid interpretation and the result of the appropriate orientation to the

1

inquiry. I show, however, that this seeming inability is in fact an asset in thinking through actual
and potential responses to the irrationality of the contemporary world.
In this introductory chapter, I first address the question of the relevance of Adorno’s
thinking today. Next, I explicate some key concepts that will be employed throughout the work
and preview some of the crucial arguments made in the body of the dissertation. Finally, I
provide a brief sketch of each chapter of the dissertation.
The Relevance of Adorno's Thinking Today
Before briefly explicating the key concepts just spelled out, I first consider the relevance
of Adorno's thought today. Since the time of Adorno's writing, perhaps the world has changed to
such a degree that the questions he asks and the concepts he employs and thus the insights he has
are now anachronistic; even if they were an adequate response to his own world, they are no
longer so, given, for example, the end of the cold-war and the increasing productivity of
capitalism. Perhaps too, liberal theory has itself changed to such a degree that it is now able to
capture those of his insights that are still viable. More specifically, perhaps the problems he
perceives for practical reason are now irrelevant given newer theoretical approaches such as
those of Rawls or Habermas, which offer a different way of connecting the intermundane
experience of existing subjects with questions of the justness of societal institutions than the
liberal approaches that Adorno knew. Adorno's relevance to the problem of practical reason
today, then, can be challenged on both historical and theoretical grounds.
Adorno's philosophy does deal with a particular historical world. Adorno in his lectures
on metaphysics, asserts that the modern world is marked by a hellish unity: torture as a
permanent institution, Auschwitz, and the atom bomb. His thinking about practical reason is
clearly marked by these linked historical crises: the rise of fascism and the failure of democracy,

2

the failure of the working class to bring about a rational society, the holocaust, and the advance
of technology that makes possible weapons like the atomic bomb. So, the questioning goes, why
would the insights he comes to in attempting to think philosophically about these crises be
relevant today?
Obviously, we do not face these precise crises in their precise configuration. Yet, it is
clear that we face similar if not the same sorts of problems. In particular, we have inherited from
the world of Adorno's work the continuation of the elements of his hellish unity. Governments
continue to use torture as an instrument of both domestic and foreign policy. The United States of
America, for example, has clearly tortured those it has labeled “enemy combatants.” In addition,
through the process of rendition, individuals are abducted and tortured in another country. Egypt,
until the recent uprising and overthrow of Mubarak, tortured individuals for the United States.
And, what the domestic prison system does to many inmates, while not necessarily an explicit
policy, is tantamount to torture. We continue to live in the shadow of genocide. The Holocaust in
particular may have marked Adorno's work, but the continuing inability for the species to avert
these horrors since WWII, belies the claim that Adorno's work has nothing to say to us today.
Today, nuclear weapons may have receded as an acute concern of the American public, but the
fact remains that at least seven nations possess nuclear weapons. The weapons have become
more powerful since Adorno's time, and the species now possesses additional weapons that are
potentially just as damaging to human beings in the form of chemical and biological agents
designed specifically for the purpose of causing human suffering and death. In addition to the
hellish unity, politics now, as in Adorno's time has failed. While this failure has not taken the
form of an explicit fascism, it is clear that western societies, at least, continue to proceed as
though capitalism is the only way to organize production and other economic activity and

3

without real political checks on the economic system. A philosophy shaped in the face of the
crises of the middle of the twentieth century, then, is certainly not irrelevant to our present day
concerns.
One might still question the relevance of Adorno for thinking about contemporary
societies, however, on the grounds that we now possess more sophisticated accounts of practical
reason within liberal theory itself, whether that comes from the Rawlsian tradition or the critical
theory tradition itself in the form of Habermas' shift to the pragmatic presuppositions of practical
discourse. As I my aim at this point is merely to show the plausibility of the claim that Adorno
has something to offer to contemporary thinking about practical reason, subjectivity, and politics,
my intent here is neither to offer a complete account of these other theorists nor to refute them.
Rather, I merely want to show some interesting contrasts between their positions and Adorno's,
thus showing the potential insights that Adorno's thinking offers, but which are perhaps missing
in these other accounts.
Rawls conceives of practical reason in relation to the constructivism of the political
conception of justice. Practical reason, society, and persons form a conjunction through which he
conceives of the capacities of agents that must be modeled in the political constructivism of
justice as fairness. Practical reason in this framework comes to the two moral powers—a
capacity for justice and a capacity for a conception of the good—and the holding of an actual,
1

determinate conception of the good. Now, this is clearly an ideal, and Rawls' position here is not
susceptible to the claim that this ideal does not map on to actual subjects in contemporary
societies. But, in response to Habermas' claim that justice as fairness is substantive, Rawls
admits it is so because he cannot cede what he takes to be Habermas' claim that substantive

1

John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia UP, 1995), 103-108.
4

metaphysical theories are captured as formal and universal aspects of the theory of
communicative action. “Justice as fairness as a political doctrine wants no part of any such
comprehensive account of the form and structural presuppositions of thought and action....It aims
to leave these doctrines as they are and criticizes them only insofar as they are unreasonable,
politically speaking.”

2

It is here, in the mere letting be of comprehensive doctrines that Adorno's thinking cannot
abide. Again, I do not take this to be a refutation of Rawls' conception of liberalism, but rather as
a brief articulation of concerns that are not comprehensible from within the theory. But, the way
that Rawls draws the distinction between the metaphysical and the political leaves the questions
that I seek to ask regarding experience and subjectivity out of an account of practical reason.
That is, Adorno, in engaging with the question of the possibility of practical reason as a
questioning of the possibility of experience at all, implicitly challenges the possibility of a
politics disconnected from metaphysics. This takes the form, in the contemporary world, of
turning toward the body and especially the suffering body. Suffering that is merely felt but not
experienced undermines the possibility of practical reason because, without an experience of
both one's own suffering and the suffering of others, reason can have no hold on us; it gets no
traction. The account of Adorno's conception of experience and hence practical reason advanced
here asks not only whether this account of practical reason is adequate, but also what conditions
would have to hold for actual subjects to engage practically in Rawls' sense. In some sense,
though, for reasons of space, I do not pursue this idea, Adorno's critique of Kant presented in
chapter 3, could, with slight revision apply to aspects of Rawls' articulation of liberalism.
Habermas, too, limits the scope of practical reason in a way that leaves a place for

2

John Rawls, “Reply to Habermas,” in Political Liberalism, 432.
5

Adorno's thinking. He states that since The Theory of Communicative Action, “I have considered
state apparatus and economy to be systematically integrated action fields that can no longer be
transformed democratically from within...” and goes on to say that the only field left for
resistance lie in building “a democratic dam against” the logic of the systems of the state and
3

capitalism's encroachment into the lifeworld. In other words, it is time to stop asking whether
individuals can overcome the social institutions that have taken on a life of their own beyond
those individuals, and instead turn to our ability to carve out ways to live with and within them.
Practical reason is still possible, its scope is just now limited to those areas of life in which
democratic deliberation has a role to play. The question regarding the possibilities of practical
reason are not to be put in terms of experience and subjectivity, but rather in terms of the
linguistic resources necessary for reproduction of the intersubjective lifeworld.
Even in the body of the work, I don't intend to provide a complete and systematic
refutation of Habermas' extensive, influential, and admittedly compelling system. Rather, my aim
is to present some elements of an understanding of practical reason that may escape the sort of
analysis that Habermas' discourse ethic allows. Adorno's attempts to deal with Lukács'
conception of the problem of practical rationality not only develops the concepts of subjectivity,
experience, and society in ways that illuminate the problem itself, but does so in ways that even
his intellectual heirs seem to either miss or ignore. By the end of this project, it may turn out that
the analysis I come to here is consistent with Habermas' more systematic account of the
possibilities and potentials and even limits of practical reason. Yet, the interpretation of Adorno I
offer would be useful nonetheless for thinking through the possibilities for both the “democratic
dam” between system imperatives and the practical reason of the lifeworld, as well as the limits
3

Jürgen Habermas, “Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,” in Habermas and the Public
Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Mass., The MIT Press, 1993), 444.
6

of this conception of practical reason. It offers the possibility, faint as it may be, that practical
reason need not be limited to the building of dams and the carving out of its own space. It can
also offer the means for critique of those systems that Habermas would leave to their own logic.
The Interpretation of Adorno: Key Concepts
Near the end of Adorno's 1962 piece, “Why Still Philosophy?” he describes the following
as a categorical imperative, “Philosophy...must unrestrictedly, without recourse to some mental
refuge, experience: it must do exactly what is avoided by those who refuse to forsake the maxim
4

that every philosophy must finally produce something positive.” In what follows, I attempt to
bring philosophy to experience, and to do so in a way that is, in large part, consistent with
Adorno's work. I advance an interpretation of Adorno's thinking and provide both a descriptive
and normative account of the conditions relating to the creation of contemporary subjects in
liberal, capitalist societies. This reflection on the conditions of subjectivity focuses on the
practical activity of subjects, what some might label agency, the ability to act in relation to one's
self, other selves, objects, and in relation to the very social conditions that form contemporary
subjects. While the standard interpretation of Adorno, as exhibited by his heirs in the Frankfurt
School, Albrecht Wellmer, Jürgen Habermas, and Axel Honneth, takes Adorno as succumbing to
a paradoxical skepticism regarding reason and enlightenment and thus argues that he has nothing
to offer in terms of a practical orientation to the world, the interpretation I offer of Adorno
provides not only a criticism of existing societies, but also shows the sources of resistance left in
the world, and in particular, in the sort of subjects which exist in liberal, capitalist societies.
To get at this conception of experience I develop the notions of self-conscious memory
and imagination. The way I develop this notion of experience is actually quite close to Dewey's
4

Theodor Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords,
ed. and trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 17.
7

development of the notion of experience in Art as Experience. Both he and Adorno are informed
by Hegelian conceptions of reality and the way in which the subject engages with reality.
Memory and imagination are crucial for Adorno's framing of the problem of practical reason
because engagement with the self has itself become a problem in both Adorno's historical world
and our contemporary existence. The individual's suffering is no longer experienced, but merely
felt. This reveals then the paucity of memory and imagination in the contemporary subject. That
the subject is incapable of experiencing even its own suffering prevents both the investigation of
the history of that subject and the thinking through of its possibilities. The subject becomes a
cold, crystalized, parody of its own possibilities. But, I argue, there remains the objective
possibility of experience. Contemporary subjects, though embattled and hemmed in by existing
social structures, still possess the capacity to engage their own memory and imaginations in selfconscious ways which allow for the practical orientation to the world.
To deal with the question of the rationality of experience, I offer three ideas which, taken
together, offer a way forward for thinking about experience that does not reduce the rational
normative potentials which are crucial to critical theory to the conditions for discursive
meaningfulness. These ideas, orientation, interpretation, and expression, first of all, provide a
way of doing philosophy in the face of the seemingly impossibility of a practical engagement
with the world, the seeming impossibility of experience. The conception of orientation, which
consists in an openness toward the object of inquiry. Orientation is implemented by non-identity
thinking, which is explicated and demonstrated in chapter 4. This is the reason for the focus on
the body, and especially the suffering body. This orientation of openness allows for a particular
sort of interpretation, which is the second key idea. The procedure of constellation brings
concepts to bear around an object in such a way that the constellation can be used to interpret

8

some object of social reality, but in doing so, the object's particularity is not superceded by the
categories used to describe it. This notion of interpretation draws on the conception of allegory
put forward by Walter Benjamin and extended by Adorno in both his work of the 20s and his
later work. Finally, through an adequate orientation toward the object, which allows for the
constellative procedure, an interpreter can arrive at an expression of the meaning of a social
phenomenon. The process of interpretation and the form of expression may take the form of
seemingly contradictory propositions. This is the result of two factors. First, the meaningfulness
of social reality cannot be reduced to its discursive form or the validity conditions for a
discursive procedure. This is because there is a sense in which language itself, as an aspect of
the social conditions responsible for the subject's seeming inability to experience, that is its
seeming inability to engage with the world practically, partially conspires against the articulation
of the very conditions that would make experience possible. Second, insofar as the constellative
procedure discovers the contradictions within material reality, an expression that is adequate to
the world and its interpretation, that is, that does not merely affirm what exists, may well itself
take the form of seemingly contradictory propositions, which, when investigated, point at the
contradictions within social reality.
These key ideas, though, also offer a way to understand the contemporary ethical subject,
and hence practical reason at least in some of its particulars. By the end of chapter 3, the
question of the possibility of experience is acute. Chapter 4 addresses this head on, articulating
the problem as Adorno sees it through the lens of the Marxian critique of reification. But, there, I
also articulate experience in the relevant sense as not only possible, but actually present, at least
in moments. The three ideas developed in chapter 5 suggest a way of getting at these sorts of
experience, which when made actual by a subject, allow the subject to make sense of the world,

9

that is, to orient themselves to the world practically. But, at the same time, it does not offer the
subject a decision procedure for this orientation, interpretation, and expression; there is no
absolute rule for determining the appropriateness of the expression. This seeming fault in
Adorno's thinking, however, turns out to be an advantage for the following reasons. First, it
allows room for the individual to connect their rudimentary experiences to the life of the species,
through universal concepts such as humanity and freedom. In particular, our experience of our
own bodily revulsion to human suffering can be redeemed through the conceptual resources
made possible by the social evolution of the species. In this way, the notion of experience at
work here does seek to keep the Kantian ideals of autonomy and a social world in which
perpetual peace is possible in play. Second, the flexibility of this concept of experience allows
for the interpretation of various social phenomena, but in a way that is tied to subject. All
expression is the product of a subject, and it is only by being filtered through the subject's history
that it can be adequately grasped. But, this continual dependence on the subject means that an
interpretation must always be articulated from a standpoint, but not in such a way that one could
merely dismiss the interpretation as a product of subjective bias. In other words, the linking of
the rudimentary subjective experience of say, horror in the face of human suffering, must also be
linked up with the actual social conditions that create the human suffering, including the social
conditions that produced the very subject capable of the judgment which indicts human
suffering. Hence, I focus on both memory and imagination in the process of having an
experience in Adorno's sense. Third, this focus on the subjective undermines the attempt to
reduce the politically or ethically relevant experience to those that can be expressed both
discursively and publicly. As Adorno puts it, “Direct communicability to everyone is not a

10

criterion of truth.”

5

In terms of experience, the validity of experience cannot be reduced either

to its public understanding or its universal acceptance. But, more than this, with these notions of
imagination and memory, alternate forms of expression become available as experience, for
example, art, dreams, and non-linguistic behavior like touching.
The interpretation of Adorno I set forth also offers an alternative way of proceeding to
contemporary modes of interpretation and criticism, even within the critical theory tradition. In
chapter 4, for example, the constellative procedure reveals aspects of the genocide in Rwanda
that would otherwise be lost. In particular, through the discovery of the native/settler distinction
in history, one can see that the seemingly natural is in fact historical, and that it had a causal
function in the genocide, and which continues to play a role in the conflicts in central Africa. Or,
through Adorno's more general reflections on nationalism, one can see both several reasons why
contemporary subjects almost need such delusions, and that the seemingly benign forms of
nationalism that are praised even by most “progressives,” are at root the nativist and racist
extremes they ostensibly reject. In other words, the constellative procedure offers not only a way
into experience and thus a way of understanding the contemporary subject, but also a way of
understanding contemporary social phenomena which are marked by the lack of experience.
Chapter Outline
Through an examination of both Adorno's procedure of examining existing social
conditions and his resulting analysis of subjectivity, my interpretative project turns to the
question of the possibility of a practical orientation to the world. Through an engagement with
the philosophical and social problems of Adorno's era, one can come to a procedure that offers
insight into the social reproduction of subjectivity under contemporary conditions. So, while

5

Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 41.
11

Adorno confronts a problem set forth by Lukács in the early 20th century, namely, the conditions
for the possibility of subjects' practical engagement with a world in which social relationships
have taken on the characteristics of a second nature, the procedure that Adorno advances, that of
constellation, is still relevant in a world, which, if any change can be detected between then and
now, is more mediated by commodities, more reified, and increasingly characterized by the
advance of a crystalized second nature in which a practical orientation to the world appears
nearly impossible. What Adorno is after, then, is a conception of experience in the face of the
seeming elimination of its possibility.
Chapter 2 provides an interpretation of Kant vaguely consistent with Adorno's work in an
attempt to at once provide context for Adorno's project and in particular set the stage for the
problem of experience and the conception of subjectivity. Here I argue that the Kantian project
of redeedming the conception of a self-conscious humanity that constitutes itself as a species, the
ideal of perpetual peace is both useful as an ideal, yet shackled to a problematic conception of
subjectivity. In particular Kant's system projects a concept of reason on to nature which
boomerangs on the subject. The subject is merely contemplative in relation to the progress of the
species as freedom becomes beholden to the law. The Kantian formulation and expression of
this ideal is inadequate to present conditions, yet remains as regulative ideal even after the
tragedies of the 20th century that continue to express themselves in our century.
Chapter 3 offers a brief summary of Adorno's attempt to overcome idealism, specifically,
Kantian idealism from within the tradition itself. I demonstrate this attempt through Adorno's
engagement with Kant's theoretical philosophy, practical philosophy, and political thought. The
very concepts of idealism are used to demonstrate both the necessity of a materialist account of
reality, but also that the self-defeating autism of transcendental idealism requires that theory take

12

seriously the social mediations that both make possible the transcendental approach and in the
final analysis reveal the necessity of rejecting this approach in favor of an immanent critique of
existing social reality. By the end of these reflections, it is clear that the problem of orienting
ourselves practically is a crucial concern.
The fourth chapter brings the project into the twentieth century after a brief interlude with
Hegel and Marx. There I offer the main aspects of my reinterpretation of Adorno. In the face of
the historical failure of the working class as the agent of change, philosophy is forced to become
interpretation. But, this is not a reduction of philosophy to hermenuetics as some in the
phenomenological tradition would make it. This chapter introduces the concept of experience
that is at the heart of Adorno's relevance to the present. I interpret this notion of experience
through challenge posed by Lukács with regard to practical reason. In the face of this problem,
Adorno offers a path opened by Benjamin, the attempt to construct constellations of concepts in
order to reveal the hidden, repressed, and otherwise seemingly unavailable possibilities
embedded in both our concepts themselves, but especially in the particulars that are thought to be
completely described by these concepts. In other words, Adorno gives us one procedure that is
not mere identity thinking. This procedure of constellation construction along with an
understanding of the relationship to the suffering body, then, allows me to develop the
conception of experience as a conception of self-conscious memory and imagination.
In the fifth chapter, I offer key interpretations of and objections to Adorno's way of
proceeding that have held sway from the time shortly after his death to the present. Here, I
introduce a conception of validity that offers a way to orient ourselves to the world, interpret that
world, and finally express that interpretation in a way that reveals the potentials for meaning and
experience in the seemingly inevitable march toward disaster. These concepts are introduced in

13

order to show the limits of the given interpretations of Adorno and a way to proceed once the
idea of experience in Adorno's sense is taken as a plausible way to conceive of possibility of
practical reason.
At the very least, in replying to the objections to Adorno's position, I show the
plausibility of Adorno's approach as well as the promise of his work for advancing thought in the
contemporary world. While Adorno relies on a conception of mimesis, an ability to identify with
another, this ability cannot be disconnected from the self-conscious ability to engage memory
and imagination. It cannot be posited as an absolute ground for a practical orientation to the
world, but is always mediated conceptually. And so, the first criticism, that Adorno requires an
implausible conception of mimesis, one that requires a return to nature, does not go through. The
claim that Adorno undermines his own ground for thinking through a practical orientation to the
world, presented in different ways by Wellmer and Habermas, assumes both that the mode of
expression appropriate the contemporary world could be non-contradictory and that the potential
for such an orientation could be reduced to its linguistic form. Adorno, while seemingly
undermining his critique, in fact does account for language in the relevant way, as a mediating
factor in the formation of subjects and indeed, even shows a tendency counter to the merely
instrumental use of language, namely the expressive use of language, which can be uncovered
through the turning of concepts against their claims to universality and naturalness. Finally, and
connecting these themes, the conception of utopia which Adorno employs does not rely on an
implausible philosophy of history, but instead attempts to redeem the inter-mundane experience
of actual subjects. The notion of experience expresses precisely the necessary connection
between mimesis and conceptual language.

14

Chapter 2 Kant, Freedom, and Progress
In the introductory chapter, I presented an outline of an interpretation of Adorno's
thinking that provides for the possibility of practical reason and a conception of practical
subjectivity. This interpretation seeks to conceptualize experience in such a way as to bring out
both the limits and potentials of the contemporary ethical subject in western societies. In this
chapter, I turn to Kant. I have three interpretative goals in this chapter. I aim to present Kant's
conceptions of practical subjectivity, freedom, and progress. I argue through this interpretation
that this conception of practical subjectivity and the corresponding conception of freedom, while
forming a starting point for Adorno's thinking on the subject, is limited in two ways. First, since
it is the result of a projection of reason on to nature it is not only questionable today in its
metaphysical assumptions about nature, but also results in a limited view of the possibilities of
the subject. Second, it more generally results in a conception of progress that is questionable in
terms of human history since Kant's time, but also undermines Kant's own idea that the
accomplishments of the species are to be brought about through its own efforts.
There are several reasons for pursuing the conception of practical subjectivity in Kant's
works. Kant's work exemplifies the liberal conception of the state and the sort of actors that are
supposed to exist within such a state. It is no surprise that contemporary liberal theorists in the
Rawlsian tradition among others, are heavily indebted to Kant's theoretical insights. Indeed, as a
classical liberal and spokesperson of the Western Enlightenment, Kant lays the theoretical
foundation of the popular self-understanding of Western democracies. The main reason for
confronting Kant at the outset is that the theoretical heart of my project relies on an interpretation
of Adorno, who when addressing subjectivity, freedom, and progress, entwines his own
theoretical apparatus with an interpretation of the Kantian system. And as a side note, the

15

Kantian conception of imagination, which will be dealt with further in the fourth chapter,
provides genuine insights into practical subjectivity, even if he does not note these insights in his
own political writings.
One of the aims of the chapter is to get clear about Kant's conception of practical
subjectivity. Any conception of practical subjectivity is related to the potentials and possibilities
of specific actors in a particular milieu. The most general way to conceive of these possibilities
is to consider the species in relation to its own nature and the non-human natural environment in
which it exists. As such, I begin with a brief explication of Kant's philosophy of history. Kant's
philosophy of history is a conception of progress. This account shows three key characteristics
of Kant's universal history: 1. it is a history of the species, 2. it is speculative, and 3. it is
teleological. The account also presents a puzzle: nature is supposed to guarantee the telos of the
species, the complete development of the human capacities of freedom and reason, while the
goal is also supposed to be brought about through the species' own efforts. Because it offers
insight into this puzzle, but also since any conception of freedom will implicate the potentials
and possibilities of specific actors, I turn to the account of freedom given in the theoretical and
practical philosophy. In particular, this account focuses on the third antinomy of the first
Critique and the analytic of the second Critique. While this account of freedom does not solve
the puzzle, it offers specific insights into the conception of subjectivity at work in Kant's oeuvre.
Freedom is understood as autonomous will where the law is given by reason. More specifically,
freedom is causality, not through nature, but through reason understood as determining the will
on the model of a natural law. The consequences of the account of freedom Kant offers in the
theoretical and practical philosophy for his conception of subjectivity emerges in the political
writings. In particular, political subjects are understood as law followers, either as homo

16

economicus, who at best are free to pursue their economic interests or as citizens who are free
speak and think, but not to act. There are certainly progressive aspects to Kant's conception of
political subjectivity and politics: the defense of the public use of reason, the contention that
international relations ought not to be ruled by what theorists today call realism, the criticism of
imperialism, the idea that individual freedom is conditioned by social structures. But, the
conception of subjectivity that emerges remains limited. In the end, by relying on a conception
of reason as law, and thus nature as law, spontaneity is eliminated in favor of rule-following.
The political subject is conceived as either a self-interested property owner and thus an identical
member of the commonwealth who must follow the law as it is already constituted in the original
legislation that establishes the commonwealth or, at best, an individual who may speak publicly
on matters of politics. The aim of the chapter is largely explanatory. It does not aim to point out
all of the problems with Kant's system, but rather it aims to show how Kant's conception of the
subject is related to his philosophy of history and how the notion of the subject that emerges is
limited by the fact that it depends on the projection of reason onto nature. Kant's conception of
political subjectivity then eliminates the possibility of concrete solidarity and replaces it with a
contemplative stance toward history. Evidence of the progress of the species comes, not from
concerted political action, but rather from the enthusiasm of philosophical spectators. While
Kant in some measure conceives of the constitution of political subjects socially, and as such
represents an advance beyond some earlier liberal thinkers, the social is only conceived
abstractly, and thus Kant's system is inadequate for theorizing adequately the development of the
practical subject and its potential neutralization.
Kant's Philosophy of History
It is clear that Kant's philosophy of history is a universal history. That is, it makes claims

17

about the history of the species as a whole, not merely particular groups or individuals. This is
what Kant means in his elucidation of the concept of universal history in “Idea for a Universal
6

History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose.” Here, Kant explains that the aim of a universal history
is to discover, “in the history of the entire species,” “a steadily advancing but slow development
7

of man's original capacities.” There is also the indication of additional characteristics of Kant's
philosophy of history, specifically the advance of specific natural traits. This aspect will be dealt
with later in the explication of the logic that Kant finds in human history. But it should be clear
8

from this essay as well as from the first supplement of “Toward Perpetual Peace” and the third
section of “On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice”

9

that Kant intends his philosophy of history as a universal history.
In addition to being a universal history, it is a speculative philosophy of history. It seeks
to chart a trend or course of history through discovery of the guiding principles or logic of
history. In the writings on history, Kant posits a logic, and this logic determines an end to which
human history is oriented. It is worthwhile here to examine this goal and the logic that is
supposed to determine these ends and the path to them. Most generally, Kant claims human
history moves toward a state of cosmopolitan right, a state of perpetual peace in which each state
is a republic, and in which the republics deal with one another in such a way as to preserve
peace. The eighth proposition of the universal history essay states: “The history of the human
6

Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” in Political
Writings, ed. H.S. Reiss, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New York: Cambridge UP, 1991), 41
7
Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 41.
8

Immanuel Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor
(New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 331-337.
9
Immanuel Kant, “On the Common Saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in
practice,” in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge UP,
1999), 304-309.
18

race as a whole can be regarded as the realisation of a hidden plan of nature to bring about an
internally—and for this purpose also externally—perfect political constitution as the only
possible state within which all natural capacities of mankind can be developed completely.”

10

The perfect political constitution is not republican in the contemporary sense of that term. It
does not imply democracy, but rather a separation of powers between the legislature and the
executive. The perfect political constitution for Kant is a constitutional monarchy with a
legislature elected by property owning adult males.

11

So, at its most basic the perfect civil

constitution must have a separation of powers and a representative legislative body. Having
briefly explicated the goal of history, I return to the logic by which this end is achieved.
Kant's first claim in defending his account of universal history is that nature is organized
in such a way that individual species must fulfill their purpose. In the first proposition of the
universal history essay, Kant argues from analogy for the claim that just as we assume individual
organs of animals fulfill their purpose, we must assume that the human species is destined to
fulfill its purpose.

12

If we do not assume that there is telos in nature and with it a telos of

humanity, we are left with “the dismal reign of chance” or with regard to humanity specifically,
without the goal of the complete development of humanity's capacities, “nature...would incur the
suspicion of indulging in childish play in the case of man alone.”

13

Of course, the capacities that

are unique to humanity, and central to the Kantian framework are reason and the freedom of the
will. As such, the end that nature intends with regard to the species is one of complete

10

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 50.

11

See, for example, the first definitive article of perpetual peace, Kant, “Toward Perpetual
Peace,” 322-325.
12
Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 42.
13

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 43.
19

expression of this reason and freedom. And, as we have already seen, this end can only be
achieved through certain social and political structures.
These structures and thus the ultimate end of the species living out its potential for reason
and freedom, are brought about, not through reason, but through the play of natural antagonisms.
Kant labels this antagonism, at its most abstract, “unsocial sociability.”

14

Or, in the perpetual

peace essay, the guarantee of perpetual peace is established by “the great artist nature” which lets
“concord arise by means of the discord between human beings even against their will.”

15

Human beings are naturally social, that is, they crave the company of others in order to develop
their individual capacities. But, at the same time, they crave to be alone insofar as the company
of others impedes their desire to “direct everything in accord with their own ideas.”

16

Seeking

status and dominance over others, which can only be established in relation to others, human
beings must surround themselves with others. But, the very discord that emerges in this social
condition prompts human beings to develop themselves. The complete development of natural
capacities “can be fulfilled for mankind only in society.”

17

The account of how nature has designed that the perfect civil state both internally and
externally is to come about follows the same general logic explained above. Through
antagonism individuals and then states are brought to accord. While Kant admits in the sixth
proposition of the universal history essay that the establishment of republics rather than despotic
governments is the most difficult problem for humanity to solve, he once again claims that nature

14

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 44.

15

Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” 331.

16

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 44.

17

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 46.
20

has ensured its development.

18

Two specific manifestations of the general logic of antagonism

promote the ends of nature: war and commerce. While states may not develop internally as
republics, external wars will make the emergence of republics more likely. For, the increasing
devastation wrought by war on the people themselves, the land, as well as the monetary interests
of the people will produce the conditions for the reform of despotic governments into republics.
Additionally, the fact that war is not conducive to trade between nations will encourage even
despotic states, “whenever war threatens to break out anywhere in the world, to prevent it by
mediation, just as if they were in a permanent league for this purpose.”

19

With this short and simplified account of Kant's philosophy of history, three aspects of it
are clear: 1. Kant's philosophy of history is a universal history, a history of the species. 2. It is
speculative, that is, it seeks to discover a logic that operates behind the backs of the actors of
history. 3. It is teleological. Through the logic of antagonism, the ultimate goal of the species,
the complete development of humanity's capacities, freedom and reason, are to be achieved.
And, as a consequence of these three aspects, Kant puts this philosophy of history forward as a
theory of human progress. Even while wars continue and despots continue to reign, nature has
ensured the development of the species by ensuring its advance toward a complete expression of
human capacities. The first and third aspects of Kant's universal history are questionable today
on metaphysical grounds. But, even within the terms of Kant's own systematic philosophy, the
account remains puzzling.
In the third proposition of the universal history essay, Kant states, “Nature has willed that
man should produce entirely by his own initiative everything which goes beyond the mechanical

18

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 46-7.

19

Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” 337.
21

ordering of his animal existence, and that he should not partake of any other happiness or
perfection that that which he has procured for himself without instinct and by his own reason.”

20

This presents a puzzle. Since, for example, “All wars are accordingly so many attempts (not
indeed by the intention of men, but by the intention of nature) to bring about new relations of
states...” will eventually bring about “a state of affairs...which like a civil commonwealth, can
maintain itself automatically,”

21

or more generally, the account of natural antagonisms given

above, there is a guarantee of the development of the social structures according to which human
capacities are to be developed, it is unclear how exactly humanity, “through its own initiative” is
involved at all in actually bringing about this ideal state. To put this simply, if nature guarantees
perpetual peace and the development of human capacities, in what sense can freedom be
consistently attributed to human beings? This warrants a turn to both the speculative and
practical philosophy in which Kant explores the concept of freedom. There is prima facie
evidence that the conception of freedom at work there is consistent with the account given in the
political writings, for, even in the first Critique, Kant asserts that “A constitution providing for
the greatest human freedom according to laws that permit the freedom of each to exist together
with that of others...is at least a necessary idea...”(A316/B373).

22

Freedom in the First Critique
The conception of freedom from the third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason,

23

requires a bit of background. Without going into the historical details of the thesis and

20

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 43.

21

Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” 48.

22

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New
York: Cambridge UP, 1997), 397.
23
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 484-489, 532-546.
22

antithesis,

24

as that would go beyond the scope of the present work, I explicate the concept of

freedom that emerges from the account. First, recall what might be called Kant's dictum, that
“Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (A51/B75).

25

Cognition can only arise from the conjunction of the understanding and the intuition, spontaneity
and receptivity. The first Critique, in answering the skeptic, is concerned with discovering the
conditions for the possibility of experience. The transcendental aesthetic gives us these
conditions from the side of intuition, specifically in the transcendental unity of apperception
through space and time. The transcendental deduction results in the claim “that the categories
contain the grounds of the possibility of all experience in general from the side of the
understanding”(B167).

26

The antinomy represents the extension of reason beyond its bounds in relation to the
synthesis in the understanding provided by the categories. In other words, the antinomy
represents the contradictions to which transcendental realism leads. The assumption that
appearances are things in themselves leads reason to contradict itself. The dynamical
antinomies, the third and fourth, are resolved by showing that the claims of the thesis and
antithesis are not incompatible. This contrasts with the resolution of the mathematical
antinomies, in which both sides are shown to be false. Causality is the relevant category with
regard to freedom. Each “side” of the debate, what Kant calls dogmatism and empiricism, offers
a consistent argument for its position. The third antinomy and its resolution is supposed to

24

See Henry Allison, Kant's Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge UP, 1990) for a
persuasive and detailed account of the arguments of the thesis and antithesis in the third
antinomy.
25
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 193-4.
26

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 265.
23

show that the claim that there must be a first cause outside of the deterministic system of nature,
“an absolute spontaneity of an action” (A448/B476)

27

and the claim that there cannot be a first

cause outside the system of nature since it would make experience incoherent, are compatible.
In simplest terms, the solution asks us to suppose an intelligible world, which, since it is outside
of time, is also not an object of possible experience. Thus, there is the possibility of a causality
of freedom. Kant calls this transcendental freedom, “the faculty of beginning a state from itself,
the causality of which does not in turn stand under another cause determining it in time in
accordance with the law of nature” (A533/B561).

28

In the third antinomy and its solution, we are given the conditions for the possibility of
the experience of morality. We have the experience that some human action “ought not to have
happened,” (A550/B579)

29

and one way to read the solution to this antinomy is as laying out the

conditions for the possibility of this experience. And, whatever these conditions are, they cannot
contradict the conditions of experience spelled out by the critique of speculative reason that the
first Critique is mainly concerned with. The intelligible realm “would have to be thought in
conformity with the empirical character...” (A540/B568).

30

It is helpful to note the sort of

experience Kant is working from here before spelling out exactly what Kant thinks the
preconditions for such experience are.
Kant gives us an example of someone stating a malicious lie as something that ought not
to have happened. Now, we can go through all the possible empirical causes of this person's lie.
The person had a bad upbringing, was under a particular pressure at the time, is naturally bad,
27

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 486.

28

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 533.

29

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 542.

30

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 536.
24

etc. Assuming one can give all “the occasioning causes” (A554/B582)

31

there is an experience

that is not accounted for: “one nonetheless blames the agent” (A555/B584).

32

We experience

agents as blame-worthy, whatever the empirical conditions that lead to the action. This
experience of blame is in turn conditioned by the experience that “the series of conditions that
transpired might not have been..., as though with that act the agent had started a series of
consequences entirely from himself” (A555/B583).

33

In other words, we experience other

agents (and presumably ourselves as well) as free to act differently than they do and therefore
blameworthy for whatever actions they do take.
It is this experience that provides the ground for thinking the intelligible realm in which
reason is free of the determinations of empirical reality, in which “reason is determining but not
determinable” (A556/B584).

34

In simplest terms, reason, in its practical use is negatively free of

the sensible realm and positively, the cause (in some way that we cannot specifically
conceptualize) of appearances. To be sure, the human being as noumena is not the cause in the
sense of the empirical cause, but rather, in the sense of a causality of reason (A547/B575,
A551/B579, A553/B581).

35

We must assume something like this in order to ground the

experience of freedom and blame-worthiness of actors. “This blame is grounded on the law of
reason, which regards reason as a cause that, regardless of all the empirical conditions just
named could have and ought to have determined the conduct of the person to be other than it is”

31

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 544.

32

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 544.

33

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 544.

34

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 545.

35

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 540-541, 542-543.
25

(A555/B585).

36

It should be clear that Kant's concern here is not to show that we are metaphysically free
in the sense addressed in contemporary writing on free will and determinism. While this
problem is present to Kant, he dismisses it as a “physiological” problem (A535/B563) and,
indeed only a real problem if one assumes “the absolute reality of appearance,” on which
assumption the possibility of freedom is eliminated (A536/B564).

37

The solution to the fourth

antinomy regarding whether there is a necessary being, as it is of the same form as the third since
they are both dynamical antinomies also supports this interpretation. “Thus it has been shown
only that the thoroughgoing contingency of all natural things and the all of nature's (empirical)
conditions can very well coexist with the optional presupposition of a necessary, even though
merely intelligible condition,..., hence they can both be true” (A562/B590).

38

In terms of

contemporary writing on the problem of free will and determinism, the most that Kant can be
said to be attempting is, in the words of Allen Wood, to show the compatibility of compatibilism
and incompatibilism.

39

The conception of freedom that emerges here is in some sense minimal. But, it still has
certain characteristics that must be emphasized before I explicate Kant's conception of freedom
36

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 544.

37

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 534-535.

38

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 548.

39

Allen Wood, “Kant's Compatibilism,” in Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy, ed. Allen
Wood, (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1984), 73-101. Even such an erudite thinker and sympathetic
Kant interpreter as Wood, though, like so many interpreters of Kant, remains so tied to the
contemporary framing of the problem of free will that his attempts to shove Kant into the
categories of this debate make Kant's account seem ridiculous. One might show that Wood, in
trying to make Kant's account commensurable with the contemporary debate thus posits
causality according to freedom as a thing in itself, and therefore, falls prey to the exact
problem Kant is attempting to avoid: transcendental realism. This goes beyond the scope of
the present work, however.
26

in the practical writings. First we must note that freedom is a causality, not according to nature,
but according to reason, for, “one can think of causality in only one of two ways: either
according to nature or from freedom” (A532/B560)

40

and as was demonstrated above, (“This

blame is grounded on the law of reason...), that this causality of freedom is a law of reason.
Second, it must be noted that already in the first Critique, the spontaneity which is attributed to
the understanding transcendentally, (see A548/B577 in the third antinomy and the B version of
the transcendental deduction)

41

begins to be limited by the way in which Kant links the

experience of freedom with the experience of morality. “Now that this reason has causality, or
that we can at least represent something of the sort in it, is clear from the imperatives that we
propose as rules to our powers of execution in everything practical” (A547/B575).

42

Kant has

shifted from an experience of morality generally, “that ought not to have happened,” as the
reason why we must presuppose the intelligible realm in which the understanding determines
itself spontaneously to a conception of morality that is a determining law. What Kant thinks we
experience when we experience another individual as blameworthy and thus as someone who
ought to have done otherwise—and recall this is the experience that grounds the assumption of
freedom in the intelligible realm—we necessarily experience as an ought, in the sense of “the
ought that reason pronounces sets a measure and goal, indeed a prohibition and
authorization”(A548/B576).

43

Reason is conceived as determining its effects in analogy with

the way in which a law of nature determines the individual phenomenon that it covers. Two
related and important characteristics of reason emerge in the speculative philosophy: reason is a
40

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 532.

41

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 541 and for the B deduction, 245-266.

42

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 540.

43

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 541.
27

cause, and specifically a cause on the model of a law. Reason determines the actions of rational
beings in the way that the law of gravity determines that an object will fall toward a heavier
body. Freedom then comes to not being determined by nature or natural laws, and positively,
reason causing an action.
The Will in the Practical Philosophy
In the practical philosophy, the will emerges as this causality of reason. Indeed even in
Kant's notes to the first Critique he mentions the will as this aspect of reason.

44

But, before

turning to an account of the will, I return to a claim made in the account of the first Critique's
conception of freedom. I claimed that the thinking with regard to freedom must begin with the
experience of morality, for that is the experience for which Kant must search out the
preconditions. In the analytic of the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant offers this claim again.
Here, however, it is clear that the experience is an experience, not of morality in general through
the experience of the blameworthiness of bad actors, but rather of the moral law. “It is therefore
the moral law, of which we become immediately conscious (as soon as we draw up maxims of
the will for ourselves), that first offers itself to us and, inasmuch as reason presents it as a
determining ground not to be outweighed by any sensible conditions and indeed quite
independent of them, leads directly to the concept of freedom.”

45

Reason gives us the moral law

as soon as we think about the principles underlying our actions. And, here, just as in the first
Critique, Kant offers an example from experience that is supposed to show that the moral law is
the only possible explanation for the experience given, and further that freedom, in the sense of a
44

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 540. Kant comments on the phrase, “Now that this reason has
causality,” that “i.e., is the cause of actuality of its objects. This causality is called the will....”
Kant's handwritten margin notes (E CLXXV, p. 52; 23:50).
45
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary
Gregor (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 163.
28

causality outside of the sensible realm, must be supposed to make sense of the moral law. It is
useful to give this example in some detail, for it shows the sort of experience Kant has in mind
and Adorno finds these examples useful in advancing his critique of Kant's conception of
freedom. Kant asks the reader to consider someone who claims that they have some irresistible
inclination. He then asks us to imagine whether this person would continue to think this
inclination irresistible if he or she were threatened directly with the gallows. He seems to think
at this point the person would admit her inclination was quite resistible. He then asks us to
contrast this with the same threat, that of the gallows, only in this case the person is asked to bear
false witness. The person is supposed to at least hesitate to a greater degree in the case of the lie
than in the case of acting on inclination. The experience of hesitation seems to be what Kant is
attempting to explain the conditions for the possibility of. This hesitation is supposed to show
that we do indeed have an experience of the moral law.
Indeed, this seems to be the basis of Kant's criticism of moral sense theorists in the
Analytic of the second Critique. In this criticism, Kant claims that only way to consider
someone blameworthy is to represent her as already morally good. There could be no moral
sense without a prior experience of the moral law. “The concept of morality and duty would
therefore have to precede any regard for this satisfaction and cannot be derived from it.”

46

The

idea of the moral law emerges more clearly in the second Critique than it did in the first as
ground for the concept of freedom. “Now, however, the concept of an empirically unconditioned
causality is indeed theoretically empty (without any intuition appropriate to it) but it is
nevertheless possible and refers to an undermined object; in place of that, however, the concept

46

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 171.
29

is given significance in the moral law and consequently in its practical reference...”

47

Without

the moral law, there would be no need to assume the causality of freedom, which is the causality
of reason. As Kant puts it in the preface to the second Critique, “the moral law is the ratio
cognoscendi of freedom.”

48

I have only examined one side of the mutual dependence of the moral law and freedom.
The moral law is also conditioned metaphysically by freedom. That is, “freedom is indeed the
ratio essendi of the moral law....[W]ere there no freedom, the moral law would not be
encountered at all in ourselves”

49

In getting clear on this point, it is worthwhile to deal now

with the roll that the will plays in Kant's moral philosophy. In part III of the Groundwork, Kant
notes, “If, therefore, freedom of the will is presupposed, morality together with its principle
follows from it by mere analysis of the concept.” 50 From the assumption of freedom, the
assumption of the will as self determining, we get the idea of the moral law. For the will to be
free, it must determine itself, and to determine itself, it must be the ability to produce effects
according to rules. This is why for Kant any creature with “a will, that is, the ability to
determine their causality by the representation of rules,” is governed by the moral law.

51

Of

course, reason, specifically in its practical aspect is the determining ground of this will, the
source of the rules through which the will can be self-determining. The fact that the will is
autonomous “is inseparably connected with, and indeed identical with, consciousness of freedom

47

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 185.

48

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 140.

49

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 140.

50

Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in Practical Philosophy, ed. and
trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 95.
51
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 165.
30

of the will....”

52

The will, insofar as it is free, is autonomous. It gives itself the law according to

which, in its connection to practical reason, actions ought to occur. So, freedom grounds the
moral law in that the only law available without freedom, the law of nature, provides no room for
an ought.
With this brief survey of the fate of freedom in Kant's speculative and practical thought in
hand, I can hazard some preliminary conclusions about the fate of freedom in the Kantian system
as well as the implications of this conception of freedom for practical subjectivity in Kant.
Freedom, in its most minimal sense for Kant is the freedom from the causal laws of nature.
Freedom understood negatively has to be understood outside of appearance and thus outside the
manifold of intuition, that is, outside space and time. But, freedom must still be understood on
the model of causal laws of nature. This is clear in both the first and second Critiques. In the
first, freedom only emerges in relation to the question of whether there is a first cause outside of
the system of nature. From the experience that something ought not to be, we are warranted in
assuming something outside of natural causality. But the ought, and this is much clearer in the
second Critique, is at the very least dependent on the moral law, if not the experience itself of the
moral law. Freedom conceived positively is determination according to laws, not given
externally by nature, but via the will, given by reason. Thus, Kant offers the notion of the
autonomous will. The will is only free insofar as it is determined, not by nature, but by reason.
But the will must be determined, at the very least on the model of the determination of particular
physical events by the relevant general physical laws. As Kant's examples demonstrate, the
individual agent is thus free in that they can be held morally blameworthy for their actions,

52

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 173.
31

whatever the psychological or social causes of the actions.

53

The postulates offer a way to connect these implications to Kant's philosophy of history
explicated earlier. After analyzing the Stoic and Epicurean attempts to combine the concepts of
virtue and happiness in the concept of the highest good, Kant comes to the conclusion that the
combination virtue and happiness are not analytically related, but can only be thought
synthetically. The moral will must have the highest good as its object. That is, if the highest
good cannot be attained, then morality itself is not possible. In the antinomy of practical reason,
Kant gives us the possibilities for combining virtue and happiness in the concept of the highest
good: “either the desire for happiness must be the motive to maxims of virtue or the maxim of
virtue must be the efficient cause of happiness.”

54

Kant claims to have already shown the

former impossible in the Analytic. The desire for individual happiness cannot ground morality.
The second possibility is also impossible, for the only efficient cause of happiness is the ability
to understand and manipulate the laws of nature for one's own ends. Kant claims the solution to
this antinomy is the same as that of the antinomy of pure reason. In one sense he is right, in
another wrong. In that the solution involves conceiving of an action as both intelligible and
sensible, rather than taking appearances as things in themselves, the solution matches that of the
first Critique. But, the solution here takes the side of the antithesis rather than holding out the
possibility that both propositions are true when looked at from the sensible or intelligible worlds.
The antithesis is correct, so long as one posits our existence as both noumenal and phenomenal
beings. That is, if it is possible to think ourselves outside the order of nature, we can think
ourselves as deserving happiness in proportion to virtue. That is, we can think of a causality that
53

In addition to the earlier mentioned examples, see the Critical Elucidation of the Analytic of
Pure Practical Reason, in particular, Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 218-220.
54
Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 231.
32

determines happiness according to virtue.
In the Postulates, Kant conceptualizes the particulars of this causality as a sufficient cause
for happiness and a system of causality that makes virtue a sufficient cause for happiness. First,
the immortality of the soul must be supposed. For sensible creatures can never be completely
moral. And, as morality is the first aspect of the highest good, the ability to make progress
toward complete conformity with the moral law must be supposed. “Since it is nevertheless
required as practically necessary, it can only be found in an endless progress toward that
complete conformity...”

55

This endless progress requires the continuing existence of the

personality of the individual, thus, the immortality of the soul. The other aspect of this causality
is the existence of God, an entity that is at least as great as its effect, namely, the proportion of
happiness with morality. The immortality of the soul allows for the complete development of the
person into a moral being worthy of happiness, the potential cause of happiness. God, as a being
greater than the highest good, anchors the system of causality in which worthiness of happiness,
complete conformity with the moral law, causes happiness.

56

The conception of the moral law,

derived from the experience of morality, since it requires as its object the highest good, the
doling out of happiness in proportion to virtue, also requires the postulates of God and
immortality.
Kant offers a third postulate, which has already been thematized, freedom. Freedom is
causality in the intelligible realm, and “is only postulated by the moral law and for the sake of

55

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 238.

56

This is not to say that Kant considers this a theological proof for the existence of God.
Practical reason must assume God in its use.
33

it.”

57

This captures the first side of the relationship between the moral law and freedom which

was summarized earlier: the experience of the moral law grounds the assumption of freedom.
The postulates taken together offer a picture of an idealized moral agent. This moral agent must
be thought of as free, infinitely perfectible, and as receiving happiness in proportion to her virtue.
Kant's account of the moral agent offers a goal to which the individual can proceed. There is
thus a structural similarity between Kant's conception of the moral agent and his conception of
the political agent. In both cases, Kant offers a telos, which then gives a standard to which actual
agents and conditions can be compared. The system of morality and the system of politics, if
they are to be feasibly thought, must suppose both ideal social conditions and ideal agency
within those social conditions. An idealized agent is legitimized through a goal and its advance
toward that goal. Kant's notion of a regulative principle captures this aspect of his thinking. The
proposition that nature tends toward perpetual peace must be thinkable in order to preserve the
duty to pursue perpetual peace. The proposition that a morally virtuous life is possible and that it
will give an individual happiness must be thinkable in order to preserve the duty to follow the
moral law. Ought implies can. The progressive conception of both nature and the soul's advance
toward perfection keeps the duty to pursue these goals in place.
While understanding the natural progress of the species as a regulative principle does not
solve the puzzle regarding freedom and nature in the political writings, it offers a reason as to
why Kant thinks it is no puzzle at all. Kant's account of the natural unsocial sociability of human
beings gives us reason to hope. That is, it provides the possibility that even if we assume human
beings are merely creatures of inclination, that is, beings who cannot act freely, the species can
advance to a condition of civil right and perpetual peace. The consequences remain troubling,

57

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 247.
34

but not in the way originally asserted in the form of the puzzle about the species being
determined by nature to maximize its reason and freedom. As was noted above in the account
given of the theoretical and practical philosophy, freedom is law following on the model of
natural laws. Freedom comes to the autonomous will, where the law is given by reason. Kant
supposes that he has captured his conception of freedom as beginning something of itself, that is
freedom as spontaneity, through the idea that reason is supposed to give the law to itself. But,
there is an aspect of spontaneity lost in this account. And this lack of spontaneity is a crucial
characteristic of Kant's conception of practical subjectivity, for it limits the scope of action of
political actors to law following, pursuit of economic self-interest, and, at best, thinking and
speaking against the state. These aspects emerge clearly in the political writings, in particular,
Perpetual Peace, “An answer to the question: What is enlightenment,”

58

59

and the Rechtslehre .

While Kant attempts to defend a conception of reason and freedom that are opposed to nature (as
the natural inclination to pursue self-interest at the cost of morality) his reliance on a conception
of freedom that remains modeled on nature undermines this account. I will spell out these three
aspects of practical subjectivity as they are presented in the political writings and then return to
the puzzle regarding progress and the history of the species.
Practical Subjectivity in the Political Writings
In the Rechtslehre, Kant offers a three pronged view of the individual as a political
subject in the civil condition. Kant addresses the political agent as a human being, as a subject,
and as a citizen. In large part these three aspects of the political actor are the self-interested actor

58

Immanuel Kant, “An answer to the question: What is enlightenment,” in Practical Philosophy,
ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 11-22.
59
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy, ed. and trans. Mary
Gregor (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999).
35

of classical economics. This is especially true in how Kant conceives of the human being and
the citizen, the first and third aspects. The human being is entitled to freedom, that is the pursuit
of happiness in the way that she sees fit so long as it does not interfere with others' pursuit of the
same. The subject is entitled to equality before the law, that is equal treatment with regard to
criminal and civil law. The citizen, insofar as he is independent of others, is entitled to
participate in the legislation that founds the state. I will deal with the first and third aspects first
and then turn back to the second.
The first aspect of political subjectivity, that of what Kant calls the human being, is the
self-interested rational actor of classical economics. Self-interest not only offers the rationale for
entering a civil condition, but it is also therefore to be the state's role to protect the pursuit of
self-interest in the civil condition. Since there is no right to property in the state of nature, one's
possessions are constantly under threat and thus so is one's pursuit of happiness. In order to
protect the right to property and thus the ability to pursue happiness people band together into a
civil commonwealth. The state's role is then to protect this property and the right of people to
pursue their various conceptions of the good. Here, the only sense in which the individuals are
conceived as political subjects is in terms of their motivation for entering a civil state. The
pursuit of one's happiness, since it does not concern the welfare of the citizenry as a whole or the
welfare of the state in relation to other states, is not political. Politics is founded on self-interest
and the political subject is here conceived as a rationally self-interested actor. This conception of
the human being also emerges in the account of the road to a condition of international right in
“Perpetual Peace,” “Universal History,” and “Theory and Practice.” In each, the citizens of
republics will resist external wars because it goes against their interest in preserving and creating
wealth and thus their pursuit of the good. This conception of the human being is the human

36

being as a being of inclination, that is, a being as an extension of nature. Since the civil
condition is supposed to allow the progress of the species through its own efforts, the puzzle
regarding progress emerges again.
The third aspect, the political actor as citizen, concerns the conditions for participation in
the legislation through which the state is governed. Once again, property and rational selfinterest form the heart of Kant's conception of the political actor. Only those individuals who are
independent of need, and thus independent of nature are in a position to affect the legislative
process (through voting for representatives). Kant puts this most simply in the Rechtslehre:
“The only qualification for being a citizen is being fit to vote. But being fit to vote presupposes
the independence of someone who, as one of the people, wants to be not just a part of the
commonwealth but also a member of it, that is, a part of the commonwealth acting from his own
60
choice in community with others....”
But, an individual cannot freely choose if she is dependent on others for her livelihood. She
must be able to serve the commonwealth solely. To be free in this sense is to own property, even
if that is only the property of a shop and a craft. If an individual has only her own labor to sell,
she is not fit to vote because she is not free of natural necessity and thus cannot serve the
commonwealth.
“He who has the right to vote in this legislation [the original contract—added by me] is called a
citizen (citoyen, i.e., citizen of a state, not of a town, bourgeois). The quality requisite to this,
apart from the natural one (of not being a child or a woman), is only that of being one's own
master (sui iuris) hence having some property (and any art, craft, fine art, or science can be
counted as property) that supports him—that is, if he must acquire from others in order to live, he
does so only by alienating what is his and not by giving others permission to make use of his
powers—and hence [the requisite quality is] that, in the strict sense of the word, he serves no one
61
other than the commonwealth.”
The requirement of property ownership for political participation superficially makes sense given
60

Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 458.

61

Kant, “On the common saying: That may be correct in theory, but it is of no use in practice,”
297.
37

the context in which freedom and reason are contrasted with nature. That is, in the practical
philosophy, we saw that freedom is conceived of outside of the determination of natural laws and
thus outside of nature. But this is puzzling given that the possession of property in the state of
nature depends on violence, that is, the extension of nature. In other words, the precondition for
participation in the construction of the social contract, the freedom from the necessity of nature
requires that one is able to use violence to keep what one has, to act like a creature of nature. In
the Rechtslehre, Kant asks, “how far does authorization to take possession of a piece of land
extend? As far as the capacity for controlling it extends, that is, as far as whoever wants to
appropriate it can defend it—as if the land were to say, if you cannot protect me you cannot
command me.”

62

The condition for participation in the founding of the commonwealth is the

ability to dominate others.
The second aspect of the individual as political agent is Kant's notion of equal subjects
before the law. That is, as a subject to the law, one cannot receive special treatment because of
one's social position. Here, the agent is conceived of as a law follower and the laws are
conceived as universally applicable to those within the civil condition (besides the sovereign).
One should note the examples that Kant offers in the practical philosophy regarding the
experience of morality. The experience of morality is presented in those examples as the
experience that the agent that violates the law is punishable. Kant clearly presents this
conception of political subjectivity as obedience in his analysis of rebellion or revolution.
A constitution could never authorize the people to overthrow the sovereign, for that
would contradict the idea of a sovereign as the ultimate arbiter. “For a people to be authorized to
resist, there would have to be a public law permitting it to resist, that is, the highest legislation

62

Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 416.
38

would have to contain a provision that it is not the highest and that makes the people, as subject,
by one and the same judgment sovereign over him to whom it is subject. This is selfcontradictory...”

63

Indeed, Kant goes even further in limiting the actions a people may take in

relation to the state, eliminating even the rightfulness of sedition:
“Therefore a people cannot offer any resistance to the legislative head of a state which
would be consistent with right, since a rightful condition is possible only by submission to its
general legislative will. There is, therefore, no right to sedition (seditio), still less to rebellion
(rebellio), and least of all is there a right against the head of a state as an individual person (the
monarch), to attack his person or even his life (monarchomachismus sub specie tyrannicidii) on
64
the pretext that he has abused his authority (tyrannis).”
Since the condition of right is possible only by submission and obedience to the law, there can be
no organized resistance to the rightful condition in which political subjects exist. This
conception of the political subject as obedient is also present in “What is Enlightenment?” Kant
characterizes Frederick the Great approvingly in the following terms, “Only one ruler in the
world says: 'Argue as much as you will about whatever you will, but obey!'”

65

Kant does defend a certain conception of resistance to the state, and with it a conception
of the ultimate freedom of subjects within the civil condition. Following the passages in which
Kant rejects the right to rebellion, he also notes that a lack of assent on the part of the
representatives of the people is healthy.
“Nevertheless, no active resistance (by the people combining at will; to coerce the government to
take a certain course of action, and so itself performing an act of executive authority) is
permitted, but only negative resistance, that is, a refusal of the people (in parliament) to accede to
every demand the government puts forth as necessary for administering the state. Indeed, if
these demands were always complied with, this would be a sure sign that the people is corrupt,
that its representatives can be bought, that the head of government is ruling despotically through

63

Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 463.

64

Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 463.

65

Kant, “An answer to the question: What is enlightenment,” 18.
39

his minister, and that the minister himself is betraying the people.”

66

So, while collective action on the part of the people in order to coerce the government is strictly
prohibited by right, there remains, as one might expect given that the hallmark of republican
government for Kant is the separation of powers, the possibility of the lack of assent on the part
of the people so long as it is expressed through their representatives in the legislative body. The
right to hold back assent to the sovereign's wishes corresponds to the way in which Kant
conceives of the public freedom to argue. That is, insofar as individuals have the freedom from
nature mentioned above, they ought to be allowed to publicly express their opinions, even about
the private bodies who pay them (whether government or church or army) and to which they owe
their obedience as private individuals. “But insofar as this part of the machine also regards
himself as a member of a whole commonwealth, even of the society of citizens of the world...he
can certainly argue without thereby harming the affairs assigned him in part as a passive
member.”

67

Such a conception of the political subject is consistent with the principle of

publicity explicated in “Perpetual Peace” as well as the duty to obey the sovereign established in
the Rechtslehre. In both cases, it is emphasized that the individual has the right to the public use
of reason, but that the individual must obey. As Kant succinctly puts it in a reply to a review by
Bouterwek in the appendix of the Rechtslehre, “The command, 'Obey the authority that has
power over you' does not inquire how it came to have this power (in order to perhaps undermine
it); for the authority which already exists, under which you live, is already in possession of
legislative authority, and though you can indeed reason publicly about its legislation, you cannot

66

Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 465.

67

Kant, “An answer to the question: What is enlightenment?” 18.
40

set yourself up as an opposing legislator.”

68

In speaking publicly, the political subject must

never go so far as to suggest that the whole government itself ought to be replaced. For to do so
would frustrate the end to which the maxim of such an act is oriented.

69

One way to understand the problems of Kant's conception of practical subjectivity is by
understanding Kant as trying to bridge the gap between is and ought. As we saw, Kant
alternately claims that the experience of the blameworthiness of actors and the experience of the
moral law itself must be explained through the critique of practical reason. But, practical reason
cannot contradict the insights of the critique of pure reason, namely the claim that the world of
appearances is determined according to natural laws. Kant's solution is to offer up either two
worlds or two aspects through which the human being is to be understood. But, they must
remain related through the concept of law. The regulative ideal of freedom grounds the ought of
the moral law. The regulative ideal is how nature must be thought in order to make sense of our
experiences. But, at the point at which it is merely posited in order to justify the thinkability of
morality, reason is merely projected on to nature. While throughout the explication above, there
is a sense in which freedom is really conceived of as nature—as a law and as dependent on
domination, Kant simultaneously projects reason onto nature. Kant is asking how we can
explain our experience of the moral law without contradiction. In the third antinomy, the
solution revolves around the principle of non-contradiction. From a more general standpoint, the
intelligible and sensible worlds must be made commensurable. The moral law itself, as well as
the principle of publicity ask whether the maxim of one's actions lead to a contradiction. The
law of morality and thus the rule following subject that emerges in Kant's thought as a normative

68

Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, 505-6.

69

Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” 347-350.
41

ideal emerges from the law of non-contradiction. The bridge between the is and the ought is to
be found in this principle. Neither nature nor reason can exist as contradictory.
This explains what is happening in the puzzle presented above regarding the philosophy
of history. Nature must be thought in terms commensurable with reason, and thus must contain
and operate according to the same principles, in particular, at the very least, the principle of noncontradiction. Nature must be thought as leading to the ends proper to human beings in order to
not contradict the experience of the moral law. Whenever Kant allows that species is capable of
unity, or even collective action, it is provided only by nature, but nature conceived as an
extension of reason as law-following. Take, for example, those passages in which Kant
conceptualizes the legislature of the commonwealth and the checks of its members against the
executive. In each case, Kant conceives of the public body as already constituted, as if by
nature, which is to say, by law, which is a product of reason. In other words, it is not through the
actions of individuals acting in concert that the realization of right, whether nationally or
internationally, is to be achieved, but through the machinations of laws, whether those of reason
or those of freedom, operating behind the backs of individuals. Kant cannot conceive of
solidarity in any meaningfully active sense. In the idea of the self-interested subject, we are left
with an extension of nature, the continuation of the domination present in the pre-political realm.
When the political agent is conceived of as free from these sorts of inclinations, as a member of
the commonwealth, we are left with the operation of the laws of freedom, reason, the moral law,
all derived from the law of non-contradiction.
Before leaving this examination of Kant and his conception of the practical subject, and
turning to Adorno's criticisms it is worthwhile to look at Kant's last explication of his conception
of progress and the relationship of the French Revolution to this idea of progress. Kant's

42

conceptions of history and practical subjectivity in “The Conflict of the Faculties” confirm the
findings here. In this piece, Kant searches for some experience that will ground the claim that
there is some moral tendency within the human being and thus the claim that the species is
progressing. This experience is not that of the participants in the French Revolution, as Kant
makes clear, but the experience of the spectators of the revolution. “It is simply the mode of
thinking of the spectators which reveals itself publicly in this game of great revolutions, and
manifests such a universal yet disinterested sympathy for the players on one side against those on
the other, even at the risk that this partiality could become very disadvantageous for them if
discovered.”

70

Because “the revolution of a gifted people...may succeed or miscarry”

71

the

experience must be found at the level of thought, not at the level of mere empirical events
themselves or even the experience of those participating. This experience of enthusiasm and
with it the willingness to speak about this experience publicly is evidence of the moral
disposition of humanity, and thus a ground for thinking that the species can progress. In a
fashion similar to that in the example of the potential false witness faced with the gallows, Kant
has begun with an experience and attempted to derive its preconditions. In this case the
precondition of the experience of enthusiasm in the spectators of the French Revolution is
conditioned by the moral disposition of human beings. And this moral disposition of human
beings provides the grounds for assuming progress (at least as an ideal), but ultimately also
ruling out the right of people to revolt. An experience that Kant finds “cannot be grafted onto

70

Immanuel Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen
Wood, trans. Mary Gregor and Robert Anchor (New York: Cambridge UP, 1996), 301-302.
Emphasis mine.
71
Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” 302.
43

self-interest,”

72

while spontaneous in the relevant sense, is transformed in the course of the

earlier political and moral writings into a basis for law, and thus spontaneity's futility. Kant
attempts to avoid this consequence by claiming that the moral disposition which forms the
precondition of the enthusiasm “is already itself progress insofar as its capacity is sufficient for
the present.”

73

But, this confirms the position spelled out above that Kant's conception of

political subjectivity is largely passive, or at best, linked to political organization only through
expression in speech, speech that may be uttered only if it may be uttered publicly without
contradiction.
This account of Kant's conception of subjectivity and progress is crucial for the unfolding
of Adorno's social theory in chapter 3. In Kant's philosophy of history and his account of the
practical subject, the species is united only through a projection of reason onto nature. This is in
effect an elimination of solidarity. Even at the point where Kant notes active solidarity, e.g., in
the French Revolution, it is banned and replaced by the enthusiasm of the spectators. The
potential in the French Revolution is turned from a fellow feeling into a contemplative stance
toward history. The external possibility of freedom, insofar as it is supposed to be evidence for
the possibility of progress, is reduced to an internal attitude and ultimately reason itself in the
form of the moral law. It is no surprise, given the time-period of Kant's writing and his defense
of liberalism and traditional morality that his system cannot conceptualize the social nature of
practical subjectivity except abstractly. That is, he only conceptualizes the sociality of human
beings in ideal terms as the general dependence of the progress of the species on the existence of
particular social institutions, and as such cannot conceptualize solidarity. The conception of the

72

Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” 303.

73

Kant, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” 302.
44

species at work in the philosophy of history, the entity which is supposed to progress, does so
only through the movement of natural laws, which as we saw is a projection of reason onto
nature. While Kant attempts to preserve the species and individuals as agents who make their
own history, the overall implication of the system is to hand their fate over to laws, whether
natural or rational, which operate behind the backs of agents and thus to eliminate spontaneity as
a practical category. In other words, there is no space for the species to constitute itself through
it's own efforts, except contemplatively, but, as Adorno argues, this constitution of the species as
an entity is the precondition for progress toward the development of the individual freedom that
is at the heart of Kant's politics and conception of the practical subject. I turn now to Adorno's
criticisms of the Kantian system. There it becomes clear why Kant's conception of both the
practical subject and progress are inadequate to contemporary conditions.

45

Chapter 3 Adorno's Critique of Kant's Conception of Freedom and Progress
Chapter 2 concludes that Kant's conception of practical subjectivity is limited both
because it is the result of a projection of reason onto nature, and conceives of the subject in terms
that are too individualistic to take account of the social factors that underlie the development of
the subject both in the individual's existence and in the existence of the species. This problem
becomes clear in two additional concepts, freedom and progress. In this chapter, then, I
articulate elements of Adorno's thinking about practical reason as a critique of Kant's conception
of freedom and progress.
The conception of freedom that emerges from the explication of Kant in chapter 2 is
characterized by its inability to deal with social conditions, whether the relationship between
human beings and nature or the relationships between human beings. This is a result of the
insistence that freedom is reason, and reason is the following of rules. This emerges most clearly
in Kant's philosophy of history, but also in his moral and political philosophy. But, as was clear
in the last chapter, the problem of sociality cannot be disconnected from Kant's speculative work.
In what follows, I will set the stage for the explication of Adorno's conception of ethical
subjectivity as it relates to the limits of Kant's conception of freedom and history. In this context,
I show the need for a theory that takes seriously the social constitution of individuality and the
relationship between history and freedom in order to come to terms with subjectivity and politics
in the contemporary world. Though these remarks are preliminary in that they certainly are not a
complete account of Adorno's engagement with Kant, several of the threads of Adorno's
criticisms of Kant will be picked up later in the work.
This chapter begins with Adorno's assessment of the Kantian speculative system as
spelled out in the first Critique and then connects these insights to Adorno's engagement with

46

Kant's practical philosophy, and finally with Kant's philosophy of history. In explicating this
interpretation of Kant, several key ideas from Adorno's social theory are introduced. In
particular, Adorno, in interpreting Kant's speculative system, dialectically approaches some
perennial problems in the history of philosophy: genesis and validity, form and matter, subject
and object, and the universal and particular. Adorno's approach, by revealing the contradictions
and aporias in Kant's transcendental idealism, points the way toward an historically conscious,
materialist social theory; in thoroughly investigating the ahistorical, idealist, and asocial aspects
of Kant's transcendental idealism, Adorno finds transcendental idealism itself provides
justification for his own attempts to advance a materialist social theory that is mindful of the
historical genesis and alterations of its concepts. In Adorno's analysis, this justification emerges
from the necessary remainder within Kant' system. The elements which Kant cannot synthesize
within his system in actually form the undergirding for the system itself.
As a starting point it is worthwhile to note that for Adorno, Kant is the culmination of the
aporias of Western Enlightenment. It is through Kant's Critiques that the conceptual form of the
problems of the Enlightenment can be viewed. In particular, Kant advances an ambiguous
concept of reason and with it, a paradoxical concept of the subject. Horkheimer and Adorno
represent this aspect of Kant in simple, dualistic terms in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.
“Reason as the transcendental, supraindividual self contains the idea of a free coexistence in
which human beings organize themselves to form the universal subject and resolve the conflict
between pure and empirical reason in the conscious solidarity of the whole. The whole
represents the idea of a true universality, utopia. At the same time, however, reason is the agency
of calculative thought, which arranges the world for the purposes of self-preservation and
recognizes no function other than that of working on the object as mere sense material in order to
74
make it the material of subjugation.”
Kant defends a reason through which both utopia and disaster are possible. The transcendental
74

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. Gunzelin Schmid
Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2007), 65.
47

subject, as the bearer of a reason that grounds the kingdom of ends, preserves the possibility of a
reconciled humanity. And as regulative ideal, as was shown in the last chapter, the possibility of
utopia as perpetual peace is the social implication of this conception of the subject. At the same
time, reason is the ground of science through which everything, including people, as empirical
subjects, are to be investigated and controlled in order to perpetuate that which exists. These two
poles of Kant's thinking are relevant then, not merely as a historical curiosity, but as the
paradigm of the species failure to actualize its rational potential because of its actualization of a
disparate form of rationality.
I. Adorno's Engagement with Kant's Speculative Philosophy
The dualistic approach spelled out at the beginning of the chapter is indeed too
simplistic. To get a hold on the relevance of Kant's entire philosophical system to Adorno's
social theory, it is crucial to begin with Kant's speculative philosophy. When Adorno interprets
or explicates an earlier philosophical theory, he does so with an eye toward understanding the
present state of affairs. Even in interpreting Aristotle, Adorno focuses on the problems of genesis
and validity and mediation between subject and object while showing the relevance of these
problems for, among other things, understanding ideology's role in present societies.

75

In

advancing an interpretation of Kant, both in his lectures and his writings, Adorno takes a similar
approach. In Adorno's view, one cannot understand Kant's philosophical system without
understanding its historical genesis. This is not to say that Adorno reduces the question of the
validity of Kant's system to a question of its historical origins. Rather, the validity and genesis of
Kant's system are intertwined:
“just as it is impossible to to see the categories other than in relation to their origin and to history,
75

Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund
Jephcott (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2002).
48

it is equally impossible simply to derive concepts like space, time and the categories from history
76
and to reduce them to social phenomenon.”
Adorno's explication of the Transcendental Aesthetic in his lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason is a characteristic example of this intertwining of genesis and validity, subject and object,
matter and form and as such provides an excellent way to understand both Adorno's engagement
with Kant and key ideas from his social theory. In what follows, I trace Adorno's theorization
about time and space as the forms of pure intuition as a critique of Kant's idealism. It is through
this critique of Kant's idealism that Adorno justifies his own materialism.
In explicating Adorno's critique of Kant's idealism, it is important to stress that this is
indeed a critique of Kant and not mere criticism. As Adorno puts it, “the challenge is not to be
against idealism, but to rise above it.”

77

More specifically, Adorno seeks to understand Kant by

understanding the irresolvable contradictions, and in these contradictions find the truth not only
about Kant's thinking, but the world in which Kant's thinking emerged and the relevance of the
concepts of Kant's thought for understanding the contemporary world. In Adorno's lectures on
the first Critique he explains that his procedure “places far greater emphasis on the ruptures, the
immanent antinomies in his thinking, than upon its harmonious, synthetic form. This is because
these ruptures can almost be said to constitute the Kantian philosophy, for the reason that they
reveal the innermost core of his thinking.”

78

Adorno regards the first Critique as an attempt to defend the validity of the natural

76

Theodor Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2002), 168.
77
Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 136.
78

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 178.
49

sciences through the analysis of the knowing subject.

79

In Kant's thinking the world of

appearances must be ruled by laws or be turned over to chaos. But, in order to move beyond
Hume's critique of the concepts of those natural laws, Kant must turn to the conditions for the
possibility of the experience of a coherent world; the knowing subject and objective natural laws
are two sides of the same coin. The thing, in its most abstract formulation then, is “the law of its
possible appearances.”

80

What Hume calls regularities and thus mere conventions are re-

conceptualized as the laws by which the understanding operates (through the categories) on the
objects of intuition. But, in order to ground the natural sciences, the experiences of the objects of
knowledge of those sciences must be shown to be valid. Kant attempts to show that those
experiences are valid by showing that the subjective experiences that we do have are dependent
on the assumption of a unified consciousness, that the “I think” potentially accompanies all our
representations. Kant's rejection of Hume's dismissal of the concept of a self then depends on the
experience of the world as coherent. So, the objectivity of the natural sciences and its laws is
dependent on the concept of a unified and unifying subject, a subject which must be experiencing
the coherence of the world.
81

But since the objects of intuition are mere appearances , the connection with the thing
in-itself is lost, or nearly so. That is, in attempting to save the laws of science from skepticism,
and thus asserting the objects of experience as the objects of knowledge, Kant leaves us
disconnected from the object. The assertion of the unified subject of knowledge requires the
experience of the coherence of the world and thus asserts the world of appearance as the real

79

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 94.

80

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 94. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 262-3. B163.

81

See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 263. B164.
50

world. Notwithstanding the amorphous causal influence the thing in-itself is supposed to have
over appearances, the price of the coherence of the world of experience is that it is reduced to the
subjective. Adorno asserts then, that knowledge becomes merely tautology:
“We assert that all our knowledge ultimately refers to the thing in itself, since the appearances
that I constitute, that I organize, are ultimately caused by the thing in itself. But since the process
of cognition and its content are radically separated from this absolutely unknowable things-inthemselves by a Χωρισμός, a rupture, in the Platonic sense, the idea of a thing-in-itself adds
nothing to my actual knowledge. This means that what I recognize as an object is just that, an
object in the sense that we have all discussed at length; it is not a thing-in-itself, and always
remains something constituted by a subject. Thus the problem of knowledge as a single
tautology survives intact: to oversimplify grossly, it is the problem that at bottom the subject can
82
only know itself.”
Adorno demonstrates this claim, that in Kant's idealism, knowledge is reduced to a
tautology, that it is merely the subject coming to know the laws of its own thinking, through an
interpretation of specific aspects of the first Critique. In particular, I will focus on his critique of
the Transcendental Aesthetic. In the transcendental aesthetic, Kant attempts to establish time
and space as the pure forms of intuition, that is, as the necessary preconditions of our sensibility.
As such, space and time as pure forms of intuition cannot be concepts, as that would require the
spontaneity of the understanding. The forms of intuition allow us to have intuitions and only
then can the understanding work on actual content. Kant's own introduction to the Aesthetic
claims as much(A22/B36).

83

As such this is the standard interpretation of the Aesthetic and so

far uncontroversial.
Adorno, though, presents the arguments that Kant offers for the status of space and time
as the pure form of intuition. And, in doing so Adorno attempts to establish that the Aesthetic is
actually dependent on the Logic, that Kant attempts to “master through mere concepts all that

82

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 129.

83

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 157.
51

cannot be mastered by concepts.”

84

In what Adorno calls the third argument of the Aesthetic,

Kant makes parallel arguments for the a priori nature of time and space. Kant argues that time
and space are different from concepts in that one can remove all appearance from them and they
remain, while one cannot remove time or space from appearances and be left with the
appearance. With regard to space, Kant supports his claim in the following way: “One can never
represent that there is no space, although one can very well think that there are no objects to be
encountered in it”(A24/B38-9).

85

And with regard to time: “In regard to appearances in general,

one cannot remove time, though one can very well take the appearances away from
time”(A31/B46).

86

In these sections, Kant offers parallel reductio ad absurdum arguments in

further support of the claim that time and space are non-conceptual, a priori conditions for the
possibility of intuitions. For, if space is to inferred from experience, geometrical truths are only
contingent (A24/B39).

87

And, if time is taken to be inferred from experience, the truth that

different times cannot be simultaneous is similarly contingent (A31/B47).

88

Before drawing out

the implications of these arguments, Adorno explains that Kant really has established that time
and space are not concepts like other concepts. That is,
“Space does not relate to individual spaces like an abstract concept to the individual items of
which it is composed....Now the concept of space is not formed by saying that the space of Hesse
and the space of North-Rhine Westphalia and space of Schleswig-Holstein all have something in
common, which is that they are a 'space'; and that the most general quality that they have in
common forms the concept of 'space'. Instead—and this explains why space is a representation,
a pure intuition, and not a concept—you form the general representation of space by adding
together all these existing spaces so that they fit together....Obviously, the same holds good for
84

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 234.

85

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 158.

86

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 162.

87

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 158.

88

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 162.
52

time, which as a continuum is the sum of all particular instances of time and not the conceptual
89
unity of all the different times.”
But, Adorno demonstrates that though Kant has shown that time and space are a priori and not
concepts, this is one side of an antinomy that Kant does not notice. Most abstractly, Adorno
asks, if space and time “are neither concepts nor intuitions, what are they?”

90

More concretely,

Adorno demonstrates the problematic nature of the idea that space and time are pure forms of
intuition by applying the Kantian insights from the Antinomy of Pure Reason

91

to the fourth

thesis of the Transcendental Aesthetic.
The fourth thesis of the Transcendental Aesthetic claims
Space is represented as an infinite given magnitude. Now one must, to be sure, think of
every concept as a representation that is contained in an infinite set of different possible
representations (as their common mark), which thus contains these under itself; but no concept,
as such, can be thought as if it contained an infinite set of representations within itself.
Nevertheless space is so thought (for all the parts of space, even to infinity, are simultaneous).
Therefore the original representation of space is an a priori intuition, not a concept” (A25/B3992
40).
To this, Adorno responds that the critique of the antinomies must apply here as well. For, this
part of the Transcendental Dialectic shows “the concept of an infinitude of a given magnitude” is
an impossibility.

93

In other words, if one tries to imagine an infinite space, one cannot do so.

One will always be left with a bounded space that is somehow supposed to represent an infinite
space. On the other hand, if one tries to think of space as bounded, one can always think of a
larger space. Hence the application of the resolution of the first antinomy to the problem of the
89

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 229-30.

90

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 230.

91

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 459-550.

92

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 175. The A and B editions differ in their numbering of these
theses.
93
Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 231.
53

aesthetic. Now Kant takes this as evidence, not that time and space as he thinks of them are
unable to be thought, but merely that they are not concepts. Adorno acknowledges that Kant
might claim at this point that since we are speaking of the pure forms of intuition and since the
antinomy refers to concepts, the antinomy is not a problem. But, we remain in the realm of
representations here. They must be thought. As such, we are left with the same problem in
trying to think the forms of intuition that we have when trying to resolve the first antinomy:
thought has gone beyond its limits. A form of the first antinomy reasserts itself in the aesthetic
and so Adorno can show that while every content is mediated by form, that is every particular is
mediated by a concept, particulars cannot be reduced to their concept without remainder. That is,
unless Kant wishes to reduce all knowledge to the subject, that is, remove any semblance of an
object beyond the understanding from the realm of knowledge, and thus revert to the rationalism
he is attempting to overcome, he must keep alive the idea that the object has some existence
independent of the subject's understanding and to which the understanding must correspond if it
is to truly have knowledge of the object. And, indeed, Kant seems to recognize this problem
when in the schematism of the concepts of the pure understanding, he attempts to show how the
understanding is supposed to apply concepts to particulars non-arbitrarily. In Adorno's reading,
the problem comes to how the objective is supposed to be present in knowledge that Kant has
already reduced to “the space of the subjective.”

94

In the schematism of pure concepts of the understanding, Kant seeks to find “a third
thing, which must stand in homogeneity with the category on the one hand and the appearance
on the other, and makes possible the application of the former to the latter” (A138/B177).

94

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 131.

95

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 272.
54

95

Kant begins the schematism chapter “In all subsumptions of an object under a concept the
representations of the former must be homogeneous with the latter, i.e., the concept must contain
that which is represented in the object that is to be subsumed under it, for that is just what is
meant by the expression, 'an object is contained under a concept.'”

96

In dividing the concept and

object so strongly into receptivity and spontaneity, Kant is left with the question as to what
connects them, what makes the conceptual knowledge of objects more than a merely subjective
projection on to the object. Adorno frames the problem this way:
“This requirement that there should be homogeneity, that is, resemblance between object and
concept, implies that Kant is aware that the separation between these two sources of receptivity
and spontaneity is somehow arbitrary. You can explain this quite simply to yourselves when you
realize that for Kant an immediate given, that is, what you appear simply to receive from the
outside, contains not just the forms of intuition, but also thought in a certain sense—namely
synthesis: the union of disparate elements into a definite intuition. Conversely, if a concept is to
be true and not just something arbitrary it must necessarily be influenced by the nature of the
object to which it refers. Thanks to the total separation of spontaneity and receptivity in the
architecture of the work this element of a relation between these two 'pillars of knowledge', as
97
Kant calls them, is utterly lost sight of—whereupon Kant then tries to retrieve it.”
That is, rather than merely consistently defending knowledge as a tautology, Kant keeps
the object of knowledge in play as well. “And in this problem what survives within the sphere of
immanent consciousness that Kant has marked out for us is, after all, the idea of synthesis, the
non-tautological, that is, the idea that knowledge must know more than itself; it must do more
than simply reflect the form of knowledge in general.”

98

Knowledge is more than identity

between concept and object—more than the self-knowing subject's reflection on itself. So, Kant
attempts to understand not just the subject, that is, he is not merely a rationalist, but also reflects
on how form and matter, subject and object are supposed to come together. As seen above,
96

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 271. (A137/B176).

97

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 132.

98

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 130.
55

Adorno interprets the Schematism of pure concepts of the understanding in book II of the
Transcendental Analytic as Kant's mediation of the Logic and the Aesthetic, or in Adorno's terms,
as the mediation between form and content, subject and object. That is, Kant certainly is an
advance beyond both the empiricist and rationalist traditions in that he at once recognizes the
problem that all rationalistic knowledge is merely tautological, that is, as Adorno puts it, merely
the subject's knowledge of itself, but also attempts to overcome Hume's rejection of knowledge
of matters of fact that was based on the discovery that all knowledge is mediated by the subject.
With Hume we are left with no way to connect our impressions with anything outside ourselves
as well as no way to connect relations of ideas to matters of fact and in the Leibniz/Wolff
tradition we are left with merely “laws of thought” and dogmatic assertions about the state of the
world outside thought. Both traditions result in idealism. And, fundamentally, all idealism is
identity thinking. Adorno shows, not that Kant's system is incoherent, but rather that Kant's
system demonstrates that identity thinking is dependent on non-identity. The non-identical, the
thing-in-itself is excluded from knowledge in order to keep the system of knowledge coherent.
Knowledge as the taking of matter/content under a universal/form, is dependent on a remainder
which Adorno calls the non-identical. Only by excluding the object as it is in-itself, that is
outside the subject, from the realm of knowledge can Kant keep his defense of knowledge
consistent.
This knowledge of the world that Kant defends is, in the end, dependent on a nonconceptual residue. And since this residue is not able to be taken under a concept, it is an
example of the non-identical that forms the basis of identity thinking in which the knowledge of
appearances is possible. But, this residue is not a given, some unprocessed sense data. “The
supposed basic facts of consciousness are something other than mere facts of consciousness. In

56

the dimension of pleasure and displeasure they are invaded by a physical moment.”

99

Adorno

interprets Hume as the last gasp of this bodily element in epistemology. “In fact it is a last
epistemological quiver of the somatic element, before that element is totally expelled. It is the
somatic element's survival, in knowledge, as the unrest that makes knowledge move, the
unassuaged unrest that reproduces itself in the movement of knowledge. ...The smallest trace of
senseless suffering in the experienced world (der erfahrenen Welt) belies all the identity
philosophy that would talk us out of that experience (Erfahrung).

100

“The physical moment tells

our knowledge that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different.”

101

This moment

of physical aversion to suffering cannot be asserted as a mere given, as some unmediated reality
which forms the ground of Adorno's materialism. The experience of the physical aversion to
suffering cannot expressed outside our interaction with the world of other individuals and objects
and that is why materialism must be attained to through the critique of idealism and not merely
through an assertion of the truth of the natural sciences or an epistemological foundationalism
that begins with some such truth. Adorno's formulation of the question of the schematism of the
pure concepts of the understanding is this problem of synthesis, how truth “adapts itself to to the
nature of what it is classifying.”

102

In concluding his discussion of the schematism, Adorno argues that Kant's epistemology
is more than a mere historical curiosity. For Kant's defense of knowledge reflects science's
actual practice. Adorno's analysis of Kant's schematism of the pure concept of the understanding
99

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202.

100

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203. Translation altered. See Theodor Adorno, Negativ
Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, B. 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1973), 202-3.
101
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203.
102

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 131.
57

attempts to demonstrate that Kant, in offering over objectivity to the subject, ironically engages
in an epistemological reification that is structurally similar to, and may in fact anticipate the
reification that capitalist relations of production as well as the contemporary natural sciences
produce in reality. Reality is shown to be the same thing as the subject. “For the sciences can be
said to have achieved dominance over the world only when they renounced the attempt to gain
knowledge of anything apart from what is accessible to human organization and human
shaping.”

103

But there is a progressive aspect to the epistemology as well. It asserts the

autonomy of the subject, a subject that can freely engage with the world around it. “...human
beings are the subjects of their world and not just the objects. Kant's critique of reason would
not be conceivable in the absence of this idea of the social and political emancipation of the
human subject that has ceased to act out of submissive role towards the world and instead has
discovered in the freedom and autonomy of the subject the principle which alone enables the
world to be known.”

104

So, while Kant's analysis of the knowing subject represents the natural

sciences' projection of subjective control on to the objects of their investigation and thus a retreat
from the object itself, it also represents an implementation of the autonomy and freedom of the
subject, and in fact, Adorno argues, this very projection of control is dependent on this notion of
freedom. But, this implementation is itself ideological in that we are not truly masters of the
world we live in. So, while we do make the world, the world is a product of the subject in the
sense that there is nothing left of the world that is not mediated by human thought, labor, or
language, we are for that very reason prisoners to a world that is out of our control, “we are

103
104

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 135.
Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 135.
58

captives of our own selves.”

105

And here is where Adorno overcomes idealism rather than

merely abstractly negating it. It is in the materialist interpretation of idealist themes that the truth
of the contemporary world is to be found. While we as a species control the world as we have
classified it, this makes us a prisoner to both that world so classified and the more specific
products of those classifications. In other words, this classificatory process is intertwined with
the advance of the forces of production that results in the alienation of human beings from the
very world that has become their product and thus alienation from themselves as free beings.
Adorno's engagement with Kant's conceptions of freedom and autonomy calls for a more
explicit engagement with Kant's practical thought. In chapter 2, I showed that freedom becomes
the projection of the rules of thought on to nature. Adorno's engagement goes further.
Adorno summarizes his analysis of the Kantian notion of will in the following.
Kant's thought experiments, which are designed to show that we have an experience of
morality
“show a moment, which, as it answers to the vague experience (Erfahrung), may be named the
addendum (Hinzutretende). The subject's decisions do not roll off in a causal chain; what occurs
is a jolt, rather. In traditional philosophy, this factual addendum in which consciousness
externalizes itself is again interpreted as nothing but consciousness....But the insistence on this
was rationalistically narrowed. In that sense Kant—in keeping with his conception of practical
reason as truly 'pure,' that is sovereign in relation to any material—kept clinging to the school
overthrown by his criticism of theoretical reason. Consciousness, rational insight, is not simply
the same thing as a free act. We cannot flatly equate it with the will. Yet this is precisely what
106
happens in Kant's thinking.”
In other words, there is an experience not captured by the Kantian conception of reason. One
aspect of this experience is freedom. In addition, the experience of—for lack of a better word—
empathy is missing. This empathy, in particular, is not available prior to the constitution of

105
106

Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 137.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 226-7. Translation altered. See Adorno, Negativ Dialektik, 226.
59

human beings as subjects. But, it is through an interpretation of the Kantian system that this
non-identical, the particular, is made available to reason. The experience itself is not yet an
epistemology, or an ethics, but, mediated by reason it begins to get us to the point of developing
an historically conscious, materialist understanding of practical subjectivity. But a full
examination of this addendum must wait until chapter 4. First, Adorno's understanding of Kant's
practical philosophy must be outlined.
II. Adorno, Kant and Freedom
The linking of the transcendental subject with freedom and the empirical subject with
determinism was spelled out under the category of freedom in the last chapter. To briefly
summarize: In Kant's philosophical system, one task of theoretical reason is to show the
possibility of freedom, that there is no contradiction between the doctrine of nature and the
doctrine of freedom. “Freedom in this signification is a pure transcendental idea, which, first,
contains nothing borrowed from experience, and second, the object of which also cannot be
given determinately in any experience...”

107

Both the transcendental subject and the object of

freedom, the moral law—to resort to the spatial metaphor that even Kant cannot avoid—lie
within the mundus intelligibilis and thus outside the causal determinations of the world of
appearance. The first section of this chapter showed that this free subject lies at the heart of the
unity of the knowing subject and thus knowledge itself. But, in turning knowledge into the rules
of thought, nature is turned into rules and the subject as part of nature, is turned into a function of
these rules. Freedom is turned into non-freedom, a second nature. In the first section of the
chapter, a brief version of Adorno's criticism of Kant's theoretical philosophy is presented. In
this presentation, Kant's philosophy at once advances thought with the assertion of human

107

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 533. (A533/B561).
60

autonomy, but retracts this advance even in the realm of knowledge through the reification of the
subject as the projection of knowledge of the world. While the last section was forced to lean
more heavily on Adorno's lectures since his writings do not usually address the theoretical
component of Kant's system, the present section takes its cue from Negative Dialectics, in which
Adorno spends a section dealing with the Kant's practical thought.
Adorno's criticism of Kant's conception of freedom begins from the commonplace
criticism that his philosophical system is contradictory in that it ascribes characteristics to that
which is claimed to be inaccessible to the senses. Kant vacillates between the attempt to
preserve freedom by assigning it to a realm beyond appearance and the attempt to attribute
freedom to actually living individuals. And, it is this vacillation that prompts and justifies
Adorno's insertion of a social element into his interpretation and criticism of Kant's philosophy.
As a preparation for the discussion that follows, it is worthwhile to note Adorno's
characterization of his introduction of social elements into his discussion of the Kantian
reflections on freedom. This mirrors Adorno's justification for bringing questions of genesis into
the discussion of Kant's theoretical philosophy.
“Such sociological reflections are not introduced into Kant's apriorism classificatorily, from the
outside. The constant recurrence of terms with a social content in the Groundwork and in the
Critique of Practical Reason may be incompatible with the aprioristic intent, but without this
kind of metabasis, the question of the moral law's compatibility with empirical man would
108
reduce Kant to silence.”
In a reversal characteristic of Adorno's thought, the empirical subject and its determinations are
at the heart of the transcendental subject, and the basis for this claim is to be found in Kant's own
explication of his moral system. Through these determinations, not only do the problems of
Kant's philosophy come to the surface, but also, one can begin to grasp the social aspect of

108

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 257.
61

Adorno's thought.
If Adorno's critical engagement with Kant is accurate, social factors determine the
character of the transcendental subject. This has two important implications. First, the society
which surrounds the subject will, to a large degree, determine the potential for freedom for that
subject. Second, if we assume, as Adorno does, that “the subject's interest in freedom will not
dwindle,”

109

then a society that manifests objective unfreedom will be marked by a merely

internal notion of freedom. Though Kantian thought aims at freedom, its identification with the
internal will and a particular conception of rationality produces a repressive notion of freedom
that corresponds to the bourgeoisie society in which it emerged. Specifically, and as was shown
in the second chapter, freedom is marked by Kant's framing of the issue in terms of laws of
reason.
As an aside, but to be clear, Adorno resists the claim that the base, the economy, causally
determines the conceptual reflections on freedom particular to the society in which they both
exist. Kant's notion of reason and freedom are reflections of the labor processes emerging at the
time, “not in the sense that they have been brought forth causally by the labor process, but in the
sense that, when consciousness reflects upon itself, it necessarily arrives at a concept of
rationality that corresponds to the rationality of the labor process.”

110

Presumably,

consciousness need not reflect upon itself at all, and whether it does or not is not determined by
the labor process that, even so, corresponds to the result of such reflection. For now, we can
leave the relationship between the notion of rationality and the labor process to the side. Instead,
what follows will focus on Adorno's claim that Kant, though rightly asking about the possibility

109
110

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 223.
Adorno, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 172.
62

of freedom, misunderstands not only the question, but his own answer. This presentation
prepares the ground for a discussion of Adorno's critical engagement with Kant's reflections on
Kant's philosophy of history, which is a theory of progress, as well as makes inroads into both
the question of Adorno's method and the nature of the social aspect of Adorno's critical theory.
It is clear that Adorno thinks that Kant, in positing the transcendental subject as the
ground of freedom, misunderstands his own solution to the problem of freedom and
determinism. Taking seriously the positivist dismissal of the free-will determinism problem as a
pseudo-problem, Adorno argues that Kant himself misses the significance of his own reflections.
The positivist, and presumably in this case, Moritz Schlick's rejection of a transcendental
realm

111

is absorbed by Adorno's engagement with Kant. In the first section on freedom in

Negative Dialectics, Adorno brings forth the positivist and now familiar criticism of Kantian
ethics as dependent on a realm of non-existent objects. The only plausible explanation of the
transcendental subject's possession of will and rationality comes from “countless moments of
external—notably social—reality...; if the concept of rationality of will means anything at all, it
must refer” to the invasion of “the decisions designated by the words 'will' and 'freedom'” by
external social reality.

112

But, Adorno rejects the positivist dismissal of the problem as a

pseudo-problem that can be resolved by defining words appropriately. While the claim about
the transcendental realm's metaphysical implausibility lays the foundation for the positivist
dismissal of the problem, it also leads to another possibility. The resulting inability to answer the
question of whether an individual's particular action is free or determined leads Adorno to the
claim that we cannot merely ask the question about an isolated empirical subject. The subject
111

Moritz Schlick, Problems of Ethics, trans. David Rynin (New York, Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1939).
112
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 213.
63

understood merely through the lens of behaviorism does not allow us to “tell what may be
predicated about freedom, or about its opposite;”

113

we must introduce a social element into

any discussion of the problem. Thus, the positivists too misunderstand the problem. In addition
to leaving the subject as conceived in behaviorist psychology, that is, totally isolated, their
dismissal does not make sense of either our intellectual need to ask the question, nor our “naïve
sense of acting arbitrarily.”

114

Insofar as Kant at least begins with the experience of morality

(whether of the moral law itself or the experience that someone could have acted differently), the
positivist dismissal of the problem is a regression. A proper understanding of the question, then,
must expand the definitions of the terms involved so that they “will include the impossibility of
nailing them down, as well as the compulsion to conceive them.”

115

In other words, while Kant

misconceives the problem and his own solution, we cannot give up on the question nor the
Kantian formulation of it. “For this interweaving of freedom and necessity and the resolution of
the contradictions implicit in it is not just a problem of cognition, but the very real problem that
confronts every philosophical account of so-called morality.”

116

What then is the character of this social element that must be introduced in order to make
sense of the free will-determinism problem? Initially, to bring social elements into the question
is to reflect on the historical nature of the question itself. The question, “Are human beings
free?” is not asked in most historical epochs. Kant is aware of this fact. The concept of freedom
is not always available. But, Adorno presses this claim further. It is not merely the concept of

113
114
115

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 213.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 213.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 212. Translation altered.

116

Theodor Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, ed. Thomas Schroder, trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Stanford, California: Stanford UP, 2002), 35.
64

freedom that is not available in certain periods of history, but freedom itself. The question
cannot emerge, because its reality is not a possibility.
“Before the formation of the individual in the modern sense, which to Kant was a matter
of course—in the sense meaning not simply the biological human being, but the one constituted
as a unit by its own self-reflection, the Hegelian 'self-consciousness'—it is an anachronism to
117
talk of freedom, whether as a reality or as a challenge.”
This could be considered Adorno's application of Marx's claim that “Mankind thus inevitably
sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve...”

118

to the problem of freedom. The challenge

of freedom does not emerge without the possibility of its realization. And, Kant, who attempts to
posit freedom outside of historical and social contingency, cannot very well conceive of it as
dependent on the social and historical circumstances that affect human self-consciousness.
That Kant does not conceive of freedom historically taints his conception of it. The
concept of freedom and the possibility of its realization are historically dependent on the
emergence of reason, a reason that instantiates the reality principle and thus the repression of
psychological drives. The external compulsion of the reality principle sets the stage for the
internal compulsion of reason, which then offers the possibility of freedom.
“Without the unity of and the compulsion of reason, nothing similar to freedom would have ever
come to mind, much less come into being; this is documented in philosophy. There is no
available model of freedom save one: that consciousness, as it intervenes in the total social
constitution, will through that constitution intervene in the complexion of the individual. This
notion is not utterly chimerical, because consciousness is a ramification of the energy of drives; it
is part impulse itself, and also a moment of that which it intervenes in. If there were not that
affinity which Kant so furiously denies, neither would there be the the idea of freedom, for
119
whose sake he denies the affinity.”
But, reason, and thus freedom, remains tied to the psychological drives that Kant wishes to
117

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 218.

118

Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy,” in Early
Writings, ed. Quintin Hoare, (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 426.
119
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 265.
65

remove from the will and thus from freedom. In his isolation of reason from contingency in the
form of the autonomous will that can only have the moral law as its object, Kant, though
attempting to save freedom from the laws of nature, ignores or misses, in addition to freedom's
historical contingency, the dependence of freedom on a particular organization of psychological
drives. The social element, introduced here as the dependence of freedom on a particular
historical constitution of reason, also includes the social organization of these psychological
drives.
In fact, it is this constitution of reason and thus freedom that provides Kant with basis for
the claim that “Practical freedom can be proved through experience.”

120

For, he must take for

granted that “we have a capacity to overcome impressions on our sensuous faculty of desire by
representations of that which is useful or injurious in a more remote way.”

121

Interpreting this

formulation in terms of psychoanalytic theory, Adorno notes that Kant is in essence formulating
the reality principle. He notes, “here we find it clearly stated that the so-called empirical proof
of our freedom is provided by the fact that reason is given us as the faculty by means of which
we can test reality.”

122

Here, I want to emphasize two things. First, the nature of social relationships conditions
the emergence of reason. And, more specifically, the nature of the relationship between reason
and the division of labor in Adorno's thought returns as a question once again. For, the division
of labor, as external compulsion, seems to be the condition for the possibility of internal
compulsion, and thus the emergence of freedom. Second, we begin to see why, in Adorno's

120

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 675. A802/B830.

121

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 675. A802/B830.

122

Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 87.
66

analysis, Kant's conception of freedom is in fact repressive. In basing the notion of freedom on
the identification of reason with the will “without a remainder,”

123

not only is Kant left unable

to theorize the historical and social preconditions for freedom, but, in addition, eliminates the
source of resistance to society, a consciousness that remains partly tied to psychological drives.
Later, we will see the link in Adorno between this conception of consciousness and the
imagination. For now, we must examine this notion of consciousness in relation to freedom.
The essence of Adorno's critique of Kant is that freedom is, despite Kant's attempts to
maintain its relationship to the universal and the necessary, a social concept: “There is no
available model of freedom save one: that consciousness, as it intervenes in the total social
constitution, will through that constitution intervene in the complexion of the individual.”
Adorno's model of freedom has the Hegelian self-consciousness making a real difference in the
constitution of social reality, which in turn, makes a real difference in the constitution of that
same self-consciousness. Kant's failure to understand freedom results from his inability or
unwillingness to theorize the relationship between social elements and the individual
consciousness, their mutual influence on one another.
To put this criticism another way, the antinomy that Kant points out with regard to
freedom is in fact an internalized, idealist version of a real experience of contradiction. Not only
does Kant's conception of freedom result in an internalized and idealist notion of freedom, but
also, in isolating freedom and the will from the social elements that condition it, Kant eliminates
the connection between practical philosophy and experience.
“The contradiction of freedom and determinism is not, as Kant's understanding of the Critiques
would have it, a contradiction between two theoretical positions, dogmatism and skepticism; it is
a contradiction in the subjects' way to experience themselves, as now free, now unfree. Under
the aspect of freedom, they are unidentical with themselves because the subject is not a subject
123

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 228.
67

yet—and its not yet being a subject is due precisely to its instauration as a subject. The self is
124
what is inhuman.”
The contradiction is not merely a contradiction in thought, a result of reason exceeding its proper
boundaries, but rather, a real experience of contradiction between the possibilities of society and
its actual constitution. In eviscerating this experience and the possibility of consciousness
intervening in the social constitution, Kant's notion of freedom becomes repressive. In chapter
two, I established freedom as law following and thus as eliminating spontaneity. Adorno's
criticism goes a step further. Freedom becomes merely “the internalized principle of society,”

125

adherence to the law, whether the law of commodity exchange or laws put forth explicitly in
statute. The laws of freedom are in fact the laws of unfreedom insofar as the laws of reason only
emerge from repressive social structures, in particular the commodity form and the division of
labor.
III. Freedom and Philosophy of History
Adorno's insights into the Kantian notion of freedom can be applied to his speculative
philosophy of history through two key assumptions: the rationally self-interested individual and
the idea of a humanity fated by nature to progress toward the perfection of the species. Recall
that Kant makes the first assumption in the Definitive Articles of Perpetual Peace, specifically,
with regard to National Right. The first definitive article claims that republics form the basis of
of an international order based on right. Because war will harm their interests in self-preservation
as well as the accumulation of wealth, the citizens of republics will be loathe to endorse calls to
war, and because of their ability to influence policy through legislation their interests will affect
policy decisions made by the republican state. With regard to the second assumption, recall that
124

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 299.

125

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 241.
68

Kant, in the First Supplement's reflections on international right, argues that nations will act
similarly to the way they would act if they belonged to an international federation oriented to the
maintenance and creation of peace between nations. Because of their desire to promote
international trade and war's harmful influence on trade, nations will attempt to prevent war even
between other nations. This argument, however, is embedded in the teleological view of history
of the First Supplement and the other writings on history. Nature has designed the species and
its environment such that in acting out its self-interests, the species, even with its individuals' evil
natures, conspires to bring about perpetual peace. Part 1. extends the analysis of the Kantian
notion of freedom to an analysis of the constitution of subjectivity within the republic. Part 2., in
part through Adorno's analysis of the notion of progress, brings this analysis to bear on the ideal
of perpetual peace.
A. Freedom as Internalized Repression
The first assumption, that of the rationally self-interested citizenry of republics, warrants
a return to the claim that freedom in the Kantian system becomes merely “the internalized
principle of society.” The individual is moral in the Kantian schema insofar as she/he acts in
accordance with (and is motivated by duty to) the moral law. The moral law, in addition, is
merely given by reason.
“Consciousness of this fundamental law [of pure practical reason] may be called a fact of reason
because one cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason....However, in order to avoid
misinterpretation in regarding this law as given, it must be noted carefully that it is not an
empirical fact but the sole fact of pure reason, which, by it, announces itself as originally law
126
giving.”
But, the only evidence we have for the givenness of the moral law derives from the empirical
existence of obligation, the experience that individuals could act other than they did, and that

126

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 164-165.
69

they ought to have. Recall, for example, the example of the gallows. The experience of
hesitation in the question regarding the bearing of false witness is supposed to be evidence for
the existence of the moral law. In other words, without the empirical fact that people do live
according to certain obligations, we would have no reason to think the moral law exists at all.
The only possible source of necessitation or obligation [Nötigung] is an empirical psychological
fact. To even understand the motivation for saving freedom, for investigating morality
philosophically, we must acknowledge the empirical existence of feelings of obligation; “For that
there must be such a philosophy is clear of itself from the common idea of duty and of moral
laws.”

127

In addition, Kant is clearly at pains to demonstrate that, though respect for the moral

law emerges from a feeling, that is, an empirical element, its genesis is in the moral law itself and
thus does not result in an heteronomous will.
“The consciousness of a free submission to the will of the law, yet as combined with an
unavoidable constraint put on all inclinations though only by one's own reason, is respect for the
law. The law that demands this respect and also inspires it is, as one sees, none other than the
moral law (for no other excludes all inclinations from immediate influence on the will). An
action that is objectively practical in accordance with this law, with the exclusion of every
determining ground of inclination, is called duty, which because of this exclusion, contains in its
concept practical necessitation [Nötigung], that is, determination to actions however reluctantly
they may be done. The feeling that arises from consciousness of this necessitation [Nötigung] is
not pathological, as would be a feeling produced by an object of the senses, but practical only,
128
that is, through a preceding (objective) determination of the will and causality of reason.”
So, again, the existence of the moral law is in fact reliant upon empirical conditions of a certain
sort, namely, the development of conscience, which, as argued above, is both an historical and
social achievement. From within Kant's system, this represents a contradiction. From without,
again from the standpoint of psychoanalysis, we gain a fuller explanation of the source of
conscience, as well as the beginning of an understanding of Adorno's use of the notion of
127

Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 44.

128

Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 204-5.
70

internalization.
The rational, self-interested individual of Kant's philosophy of history and the Kantian
schema as a whole is, according to Adorno, both true and untrue. This model of the individual is
true in two senses. First, this individual represents the internalized norms of society, and thus,
this truly is the picture that individuals have of themselves. Second, individuals are indeed
separated from society and its administration; they truly are isolated individuals only concerned
with their own interests. But, this model of individuality is also false. First, it offers a model of
the individual and its freedom as isolated and unencumbered by its relationship to the society in
which it exists; it “tends to insulate them from the encompassing contexts and thereby
strengthens their flattering confidence in the subject's autarky.”

129

Second, the notion of

freedom of the individual becomes merely internal; in the face of the individual's inability to
change the society in which it exists, the individual—and idealism of Kant's sort is an apologia
for this conception—comes to think of her freedom as a state of mind, as merely the freedom of
thought or conscience.
Through Adorno's discussion of the Kantian conception of the self-interested individual,
the limits of the theoretical apparatus of Kant's philosophy of history become clearer. Instead of
republics merely providing a precondition for the establishment of perpetual peace, the
constitution of the individual in the contemporary republic serves to legitimize the use of force
and the continuance of both psychological and legal repression.
“Social stress on freedom as existent coalesces with undiminished repression, and
psychologically with coercive traits. Kantian ethics, antagonistic in itself, has these traits in
common with a criminological practice in which the dogmatic doctrine of free will is coupled
with the urge to punish harshly, irrespective of empirical conditions. All the concepts whereby
the Critique of Practical Reason proposes, in honor of freedom, to fill the chasm between the
Imperative and mankind—law, constraint, respect, duty—all of these are repressive. A causality
129

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 219.
71

produced by freedom corrupts freedom into obedience.”

130

In terms of actual individuals, the societal norms that are internalized consist in notions of duty,
law, and respect. The psychological observation noted above, that we have a conscience and do
act out of something like obligation is clearly true. But, Adorno notes, it is in his defense of this
fact, in psychoanalytic terms, his defense of the current constitution of the super-ego, that Kant
“is an authentic spokesman of bourgeois society and its discipline, above all, of the bourgeois
work discipline.”

131

Recall again the example from the first Critique. The experience of

morality is supposed to emerge even if one can explain all “the occasioning causes”
(A554/B582).

132

There is an experience that is not accounted for: “one nonetheless blames the

agent” (A555/B584).

133

This is not to say that Kant is to blame for the contemporary

constitution of individuality, but rather that material reality mirrors the theoretical repression of
Kant's system. For, “Anyone who traces de-formation to metaphysical processes rather than the
conditions of material production is a purveyor of ideologies.”

134

But, at the same time, we can

trace the failure of Kant's system as a plausible description of contemporary political subjectivity
and the contemporary republic and thus as a plausible description of the relation between reason
and politics to his metaphysical claims, which all the same, can be understood only in relation to
the material reality in which they emerged.
The picture of the subject and its relation to society then begins to emerge. The
experience of contradiction, while elevated into a metaphysical contradiction in Kant's notion of
130

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 232.

131

Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 86.

132

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 544.

133

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 544.

134

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 284.
72

freedom, is real and the result of real societal contradictions. In Adorno's account of the social
system and the contemporary ethical subject, he worries that this experience of contradiction is
itself threatened with elimination. Through the internalization of the contradictory society's
notion of subjectivity, the subject risks eliminating experience of the contradictions, to
internalize a subjective notion of freedom and to rationalize the constitution of society as given.
Adorno's insights begin to make sense of such wide-ranging social phenomenon as the
disproportionate sentencing of criminals, the willingness to believe obviously false claims about
“our enemies,” and the subjective relativism encountered in public discussion of almost any
kind. But, this gets ahead of the explication. In chapter four I explain these insights' relevance to
understanding contemporary social phenomena.
B. Freedom, Nature, and Perpetual Peace
In Adorno's criticism of Kant, we see that the condition of freedom is, in fact, unfreedom,
but, that this unfreedom, in the form of the division of labor and the internalization of the societal
structure that forms the super-ego, at the same time advances the cause of repression. Through
an analysis of the concept of progress, Adorno applies this insight to Kantian conception of
progress. While Kant's thinking about perpetual peace constitutes an advance in so far as it
formulates the notion of a reconciled humanity and puts this within our grasp as a species, it
remains repressive and apologetic for the status quo in its static conception of nature and the
projection of reason onto this concept.
Recall Kant's claim that, “What affords this guarantee [of perpetual peace] is nothing less
than the great artist nature...”

135

While for Kant, we cannot know this with total certainty—that

is, the claim that the species is destined for perpetual peace is not guaranteed by providence—the

135

Kant, “Toward Perpetual Peace,” 331.
73

claim remains an attempt to reconcile the actual, a species that seems intent on destroying itself,
with the ideal, a species that would guarantee the freedom and peaceful coexistence of all its
members. Recall that the conception of nature, with rules that determine the course of the
species requires the projection of reason on to nature, for, “The idea of 'design' cannot be
conceived of at all except with the provision that reason is attributed to nature itself.”

136

This

projection of reason onto nature at once reveals humanity's domination of nature and an
elimination of human determination of its own fate. Reason is projected onto nature; nature is
given the telos to promote our highest end through the blind following of our own self-interest.
As a conception of progress, the dynamic between nature and humanity is reified. Both internal
and external nature are taken as a given. This becomes repressive by eliminating the elements of
freedom, self-consciousness, imagination, “This is because we are dependent upon blind, organic
necessities of the kind that we project onto non-human nature.”

137

Time, then, is the continuing

advance of unconstituted humanity's domination over nature. Progress is taken as the continuing
advance of the means of control over nature. This is a one-sided view of progress. Progress also
requires an advance in the species' constitution of its own social conditions.
Kant remains tied to this conception of nature and with it, the assumption that humanity
is already constituted. While Kant offers us the possibility of human control over its own
progress, he also settles for what exists.
“Within such enlightenment, however, which first of all puts progress toward humanity into
people's own hands and thereby concretizes the idea of progress as one to be realized, lurks the
conformist confirmation of what merely exists. It receives the aura of redemption after

136

Adorno, “Progress,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, ed. and trans. Henry
Pickford (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 149.
137
Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 134-5.
74

redemption has failed to appear and evil has persisted undiminished.”

138

An internalized notion of freedom, that freedom is merely freedom of the internal will, is
projected on to external nature, which is also posited as something beyond our control. Nature is
posited as something with a will, a plan for humanity that transcends both our individual and
social will. This two-sided reification is encapsulated in Adorno's claim, derived from a reading
of Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” that, “no progress is to be assumed that
would imply that humanity in general already existed and therefore could progress.”

139

Kant's

idea that the conflicts between individual human beings and individual nations are merely
carrying out nature's plan for the ultimate realization of the species' potential at once solidifies
human conflict as natural and eliminates the potential for overcoming this conflict.
Humanity remains nature-like in its will to dominate all nature. “Absolute domination of
nature is absolute submission to nature.”

140

If it is truly our nature to dominate nature, then

through that domination of nature, we merely succumb to our own internal nature. In other
words, we do not constitute ourselves as a species capable of organizing our own relations
between individuals and between the species and nature. This does not mean that Adorno
advocates some return to a mythical state of nature. Quite the opposite. For, the originary
dominion over nature is the prerequisite for overcoming the domination of human beings by
nature, (both internal and external), that is, it forms the condition for the faculty of reason as selfreflection; it cannot develop outside of the division of labor and the internalization of society.
This is why a materialist, historically-minded, social theory is needed. Through this

138

Adorno, “Progress,” 146.

139

Adorno, “Progress,” 145.

140

Adorno, “Progress,” 152.
75

analysis of the notion of progress, the underlying meaning of Kant's assumption of the rational,
self-interested individual and the teleological conception of nature is revealed. The formation of
the self-interested individual does carry with it the possibility of perpetual peace. But, this
possibility cannot be realized within a system in which a merely internal notion of freedom is
taken for freedom and in which nature itself is taken to have a rational plan for the species. Only
through a self-conscious reflection upon the subject that emerges in this system, do we begin to
get a picture of the contradictions that particular arrangements of society create and perpetuate.
The failure of blind self-interest to create perpetual peace implies its inability to do so. In other
words, something beyond self-interest and the plan of nature is required for the species to create
a world in which freedom and peace are realized. An understanding of the meaning of this
failure calls for social theory. In terms of Kant's philosophy of history, questions arise about the
failure of humanity to constitute itself as collective humanity. In addition, we must question of
the meaning of our failure as a species to recognize itself as a part of nature, a part of nature that
has acquired self-consciousness through its own activity. This is to say, only a social theory that
takes seriously the constitution of individuals by the social relationships which surround them,
but also takes seriously the question of history and nature, the question of progress, can come to
terms with the contemporary problems of practical subjectivity.

76

Chapter 4 The Possibility of Practical Subjectivity
Part I Introduction to Adorno, Natural-History and Norms
In Chapter 3, Adorno's normative stance emerges from the criticism of Kant's idealism.
Adorno's attempt to formulate a normative position that is not idealist proceeds through a
critique of idealism. Here we saw that Kant's theoretical philosophy depends on a remainder, the
thing-in-itself, and the contradictions within his system point to a “non-conceptual residue,”
which Adorno articulates as “a physical moment.” This moment, however, has implications for
thinking about practical philosophy. In Kant's thought, this remainder is reduced to the freedom
of the will, and in being so reduced is stripped of its spontaneity. The practical philosophy
depends on a physical impulse, which is eliminated from Kant's thinking about morality.
This impulse, which Adorno associates with the body, I take as the beginnings of a
normative stance which is useful, not only for understanding ethics, but especially for
understanding politics. The constitution of the species as humanity, which for Adorno is the
precondition of political progress presupposes this bodily revulsion to physical suffering. But,
this bodily impulse is not sufficient for reinvigorating practical reason and ethical subjectivity.
In addition, the physicality of the aversion to suffering must be redeemed through reflection on
the emergence of universal concepts from our social evolution as a species. This social evolution
and thus the evolution and status of these concepts cannot be understood outside an
understanding of our and our concepts' relationship to nature. As Adorno puts it in his lecture
course from 1964-5, “this interweaving of nature and history must in general be the model for
every interpretive procedure in philosophy.”

141

In the last chapter, one is left with Adorno's criticisms of Kant, which, especially in
141

Theodor Adorno, History and Freedom, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Malden, Mass: Polity Press, 2006), 133.
77

relation to Kant's practical and political thought, can be characterized as confronting Kantian
themes with the social considerations that are absent from these themes. Of course, Adorno is
not the first post-Kantian philosopher to do so. Considering the way in which Adorno adds
social content to the abstract moral principle available from Kant's system, it is worthwhile to
turn to Hegel directly, if only briefly. In so far as Kant offers up freedom from determination by
mere nature in offering the categorical imperative as the determination of the principle to which
maxims must align if they are to be moral, Hegel can agree. The problem arises for Hegel when
one attempts to provide content, and here that means to come up with any actual principle that
can be acted upon. It seems Hegel takes absolutely seriously Kant's claims that the moral law
must be arrived at a priori and that the question of freedom (beyond that of its possibility in the
face of the determinations of pure reason) must be left out. Thus, Hegel can claim that the
injunction to act only out of duty, that is, only out of respect for the moral law, leaves one
without any relationship with a world in which a contradiction could occur. Hegel goes so far as
to claim that even the universalization of a maxim that endorsed murder would be acceptable
without a world in which human beings were already an end.

142

Apparently, practical reason in

a completely unembodied form cannot come to concrete determinations of right and wrong.
Thus, Hegel can characterize the difference between morality and ethical life in the following
way: “For whereas morality is the form of the will in general in its subjective aspect, ethical life
is not just the subjective form and self-determination of the will: it also has its own concept,
namely freedom as its content.”

143

Morality, then is freedom from nature, in that it requires the will be dictated by reason,
142

G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen Wood, trans. H.B. Nisbet (New
York: Cambridge UP, 1991), 162-3. §135.
143
Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 186. §141.
78

but it is not yet affirmative freedom, as Hegel calls it. It is only in ethical life that an individual
can be said to possess freedom and to come to morality. Once the individual is engaged in the
life of the family, civil society, and the state, there are actually existing norms that can then be
willed or not willed through the individual's actions. The injunction against murder then, as it is
embodied in the state and the family, now has a determinate content, for as a member of the
family, one is tied to certain goals that are inconsistent with murder. Similarly, in being tied to
the ends of the state, including its own continued existence, the will murder becomes
contradictory. The key point for the discussion here is that it is only in the face of particular
social mediations that the individual can even become the individual that could will morally or
immorally. In other words, the self-self relationship that contemporary societies largely take for
granted is a product of human beings' social history. But, Hegel is going further than this. It is
not only the individual's will that is in some sense subordinate to social forces, but the entirety of
the individual's being as an individual. The state, as the embodiment of spirit, is the only true
end. “The association of duty and right has a dual aspect, in that what the state requires as a duty
should also in an immediate sense be the right of individuals, for it is nothing more than the
organization of the concept of freedom. The determinations of the will of the individual acquire
an objective existence through the state and it is only through the state that they attain their truth
and actualization.”

144

The individual is subordinate to the state, and only comes into her

freedom as a member of the state, only becomes moral in light of the principles put forth for
action by the state and in relation to the other members of the state. “Whether the individual
exists or not is a matter of indifference to objective ethical life...”

144

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 285. §261.

145

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 190. §145.

79

145

Adorno can be thought of as challenging the Hegelian subordination of the individual to
the totality, in Hegel's thinking just outlined, embodied in the state, but also challenging the
asocial nature of Kantian morality. Kant's focus on the individual subject of morality is turned
against Hegel, while Hegel's social conception of individuality is turned against Kant. Hegel is
right that in order for subjectivity to even exist, certain social conditions must be in place, but is
wrong in thus completely subordinating the individual subject to the status of a mere moment in
the evolution of spirit. The problem, then, is that the social conditions that Hegel proposes as
necessary for the realization of morality and the ethical subject are not in place, or, rather that the
social conditions that Hegel describes are not the social conditions that are necessary for the
realization of morality or even subjectivity, and those conditions that are necessary are not only
not actual, but in danger of being eliminated from thought itself. Today, I take this as the
problem of ethical subjectivity. What objective conditions must hold in order for subjects to
orient themselves in the world practically? In more Kantian terms, what are the conditions for
the possibility of practical reason. Thus, the problem of ethical subjectivity and practical reason,
as briefly put as possible, is that the subject, in order to orient herself ethically, must exist within
certain social conditions and those social conditions do not hold.
Practical Subjectivity is an Acute Problem for Adorno's Thinking
The acute problem for Adorno's thinking, then, is that, according to his own analysis of
society, the social conditions necessary for the realization of subjectivity are not only not actual,
but the mere possibility of their realization is in danger of being extinguished from consciousness
altogether. It seems that contemporary societies mediate the relationships between subjects and
themselves, subjects and other subjects, and subjects and the objective world in such a way that
no non-instrumental relationship is even possible. While the problems in each particular

80

relationship are intricately related to one another, it's worthwhile to briefly examine some of the
specific problems that arise in each of the relationships as I've laid them out. The self-self
relationship is mediated by a social conception of self-preservation which turns all suffering into
a means to self-preservation, makes individual suffering seem inevitable, and societies are
seemingly able to reabsorb and turn into commodities all spontaneous attempts to break free
from these forms of self-relation. But, even worse for the state of ethical subjectivity, it seems
that the individual is so isolated by forces that are beyond the individual's control that actions
and relationships cannot even rise to the level of sociality called for in the understanding of
ethical subjectivity outlined above. In the Kantian terms of the last chapter, the conditions for
the possibility of freedom, spontaneity, and progress cannot be realized. Similarly in
relationships between two or more subjects. Something like solidarity seems impossible in a
world in which all are threatened with starvation, homelessness, or worse, and in which even
one's experiences of suffering are turned toward reinforcing the very social systems that are at
the root of this suffering. For Adorno, even the seemingly most immediate relationships,
friendship, familial and romantic love, are all in danger of becoming totally mediated by social
forces that eliminate the possibility of something different. The notion of humanity necessary for
progress has not, and it seems, anyway, cannot, be realized by the species. And in terms of the
subject's relationship to objects, which includes external nature, everything has been turned into
raw-material for our use. Particulars have become mere specimens of the general characteristics
of the category under which they are placed, even where this treatment threatens our own species
with extinction. So, the problem of the chapter is this question. Given Adorno's analysis of
social conditions and his understanding of the conditions for the possibility of practical reason
and ethical subjectivity, how is an ethical orientation to the world even possible?

81

How does Adorno show the continuing possibility of ethical subjectivity?
Indications of something different, of the possibilities of ethical subjectivity have to be
present if Adorno's criticisms of contemporary societies is to go through. Kant's formal moral
system requires a certain content, but Hegel, in his subordination of the individual to the totality
of social conditions cannot provide it. In this chapter, I bring out the connections between
Adorno's critique of idealism and the problem of natural history in such a way that the normative
status and potentials of the bodily revulsion to suffering in Adorno's thought become clear.
Adorno concludes that conceptual thought and the best of modernist art, both particular results of
our emergence from nature, preserve certain possibilities for self-conscious experience of a
certain sort, memory, and imagination, and thus the possibility of ethical subjectivity. Here, I
will focus on philosophy, conceptual thought. In this realm, to conceive of ethical subjectivity as
a continuing possibility, the connection with past suffering, including our own, cannot be
severed. Reason must also acknowledge the bodily identification with the suffering of others,
both human and non-human. But Adorno is no irrationalist in regarding norms being partially
emergent from the body. In acknowledging the history of suffering that has been covered over
by the processes of capitalist reification, reason too must be taken into account. In particular, the
universal concepts that have emerged in the evolution of our social conditions, and those
universals mediated by their own history in relation to particulars and other concepts must be
brought into relation with the history of suffering. In this process of uncovering the natural in
the historical and the historical in the natural, the potential for something different emerges from
the very concepts that had been used to make the phenomenon appear natural and unchangeable,
and it is in these insights that the bodily aversion to suffering has normative force. In terms of
the confrontation between Hegel and Kant characterized above, Kant's formalism seems to

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require a certain content, but that content is not to be provided by the Hegelian ethical life, the
institutionalization of freedom and thus morality in particular ways of life, but rather by the body
of the subject in its resistance to the continuing bad formalism of the very institutions that are
supposed to provide content in the Hegelian system and are mediated by the forms of thought,
the evolution of the universals that must be employed in understanding the world at all and
which remain embedded, even in the practices of these social institutions.
Road Map of Chapter 4
The problem of ethical subjectivity will thus be confronted as the problem of the practical
orientation of reason in world in which human beings are alienated from their social world. I
begin hashing out a solution of sorts to this problem with a discussion of the relationship
between nature and history. We can see the importance of the relationship between history and
nature, society and the body, first in the views of key philosophers that span the historical gap
between Kant and Adorno: Hegel, Marx, and Lukaćs. Thus, following this introduction (Chapter
4, Part I) I briefly present the understanding of nature that emerges from these figures (Chapter 4,
Part II). Of course Adorno is deeply indebted to Hegel for the conception of dialectic at use in his
own philosophy. But, from Hegel's thinking about nature specifically, Adorno takes up the key
insight that nature, at this point in history, is always socially mediated. There is no nature that is
not the product of human activity, even if merely conceptual activity. In Marx's thinking, this
insight takes the specific form of the relationship between labor and nature. Marx, thus has the
resources for both understanding the constitution of subjectivity after the victory of the
commodity form in economic thinking, and for understanding the abstractions of Hegel's own
thinking about the relationship between history and nature. Lukaćs expands this critique of
capitalist thinking to the whole of capitalist societies through an analysis of the commodity form.

83

In addition, he offers a systematic account of the problem of norms in the world in which nature
has become either the repository of the material for aesthetic contemplation or the material of
scientific investigation, but where practical reason has no role to play in the understanding of the
relationship between individuals and their own second nature, the givens of the social world.
Following a summary of the relevant insights from these thinkers(Chapter 4, Part II), I
turn to Adorno's early talk on Natural-History(Chapter 4, Part III, Section I). It brings Lukaćs'
insights into the problem of practical reason and ethical subjectivity into conversation with
Benjamin's methods for attempting to solve this problem. It is Benjamin's constellative method
that Adorno appropriates in order to understand the state of practical reason and ethical
subjectivity in the contemporary world, and which allows him access to the non-identical of
concepts, which he then uses to begin thinking through possibility of a critical reason. This takes
the form of a procedure for uncovering the historical in the natural and the natural in the
historical. In this section, however, the problem of the possibility of ethical subjectivity remains,
though some resources for working through the problem are presented.
Thus, I turn to some preliminary thoughts about the problem of critical reason in light of
these resources (Chapter 4, Part III, Section II). In this section, I spell out that Adorno is not
concerned with formulating a principle of morality, but rather in working out the conditions for
ethical life and locating sources of resistance to the current social structure in which ethical
subjectivity seems impossible. This section highlights that Adorno's account requires a certain
sort of experience if ethical subjectivity and critical reason are to remain possible. And this
notion of experience is connected with suffering, self-consciousness, memory, and imagination.
Thus, in the penultimate section of the chapter (Chapter 4, Part III, Section III), I spell out
the conception of experience that provides the possibility of resistance to the social system in

84

which ethical subjectivity, a practical orientation, seems impossible. Through Adorno's insights
regarding key concepts that form a constellation with this concept of experience, I spell out the
conditions for ethical subjectivity and argue that they remain alive, if only in brief moments. To
move beyond the standard mode of existence in this society, bourgeois coldness as Adorno calls
it, one's relationship with the world, in all three modes outlined above, must include a certain sort
of self-conscious experience, which requires memory and imagination understood in particular
ways and through which reification can be overcome. Following this, I show, not just that
ethical subjectivity remains possible, but also the fruitfulness of Adorno's insights for thinking
about the social world. In particular, I briefly reflect on the genocide in Rwanda, primarily from
the standpoint of this society, but in a way that also offers insights into how to think about the
situation on the ground there as well.
In the last part of the chapter (Chapter 4, Part IV), I offer concluding remarks on the
practical orientation that Adorno's thinking thematizes. These reflections take the form of a
summary of the objective and subjective conditions for the possibility of experience in Adorno's
sense, and thus of ethical subjectivity. Following this, I begin a reflection on the validity of
experience. The question of what makes a particular experience valid or rational in some sense
offers a transition to some of Adorno's critics, Habermas in particular, and thus also offers a
transition to chapter 5.
Part II Nature and the Problem of the Practical Subject in Hegel, Marx and Lukács
To make Adorno's conception of nature clear, it is necessary to briefly recount the
conception of nature in Hegel, Marx, and Lukács' thinking. Adorno's debt to the Hegelian
dialectic in general notwithstanding, there are three key ideas to take from Hegel's thought with
regard to a conception of nature. First, at the heart of Hegel's epistemology is the notion that our

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abstract concepts do not spring fully formed into the world, but emerge through human beings'
relationships to both other human beings and to the external world. And this is true of the
concept of nature as well. Nature is not a given, unmediated by human beings' relations to other
human beings and their relation to external objects. This is apparent in the dialectic of the master
and slave in the Phenomenology, where the relation between human beings is mediated by the
object upon which the bondsman labors and which the master uses up. But, in the Encyclopedia,
and this will become clear in Marx's criticisms of Hegel, nature is also conceived of as an
abstract other to world spirit and progression of the absolute idea. Second, Hegel provides the
insight that our sociality, our second nature, is constituted by human beings; it is not merely an
inevitable extension of nature. Hegel introduces the idea of a second nature in the section on
ethical life (Sittlichkeit) in the Philosophy of Right. There, in criticizing Kant's philosophy as
reaching only to the level of abstract morality (Moralität), Hegel understands education as “the
art of making human beings ethical: it considers them as natural beings and shows them how
they can be reborn, and how their original nature can be transformed into a second, spiritual
nature so that this spirituality becomes habitual to them.”

146

Through the mediation of civil

society and the family, the state becomes the embodiment of this educational function that
imbues individual human beings with their second nature. Third, and crucially for Adorno, while
this second nature is embodied as the constitutional arrangement of the state, it becomes a mode
of the absolute and thus unchangeable. In Hegel's analysis of the state as the ultimate historical
embodiment of ethical life, Hegel shows again the subordination of the individual to the
collective in his system. The will of the individual becomes truly free for Hegel only in
subordination to the spirit of the people, and ultimately only in subordination to the world spirit,

146

Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 195. §151.
86

subordination to our self-constituted second nature. While Hegel's notion of ethical life is
supposed to free the Kantian notion of freedom from its abstraction, it actually turns abstract
freedom to concrete subordination to the state. Hegelian ethical life, in Marxian terms,
represents the subordination of individuals to laws operating behind their backs. Still, Hegel's
system does provide the basis for thinking about nature as a social category.
Marx provides an important counter to the Hegelian subordination of the individual to the
whole as well as a critique of the Hegelian conception of nature. As early as 1843, in the
Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's “Philosophy of Right,” Marx had already reached the
point of understanding Hegel's political philosophy as an inversion. That is, instead of
understanding the state as the result of the workings of the family and civil society, the ideal of
the state is described as if it produced the differentiations of civil society and the family. As
Marx puts it, “the condition is posited as the conditioned, the determinator as the determined, the
producer as the product.”

147

This can be understood as one source of Adorno's criticism of

Hegel's subordination of freedom to the collective.
In the 1844 Manuscripts, in his discussion of alienation (Entfremdung), Marx presents the
results of his materialist inversion of Hegel's dialectic for thinking about nature. It is not merely
human thought about the external world that comes between human beings and external nature—
and Hegel at certain points of the Phenomenology clearly sees this— but rather, human labor.
This allows Marx to emphasize—and this is crucial for understanding Adorno's claims about
reconciliation with nature—that human beings come to know nature through labor upon nature,
and that they themselves are a particular sort of nature: human nature. Interestingly, this also
allows Marx to criticize idealism's conception of nature in a way that anticipates Adorno's
147

Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State,” in Early Writings,
trans. Gregor Benton (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 63.
87

criticisms of idealism laid out in chapter 3. For, Hegel conceives of nature abstractly, as an
external nothing to be negated and overcome by thought. In Hegel's philosophy, “Nature is only
the form of the idea's other-being.”

148

Marx asserts instead that in order to concretely

understand human beings' relationship to nature, one must begin with the insight that human
beings “must remain in continuous intercourse” with nature.

149

This is not merely an accidental

fact nor a mere externalization of the idea, but is part of understanding that human beings are
also a species being. It is through human labor upon external nature that human beings become
conscious of themselves as a species. Marx's notion of species being is also an infant form of the
later notion of the universality of the interests of the working class which stands as one
justification of the practical orientation of Marx's later work. In these early writings, human
beings are a species being because of their universality. They are the only species that can treat
itself as a species, and thus the only species that can consider nature as also part of itself. Or,
rather, it is the species that can know itself as a part of nature that comes to know the rest of
nature as its “inorganic body” through its own activity.

150

This conception of species being

allows Marx to posit that in the relations of production in capitalism, human beings are alienated
from their own species being. For, labor on nature is properly an expression of humanity's
freedom, a coming to know itself as that aspect of nature that comes to know itself through its
own labor. But in a system of labor that alienates the activity of working on external nature, the
product of this labor from the laborer, and the laborers from one another, the condition of
humanity's freedom is turned into a mere means to existence, a relation of dependence. This is
148

Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader,
nd

2

Edition, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 125.

149

Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 75.

150

Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 75.
88

why, even in these early writings, Marx can claim that Communism “is the genuine resolution of
the conflict between man and nature and between man and man...”

151

Only with the

overcoming of capitalism through real control of the means of production, in particular, our own
labor, can the species come into its own, can human freedom be the result of labor rather than a
mere means subordinated to the goal of increasing capital. And, only then, as we saw in
Adorno's criticism of Kant in chapter 3, is it possible for humanity to begin to constitute itself as
a species, as humanity.
Marx is also engaged in an immanent critique of liberalism. The presuppositions of
capitalism make the realization of the liberal ideals of equality, freedom, and justice impossible.
Marx's process of immanent critique of liberalism can also be garnered from this discussion of
nature. Above, the liberal conception of freedom is turned against the economic system through
the concepts of nature and labor. But Marx also turns the liberal conception of political equality
or formal equality against itself. For example, the elimination of the property requirement for
political participation, in fact, presupposes the continuing existence of private property. Even in
his early writings, Marx takes up the critique of idealism from within idealism. The concept of
nature at work in Hegel, for Marx, shows that the system itself is a mystification, that it inverts
material relations into relations between ideas. The commodity form itself instantiates a similar
mystification, but in a socially effective way. This procedure of critique, of confronting existing
social conditions with the way in which they undermine the conditions of their own possibility
forms part of Adorno's future procedure for aligning a constellation of concepts in order to show
the missed possibilities in history of concepts.
Capital is an immanent critique of bourgeois political economy. In Marx's analysis of the

151

Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” 84.
89

commodity form one finds his mature view of nature. Commodities consist of two opposed
moments, use-value and exchange-value. Use-value is nature mediated by labor, though, not
even that necessarily, e.g. water, air, soil. Use-value is also labor mediated by nature. As Marx
puts it in “The Critique of the Gotha Programme,” “Labour is not the source of all wealth. Nature
is just as much the source of use-values (and surely these are what make up material wealth!) as
labour. Labour is itself only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power.”

152

The

commodity form, the appearance of value as an independently existing thing, is a form of
alienation from ourselves as a mode of existence of nature. In the process of exchange, not only
is the social character of labor covered over and replaced with the appearance of a social relation
between things, but nature, as an object of human labor is covered over in a similar fashion to
labor. Marx comes close to directly saying so in the contrast he establishes between labor done
under the sway of commodity production and that done under a feudal system. In the feudal
system, “The natural form of labour, its particularity—and not, as in a society based on
commodity production, its universality—is here its immediate social form.”

153

In other words,

the social relations between people are not obscured by the layer of social relations that produces
the fetishism of commodities. The peasant knows that she is giving 10 hours of labor to the lord
per week because the peasant works directly for the lord for 10 hours per week. While in an
economy dominated by the production of commodities, the labor done for oneself and that done
for the capitalist is indistinguishable. And, for that matter, one's labor is indistinguishable from
anyone else's labor; it has become abstract human labor. Just as particular human labor on and
with particular objects becomes abstract, fungible human labor, all of nature too becomes the
152

Karl Marx, “Critique of the Gotha Programme,” in The First International and After, ed.
David Fernbach, trans. Joris de Bres, (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 341.
153
Karl Marx, Capital v. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 171.
90

abstract material upon which labor works.
Commodities, understood in their qualitative aspect, as use-values, require nature:
“Use-values like coats, linen, etc., in short, the physical bodies of commodities, are combinations
of two elements, the material provided by nature, and labour. If we subtract the total amount of
useful labour of different kinds which is contained in the coat, the linen, etc., a material
substratum is always left. This substratum is furnished by nature without human intervention.
When man engages in production, he can only proceed as nature does herself, i.e. he can only
change the form of the materials. Furthermore, even in this work of modification, he is
constantly helped by natural forces. Labour is therefore not the only source of material wealth,
154
i.e. of the use-values it produces.”
Under the social domination of the exchange principle, it is not merely the social relations
between people that are obscured and which appear as a social relation between things, but the
social relation between human beings and nature becomes obscured as well. First, human beings
no longer see themselves as nature. Second, nature is no longer seen as necessary for the
reproduction of the species in anything but the most abstract sense. But, in obscuring both these
things, the sway of the commodity form opens up a new possibility for the concept of nature: the
repository of that which has been banished by the commodity form itself. In this way, the
mystification of Hegel's idealist conception of nature becomes instantiated in material reality;
nature is the nothing upon which anything can be written. While nature is a social category, this
fact is obscured by the commodity form, which, just as it obscures the relations between human
beings, also obscures the relation between human beings and the rest of nature.
Lukàcs connects the state of production with the state of reason in a way that is crucial
for understanding Adorno. Lukàcs advances Marx's insight that the state of consciousness is
dependent on the state and organization of our productive powers. Beginning with Marx's
insight into the workings of the commodity form, Lukàcs offers a specific way to understand the
state of reason under capitalism. Lukàcs shows how a certain sort of reasoning comes to be the
154

Marx, Capital v. 1, 133-4.
91

dominant form of reason. The sort of thinking required for the exchange of commodities and
more generally the functioning of advanced capitalism comes to be the way of thinking in an
advanced capitalist society. For example, time is reduced to space through the particular form of
abstraction made prevalent by the commodity form.

155

While Lukàcs' importance in the history of Marxist thought can hardly be
overemphasized, Alfred Schmidt points out one problem with Lukàcs' understanding of Marx's
conception of nature. Namely, Lukàcs seems to hold that sociality of nature goes all the way
down, so to speak. There is no nature outside of the social categories, which are the result of
certain purposes organized by the dominant mode of production, used to describe it. “Nature is a
social category. That is to say, whatever is held to be natural at any given stage of social
development, however this nature is related to man and whatever form his involvement with it
takes, i.e. nature's form, its content, its range and its objectivity are all socially conditioned.”

156

Schmidt, referring to the just quoted passage, rightly points out that “in Marx nature is not
merely a social category.”

157

While nature is deeply social, it also exists as a substratum outside

of human beings' labor upon it. This criticism allows Schmidt to emphasize two points. First,
human beings will always have to work. The metabolism with nature is necessary to the
reproduction of human life. And second, the difference between Hegel and Marx's conceptions
of alienation. To overcome alienation for Hegel is to overcome objectivity as such through its
eventual absorption in the World Spirit, that is, thought. While Marx highlights that even in a
155

Georg Lukàcs, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” in History and Class
Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1971), 90.
156
Georg Lukàcs, “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism,” in History and Class
Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1971), 234.
157
Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: New Left
Books, 1971), 70.
92

condition in which alienation has been overcome, “nature's objectivity does not simply
disappear, even when it is adequate to men, but remains something external, to be
appropriated.”

158

Schmidt, a student of Adorno, might be thought of as playing out Adorno's

insight that subject and object, while always mediating one another, cannot be reduced to one
another. Even in a state in which nature is adequate to human beings, that is, in which human
labor is not alienated from human beings, external nature will remain alien in Hegel's sense. It
cannot be reduced to either the thought or labor of human beings.
All the same, Lukàcs, in his earlier work, The Theory of the Novel, also offers the insight
that nature becomes the repository of lamentations over our own alienation. It becomes in reality
the abstract nothing that Marx criticizes Hegel for making it in thought, but with a twist. The
concept of nature results from the projection of our relationship to our sociality, our second
nature. As this relationship with second nature changes, so too does the society's understanding
of nature itself. The novel is the form of art in the modern period because human beings are
alienated from their society; it is characteristic of an age “in which the immanence of meaning in
life has become a problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”

159

The historical world

that produces the novel, the structures of the world in which the human being acts, is a world
that, despite its being created and maintained by human beings, feels to the human beings within
it as out of control, devoid of relation to the meaning of their own lives, yet determined and
necessary.

160

Nature (first nature) thus becomes a repository of both the subjective and the

objective: the subjective in moods, aesthetic contemplation and the objective in terms of the laws
158

Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, 71.

159

Georg Lukàcs, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971),
56.
160
Lukàcs, The Theory of the Novel, 62.
93

of nature. Because human beings are alienated from second nature, our social world, practical
reason, reason oriented toward action cannot unify the subject and object. In Kantian terms,
which Lukács is drawing on throughout this discussion, we cannot even imagine living in the
kingdom of ends given that our second nature is totally out of our control. Nature becomes both
the world of laws beyond our control, the laws of nature, as well as the object of our moods and
tastes, the realm of aesthetic contemplation. First nature comes to mediate our relationship with
second nature in such a way that it marks our alienation from our own social world. Lukács'
discussion here, along with Benjamin's conception of the allegory form the bases of one of the
earliest of Adorno's lectures, “The Idea of a Natural History.”

161

I will begin the next section

with a discussion of Adorno' conception of nature in this piece and a further analysis of Lukács
and Benjamin's relationship to this piece.
Before undertaking an explication of the relevant themes from this essay and Adorno's
rejection of these earlier approaches, Adorno's motivation for reorienting theory will be briefly
spelled out. Adorno's attempt to move beyond Hegel, Marx, and Lukács generally, and
specifically with regard to their understanding of nature can be summarized along 3 lines: first,
the historical failure of the working class to realize the potentials of the species, second, the
failure of culture—and this is intricately linked to both the failure of the working class and what
becomes of nature in the evolution of reason and enlightenment, and third, as was spelled out in
chapter 3, the failure of idealism. In the failure of each of these, a source of practical orientation
and motivation dries up.
In both Marx and Lukács' understanding of history, the universality of the interests of the

161

Theodor Adorno, “The Idea of a Natural-History,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Telos 57
(1985): 111-124. Hullot-Kentor relates that the talk was given at the Frankfurt chapter of the
Kant Society on July 15, 1932.
94

working class are to provide the normative basis for overcoming capitalist organization of
production and with it the commodification of nearly all aspects of social reality. Whether the
failure of the working class to realize the emancipation of humanity can be attributed to the
increasing dependence of capitalist economies on government intervention to ameliorate crises,
or the increasing means of violence in the hands of the ruling class, or the repression of the
working class through ideology and construction of avenues of false consciousness, or the nature
of the working class itself having been oversimplified and overfilled with potentials through a
lingering idealism in Marx's thought, or some combination of these and other factors, it is clear
that the working class has not, as a whole, organized itself and successfully liberated itself and
humanity from the control of the few or the control of the laws which emerge from production
for mere exchange. We remain alienated from our second nature; the realization of the kingdom
of ends seems a pipe-dream. For Adorno, this represents not just an historical failure, but also
undermines the practical orientation of Marx and Lukács' approaches; it must also be understood
as a theoretical failure. For example, Lukács, in applying Marx's notion of the “leap from the
realm of necessity into the realm of freedom” to the situation in 1919 and simultaneously
attempting to guide action away from both voluntarism and vulgar Marxism, argues that the
realm of freedom is not merely an end, “but also the means and the weapon in the struggle. And
here the situation is revealed: for the first time mankind consciously takes its history into its own
hands—thanks to the class consciousness of a proletariat summoned to power.”

162

Adorno takes

seriously that the proletariat has failed both in gaining this freedom as a means and as an end.
Reflecting on the 11th thesis on Feuerbach, Adorno begins the introduction to Negative
Dialectics, “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it

162

Lukàcs, “The Changing Function of Historical Materialism,” 250.
95

was missed. The summary judgment that it had merely interpreted the world, that resignation in
the face of reality had crippled it in itself, becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to
change the world miscarried.”

163

In the face of the failure of the working class, philosophy lives

on as one avenue for preserving the possibility of an alternative to what exists while the attempt
to reject philosophy in favor of practice merely reproduces what exists, and in doing so is a
practical dismissal of reason when reason is most needed. Lukács and Marx's emphasis on
practice in the sense of the revolutionary organization of the proletariat has been eclipsed by
history and this implies a new basis for theory.
In addition to the fact of historical failure of the working class to realize the potentials of
humanity, Adorno is also motivated by the more recent failure of culture revealed in its extremes
by the victory of fascism in Germany, and the politics in both cold-war blocs. Adorno
characterizes post-war culture as instantiating a “hellish unity” composed of three related
phenomena: Auschwitz, the atomic bomb, and torture as a permanent institution.

164

On the one

hand, these events mark qualitative changes in experience. In particular, this hellish unity makes
subjects aware that there are fates worse than death to be feared in contemporary societies: not
merely the suffering and pain of torture and the camps, but the elimination of one's self before
one is actually killed. In the camps, for example, survivors describe the destruction of human
beings in the form of the Muselmänner.

165

As Agamben points out, “the sight of the

163

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 3.

164

Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, 103-104 and the final section of Adorno,
Negative Dialectics, 361.
165
See for example, Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (If this is a Man), trans. Stuart Woolf
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). For a contemporary recounting of the Muselmänner,
see Georgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen, (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 41-86.
96

Muselmänner is an absolutely new phenomenon, unbearable to human eyes,” but which
represents the core of the camp.

166

In addition, these events mark an end to any teleological

philosophy of history; no future can imbue these events with a positive meaning. Our feelings
“balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the victims' fate.”

167

At a

minimum, the hellish unity of the contemporary world makes life itself inevitably guilt-ridden.
This unity makes it clear that one's life was only spared, only continues because someone else's
has not. Whether causally or merely statistically, one lives because others do not live any longer.
In a way, the failure of culture is proof of the failure of idealism. Kantian and neoKantian ethics were largely powerless in the face of the fascism. But, more than this, as chapter
2 and 3 show, there are elements of the pathic projection of fascism within idealism itself.
Idealism fails not only as metaphysics, but as ethics. It is clear that Adorno's work is always
linked to an immanent critique of idealism. And insofar as this is the case, the failure of
idealism also motivates Adorno's attempt to reorient theory around a self-reflective materialist
dialectic. And, from the beginning, Adorno's reorientation turns to thinking about nature and
history.
Part III Adorno, Experience, and Practical Subjectivity
In moving from the analysis of the commodity and the reflections on nature in Marx and
Lukács to Adorno's mature understanding of the possibility of a practical orientation to the
world, it is worthwhile to consider Adorno's early lecture on natural history.

168

As was

mentioned in part II of this chapter, Adorno puts Lukács' formulation of the problem of natural

166

Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, 51.

167

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 361.

168

Adorno, “The Idea of a Natural-History.”
97

history into relation with Benjamin's notion of allegory. In doing so, Adorno moves toward a
different understanding of practical reason than we find in some readings of Marx and Lukács.
Instead of the universal interests of the working class, a practical orientation is generated from a
dialectical reflection on nature and the evolution of universals. In particular, Adorno takes up the
non-identical that emerges from idealism, the bodily impulse, while attempting to redeem, or at
least keep open the possibility of the redemption of the universals that emerge in idealism.
Through a critique of idealism, in particular, the conception of nature and history, the practical
orientation for dialectical theory emerges from the bodily revulsion to suffering. The aim of this
section is to bring out the connections between the critique of idealism in chapter 3 and the
problem of natural history in such a way that the normative status and potentials of the bodily
revulsion to suffering in Adorno's thought become clear.
Section I Natural-History, Constellations, and the Non-Identical
Adorno concludes that conceptual thought and the best of modernist art, partial results of
our emergence from nature, preserve certain possibilities for memory, experience, imagination,
and thus the possibility of ethical subjectivity. I focus on his reflections on conceptual thought.
In attempting to preserve these possibilities, the connection with past suffering cannot be
severed. To conceive of the possibility of a practical orientation, we must take our own suffering
seriously. To do so, the bodily identification with the suffering of others, both human and nonhuman must also be acknowledged by reason. In acknowledging the history of suffering that has
been covered over by the processes of capitalist reification, reason, in particular, the universal
concepts that have emerged in the evolution of our social conditions, and those universals
mediated by their own history in relation to particulars and other concepts must also be brought
into dialectical relation with the history of suffering.

98

Adorno's presentation in the natural history essay offers a starting point. There he begins
with rough concepts of both nature and history, but disclaims these definitions as to be dissolved
in the course of the essay itself. Nature is “what has always been.” It is “closest to the concept
of myth.” While, history is “the qualitatively new.”

169

In disclaiming these definitions, the first

part of the essay seeks to spell out several problems in the evolution of phenomenology in
Scheler and Heidegger. I will only mention two points from this criticism. First, Adorno shows
that the problem of history in phenomenology is resolved by turning historical being into a
structure of subjective being, historicity. Thus, the project is always to take precedence over
reality. Adorno thus characterizes phenomenology, or as he refers to it in its Heideggerian form,
neo-ontology, as another example in the history of idealism of the reconcilliation of subject and
object through a projection of subjective structures on to the world of objects. Thus, secondly,
the problem of the relationship between history and nature cannot be resolved through the
categories of phenomenology and we must instead attempt to read the historically new as
mythical and read the given, that which is supposedly static (and which is reified in ontology) as
historical, as new.
By the end of the essay, Adorno claims that the dissolution of nature and history as
categories is a project of historical materialism. Implicit in his approach, then, is Marx's insight,
explained above, that we are nature, come to know itself through labor upon non-human nature
and through that labor, we become distinct. As we form ourselves as subjects, we form nature as
objects. Initially, then, it is important to note that Adorno's notion of mimesis is not an attempt to
return to a state prior to the emergence of the subject. Neither is Adorno's philosophy a return to
nature or natural law. Adorno takes from Marx, not just a materialist view of history, but also the

169

Adorno, “The Idea of a Natural-History,” 111.
99

criticism of the projection of the product of peculiar social conditions into the past, for example,
Marx's criticism of the Robinson Crusoe stories at the heart of bourgeois economics in which the
sort of people produced by the social conditions of capitalism are taken to not only pre-exist
those conditions, but form the basis for the emergence of those very conditions. In early
liberalism, human beings are taken to be naturally the sort of beings that we had become in the
evolution of capitalism from feudalism. And, while these state of nature stories fail as
explanations and justification for current conditions, they, as explanations that are products of
these very conditions, offer up insights into those conditions as they actually exist. The point is
not a return to nature, but rather that insight into history is to be gained by reflection upon what
the dominate mode of rationality takes to be natural. An orientation toward our second nature is
to be gained through a detailed reflection upon what that second nature has turned first nature
into.
The natural history essay is Adorno's earliest attempt to extend Marx's understanding of
the commodity form into a method for understanding society. Like Marx, Adorno argues that
one can discover the truth in the existing society through the examination of what it declares to
be natural or part of nature. One discovers not only the reified nature of existing understandings
of society, but also specific blind spots and problems of existing social reality and the
understanding of itself that it advances in the form of reified consciousness. Adorno's extension
of Marx relies on Lukács' reflections on nature in The Theory of the Novel and Benjamin's
conception of allegory from Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiel.
Adorno explains that Lukács understands the problem that theory faces in the
contemporary world. Namely, how can one make sense of a social reality that has been turned
into a second nature? As one's knowledge is also a product of reified social reality, how can one

100

know anything different from that reality? Or in terms of the criticism of phenomenology above,
and of the criticism of idealism more generally as articulated in chapter 3, how can one know
reality without merely projecting the subjective on to that reality? How can one get beyond
“traditional philosophy,” as Adorno puts it almost 35 years later, which, “believes that it knows
the unlike only by likening it to itself, while in doing so, it really knows itself only”?

170

Or as

he puts it more metaphorically in the natural history essay, how can philosophy tackle this
question without turning the world into “the night of indifferentiation in which all cats are
grey”?

171

Is it possible to get at nature without merely reproducing the categories of subjectivity

that result from our own second nature, and thus to reject everything that exists as mere
reificiation? This is Adorno's early formulation of the problem I am calling the problem of
ethical subjectivity, the question of whether critical reason remains possible.
Adorno thinks that Lukács very clearly articulates this problem and at least reveals a path
toward overcoming it. First, he shows that second nature, our human constructs, have begun to
take on the characteristics of nature, the immutable, the always has been. “The first nature,
nature as a set of laws for pure cognition, nature as the bringer of comfort to pure feeling, is
nothing other than the historico-philosophical objectivation of man's alienation from his own
constructs.”

172

As I spelled out in the last section, nature becomes either the world of laws

beyond our control, the world of Kant's first Critique or the world of mere aesthetic
contemplation. There is no place left for practical reason, for rational answers to the question
“what should I do?” Second, Lukács, through the introduction of the possibility of overcoming

170

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 150.

171

Adorno, “The Idea of a Natural-History,” 122.

172

Lukaćs, The Theory of the Novel, 64.
101

this reified state, introduces the necessity of a concept of experience. In The Theory of the Novel,
however, Lukács actually dismisses the possibility of this sort of experience: “this second nature
could only be brought to life—if this were possible—by the metaphysical act of reawakening the
souls, which in an early or ideal existence created or preserved it...”

173

So, Adorno turns to

Benjamin for a solution.
From Benjamin's Ursprung, Adorno appropriates the concept of allegory and
constellation. After quoting a long passage from the Ursrpung, Adorno asserts that “According
to Benjamin, nature, as creation, carries the mark of transience. Nature itself is transitory. Thus
it includes the element of history”

174

Adorno takes this in a very specific way. The historical is

an allegory, a sign for something natural, while the natural is a sign for the historical. While
Benjamin may be speaking only of art here, Adorno extends this to all existence. To interpret a
phenomenon, one must collect around it the appropriate concepts for unlocking this allegory and
thus the signs within the natural that point to the historical and the signs within the historical that
point toward the natural. But, this simplified formulation requires a caveat. As stated, this seems
to indicate that merely through the constellation of the appropriate concepts, one can find nature
simpliciter, the object independently of all concepts, the truly unalterable. But, this would be to
merely interchange history and nature, leaving the reification of history unaltered. Rather, this
way of proceeding can only be taken up within history, because the aim is “a procedure that
could succeed in interpreting concrete history as nature and to make nature dialectical under the
aspect of history.”

175

This results of this procedure then, cannot, in contrast to phenomenology's

173

Lukaćs, The Theory of the Novel, 64.

174

Adorno, “The Idea of a Natural-History,” 120.

175

Adorno, “The Idea of a Natural-History,” 121.
102

categories, be turned into the given or a structure through which we are to interpret all
phenomenon. What results in this way of proceeding will always remain discontinuous; the
result of the investigations cannot be anticipated as a unity as it is in Hegel, nor can it be read as
a structure of Being as it is in phenomenology. To put this another way, in proceeding in this
fashion, one must always begin with the particulars of a phenomenon and derive the concepts
and meanings from the appearance of the natural, the contradictions from the appearance of
reconciliation. This procedure forms Adorno's approach to the problem of natural history, which
is actually the problem of doing philosophy at all in the face of reification. While Adorno acts
out this procedure in slightly altered form throughout his life, in Negative Dialectics, he
describes the procedure in a way that relies not on Benjamin, but instead on Max Weber's ideal
type.
Weber explains his use of ideal types in the first chapter of Wirtschaft und
Gesellschaft.

176

Weber explains that the ideal type is always related to social action. The ideal

type is formulated in order to distinguish and explain the rational and irrational causes of social
action. The ideal type allows the theorist to posit a form or general logic and with it project the
specific path(s) social action should or would take if this form or general logic were consistently
followed. In turn, the theorist can then isolate the elements outside of this general logic and the
causal role they play. In Weber's example of a stock market panic, one arrives at the pure or
ideal type by asking what course of action would have been taken had all irrational causes been
absent. This allows the sociologist to isolate the rational and irrational causes of the stock
market panic and perhaps to assign each their proper causal role in an actual situation.

176

Max Weber, “Basic Sociological Terms,” in Economy and Society, eds. Guenther Roth and
Claus Wittich, trans. Talcott Parsons and A.M. Henderson (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978), 3-62.
103

Weber's attempt to define the spirit of capitalism goes some way in explaining Adorno's
notion of constellation. At the outset of chapter II of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism, Weber highlights how one ought to proceed in an investigation of social objects. A
concept like the 'spirit of capitalism,' “cannot be defined according to the formula genus
proximum, differentia specifica, but it must be gradually put together out of the individual parts
which are taken from historical reality to make it up.”

177

The object of investigation, in this case

the spirit of capitalism, cannot be defined, except provisionally, at the outset. Instead, the
investigator must develop and clarify the concept in the course of investigation. Weber, instead
of immediately defining the spirit of capitalism and then marshaling evidence and arguments for
its causal significance in the rise of capitalism, begins with a merely provisional understanding
of it, the exemplary writings of Benjamin Franklin.
While Weber's account of the ideal type offers insights in the relationship between
concepts and objects, it remains nominalist in that ideal types are merely heuristic tools for
getting at the function of a form of rationality in social action; concepts have no real content.
Adorno, on the other hand, allows that the concepts do get at aspects of the object. “But as in all
nominalism, however insignificant it may consider its concepts, some of the nature of the thing
will come through and extend beyond the benefit to our thinking practice...”

178

Constellations

of concepts, revolving around a thing and developed from ideal types, get at the meaning of an
object in its social relationships. “By gathering around the object of cognition, the concepts
potentially determine the object's interior. They attain, in thinking, what was necessarily excised

177

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1958), 47.
178
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 164.
104

from thinking.”

179

In other words, the constellation of concepts gets at the aspects of the object

that are removed from thinking when one assumes that concepts map onto the world with no
remainder, that thought is a complete representation of reality, concept realism. Only through
concepts is thought possible and these concepts are not merely subjective projections with no
reference or influence on reality. In a way this derives from Adorno's understanding of the
notion of concept (Begriff). Concepts are not only the universals under which particulars do or
do not fall, but rather also the properties that a particular would ideally have.

180

Adorno

frequently writes that particulars, in their way, strive for identity with their concepts or that they
collect around themselves concepts. This metaphorical attribution of agency to objects intersects
with the notions of identity thinking and non-identity thinking. Non-identity thinking, while
dependent on identity thinking, negates it. One can come to know the potentials of both the
universal, the concept, and with it, the potentials of the particulars that are supposed to be under
that concept through the negative dialectic, which proceeds through the unearthing of the nonidentical in the particular, which cannot be disconnected from its falling under a universal (in
identity thinking).
Take a simple example, an object of use like a particular table, say the table at which I
am now composing this and its relationship to the category table. The table is merely a sample
of the kind, table. In identity thinking, all the relevant tasks of thought regarding the table are
captured in the classification of this particular table as a table. And this category, its construction
by human beings, is erased. It is taken to be not merely a natural kind, but taken to be so without
thought of the status of categories and their relationships to particulars at all. But, Adorno is not
179

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 162.

180

For a particularly clear account of the concept in Adorno see Gillian Rose, The Melancholy
Science (New York: Columbia UP, 1978), 44-5.
105

concerned here with a theory of meaning; this is not merely Wittgenstein's point about categories'
meaning being determined by their use in language. To pursue the non-identical, one must
consider the particular table. It, like the other tables here, is constructed of three component
parts: a table top, a stem, and a base. The table top is constructed from some combination of
wood and plastics derived from petroleum, while the stem and base are both a heavy metal alloy.
The three parts are constructed and then assembled in factories half-way around the world.

One

gets the picture. Our table, and each of the tables around it is mass-produced, produced for
exchange, and as such has a social history. In addition, even in this location, the table has a
particular history which has made it somewhat unstable and which constitutes its deviation from
the category. It is no longer a very good table. By thinking through certain concepts in relation
to the table, one constructs a constellation in which the non-identity of the category table and the
particular table comes to light. Immediately, we see, even in its mere use, it has deviated from
the concept table. It no longer adequately fulfills the function of a table of holding objects above
the ground. The particular table does not live up to the concept of table. But, by thinking
through the concepts of history, the division of labor, the commodity, and others, we come to see
that our table is an example of a table, but also a particular table, something beyond its status as
exemplar, and as such note that the category table does not do justice to the particular table
either. In Hegelian terminology, we come to think concretely about the table by hashing out its
relationships to its category. But, more than this, our table, like Marx's, spins grotesque thoughts
out of its wooden brain.
The principle of exchange (Tauschprinzip) is the social form of the principle of the
identity between a concept and the particulars which are to fall under it.

181

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 146-7.
106

181

In the principle of

the equal exchange of goods, there is already a normative claim. Like our table's failure to live
up to the concept of table, exchange in capitalist society fails to live up to the concept of equal
exchange. The emergence of the table as a commodity, its production for exchange, covers over
the social relationships that created the table. Among these social relationships is a particular
labor relation in which surplus value is extracted from the people who, among other things, mine
the ore, refine the ore, shape the refined metal into table bases and stems, attach the parts. In
extracting surplus value, the principle of equal exchange is violated. But, the relationship
between constant capital and variable capital, machinery and labor power, is also covered over in
the process of exchange. The table's exchange value is thought to emerge from the machinery,
rather than labor, which is ultimately the source of value. The labor relation is obscured and it
as well as the exchange relationship between the table and money is taken as natural.
What I've demonstrated with the theoretical reflections at the beginning of the section and
the example of the table is that through investigations into what is taken to be the natural, one
can begin to form a constellation of concepts around objects in such a way that one can uncover
the particularity of the object, as well as its existence as a concrete product of a particular
organization of social labor. Adorno's procedure of investigating the natural and the historical
through a constellation of concepts so that the non-identical of a particular can show itself is
called for in the face of the devastation of history. Recall the 3 pronged analysis of Adorno's
motivation offered at the end of Part II. The working class, culture, and idealism have failed.
This is why Adorno's claim that history forces constellations on us holds.

182

But history also

forces the body on us as the last remaining source of critical reason since reason itself is
implicated in the destruction wrought by contemporary societies.
182

Adorno, Negative Dialectics,166. “We need no epistemological critique to pursue
constellations; the search for them is forced upon us by the real course of history.”
107

Where then does bodily revulsion to suffering come into play, if, as this has been spelled
out, the criticism of an existing practice seems to emerge from an immanent investigation of the
natural and the historical? How does the non-conceptual in general or the body in particular get
any traction in this schema? In the abstract, an answer has already been provided. In chapter 3,
Adorno's procedure is played out with regard to Kant's ethical theory. To simplify, there, the
bodily impulse, as both self-consciousness of our freedom and what I am calling here the bodily
revulsion to suffering is discovered at the heart of Kant's attempt to justify the categorical
imperative. Through the constellation of the concepts of Kant's own ethics, the non-identical,
that which Kant attempts to and must eliminate in making his system consistent, is shown to be
the actual basis of the system. The system cannot be kept consistent without eliminating the
non-identical, in this case, the body and its impulses. But, at the same time, nothing can justify
the “facts of reason,” but these very impulses. So, in Kant and in idealism generally, the nonidentical is covered over. But, this insight must be applied clearly to existing social reality. For,
Adorno is advancing this procedure not merely as a philosophical critique of idealism, but as a
critique of existing social reality. Social reality itself has become obscured by the categories
used to understand it. Social reality has been reified, but the only way to get beyond this is
through those reified categories. In the face of that critique, it is difficult to formulate any notion
of ethical subjectivity that does not turn into the night in which all cats are grey, and thus one in
which criticism itself is not possible.
Section II Transition to Experience: Initial thoughts on the Possibility of a Practical
Orientation
In one of the moments where Adorno advances what seems to be a moral principle that is
supposed to offer a way to distinguish the moral from the immoral, he orients morality around

108

the Holocaust:
“A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to
arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar
will happen. When we want to find reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given
one of Kant was once upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage, for the new
imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral addendum—bodily, because it is now the
practical abhorrence of the unbearable physical agony to which individuals are exposed even
with individuality about to vanish as a form of mental reflection. It is in the unvarnished
183
materialistic motive only that morality survives.”
In particular, it is clear from this passage that Adorno connects morality with his critique of Kant.
The implication of this critique for thinking about morality after the Holocaust is that morality
cannot be based on reason alone, at least reason as it has come to be understood. The bodily
impulse has a place in understanding thought, human freedom, and the normative claim that
human suffering is to be avoided. But, this is not a decision procedure for determining what
thoughts and actions we should take. For, just as with Kant's categorical imperative, it would
prove useless, not only in adjudicating moral controversy, but even in determining whether
morality comes into play in a particular situation. Instead, Adorno puts forward a quasitranscendental claim that the only source of a practical orientation yet to be emptied of its force
is to be found in the body. This is why he claims that history has forced materialism on
metaphysics. But, more than this, the extra-rational basis of thought itself is the body in its
impulse to identify with the suffering of others.
The link between this bodily revulsion to suffering and the universal concept and thus the
key ideas for understanding ethical subjectivity today lies in self-conscious experience, and in
particular, the concepts of memory and imagination as elements of this experience. I will briefly
reflect on these concepts here before explicating them in detail in the next section (section III).
When Adorno argues that nature is to be found in the historical and the historical in the natural,
183

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365.
109

he claims that even the gutting of our practical orientation toward nature is a sign of our guilt.
But, this guilt is a practical orientation. This is the flip side of the claim that all reification is a
forgetting.

184

When we take second nature, nature mediated by our own social activity, as

natural, or first nature, we are repressing or otherwise ignoring our own guilt in constructing this
second nature. But even more than this, even claims regarding what counts as first nature are
implicated. As Lukács showed, nature simpliciter becomes the repository of science and
aesthetic contemplation through the alienation that is produced through our creation of this
second nature. To make natural this social activity is to effectively make it inevitable and thus
beyond our responsibility, and thus nothing for which we could be guilty. And this is why
Adorno argues that the historical is to be found in our treatment of nature, which includes our
treatment of ourselves and other human beings.
Memory is thus the ability, first of all, to actually experience oneself as something other
than the abstract functioning of this second nature, to experience oneself as more than merely a
means to one's own self-preservation. If this second nature, as Lukács describes it, is marked by
reification, then the way beyond reification must involve a form of reflection upon those very
categories of second nature. The appearance or semblance (Schein) of this form of reflection is
to be found in our bodily gestures. And the experience of the world as it is, the world of second
nature, as uncomfortable, alienating, painful, guilt-ridden, does appear in our bodily orientations.
The physical moment, which I’ve referred to above as the impulse, and which Adorno claims is a
remnant “from before the split between extra- and intra-mental,”

185

is the source of these bodily

gestures and thus that which we must experience if we are to engage in remembrance. So, the

184

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 191.

185

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 228.
110

body, in particular, the contortions we put ourselves through, can be taken as evidence of the
interceding of social pressures on our impulses. Self-preservation recoils on the subject in its
repression of this impulse. But, these contortions are precisely a forgetting. They are the
continued assertion of the principle of individuation, of control over ourselves and the outer
environment, over nature, even when they no longer advance the very goal for which the
principle was asserted. Numerous examples reveal the repression and inversion of this impulse.
The orientation to our own bodies is distorted in various ways by a multitude of social forces.
The fast food and pre-packaged food industries, the diet industry, the exercise industry, the health
food industry, and the culture industry in general all contribute to the contortions we put our
bodies through. While these are largely unconscious contortions, that we frequently and
consciously become unhappy in our pursuit of self-preservation in its current form is further
evidence that what would truly make us happy is undermined in our relationship with our second
nature, the forces we have ourselves shaped, yet that appear out of our control. “[I]n this age of
universal social repression, the picture of freedom against society live in the crushed, abused
individual features alone.”

186

In terms of the concept of memory then, there must be an

experience of these contortions as wrong. To remember in this sense means to call into question
the very social forces that produce the contortions of our bodies and thus the experience of their
wrongness through the ability to bring concepts and their history in relation to the suffering and
guilt surrounding and interpenetrating the subject.
Connected to this experience of wrongness is the ability to envision, if only in passing,
something different. Adorno, while engaging in a critique of idealism, locates the possibility of
this experience in the exercise of the productive imagination. “The fact that without a will there

186

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 265.
111

is no consciousness is blurred by the idealists by sheer identity, as if the will were nothing but
consciousness. In the most profound concept of transcendental epistemology, the concept of
productive imagination, the trace of the will invades the pure intellective function.”

187

So, in

this critique, the productive imagination, as a concept of idealism, actually points beyond
idealism's identification of will and consciousness to this material moment in the body. Most
abstractly, to engage in remembrance, to experience one's self as unfree, requires the ability to
envision the possibility of a world in which one is free, in which one's own impulses can be acted
upon in ways that are not mediated by the existing form of self-preservation which produces
these wrong orientations toward our own bodies, and eventually even our conscious actions. To
put this another way, reification, or rather, the mechanism through which reification takes its
hold on individuals, the imagination, allows the current organization of society to offer up
visions of the future, but without the possibility of certain things, for example, the principle of
self-preservation, being any different. The principle of self-preservation becomes nature; we are
to believe that it, in its current form, is unchangeable and thus a necessary aspect of any society.
Social Darwinism and the reduction of freedom to the freedom to compete then, not only assume
the current form of self-preservation as a necessity, but turn this supposed necessity into a virtue.
This imaginative projection into the future remains abstract when thinking through the
relationship one has to one's self, because it still reifies the individual. It is only when the
sociality of individuals is brought into the picture that the impulse to freedom begins to become
concrete. For, if the individual, as it stands today as the product of the historical victory of the
principle of self-preservation, merely asserts its experience of unfreedom, it is still always
possible for this to be interpreted as the assertion of power over others. But, then freedom is

187

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 230.
112

merely purchased at the price of others' unfreedom, and indeed, the impulse, the physical
moment is not redeemed, but once again mediated by self-preservation and turned to the cause of
injustice and oppression. The sign of the natural in the historical is to be found, however, in our
gestures of compassion toward others that occur without the direct mediation of the principle of
self-preservation. When we see another in pain, we are moved to act. Take for example, the case
of Wesley Autrey, who, upon seeing a man have an epileptic seizure and fall into the path of an
oncoming subway train, jumped on to the tracks and placed his body over the man's as the train
passed overhead. This is a dramatic example of an everyday aversion to the suffering of others.
We take Autrey's actions as an act of heroism, since he so obviously put himself at risk in order
to rescue another from physical suffering. Other, less dramatic actions also evidence this
aversion to suffering. The immediate motion toward someone who slips provides an example.
This is also an expression of a spontaneous solidarity with others, an expression that what
happens to her matters to me. “[C]onscience consisted in the self's devotion to something
outside itself, in the ability to make the true concerns of others one's own. This ability involves
reflection as an interpenetration of receptivity and imagination.”

188

It requires both the impulse

of the body and the imaginative projection into the place of the other. The bodily impulse as it
has been articulated here then begins to coincide with contemporary sentimentalist meta-ethical
positions coming out of the analytic tradition. For example, Michael Slote argues that ethical
norms can only be generated by the facts of empathy.

189

The connection to Adorno's motivations for reorienting practical reason toward the body
(see the conclusion to Part II) and nature stems from the qualitative and quantitative axes of

188

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 164.

189

Michael Slote, Moral Sentimentalism, (New York: Oxford UP, 2010).
113

suffering since the western Enlightenment. The character of suffering is historical. First of all,
overcoming scarcity on a worldwide scale is not a possibility until the industrialization of
agriculture and manufacture. But, this possibility has not been realized, and so we can now
characterize this as a failure on our part as opposed to something natural. Of course, this does
not prevent certain ideologues from asserting the naturalness of that scarcity, and thus justifying
certain types of suffering as inevitable and so, outside our responsibility. This changes the
quality of suffering. One, potentially at least, can experience this suffering as contingent. In
addition, the sheer horror of suffering in the present is in some senses new. This is not to claim,
and Adorno would not endorse the view, that the horrors of slavery, the genocide of American
Indians, and other atrocities prior to the industrialization of death do not warrant their own
analysis. But, suffering in a Nazi concentration or death camp, or from radiation poisoning as a
result of atomic weapon use have a qualitative character all their own. Lastly, in terms of sheer
numbers, again the Holocaust or the use of atomic weapons over Nagasaki and Hiroshima may
not rival the genocide in the Americas or European and American slavery, but in terms of
numbers over time, there is something quantitatively new.
Thus, Adorno articulates the demand that any theoretical apparatus, if it is to claim to be
critical, must orient itself toward the disasters of the twentieth century, in particular, the
Holocaust, the atom bomb, and “torture as a permanent institution.”

190

Auschwitz is a symbol

for the fact that there are fates worse than death to be feared in the contemporary world, and
Hiroshima represents the potential for an entire population to be wiped from the earth in an
instant. Interestingly, in both these cases, memory of the atrocity itself is potentially eliminated
along with the human beings. In first hand accounts from the Holocaust, especially those from

190

See Lecture 14 in Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems.
114

the death camps, the survivors frequently express that they thought there would remain no record
of what had been done to people there. The concept of guilt, thus returns, firstly, as our inability
to redeem the injustices of the past. People suffered in this way, and there is no undoing the
suffering. Yet, we live off the future that emerged from this past. Secondly, our guilt continues.
Our happiness is bought at the price of others' suffering, and even that happiness is fleeting. The
consumptive habits of the economically well-off are carried along on the backs of the exploited
and abused laborers. Lastly, Adorno points out our mere statistical guilt. By merely surviving in
a system that is organized such that some must not, each of our lives has ensured someone's
death. The first step in at least doing theoretical justice to guilt, then, is to more clearly articulate
experience as self-conscious memory and imagination through which the suffering body is
connected to reason and the species. The injustices of the past in some sense cannot be
redeemed, no matter the future. Yet, the aim of philosophical work must be to redeem them.
This is why the imagination is also important. It allows for perspectives to “be fashioned that
displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and
distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”

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Section III Experience: Self-Consciousness, Memory and Imagination
In the last section, the beginnings of the relationship between universals and bodily
suffering were articulated. The key to getting to their relationship is within the concepts of
experience and memory. Experience, we saw, however cannot be reduced to the mere
immediacy of experience that empiricism to this day relies on: “Pure immediacy and fetishism
are equally untrue. In our insistence on immediacy against reification we are (as perceived in
Hegel's institutionalism) relinquishing the element of otherness in dialectics—as arbitrary a

191

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Verso, 1978), 247.
115

procedure as the later Hegel's unfeasible practice to arrest dialectics in something solid beyond
it.”

192

And this is why the mere impulse to freedom and the moral addendum are necessary, but

not sufficient for Adorno's normative stance. “Thus, practice, including political practice, calls
for theoretical consciousness at its most advanced, and on the other hand, it needs the corporeal
element, the very thing that cannot be fully identified with reason.”

193

So, in what follows, then

I will make the concept of experience in Adorno more concrete while attempting to link memory,
universals, and the bodily aversion to others' suffering through this concept of experience. To do
so, first some of Benjamin's key insights into experience will be explicated. Next, I will show
the link between these insights and Adorno's own thinking about experience and its possibility in
the contemporary world. In doing so, I will start from the facts of suffering and the aversion to
suffering in the body. Following this, I connect the ability for memory and imagination through
brief analyses of freedom and nationalism. I then link these abilities together and with the
species in a concept of self-conscious experience. Finally, I link these abilities to objective
conditions and illustrate the possibility of ethical subjectivity with two contemporary examples.
Benjamin on Experience
Both Adorno and Benjamin distinguish Erfahrung from Erlebnis. Both terms translate
into English as experience. But, both Benjamin and Adorno are reacting against the immediacy
and giveness that is supposed to be present in Erlebnis, especially in the philosophies of Dilthey
and Bergson. Adorno in particular is also rejecting an empiricist version of experience. So, in
unpacking Adorno's conception of experience, we have to distinguish between Erfahrung and
Erlebnis. When Adorno refers to experience as Erlebnis, he frequently does so with a disdainful

192

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 374-5.

193

Adorno, History and Freedom, 238.
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twist, calling it Urerlebnisse, primal experience, dismissing with it the unmediated given that is
supposed to be at the root of Heidegger's ontology as well as other philosophical systems that
emerge from Husserl's phenomenological approach.
In Benjamin's “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” he situates Baudelaire's poetry as an
attempt to recapture Erfahrung in the time of its passing.

194

Because of the shocks of modern

life, in particular, the urban life of the crowd, Erfahrungen have been stripped of their aura, and
we are thus left with only the shocks of that life. But, in relaying the very experiences of shock,
Chockerlebnis, as though they possessed an aura, as though there remained an element of ritual
which would link the individual Erlebnis to the collective experience of human beings and thus
transform it into the matter of Erfahrung, Baudelaire's poetry is capable of getting at what
experience means in the industrialized world. With the mechanization of the world, including
the mechanical reproduction of art, the involuntary memory, a concept taken from Proust, and
most characteristically illustrated by his famous madeleine and the memories it prompts, the
experiences of aura and ritual are eviscerated and with them and connection between the isolated
experience and the collective experience. Consciousness, as the ability to fend off sensory input,
is overwhelmed by the persistence of shocks in the contemporary world, and as such prevents the
sedimentation of the sorts of memories that could later be activated in the manner of Proust's
mémoire involuntaire.
But, in linking his reflections to Proust's, Benjamin seems to leave us with the problem —
the same problem that Lukács explicates and with which the chapter began — the inability to
have the sorts of experiences that would reinvigorate memory and thus some connection to

194

Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Selected Writings v. 4, 1938-1940, ed.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge, Mass: The
Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1996), 313-343.
117

nature and thus experience as Erfahrung. For Proust involuntary memory is brought about by
chance, the eating of the madeleine is responsible for the ability to access memories which link
his individual experiences with that of the collective through ritual and aura. “According to
Proust, it is a matter of chance whether an individual forms an image of himself, whether he can
take hold of his experience.”

195

Benjamin, however, counters the seemingly mutual exclusivity

of consciousness and memory with Baudelaire's poetry. Through it, Benjamin argues, the shock
experience (Chockerlebnis) of modernity is “given the weight of long experience
[Erfahrung].”

196

For example, the eye and the gaze, as related in Baudelaire's poetry, is bereft

of the distance that creates the aura necessary for beauty and experience. It is because the poet
gives himself over to the “eyes-without-a-gaze,” that he is capable of relating the meaningfulness
of a distance that has been lost. “In the protective eye, there is no daydreaming surrender to
distance and to faraway things.”

197

A psuedo-aura is given by the very shock experiences that

are characteristic of the contemporary world. The meaning of this sort of experience, while
bereft of meaning and the possibility of memory in Proust's sense of involuntary memory, is
captured precisely by Baudelaire's ability to relate the coldness of modern life. And this coldness
also provides a link to the collective experience of the bourgeoisie; coldness is the mode of life in
the modern world.
In reflecting on Benjamin's “One-Way Street,” a piece in which similar themes regarding
experience emerge, Adorno points out that Benjamin is engaged in the construction of
Denkbilder, thought images, which provide for a physiognomy of modern life in which the

195

Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 315.

196

Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 343.

197

Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 341.
118

subjective experience of the world is redeemed as the objective truth about that life. This
redemption is possible, from Adorno's perspective, because Benjamin engages in “a process of
succumbing to the object to the point of the literal extinction of the self.”

198

And in his

introduction to Benjamin's post-humously collected works, Adorno notes that Benjamin's form of
thought, rather than attempting a direct correspondence between thought and idea, “is a
constellation of ideas that, as he may have envisioned it, together form the divine Name, and in
each case these ideas crystallize in details, which are their force field.”

199

Thus, from Adorno's reflections on Benjamin here, several points are relevant for
thinking through experience, memory, and imagination: first, the attempt to find the universal
within the concrete, to always remain in touch with the object of theory, rather than fitting the
objects of investigation to the theory—and this is what Adorno redeems in a form of Benjamin's
constellative procedure, second, the notion of memory as the related to this way of being in touch
with the object of analysis through concepts and whose possibility is in question in the
contemporary world, third, the notion of coldness as a way to characterize normal contemporary
experience, finally, the link with the Name of the divine, which in secular form is the connection
between memory, imagination, and concepts. Adorno is not merely explicating Benjamin's ideas,
but linking his own methods and insights to Benjamin's in a tangental way. For example, in
Negative Dialectics, at the end of his reflections on natural history, Adorno quotes Benjamin in
order to explicate the role of philosophy in the contemporary world: “it would be up to thought
to see all nature, and whatever would install itself as such, as history, and all history as nature—

198

Theodor Adorno, “Benjamin's Einbahnstrasse,” in Notes on Literature, v. II, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 327.
199
Theodor Adorno, “Introduction to Benjamin's Schriften,” Notes on Literature, v. II, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, (New York: Columbia UP, 1992), 223.
119

'to grasp historic being in its utmost historic definition, in the place where it is most historic, as
natural being, or to grasp nature, in the place where it seems most deeply, inertly natural, as
historic being.'”

200

Adorno's conception of experience as self-conscious memory and imagination
Experience as a concept in Adorno's thought then is closely linked to Benjamin's usage of
Erfahrung as well as his criticism of the immediacy of experience in the concept of Erlebnis. It
is through this notion of experience that Adorno links the physical body, in particular, the body
that suffers with the universality of concepts that are still available to a critique of existing social
reality. But, similar to the way in which Adorno characterizes Benjamin's approach in creating
Denkbilder, the concepts themselves can only be redeemed through an immersion in the objects
to which they are supposed to supposed to apply.
“Ideas that have confidence in their own objectivity have to surrender va banque, without mental
reservations, to the object in which they immerse themselves, even if that object is another idea;
this is the insurance premium they pay for not being a system. Transcendent critique avoids from
201
the outset the experience of what is other than its own consciousness.”
The normative import of a concept can only be had, not through the mere application of a
universal to a particular, nor even with an immanent application of a universal that a system
claims for itself to that system, but rather only through the subjective experience of the object in
question, even if that object is a concept. A concept's claim to universality is always mediated by
subjective experience, yet the truth of the concept is only to be had through a resistance to the
tendency, implicit in all judgment, to apply concepts to objects without acknowledgment of the
object's spilling over the concept. It is only with adequate experience of the object that critique
200

Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutsches Trauerspiel, (Frankfurt: 1963), 197. Cited in
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 359.
201
Theodor Adorno, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry
Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1993), 146.
120

of either the concept or the object can begin.
What constitutes experience of this sort then? Adorno explicates experience of this sort
through suffering and the body, but in a way in which it also requires self-consciousness. And
self-consciousness must involve the kind of memory and imagination sketched in the previous
section (part III, section II). While the suffering body that motivates thought itself, the thinker
must be changed by the experience, or it does not constitute experience, and thus what she is
engaged in does not constitute thought. In this way, one can make sense of Adorno's dismissals
of positivist attempts to eliminate values from thought as not really thought at all, but rather,
something like the scientific cataloging of specimens. Experience (Erfahrung) always carries
with it the bodily moment, or else becomes mere Erlebnis, a living in immediacy, and thus a
justification for what exists. But, in Benjamin's conception of Erfahrung, the individual
experience must be connected to the collective and its memory in some fashion through the aura.
This is what Baudelaire's poetry accomplishes, though after the failure of the aura. The
collective for Adorno, however, can only mean the species itself. As I showed in chapter 3, the
potential for experience (Erfahrung) is linked to the species' ability to constitute itself as a
species. So, then, so far, experience in this specialized sense requires a bodily moment that at
once prompts self-consciousness, but also an immersion in the object of reflection. And, in
addition, this self-consciousness must be linked to the concept of humanity in some fashion
through memory. In order to explicate this conception of experience in more detail, first, I will
return to the notion of suffering, concluding that the redemption of the aversion to suffering
requires a form of self-consciousness, and in particular the sort of memory spelled out above, in
which concepts can be brought into relation to the immediate experience of suffering. Next, I
will connect these conclusions to what Adorno calls the memory of freedom. Following this, the

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imagination must be explicated in more detail. I do so through Adorno's reflections on
nationalism. To bring all this together and connect the memory and imagination of the individual
to the collective, the species, in a way sufficient to both Benjamin's insights regarding the state of
memory today and Adorno's reflections on progress, I conclude the theoretical aspect of this with
Adorno's reflections on society and self-preservation. Finally, I offer an illustration of these
ideas' plausibility and the possibilities of ethical subjectivity under current conditions.
In explaining the possibility of the pogrom, Adorno shows how human beings are turned
into something else in the perceptions of the executioners, and in a way that draws on Benjamin's
reflections on Baudelaire. Here, the response of a perpetrator, or even a spectator, to the gaze of
the victim determines the possibility of the pogrom.
“People are looking at you.— Indignation over cruelty diminishes in proportion as the victims
are less like normal readers, the more they are swarthy, 'dirty,' dago-like. This throws as much
light on the crimes as on the spectators. Perhaps the social schematization of perception in antiSemites is such that they do not see Jews as human beings at all. The constantly encountered
assertion that savages, blacks, Japanese are like animals, monkeys for example, is the key to the
pogrom. The possibility of pogroms is decided in the moment when the gaze of a fatallywounded animal falls on a human being. The defiance with which he repels this gaze—'after all,
its only an animal'—reappears irresistibly in cruelties done to human beings, the perpetrators
having again and again to reassure themselves that it is 'only an animal', because they could
never fully believe this even of animals. In repressive society the concept of man is itself a
parody of divine likeness. The mechanism of 'pathic projection' determines that those in power
perceive as human only their own reflected image, instead of reflecting back as human precisely
what is different. Murder is thus the repeated attempt, by yet greater madness, to distort the
madness of such false perception into reason: what was not seen as human and yet is human, is
202
made a thing, so that its stirrings can no longer refute the manic gaze.”
Immediately, there is an aversion to suffering, even to the suffering of an animal. But, whether
on the level of perception or the level of conscious reason, this aversion is eliminated,
rationalized away as not counting, as not real suffering, since “it is only an animal.” Recall the
quote with which part III, section 2 began, in which Adorno asserts that Hitler has imposed a

202

Adorno, Minima Moralia, 105.
122

new categorical imperative. There he claims, “dealing discursively with it would be an outrage.”
Here we have an explanation as to why. The imperative is not derived from reason alone, but
rather the discursive formulation of the impulse, this aversion to suffering. Thus, to deal with it
through the terms of the contemporary form of reason already makes the pogrom a possibility,
something to be contemplated under certain conditions, say under threats of terrorism, it now
becomes reasonable to torture certain people. The evidence for this is, of course, all around us.
Pick up any contemporary anthology on torture or simply listen to the former vice-president. I
won't dwell on this. For, as it stands, Adorno appears, then to simply be advocating a form of
natural law theory or sentimentalism. But, this is not the case. Instead, while we must take this
aversion to suffering seriously, even in the face of these rationalizations, Adorno here also gets at
the necessity of self-consciousness, in particular, a sort of memory that can bring key concepts to
the fore. That is, “In repressive society, the concept of man is itself a parody of divine likeness.”
Memory here, then, is the ability to bring the concepts of human and animal into relation to the
aversion to suffering. The concept of the human, as all are equally made in god's image, that is,
given its history in monotheism and then natural law theory, while providing a way “of reflecting
back as human precisely what is different,” is distorted by contemporary reason into mere power
over. To get through this rationalization, the aversion to suffering is clearly not sufficient, it
requires reflection on the very concepts used to justify racism, genocide, and the pogrom, human
and animal. And the perpetrators and spectators then murder as a culmination of the belief that
the victims do not suffer, “because they could never fully believe this even of animals.”
This tenuous link between the suffering body and memory in this sense also appears in
the relationship that contemporary subjects have to their own freedom. While we are formally
free, the implication of the demands made upon us in relation to the whole, in our social

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positions, is that we ought to be substantively free. The level of activity expected from us
implies the ability to effect change in the institutions under which we labor. The experience of
being overwhelmed, thus is rational in that it's source is to be found in the historical evolution of
the concept of freedom. The experience is valid in so far as it gets at this “memory” of freedom.
“All these things are probably no more than a cover for the fact that we live in a society based on
formal freedom, and in return for this formal freedom it demands that we wholeheartedly devote
our efforts to whatever has fallen to our lot, while at the same time preventing us from doing so
because of the overwhelming power of its institutions and the overwhelming power with which it
confronts us at every moment. This, I would say, is the concrete form in which we experience
the question of freedom and unfreedom today....What marks out this feeling of chronic overwork
is that it always contains, in a concealed form of course, something like a memory of freedom.
That is to say, unless we felt that we ought by rights to be free, that we ought to be free persons to
be able to cope with all the demands that have been made, we would not have this chronic feeling
of being overstretched, a feeling that is undoubtedly far keener than the feeling of 'care' [Sorge]
203
and similar ideas that the existentialists tell us about.”
Memory in this sense of drawing out the history of concepts, then gets us someway in thinking
about a concept of experience that makes possible a practical orientation to the world, a stance
that certain conditions should not be. And, as was shown in both of these situations, the memory
of these concepts also links us with the collective, though in such a way that one recognizes the
failures to realize the concepts, rather than the aura of a tradition that should be affirmed.
The phenomenon of nationalism thus provides a way into this link between the
experience of suffering and some notion of the species as a self-constituted whole. The problem,
however, is that nationalism is pathological, a way in which the power of the collective is
confirmed, yet without either the element of self-constitution or the potential solidarity with
humanity that I am linking to the individual's suffering.
“The characteristic form of absurd opinion today is nationalism. With new virulence, it infects
the entire world, in a historical period, where, because of the state of the technical forces of
production and the potential definition of the earth as a single planet, at least in the nonunderdeveloped countries nationalism has lost its real basis and has become the full blown
203

Adorno, History and Freedom, 205.
124

ideology it has always been. In private life, self-praise and anything resembling it is suspect,
because such expressions reveal all too much the predominance of narcissism. The more
individuals are caught up in themselves and the more fatally they pursue particular interests—
interests that are reflected in that narcissistic attitude, which in turn reinforces the rigid power of
the interests—the more carefully this very principle must be concealed and misrepresented, so
that, as the National Socialist slogan has it, 'service before self.' However, it is precisely this
force of taboo on individual narcissism, its repression, that gives nationalism its pernicious
power. The life of the collective has different ground rules than those at work in the relations
between individuals. In every soccer match the local fans, flouting the rules of hospitality,
shamelessly cheer on their own team....People would only need take the norms of bourgeois
private life to heart and raise them to the level of society. But well-meaning recommendations in
this vein overlook the fact that any transition of this kind is impossible under conditions that
impose such privations on individuals, so constantly disappoint their individual narcissism, in
reality damn them to such helplessness, that they are condemned to collective narcissism. As a
compensation, collective narcissism then restores to them as individuals some of the self-esteem
the same collective strips from them and that they hope to fully recover through delusive
identification with it. More than any other pathological prejudice, the belief in the nation is
opinion as dire fate: the hypostasis of the group to which one just happens to belong, the place
where one just happens to be, into an absolute good and superiority. It inflates into a moral
maxim that abominable wisdom born of emergency situations, that we are all in the same boat. It
is just as ideological to distinguish healthy national sentiment from pathological nationalism as it
is to believe in normal opinion in contrast to pathogenic opinion. The dynamic that leads from
the supposedly healthy national sentiment into its overvalued excess is unstoppable, because its
untruth is rooted in the person's identifying himself with the irrational nexus of nature and
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society in which he by chance finds himself.”
Given the state of real helplessness, the overwhelming momentum of social forces operating
behind peoples' backs, the privations, both material and emotional that are foisted on people
living under such a system, irrational identification with a collective is, almost literally, all
people have. Individuals' real and perceived weakness could be the basis for change, but instead
is turned into a way to keep people bound to the relationships that put them in a position of
weakness in the first place. The connection with objective helplessness is eviscerated and
replaced with a subjective feeling that can be remedied with individual action. This is the
elimination of experience in the sense Adorno speaks of. The notion that one's experience is
objective, an object to be reflected upon, mediated, is lost and replaced with the subjective
204

Adorno, “Opinion, Delusion, Society,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, ed.
and trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 117-18.
125

feeling that merely requires some immediate action in order to compensate. Memory,in the sense
above is eliminated. The potential object of rational reflection is turned over to the irrational
forces of the psyche, which in turn is the product of both psychological and non-psychological
factors. “The concept of the ego is dialectical, both psychic and extrapsychic, a quantum of
libido and the representative of outside reality.”

205

Healthy national sentiment is already

pathological insofar as it already, even without explicitly endorsing the horrors of jingoistic
nationalism run wild, evidences precisely the same logic.
But, we can also see the possibilities of something different. Adorno assumes that there
is an objective possibility to eliminate the necessity of nationalism, that is, that people could be
free in a way that does not require the logic of us and them, for me or against me. This
assumption, as the ability of productive forces to provide for all human needs, I think is
unquestionable. And, the very concepts used to make nationalism seem natural, and thus
inevitable, can open the possibility of something different. The taboo on narcissism, that is, a
concept of selflessness that societies demand of their members, provides one possibility. In
addition, the concept of hospitality also reveals individual possibilities. Now, Adorno
immediately undermines the application of these concepts. For, the ego is too weak in the face of
deprivation to engage in the sort of selflessness that would undermine nationalism, the very
cause of that weakness.
This is why the concept of imagination is required to understand the possibility of ethical
subjectivity. I conceive of imagination here as the ability to hold open these concepts as they are
“remembered” in a self-conscious way. That is, by not determining the concepts before hand,
but rather letting them emerge from the experience of the object and in relation to one another,
205

Theodor Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology, Part II,” trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left
Review I/47 (1968): 86.
126

one holds open possibilities from the past and brings forth new possibilities as well. Adorno, in
describing the play of children, actually attributes to them an unconscious knowledge of the
falsity of the commodity. In depriving
“the things with which he plays of their mediated usefulness, he seeks to rescue in them what is
benign toward men and not what subserves the exchange relation that equally deforms men and
things. The little trucks travel nowhere and the tiny barrels on them are empty; yet they remain
true to their destiny by not performing, not participating in the process of abstraction that level
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down that destiny, but instead abide as allegories of what they are specifically for.”
In a sort of imaginative mimicry of the world of work, children show up the falsity of that world.
By removing the exchange relation, at least in imagination, they show in their purposeless
activity the possibility of the actions they mimic. And this possibility also remains in art. For,
art, “by withdrawing into the imagination” does not fully participate in actual material relations
and so “does not resign itself to adaptation, does not prolong external violence in internal
deformation.”

207

But, as we saw in the last chapter, while the concept of progress points to the missed
opportunity to constitute ourselves as a species, the fact is that we have not. Even with the
possibilities held onto by a self-conscious experience informed through memory and
imagination. So how is it possible to connect the individual experience of phenomenon with the
species? The remaining avenues are to be found in reflection upon the very institutions that
prohibit the species' realization as a self-constituted humanity. Even in Kant's reflections, our
will to self-preservation is at the heart of the species' ability to reach a state of perpetual peace.
Mediated through the nation-state, the attempts to preserve ourselves are supposed to guarantee
that republican nations will refrain from war, encourage trade, and mediate conflict between

206

Adorno, Minima Moralia, 228.

207

Adorno, Minima Moralia, 214.
127

nations that have not yet reached republican forms of government. Kant, in attempting to take
seriously those skeptical of peace on the grounds of some idea of human nature turns the concept
of human nature against them. While the puzzles and problems with this account were made
clear, Adorno does attempt something of the same form in his attempts to redeem a concept of
humanity and solidarity.
The concept of self-preservation is ambiguous for Adorno. It at once seems to undermine
the very reason that Adorno would like to use to critique contemporary societies, but it also
provides a way for getting at those societies' failures. This is clear when Adorno links the
suffering body to the failed realization of the species.
“All activities of the species point to its continued physical existence, although they may be
misconceptions of it, independent organizations whose business is done only by the way. Even
the steps which society takes to exterminate itself are at the same time absurd acts of unleashed
self-preservation. They are forms of unconscious social action against suffering even though an
obtuse view of society's own interests turns their particularity against that interest. Confronted
with such steps, their purpose—and this alone makes a society a society—calls for it to be so
organized as the the productive forces would directly permit it here and now, and as the
conditions of production on either side relentlessly prevent it. The telos of such an organization
of society would be to negate the physical suffering of even the least of its members, and to
negate the internal reflexive forms of that suffering. By now, this negation in the interests of all
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can be realized only in a solidarity that is transparent to itself and all the living.”
Society, by its mere concept, implies the goal of ending the suffering of its members. This can
even be garnered from the concept of the social contract in its use by classical liberals from
Hobbes through Rousseau and Kant. The reason for entering a society, the self-interests of the
individual, implies the norm of overcoming suffering. But, this is not merely an ad-hoc
determinate negation of liberalism. For, beyond this sort of analysis, the concept of selfpreservation is also implicated. Even societies' attempts to destroy themselves are really
attempts to preserve themselves that have gone horribly wrong. The concept of society implies

208

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203-4.
128

the concept of self-preservation and its application to both itself and its members. But, by
introducing the concept of self-preservation, the implied unity between the society and its
members is also undermined. There is no unity without the ending of the suffering of its
members. Thus the experience of suffering is a political experience, or at least potentially so. If
one can experience her own suffering as unnecessary, as a problem with the social organization
in which she exists, there is forged a tenuous connection between the individual and humanity.
To put this all together, through the concepts of self-preservation, humanity as the species'
self-constitution, and knowledge as shot through with bodily impulses, Adorno creates a
constellation in which experience of specific sort provides the insight through which a sort of
practical orientation toward existing societies become available, even if that orientation cannot
offer a code for action or a decision procedure for individual cases. It shows the possibility of no
longer holding on to domination as the principle of organization of our second nature.
Society, as a collective attempt to bring about a better world for all, requires that one care
about the suffering of others, even when this attempt is expressed through actions that will
obviously bring about suffering. And this is how, through the concept of a self-conscious
experience, held together through memory and imagination, a practical orientation toward the
world remains possible. Decent satire offers a way to understand sort of thinking. A news story
in the satirical paper, The Onion, right after the “shock and awe” bombing campaign of Iraq
shows this. A short article titled, “Dead Iraqi Would Have Loved Democracy,” relates how Taha
Sabri was no fan of Hussein and was completely in favor of democracy, but that he was killed
when a cruise missile hit his home.

209

Of course, all the details here are fictional. Nonetheless,

it shows the “liberation” of Iraq for what is was, the killing of innocents who had nothing to do
209

The Onion, March 26, 2003, http://www.theonion.com/articles/dead-iraqi-would-have-loveddemocracy,1421/ (Accessed on May 27, 2010).
129

with the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction or the regime in power. But, it also requires an
ability to empathize to even understand the piece. For certainly this did happen to specific
people. The deadpan tone of the article depends on the reader to carry out the implication and
self-reflection required for the ironic effect. The liberation of Iraq implied the end of the
precondition for that liberation, the lives of the people who were to be liberated. So, in a
simplified form, the physical impulse against one's own and others suffering tells us that
something is wrong. It is through thinking through the concepts involved in the particulars of
suffering that tells us what is wrong. For, the satire requires, not just the aversion to suffering,
but also the ability to then bring the appropriate concepts into play with that impulse. Here, in
particular, democracy and freedom, “liberation.” And as this example of satire illustrates, the
contemporary subject is still capable of an ethical orientation, even if it only results in the
grimace in the face of others' suffering. That grimace is the appearance of the possibility of a
realized morality.
The concept of human rights provides a further demonstration of the power of Adorno's
sort of analysis for understanding social reality. While human rights as they exist in international
law are the product of a particular collective experience, they are the most progressive
internationally agreed to norms for the conduct of national politics and even international
relations. Of course, these rights have been subjected to criticism from non-western actors as
well as western intellectuals. Adorno himself, in a passage cut from the final draft of Minima
Moralia calls the world to task, not on the specific rights that are included in the Declaration, but
on the grounds that nationalism and capitalism will prevent them from being enforced in any
meaningful way. He specifically and prophetically calls out the world for including language
that prohibits genocide, all the while implying, by naming it, that it will happen, and creating

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societies that will be unwilling to enforce the prohibition. But, at the same time, naming what
has happened is necessary “if the victims—in any case too many for their names to be recalled—
were to be spared the curse of having no thoughts turned unto them.”

210

So, while the universal

claims made in the Declaration are not questioned directly by Adorno, the ability of
contemporary societies to achieve them is. They have become abstractions, even if they were not
so from the start. In the passage above from “Opinion, Delusion, Society,” characteristic of this
sort of criticism, Adorno remarks on nationalism and its absurdity. Nationalism could be
overcome if only we took seriously the bourgeois ideal of hospitality. Implied, even in the
liberal state is the concept of hospitality through which we are supposed to treat our home as
though it belonged to the visitors. But, this ideal is blocked by the social imposition of
deprivation and the resulting collective narcissism of the citizenry. In terms of the approach
marked out above, nationalism has become natural; it has become reified. And in the
phenomenon of nationalism, in particular, in the declarations of its naturalness, one finds the
social forces at play in constructing the reality of the contemporary nation-state. The functioning
of the contemporary nation-state depends on its pseudo-democratic decision procedures for
legitimation and these procedures depend on the impoverishment of experience, a turning of the
suffering that could be experienced along with solidarity into actions that instead demonstrate
narcissism and paranoia. Thus, through Adorno's analysis, one can at once grasp the normative
force of human rights and, at the same time, the failure of the species to achieve them.
A brief examination of a specific violation of the genocide prohibition will demonstrate
these concepts and the capabilities of Adorno's approach bit more concretely. On April 6th ,
1994, a plane carrying both the President of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, and the President of
210

Theodor Adorno, “Messages in a Bottle,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, New Left Review I/200
(1993): 6.
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Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, was shot down as it was landing in Kigali, the capital city of
Rwanda. Following this, a coordinated attempt to eliminate ethnic Tutsi as well as moderate
Hutus was undertaken. As the United States, especially at this point in post-cold war history had
claimed to be the last remaining superpower, leader of the free world, and suchlike titles, it is
productive to focus on the reaction here. In particular, just a glance at the pieces that appeared in
the New York Times, the country's supposedly liberally aligned newspaper, garners key insights
into the refusal of western powers to intervene, and even the refusal to use the word “genocide”
to describe the killing.
Almost immediately, the paper's coverage implied that the state of conflict between the
Hutu and Tutsi groups was natural and thus inevitable. In the April 9th edition, two pieces
advance this view: an op-ed written by former Clinton administration Deputy Secretary of State,
Clifton R. Wharton Jr.

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and a “news” piece titled “2 Nations Joined by Common History of

Genocide,” by Jerry Gray, who seems to have no other qualifications than working at the New
York Times as an editor.

212

The language used in both pieces is startling. Wharton's piece,

while imploring the reader against the view that democracy cannot take hold in some places,
actually tends to reinforce such a view.
“What has happened in Burundi and Rwanda may reinforce a widely held view in the West that
democratic roots simply will not sprout in some African countries, which are often seen as hybrid
political creations throwing together tribes and cultures whose only common heritage, unless
held in check by a brutal dictatorship, is warfare against one another. There may be some truth to
this view -- but it does not apply only to Africa. Ancient hatreds and a lack of democratic
traditions also lie behind the struggle in several former Soviet republics and of course in Bosnia.
Africa's smaller nations continue their bloodshed and turmoil largely out of sight, often
considered a lost cause.”
211

Clifton Wharton Jr., “The Nightmare in Central Africa,” The New York Times, April 9, 1994,
Section 1, 21.
212
Jerry Gray, “2 Nations Joined by Common History of Genocide,”The New York Times, April
9, 1994, Section 1, 6.
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So, while the genocide is supposedly at fault for the view that genocide is inevitable, “there may
be some truth to this view.” And further, it's not only true of Africa, but wide swaths of the
planet that are outside of the American and western European direct sphere of influence. In
addition, the piece itself is written as a sort of obituary for former President Ndadaye of Burundi
as well as his successor, Cyprien Ntaryamira and their heroic attempts to overcome the history of
genocide in the region. Skipped over in the piece is the history of colonialism or any mention of
what could be done to stave off the genocide. Thus, the reader is left with the piece's ultimate
conclusion, America cannot push democracy on other countries without an accommodation of
“historical reality.” Since that historical reality is one of ethnic divide, with which the west
apparently had nothing to do with creating, the conflict and genocide seem to be none of our
business.
As if this weren't enough, Gray's piece, in a mere 861 words, purports to be a history of
the two nations involved, Burundi and Rwanda. And that history is a history of genocide. In a
direct analogy to nature, Gray claims, “the bloodletting in Rwanda and Burundi runs through the
history of both countries as fluidly as the meandering Akanyaru River that marks their common
border.” Beyond this, the article recapitulates debunked racialist theories about the origins of the
Hutu and Tutsi groups and their conflicts in central Africa. Take this gem, for example, “The
first recorded tribal clashes date to the 15th century, when the Tutsi -- a tall and elegant Nilotic
people also known as the Watusi -- migrated from Ethiopia and imposed feudal rule over the
Hutu, a short, stocky Bantu people living in the forested hills.” This replicates the racialist
theories of colonial powers, specifically, the Hammite theory, the authors of which, upon finding
Rwanda essentially organized as a monarchy, could not imagine that an African country could
organize itself as a European nation had without a European influence. The European colonists

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thus theorized that settlers of essentially European ethnicity, but dark skin, the Tutsi, the wouldbe Hammites, had at some earlier date colonized this region of backward Africa. And indeed, as
Mahmood Mamdani argues, the deployment of the settler/native distinction was subsequently
crucial to the “popularity” of the genocide among the Hutu.

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And so, ironically, the European

use of the Hammite theory forms part of the history that makes the Hutu genocide against the
Tutsi “settlers” possible. Underneath the supposed natural distinction between Hutu and Tutsi,
we find history and politics, colonialist invaders and post-colonial conflict deploying similar
categories. In more general terms, the attempt to locate the historical within the supposedly
natural begins to offer insights into the events both in Rwanda itself and the lack of western
response to those events.
The notion of experience explicated above also offers a fruitful way of understanding the
situation. The bourgeois coldness that Adorno argues characterizes the actual interactions of
contemporary subjects shows up the western response to the genocide for what it is: a collective
shoulder shrugging. This short-handed way of calling out western powers for inaction also
contains the possibilities for a more detailed analysis. For, more than mere coldness, the lack of
reaction requires a particular repression of nature, the moral addendum, the bodily rejection of
suffering. The natural is to be found within the historical. In the contingent fact of the genocide
and the western powers' response, one finds the potential to have done something, the bodily
aversion to suffering must be “dealt with.” This is why we need the ideological justifications of
the conflict in the New York Times. “Experiences of real helplessness are anything but
irrational—and they are actually hardly psychological. On their own they might be expected to

213

Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide
in Rwanda , (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001).
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prompt resistance to the social system rather than further assimilation to it.”

214

But, the

experience of the others' suffering is turned into the feeling of helplessness. The mediated
potential for action is reduced to the immediate feeling of helplessness, which is at the same time
real. Yet, despite all this, the possibility of an ethical orientation remains. The ethical subject,
while in some sense powerless in the face of the direct forms of violence in Rwanda, can begin
to redeem the suffering of others through a reflection on the possibilities of a different response.
Concrete affirmation of this possibility was to be found in the actions of people in Rwanda who
risked their own lives to save others.
Part IV. Concluding Remarks on the Possibility of Ethical Subjectivity
In this chapter, I have moved through some of the historically relevant insights that
inform Adorno's conception of a practical orientation to the irrational world. Through insights
from Hegel, Marx, Lukacs and Benjamin, the chapter arrives at Adorno's conception of the
relationship between history and nature, which then structures his reflections upon ethical
subjectivity under contemporary conditions. This movement culminates in reflection upon the
possibility for a certain kind of experience, even in the face of social forces that tend to dissuade
us from having experiences of this sort.
Before turning to the criticisms of Adorno in chapter 5, it is worthwhile to briefly outline
what has been shown about experience here in chapter 4 and thus how a practical relation to the
world remains possible. Heuristically, one can think of this along two lines, first, what
conditions must be present for experience of the sort Adorno is after, and second, what makes
the specific sort of experience that Adorno is after valid in the face of irrational social systems.
The first question is really two, however. In addition to the hypothetical subjective conditions

214

Adorno, “Sociology and Psychology, part II,” 89.
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for experience, one must also ask after what social conditions actually exist that would allow for
such conditions to be met, what objectively must hold in order for subjective experience to be
possible. The second question, that of validity, is really inseparable from the first. Experience in
the relevant sense is rational.
In the distinction between Erlebnis and Erfahrung, it was made clear that some mediation
by consciousness is a necessary condition for the possibility of experience that is linked to the
ability to be an ethical subject; felt immediacy of an emotion like empathy is not sufficient for
experience in this sense. One can understand this also in terms of a distinction between feeling
and experience. For it is the turning of the impulsive aversion to bodily suffering into a mere
feeling that undermines its ability to constitute an experience. As the example of nationalism
shows, the impulse that something is not right can be turned into a mere feeling and in this way
stripped of its potential to inaugurate self-consciousness of one's guilt and thus the memory of
freedom and the imagination to pursue something different. Thus, this impulse is necessary, but
not sufficient for experience. In addition, then, self-consciousness is necessary for experience.
The structure of the subject's consciousness must be such that a practical orientation can arise in
the difference between the self as identical with itself and the self as non-identical with itself.
This difference is a relationship that makes the demand on the self that it become something
other than what it is. This presupposes a subject with the capability of self-reflection such that
the self as other can make a demand, the self as the demand that something ought to be or ought
not to be. This ability for self-reflection, must also be linked to the social evolution of the
species in some sense. This link to the species can no longer be provided in the aura produced
by rituals. Instead, the possibility of linking one's individual life to the life of humanity, the
species as self-constituted is to be found in the repository of concepts as they have evolved both

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philosophically and historically. In this sense, memory is the ability to bring concepts to one's
impulses through which one reflects on those impulses. This link to the conceptual history of the
species is required because of the failure of the species to constitute itself as a species. Memory
is the uncovering of the missed opportunities within the concepts, which could redeem the
impulses of one's own experience. To summarize, four subjective conditions must hold for
experience in this sense to be possible: 1. an impulse, here conceived as the bodily aversion to
suffering, 2. self-consciousness, which contains the ability to recognize one's own guilt, the
ability to make a demand that both objectively and subjectively things could be different, which
really means a self-consciousness that is marked by 3. memory, here understood as the ability to
reflect on the very concepts used to understand one's experiences in self-consciousness, and thus
to recognize the missed possibilities within the concepts themselves, and 4. imagination, here
conceived as the possibility of bringing something new into the world. In a way, this is merely
the active ability to hold open the concepts that are used in self-consciousness to understand
one's experience. That is, the ability to reformulate one's own experiences in light of one's own
reflection upon the concepts implicated by those experiences. Putting these two aspects,
memory and imagination, offers the moment, the present, in which “the power of experience
breaks the spell of duration and gathers past and future into the present.”

215

In addition to the subjective abilities that must be in place for experience, there are
objective conditions that must exist in order that the subjective abilities can be realized by actual
subjects and that must exist before the idea of something different from current social conditions
even makes sense. The latter sort of conditions are those that Marx theorized as the conditions

215

Adorno, Minima Moralia, 165. Adorno, in this passage, is actually providing an analysis of
this moment's opposite, the experience of one's life as nothingness. But, in this way he shows
the possibility of experience of the sort outlined.
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for the realization of the universal class. Adorno takes these as an uncontroversial matter of fact.
It is possible, given the state of the technical forces of production that all people, the species as a
whole, could be free from want. This fact enables the thought that we might organize ourselves
differently, that we could decide, at least in principle, to no longer organize production around
the construction of exchange-values and the reproduction of capital. Second, among the latter
sort of conditions is that the means of communication and transportation are such that the species
can be conceived of as a species. Beyond the radio, television and telephone that Adorno
conceives of as sufficient for this conception, we now have in addition various networking
technologies mediated by the cellular phone and personal computer.
The objective conditions that must be in place for the subjective abilities outlined above
to be possible can be conceived of either positively or negatively. Negatively, there must be gaps
in the process of “total societalization,” as Adorno sometimes calls it, that allow room for the
subjective ability to relate to suffering, become self-conscious of that suffering, reflect on the
concepts used to understand that suffering, and finally to imagine something different in the
world. Positively, there must be social ways of being that promote the subjective abilities
outlined above. Consider each of the 4 subjective conditions in relation to their objective
possibility given what has been established in this chapter.
The impulse, or the moral addendum, the bodily aversion to suffering, might be thought
of a biological fact that no social conditions, other than those that might change our genetic
make-up, might undermine. Adorno would reject this approach, and for good reason. It risks a
reification of the immediate that would undermine the further reflection required for
consciousness and memory. Instead, these very impulses are, in a sense, the unconscious
historical memory of the species. So, while they are “deep” in the constitution of individuals,

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one cannot assume their existence without qualification. And, the ability to overcome them
through reason and psychological factors is well established. We can dismiss this impulse, even
in the case of our own suffering, through rationalizations and projections, as history shows. Yet,
as developmental psychology, contemporary anecdotal evidence, as well as Adorno's anecdotal
reflections upon childhood show, the ability to empathize with others is certainly still available
as well.
Self-consciousness which is marked by the ability to reflect upon those impulses in such
a way that one can feel guilt, the pull from one's self that that very self could be different is also
in question. Again, Adorno's reflections on childhood show the possibility self-reflection
remains, if only in moments of puzzlement with the adult world and the forms of mimicking play
that children engage in. But, even in Adorno's more pessimistic moments he holds his foot in the
door of possibility. In reflecting on the diremption of pleasure and joy from work, he points out
that those who are privileged are still capable of a “cunning intertwining of pleasure and work,”
which “leaves real experience still open, under the pressure of society.”

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And, so long as

memory and imagination in the relevant senses are still possible, self-consciousness in this sense
is as well.
The social conditions in which the contemporary subject exists make memory, here
understood as the ability to reflect on the concepts employed in understanding one's experience
and thus connecting that experience to the species through those concepts, particularly
problematic. For, this process of remembrance requires the ability to hold on to contradiction
and the guilt provided by self-consciousness. As Adorno puts the problem, social pressures tend
toward a weakening of memory through the effects of these pressures on consciousness: “The

216

Adorno, Minima Moralia, 130.
139

effacement of memory is more the achievement of an all too alert consciousness that its
weakness when confronted with the superior strength of unconscious processes.” The ability to
forget “immediately fits in well with the desire to get on with things. Whoever doesn't entertain
any idle thoughts doesn't throw any wrenches into the machinery.”

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Lastly, one can ask whether there exists a form of social life which develops the
imagination as the ability to bring something new into the world. The objective conditions for
imagination, then must allow for subjects to come to the realization that those very objective
conditions are wrong. While one might think of the reflections on childhood play merely allow
for a continuation of consciousness, I think it also implicates the subject's ability for memory in
this specialized sense. For, in play and in the names of animals, children hold onto a utopian
possibility that brings with it potential consciousness of contradiction and universals through
which objective reality can be seen as wrong, a society in which individuals are valued, not for
their exchangability, but in their difference, their particularity. The point here, is that while
social forces, and they have taken on the force of objective powers, discourage the continuation
of the sorts of imagination that are possible from the forms of play and expression still available
to children, these forms of expression and play remain as positive forms of social life which
make possible imagination in the sense required. Obviously, Adorno is pessimistic that this
could take the form of a social movement. A political movement which emerged under current
social conditions would be more likely to promote the regressive tendencies of those conditions
than to attempt to overthrow them. The objective possibility of imagination in this sense, then is
merely hope: the objective possibility of memory, confronted with the possibility of disaster and
emerging, not unchanged, but as hope. And here, imagination's objective conditions are really
217

Theodor Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” in Critical Models:
Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 92.
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the objective conditions of thought itself, which at this historical stage are the existence of
subject and object. Since these cannot be reduced either one to the other or both to some third
term, the potential for something new cannot be eliminated. The subject, as it is understood in
idealism, posits itself. Fichte here is the true understanding of the consequences of idealism, and
as such the potential for freedom, the potential “sublation of its own domination” will continue in
the appearance of subjectivity as free self-creation. This makes possible the anticipation of
freedom in the state of technical forces of production, though idealism distorts the form freedom
would take.
“The subject as productive imagination, pure apperception, ultimately as free action, enciphers
that activity in which the life of people actually reproduces itself, and with good reason
anticipates in it freedom. That is the reason why subject will hardly vanish into object or into
anything else allegedly higher, into Being however it may be hypostatized. Subject in its selfpositing is semblance and at the same time something historically exceedingly real. It contains
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the potential for the sublation of its own domination.”
Given these reflections on the possibility and characteristics of experience that can
redeem certain historical potentials submerged in concepts, we can once again ask after the
possibility of politics in the contemporary world. As the continuing phenomenon of nationalism
illustrates there is little reason to hope that freedom as the realization of self-consciousness on a
collective level, the formulation of ourselves as a species, is likely anytime soon. Faced then
with the continuing irrationality of history, the position outlined above seems plagued by a
serious problem. It is caught between a Hegelian position in which there is a logic of history,
and which is guaranteed by the totality, by World Spirit's movement and eventual self-realization,
and an irrationalism toward history in which it is either one damned thing after another, or what
would be even worse, the continual deepening of the tragedy of enlightenment, in which the

218

Theodor Adorno, “On Subject and Object,” in Critical Models: Interventions and
Catchwords, trans. Henry Pickford (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 256.
141

possibilities of freedom as self-consciousness limp along in the wake of accumulating and
avoidable suffering and domination. The position here cannot claim the existence of a totality of
the sort which allows Hegel to avoid the problem of the seeming irrationality of history, nor can
the position claim, like Kant, an ahistorical fact of human nature, unsocial sociability, that will
bring about the realization of the species. Neither history nor nature can guarantee the rationality
of history.
Adorno's position as explicated here cannot provide a categorical imperative of the sort
advocated by Kant. It cannot provide a formula through which specific actions can be
determined to be right or wrong, rational or irrational. It can provide, on the other hand, an
account of the remaining sources of resistance, the places and constellations in which the
possibility of a realized freedom and thus the possibility of morality and politics can be found.
In doing so, it can also provide an account of failures and missed possibilities of history. This is
perhaps contradictory. At once, the position of this chapter characterizes certain phenomena as
tragic, as wrong, as to be avoided, yet it seems to also say that one cannot provide a ground from
which these claims can be made. Even on the level of the individual, the position here locates a
certain form of experience as something to be promoted: self-conscious experience in which
memory and imagination are engaged in understanding suffering and its avoidability. Yet, it also
seems to claim that history is on the brink of making these experiences impossible and that they
do not and cannot come from unmediated nature. While the chapter runs through a procedure for
mediating this problem conceptually, through the immediate experience of suffering and the
constellation of key concepts, one cannot turn this procedure into a universal criterion for the
rationality of experience. As one might expect from a negative dialectic, the procedure produces
a negative orientation toward politics as it exists, a resistance without necessarily providing the

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possibility of an alternative politics taking its place. Chapter 5 thus turns to the question of
validity with regard to the constellative procedure and the sorts of experiences Adorno is calling
for in the face of historical tragedy. This takes the form, first of a summary and refutation of
Habermas' criticisms of Adorno, specifically with regard to the question of validity of the criteria
that can be used to frame ethical subjectivity and a practical orientation toward the world.

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Chapter 5 Criticisms of Adorno and the Validity of Experience
The aim of this chapter is to at once deal with prevalent objections to the way of
proceeding in philosophy and with regard to practical reason in particular articulated in chapter 4
and to outline a way of understanding a conception of validity of experience through the
concepts of orientation, interpretation, and expression. Both Adorno and Habermas are
concerned with the possibility of meaning in a world marked by the dominance of instrumental
reason, a world in which even the most intimate relationships are potentially instrumentalized
through the ways in which they are inevitably mediated by society. Habermas, though, criticizes
Adorno's attempt to demonstrate the possibility of meaning in the seemingly meaningless world
because it relies on a conception of mimesis that is unsustainable. While Adorno does rely on a
conception of mimesis, this concept is more complicated than a simple mimicking of an
inanimate object of nature, an animal, or another conscious human being; the sort of
identification captured in the notion of mimesis is neither a reason before reason nor a claim that
to theorize meaning in the contemporary world requires a communicative relationship with such
objects. These claims, and thus the rejection of Adorno's conception of mimesis ignore the
relationship between mimesis and utopia. Mimesis, as mere identification with another, is not
sufficient for theorizing the possibility of meaning in the instrumentalized world. Instead, nonidentity thinking is also required, and it is through this sort of thinking that utopian possibilities
are preserved. Our ability to immediately identify with the other is inevitably mediated by the
societies we live in. Yet, this experience of identification is not reducible to a discursive
relationship to the object identified with. Though language itself has a role in any mediation of
experience by thought, neither the experience of identification nor the mediation of this
experience in language captures the utopian moment of thought that Adorno wishes to preserve

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in the mediation of identification by concepts such as freedom. While any articulation of the
potentials that open up in the object through the subject's identification with it requires the use of
concepts that can only be expressed in language, the moment of identification is not merely those
concepts' linguistic articulation, nor can the conceptual mediation of this experience be
completely described in language. That is, even though any articulation of the experience of
mimesis and the non-identity between the object of identification and the concepts used to
describe and understand the object takes place in language, there will always be a remainder that
is unarticulated in a description of the experience of the object. But more than this, even the
concepts themselves contain more than their expression in language. This is the case even when
one orients oneself toward both the object and the concepts used to interpret the object in the
spirit of openness, letting the object “speak for itself.” And, in fact, this remainder is precisely
why Adorno articulates the possibility of meaning as requiring an orientation toward the object in
which one does not merely reduce the object to the linguistically articulated concepts that
describe it. So, even the ideal of a humanity that expresses solidarity with all human beings
through its self-constitution, an ideal that Adorno returns to over and over, is an expression of the
possibility of meaning that remains inscribed in the objects. This ideal is merely an expression
of the those possibilities' non-existence. In interpretation, which takes the form of constructing a
constellation of concepts around the object, the resulting analysis aims at the expression of the
potentials inscribed in the object through the articulation of those potentials' non-existence as
contradictory with the concepts inscribed in the object. When Adorno relates the anecdote of a
woman, who, having seen a dramatization of The Diary of Anne Frank, remarked, “Yes, but that
girl at least should have been allowed to live,” he at once rejects her response as “an alibi” for
the totality of anti-Semitism and totalitarian tendencies remaining in Germany, but also describes

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it as “good as first step toward understanding.”

219

This anecdote shows at once the tendency

toward excusing the status quo as well as the possibility of overcoming it through the
identification with the victims of oppression. The anecdote reveals a proto-experience, which
provides the possibility of overcoming the orientation of the anti-Semite, who “is defined far
more by his incapacity for any experience whatsoever, by his unreponsiveness.”

220

Here, the

woman's potential experience is mediated by the prevailing anti-Semitism. To get at this
mediation, mere identification with the individual victim is insufficient. The leap from the
individual case of Anne Frank to a criticism of the fact of anti-Semitism requires the connection
in experience from that case to the claim that everyone “should have been allowed to live,” a
claim which brings out the conceptual potential within the experience of identification with Anne
Frank. Her interpretation of experience is already mediated by concepts other than solidarity or
equality, despite her proto-experience of identification with Anne Frank revealing an
interpretation that contradicts the concepts of anti-Semitism. It is only with an eye toward the
conceptual in addition to the notion of mere identification that the anecdote becomes a potential
object of interpretation and further reveals the contradictions within existing reality.
The contradiction between reality and the potentials inscribed in the object of inquiry
explains why Adorno's analysis takes the form it does and why in this form it must always appear
contradictory. The sort of interpretation that Adorno articulates and which attempts to express
the potentials within the objects takes this form because reality itself is contradictory. To get at
this, Adorno seemingly exaggerates, though, in reality, he merely focuses on the extremes within
existing reality. In doing so, he attempts, from within language, to break through the ways in

219

Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 101.

220

Adorno, “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 101.
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which language itself falsely resolves the contradictions in reality. But as I tried to show in
chapter 4, this procedure of constellation works toward an orientation to reality in which the
subject can interpret the world and even express that interpretation in language in such a way as
to at least show that meaning remains a possibility, though one must guard against the possibility
that even this sort of interpretation could be used to justify existing reality rather than show it up
as contradictory. Adorno's procedure is designed to reveal the possibilities for meaning and thus
utopia in the very objects, subjective experiences and actions that simultaneously enforce,
embody, articulate our very oppression. But, to avoid merely resolving the contradictions in
material reality as though they were merely contradictions in thought, Adorno's mode of
expression attempts to keep both utopia and disaster in view. To do so, he attempts to show even
the mode of expression proper to the contemporary world, the injunction to always make oneself
understood, the claim that one's ideas are either communicable or meaningless, literally nonsense, is part and parcel of the world that reduces meaningful experience to a function within
existing institutions and an excuse for the existing state of affairs. But, even within language, he
finds the possibility of meaning. Otherwise, Habermas' criticism that Adorno is engaged in a
performative contradiction would be a strike against Adorno's project. The contradictions in
Adorno's thought would be vicious only if they are merely an artifact of his interpretation, rather
than the mode of expression appropriate to a world which is itself contradictory. Rather, by
proceeding in a way that appears contradictory, Adorno finds the very possibility of escaping the
contradictions that he attempts to express. By spotting the tendency to reduce all language to
mere communication, to a mere tool in the functioning of social systems that are beyond our
control, Adorno can then find the counter-tendency, that, while all but extinguished, continues to
provide the basis for thinking differently at all: language as expression. Even in Dialectic of

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Enlightenment, this counter-tendency takes the form of the name, which as the particular, shows
up the concept as more than mere category for the classification of particulars, and so, reveals
language as potentially more than what Adorno takes it to be at the beginning of the
investigation.
Chapter 5, then, presents the objections mentioned above, that Adorno relies on an
unsustainable conception of mimesis and that his procedure results in a performative
contradiction and proceeds to a defense of Adorno which takes these objections seriously, yet
finds that these objections largely miss their mark. More specifically, in this chapter I will
address the question of the meaningfulness of experience through 3 sorts of objections that are
made against Adorno's way of proceeding. The first two sorts of objections are made by
Habermas, who claims to have redeemed whatever normative potentials are left from
enlightenment reason after the tragedies of the twentieth century. The first sort of objection
claims that Adorno's conception of reconciliation, of the overcoming of the problems of the
history of reason, is dependent on mimesis, which is either a form of irrationalism or dependent
on the unrealistic claim that we need to communicatively reconcile with nature. I address this
claim by first, showing that Adorno does not advocate, nor could he, a return to nature of the sort
that Habermas claims he does. Secondly, I deny the claim that reconciliation for Adorno must
involve a communicative relationship to non-human nature. The second sort of objection
presented by Habermas, goes to the heart of the question of meaning and validity. It claims that
Adorno (and Horkheimer), are stuck in a paradox or performative contradiction with regard to
their judgments regarding existing reality. In Habermas' interpretation of their work, they are
engaged in a totalizing critique not only of existing reality, but of the very reason that might be
used to critique existing reality. Thus, they are left with no rational basis for their critique. The

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third sort of objection is brought most clearly by Albrecht Wellmer, who claims that the Adorno's
critique requires a vision of utopia that is dependent on an unsustainable philosophy of history.
Put differently, from Adorno's social theory, there is no everyday experience which can provide
the basis for a principle of morality. As I will show, however, this objection is largely answered
if one has a proper account of Adorno's use of mimesis and its relationship to utopia. As an
interlude between Habermas' criticisms and Wellmer's, I want to address Axel Honneth's more
recent attempts to redeem Adorno's work through the notions of physiognomy and imitative
reason. This interpretation is promising, but I think too quickly moves from the sorts of
experiences that Adorno does in fact rely on to a claim to reason and the grounding of norms. I
want to show that each of these objections fails either in its interpretation of Adorno, its
arguments against Adorno's views, or both. In doing so, I also want to articulate the way in
which Adorno's position on experience can provide something approximating criteria for the
validity of experience and thus judgment, though, because of its more modest claims for reason,
these criteria do not make available a complete set of moral principles or decision procedure for
determining absolutely the rationality of experience. Instead, drawing from the work in chapter
4 on self-conscious imagination and memory we are left with the notions of interpretation,
expression, and orientation, which will always leave room for fallibility and revision.
Part I Adorno and Habermas
Adorno's negative dialectic has faced its most biting criticisms from those who claim his
intellectual mantel. In particular, the criticism that he is unable to formulate a theory because his
philosophical insights themselves undermine the possibility of theory, that is, the criticism of
reason itself falls prey to the self-same criticism of reason, is quite widespread. The most
influential critic holding this position is, of course, Jürgen Habermas. This criticism is most

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famously and most thoroughly presented in Habermas' The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity and The Theory of Communicative Action. But, even earlier, in a talk given almost
immediately following Adorno's death in 1969, Habermas attributes the following to “a young
critic still sure of his Hegel”: Adorno's assessment that “the totality of society is untrue” “would
actually be a theory of the impossibility of theory.”

221

Without the totality of Hegel's system as

truth to provide a position from which the rest of history can be understood, toward which it
history moves, one cannot provide meaning to the other moments in the movement of history.
This is an abstract formulation of Habermas' later claim that Adorno and Horkheimer are caught
in a performative contradiction. “If they do not want to renounce the effect of a final unmasking
and still want to continue with critique, they will have to leave at least one rational criterion
intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criterion.”

222

This chapter, then,

addresses itself to this question. Does Adorno's thought, as explicated in chapter 4, provide at
least one rational criterion? Or, if it does not, what does it need to show in order to avoid falling
into irrationalism?
All the targets of Habermas' criticism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity
(Derrida, Heidegger, Foucault, and the early Frankfurt School) are characterized as rejecting
modernity along Nietszschian lines and because of this, all of these projects, including
Horkheimer and Adorno's, ultimately fail because they cannot provide a rational criterion for the
rejection of the status quo, that is, for their own normative claims and practical orientation. So

221

Jürgen Habermas, “Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity—Self-affirmation
Gone Wild,” in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1983), 108.
222
Jürgen Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno,” in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), 126-7.
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despite Adorno's attempts to in fact criticize given reality from within that reality, the norms from
whence he does so are not available to him. For, “this normative content has to be acquired and
justified from the rational potential inherent in everyday practice, if it is not to remain
arbitrary.”

223

While Habermas interprets his own project as capturing the rational aspects of

mimesis, which “can be laid open only if we give up the paradigm of the philosophy of
consciousness—namely, a subject that represents objects and toils with them—in favor of the
paradigm of linguistic philosophy—namely, that of intersubjective understanding of
communication...,”

224

Habermas is also attempting to capture the normative potential of the

other of reason in Adorno's work, the non-identical or non-identity thinking, through the
reclaiming of the rational potentials implicit in the making of validity claims in lifeworld
interactions. The reproduction of the subject who is capable of knowledge presupposes the realm
of communicative rationality that is implicit in these lifeworld interactions. The use of language
itself presupposes not purposive rationality, that is an instrumental orientation toward the
objective world and a strategic orientation toward other human beings, but instead the ability to
take up the position of the other in an interaction with the goal of mutual understanding. The
purposive orientations of individuals presupposes the production of a subject capable of such an
orientation, and this production of individuals presupposes the symbolic reproduction
characteristic of the lifeworld in which people take up the position of the other(s) present in the
interaction. Habermas thus claims that the “way out” of the performative contradiction implicit
in the use of reason to criticize the devolution of reason into purely instrumental reason, into

223

Jürgen Habermas“The Normative Content of Modernity,” in The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), 341.
224
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action v. 1, trans. Thomas McCarthy
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), 390.
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mere power, is the reorientation of the subject of reason toward its own basis in the
intersubjective realm.
“From this perspective, both cognitive-instrumental mastery of an objectified nature (and
society) and narcissistically overinflated autonomy (in the sense of purposively rational selfassertion) are derivative moments that have been rendered independent from the communicative
structures of the lifeworld, that is from the intersubjectivity of relationships of mutual
225
understanding and relationships of reciprocal recognition.”
Both strategic rationality and instrumental rationality are fundamentally parasitic upon the norms
implicit in symbolic reproduction of the species in the communicative rationality of the
lifeworld.
From the perspective of Habermas' reorientation of critical theory, which Habermas
seems to have come to, if not explicitly theorized, even as early as Adorno's death, Adorno's
notion of reconcilliation can only be explicated as “the idea of maturity, of a life together in
communication free from coercion.”

226

For, the alternative to this understanding of

reconcilliation, which Habermas characterizes as “the demand that nature open up its eyes, that
in the condition of reconcilliation we talk with animals, plants, and rocks,” is impossible because
it assumes “a categorically different science and technology.”

227

This categorically different

science and technology is not possible, that is, there is no alternative to the instrumental
orientation of human beings toward nature. And so, while Adorno links the domination of
human beings by other human beings with human beings' domination of nature, Habermas

225

Jürgen Habermas, “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative
v. Subject-Centered Reason,” The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G.
Lawrence, (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1987), 315.
226
Habermas, “Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity—Self-affirmation Gone
Wild,” Philosophical-Political Profiles, 107.
227
Habermas, “Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity—Self-affirmation Gone
Wild,” Philosophical-Political Profiles, 107.
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attempts to split these forms of domination from each other, and in doing so locate a rational
criterion for the liberation of human beings, the counter-factual norms of an ideal speech
situation, which only calls into question domination that does not depend on the simultaneous
liberation of nature from human beings. For Habermas, this division between the domination of
nature and the domination of human beings and thus the cleaving of the liberation of human
beings from the liberation of nature is the only way to preserve “the hope of someday arriving at
a right and just reality,” a hope that, according to Habermas, “Negative Dialectics gives up.”

228

I want to address Habermas' criticism and attempt to capture the normative potentials of
Adorno's philosophy along two lines. First, I will address Habermas' characterization of mimesis
as requiring a fundamentally different kind of science, or briefly that Adorno's notion of
reconcilliation requires that we “talk to minerals.” Second, I will deal with what can briefly be
called the accusation that Adorno is caught up in a performative contradiction. In addressing
these criticisms, I will show that Adorno's project, while depending on a notion of mimesis and
while seemingly contradictory, in fact provides a way of proceeding in which both the problems
and possibilities of subjectivity and meaning are laid bare.
Section I. Talking to Minerals?
As I merely mentioned above, when Habermas presents his theory of communicative
action, one aspect of that presentation is its attempt to capture the rational grounds implicit in
Adorno's notion of mimesis. But Habermas, in fact, must also be attempting to get at the nonidentical, or the aspect of the object that is eviscerated and ignored in a closed conceptual
228

Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action v. 1, 452, fn 28. Here he is of the odd
opinion that Adorno's later work gives up on any “dialectical grasp of the non-identical.” He
then proceeds to primarily depend on quotations from Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason, which
is both an early work and one in which Horkheimer is obviously simplifying some key ideas
from the Dialectic of Enlightenment. So, it is unclear how Habermas thinks this is the case
with Negative Dialectics.
153

system. It is partly by ignoring this aspect of Adorno's thought that Habermas can characterize
Adorno's notion of reconciliation as literally requiring the communicative interaction of the
species with non-human nature. It seems that Habermas has in mind something like a return to a
pre-rationalized relationship to nature, in which human beings mimic nature rather than dominate
it. This is why he can characterize Adorno and Horkheimer as searching for a “reason before
reason,”

229

to ground their criticism of contemporary society. Since even this “reason before

reason” would be marred by its origins in an instrumental orientation toward nature, they can
only “nominate a capacity, mimesis, about which they can speak only as they would about a
piece of uncomprended nature.”

230

This misunderstands Adorno's notion of mimesis in two

ways. First, Adorno could not be more against a “return to nature.” Second, mimesis, all by
itself, is not a normative grounding for criticism. It provides for a descriptive account of the
evolution of reason itself; the assertions of reason, are in fact based on its non-identical other,
accessed through a mimetic element in thought, which as identity thinking, it denies reality to.
With regard to the first point, as a merely interpretive matter, the places in which Adorno
defends reason against irrationalism, a return to nature, relativism, and such-like ideas are almost
too numerous to count. In his Hegel: Three Studies, which he characterizes as a preparation for
Negative Dialectics, Adorno explains approvingly that Hegel's philosophy understands that
“the reified, rationalized society of the bourgiose era, the society in which nature-dominating
reason had come to fruition, could become a society worthy of human beings—not by regressing
to older, irrational stages prior to the division of labor but only by applying its rationality to
itself, in other words, only in a healing awareness of the marks of unreason in its own reason, and
231
the traces of the rational in the irrational as well [emphasis mine].”
229

Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action v. 1, 382.

230

Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action v. 1, 382.

231

Theodor Adorno, “The Experiential Content of Hegel's Philosophy,” in Hegel:Three Studies,
Shierry Weber Nicholsen, trans., (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993),74.
154

In other words, while reason has retained elements of myth or unreason or as chapter 4
formulates it, nature, and defended those remaining elements as reason, it is only by using reason
that this unreason can be overcome. As Adorno puts it more succinctly, “Only reason, the
principle of societal domination inverted into the subject, would be capable of abolishing this
domination.”

232

This could not be a matter of forgetting the technological progress made

through reason as it now exists. Instead, Adorno is after the recognition that nature, that is,
unreason, continues to exist under the guise of reason, and reason, in its present guise, obscures
the rational potential that remains in nature. This recognition occurs through the notion of
experience as self-conscious imagination and memory, unpacked through the constellation of
concepts as spelled out in chapter 4. In other words, reason as it exists, as the universal concepts
that have passed down to us, for example, freedom must be employed in a constellation around
the object that is being investigated, even if there is also an element of mimetic identification
with the object. In his claim that Adorno is after a reason before reason, the ability to talk to
minerals, Habermas does not account for the relation between mimesis and non-identity thinking.
And this leads into the second point against Habermas' interpretation.
A suggestion by Jay Bernstein offers a way into this second point. Bernstein points out
that the targets of Habermas' criticism in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity are indeed
attempting to get at something that lies outside of reason, at least in part. This claim is
embedded in a larger argument that philosophical modernity is itself a latter day attempt similar
to the earlier attempt by artistic modernists to give voice to the non-conceptual. This larger
argument need not be summarized here. But, in advancing this larger argument, Bernstein
provides at least one reason why Adorno's non-identical is still relevant after Habermas'
232

Adorno, “Progress,” 152.
155

communicative turn: a reflexivity absent in monological conceptions of reason.
Bernstein, in claiming that modernist philosophy comes late to the lessons of artistic
modernism, argues that Adorno's Negative Dialectics advances the project of modernism through
“the elaboration of of the interconnection of three elements: local reason and rationality, sensual
particularity (non-identity, alterity, otherness, the body), and judgement.”

233

For Bernstein, the

movement of modernist art toward reflection on its own forms is mirrored in philosophy's
(belated) turn toward reflection on its own exclusions. In particular, Adorno rejects the great
philosophical systems, those of Hegel and Kant in particular, in part, on the grounds of their
conceptual closure. That is, the role of philosophy, at least in part, must be the reflection on what
is lost in the very concepts it must use to understand the world. And in fact, Adorno goes further.
The concepts of philosophy are dependent on what those very concepts exclude. In excluding
mimetic elements, reason carries elements of nature along with it. In our emergence as a species
with reason, and too, as individuals capable of reason, we bring along with us the irrational and
proto-rational, but couched in rationality. As was shown in chapter 4, this is relevant for
understanding Adorno's thought in two ways. First, reason, while remaining irrational, continues
to claim complete rationality, and this is the conceptual closure that Bernstein points out is
unaccounted for in Habermas' interpretation. In the terms of chapter 4, reason as it exists is a
forgetting, hence the necessity of memory. And second, there remain rational elements in that
which reason disclaims. Here, the necessity of imagination in experience reemerges. The
imaginative projection and identification with the other, especially as that other that excluded by
existing reason is necessary for reconciliation. Thus, the conclusion of chapter 4: history is to be

233

J. M. Bernstein, “The Causality of Fate: Modernity and Modernism in Habermas,” in
Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d'Entrèves and
Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997), 254.
156

found in those elements shunted into nature by existing reason, and nature is to be found in what
reason, or history, takes itself to be. Or, to put this in terms of the discussion of mimesis,
mimesis is an element of reason that has been disclaimed by reason, shunted into nature, and the
recognition of which is required for the critique of existing reason. We can see this in key
passages in Negative Dialectics.
There, Adorno uses the word “mimesis” a mere five times. It is worthwhile to examine
the most characteristic passage. This passage offers three key ideas for replying to Habermas'
criticism. In this passage, a part of which was interpreted in chapter 4, not only is it clear that,
first, the role of mimesis is to make us aware of the non-identical in application of concepts to
particulars, the reason that has been shunted into nature, but also, second, that a regression to
knowledge as mere mimesis would not be knowledge at all. And third, as Adorno puts it below,
“this awareness grows untrue when the affinity—indelible, yet infinitely removed at the same
time—is posited as positive.”
“For the sake of Utopia, identification is reflected in the linguistic use of the word outside of
logic, in which we speak, not of identifying an object(Objekt), but of identifying with people and
things (Dingen). Dialectics alone might settle the Greek argument whether like is known by like
or unlike. If the thesis that likeness alone has that capacity makes us aware of the indelible
mimetic element in all cognition and human practice, this awareness grows untrue when the
affinity—indelible, yet infinitely removed at the same time—is posited as positive. In
epistemology, the inevitable result is the false conclusion that the object is the subject.
Traditional philosophy believes that it knows the unlike by likening it to itself, while in so doing
it really knows itself only. The idea of changed philosophy would be to become aware of
likeness by defining it as that which is unlike itself. The nonidentical element in an identifying
judgment is clearly intelligible insofar as every single object subsumed under a class has
definitions not contained in the definition of the class. But to a more emphatic concept, to one
that is not simply the characteristic unit of the individual objects from which it was abstracted,
the opposite applies as well. Emphatically conceived, the judgment that a man is free refers to
the concept of freedom; but this concept in turn is more than is predicated of the man, and by
other definitions the man is more than the concept of his freedom. The concept says not only that
it is applicable to all individuals defined as free; it feeds on the idea of condition in which
individuals would have qualities not to be ascribed to anyone here and now. The specific
praising a man as free is the sous-entendu that something impossible is ascribed to him because it
shows in him. This quality, striking and secret at the same time, animates every identifying

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judgment that is worth making.”

234

Here Adorno takes the experience of identification. Despite everything, human beings are still
capable of the experience of identifying with another human being, and more than that, even
with objects. This is an element of the subjective capability of self-consciousness I explicated in
chapter 4. In part, he then proceeds to show that this identification is dependent on the nonidentical. Identifying with another is dependent on that thing not being the same as that which
identifies with it. In “Aspects of Hegel's Philosophy,” Adorno does in fact make the claim that
there must be a commonality between the subject and object of knowledge, for without it, the
subject would know only itself, and in fact, this is his claim against the goals of positivism. But,
again, knowledge also cannot be reduced to mimesis, as Habermas interprets Adorno as
claiming. In addition to mimesis, this affinity between the subject and object of knowledge, the
ability of the subject to identify with an object and the commensurability of the object with the
subject's means for understanding it, Adorno is calling for a two-sided reflection. First, mimesis,
identification with the object, makes us aware of the non-identical in all rationally identifying
judgments. Mimesis, as the experience of identification by the individual is a stand-in for
species, the evolution of reason, and what was lost in it, but that makes us feel the need for the
meta-theoretical claim that the identification of the object with its concepts requires the
nonidentical in the object. In the example of freedom as applied to human beings above,
mimesis, identification with a particular human being grants us the experience of the individual
human being as more than the concept freedom predicates of the human being. But, the nonidentity between object and concept adds a key element. That is, in the second place, the concept
contains potentials that transcend the object to which it is applied. In the example above, the

234

Adorno, Negative Dialectics,150-1.
158

concept of freedom as applied to the particular human being implies possibilities that are not
available given the social conditions in which that human being exists. Thus, the concept of
freedom indicts those social conditions. So, the momentary assumption of identity between
concept and particular is necessary for judgment. For, only if the human being has indications of
that concept of freedom can the immanent critique hold. If it simply were not possible for
human beings to be free in a sense beyond the formal freedom of the exchange society, there
would be no sense in claiming that current conditions are unfree. Mimesis names the experience
that something is lost in judgment and prompts a way to get at what that identification assumes,
the non-identical, which ultimately provides a basis for criticizing existing states of affairs
immanently. But, to be clear, experience, in addition to mimesis, requires reflection on the
difference between the particular that is identified in a judgment and the concept that is supposed
to describe the particular. This is how Adorno can characterize identification, not in the sense of
A=B, as in logic, but rather as the subjective ability to identify with another, as remaining “for
the sake of utopia.” And it is through the notion a self-conscious memory and imagination
outlined in chapter 4, a bringing into play of the relevant concepts, that can make this experience
one worthy of the name, one that points toward something different, and thus utopian.
Just as Deborah Cook argues

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, mimesis in the false world is not sufficient. One cannot

merely non-conceptually identify with the object. Without the thought of utopia, the ways in
which the objects fail to reach their concepts, the ways in which particulars do not even reach the
concept of freedom as it already exists, for example, mimesis cannot capture non-identity of
object with concept, of particular with universal. And this is the fundamental problem with
Habermas' criticism. Adorno is not calling for a return to simple mimesis with nature, but
235

Deborah Cook, “From the Actual to the Possible: Nonidentity Thinking,” Constellations 12,
no. 1 (2005): 21-35. In particular, see, 31-2.
159

instead attempts to redeem what is lost from thinking when these objects are thought to exist as
mere samples of concepts, when all relevant properties of an object are thought to be captured by
a concept without a remainder. And this attempt requires both a mimetic experience, an
identification of some sort with the object of inquiry and the subsequent engagement with the
object in which relevant concepts enable an interpretation of the object and an expression of the
meaning of the phenomena in question. This process is detailed in chapter 4.
This means that Habermas' interpretation of Adorno as merely calling for a mimetic
relationship to nature as the alternative to the devolution of reason into instrumental rationality is
not accurate. Adorno's conception of mimesis, as outlined above, does not require talking to
minerals, but an orientation of engagement toward the object of inquiry. In this way, the rational
potentials that are all but lost in the historical evolution of reason, and which are obscured in the
turn to communication as the basis of a practical orientation, become available. By orienting
oneself to the object of inquiry in this way, an aspect of experience, which is mediated by
concepts, but not reducible to communication becomes possible. A model of this orientation is
provided in chapter 4 through Adorno's claim that philosophy ought to become interpretation, in
particular, that philosophy ought to take the historical as a cipher for the natural and the natural
as a symbol for the historical. This discussion of mimesis also goes some way in explaining
Adorno's mode of expression and its seeming contradictions. The immediate, the irrational, the
natural, is to be investigated, interpreted as a way into the irrationality of existing reality and at
the same time as a way to show the possibility of redemption through rational interpretation from
within the irrational.
Section II. Performative Contradiction?
Habermas' Criticism

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In the chapter specifically dealing with Horkheimer and Adorno in The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity, Habermas characterizes them as falling into a paradox with regard to
the possibility of theory. As was mentioned above, he had already at the time of Adorno's death
put this claim into the mouth of a “a young critic still sure of his Hegel.” In the later work, he
variously refers to the problem as a paradox and a performative contradiction. In Habermasian
terms, Horkheimer and Adorno fail to distinguish between the quasi-transcendental norms
implicit in communicative competence and linguistic reproduction and the empirical reality
which may or may not live up to those norms. This analysis depends on a particular
interpretation of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Habermas claims that Adorno and Horkheimer are radicalizing ideology critique, that is,
turning ideology critique against itself. In this understanding, ideology critique simply means
holding up to empirical reality the norms which it claims for itself, and so indicting empirical
reality based upon its own norms. The radicalization of ideology critique, then, takes the norms
of ideology critique and applies them to ideology critique itself. In Habermas' understanding,
ideology critique is an unmasking of reason as power. That is, the universal claim of a norm is
shown to actually be the assertion of power by some particular group. So, if we apply this to
ideology critique itself, we have what Habermas calls the critique of instrumental reason, in other
words, the claim that the reason that we use in ideology critique, because of its entwinement with
power, is corrupted in the same fashion as the empirical reality it seeks to reveal as contradictory.
The result:
“The suspicion of ideology becomes total, but without any change of direction. It is turned not
only against the irrational function of bourgeois ideals, but against the rational potential of
bourgeois culture itself, and thus reaches into the foundations of any ideology critique that
236
proceeds immanently.”
236

Habermas, “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor
161

In unmasking—as Habermas calls it—the elements of domination within ideology critique,
Horkheimer and Adorno undermine the very norms they invoke in their unmasking of the
critique of ideology. This is the problem that Habermas variously refers to as paradox and
performative contradiction.
As performative contradiction, Habermas is claiming that Horkheimer and Adorno must
appeal to norms that are not available to them since, apparently, even the norms that would be
used in criticizing instrumental reason are themselves corrupted by power. As paradox, if
Horkheimer and Adorno are right, then they are wrong and if they are wrong, they are right.
Unpacked, if all reason is entwined with power, then the rational norms which allow for this
claim are themselves entwined with power, and thus just as questionable as the instrumental
reason which is being critiqued: if they are right that the victory of instrumental reason is total,
then they cannot make this critique. On the other side, if they claim a rational criteria for
criticizing the total reversion of reason to mere instrumental reason, they must some how be
outside of that reversion: the critique can only be true if it is false. From this reduction of
Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment to a critique of instrumental reason
understood as the radicalization of the critique of ideology, Habermas then derives the necessity
of turning to an alternative paradigm, the paradigm of communicative action, in which rational
norms can be located outside of the vagaries of reason's involvement with power. As outlined
above, Habermas has other grounds for his account of the practical discourse and the norms
generated therein, but in the context of his criticism of Adorno, he is claiming that his turning to
the communicative paradigm is the only way to provide quasi-foundational norms from which
one can then criticize the actual entwinement of reason with power and offer an alternative,

Adorno,” 119.
162

which takes the form of the coercion free participation of all those affected in a discourse
regarding what norms are to be acted upon.
Habermas, then, aims to provide the grounds for proceeding immanently in a critique of
the entwinement of reason with power, the grounds for arguing that a particular
institutionalization of norms does not in fact meet those norms. In this way, he can also claim to
be reconstructing the Marxist critique of liberalism. For example, the claim that only certain
people are to be allowed a say in the public sphere, in the democratic formation of wills, is to be
rejected on the grounds that this very process presupposes, at least counter-factually, the
participation of all those concerned. The counter-factual presuppositions of argumentation in
practical discourse imply the ability of all those concerned to consent to or dissent from the
particular norm that is to be taken as a principle of action. Habermas, then, is attempting to show
the potentials of reason that have yet to be institutionalized sufficiently, yet remain available
both to the interlocutor in everyday interaction and to the theorist who attempts to reconstruct
these everyday interactions with practical intent, since for both the discourse surrounding
practical norms inevitably assumes a concept of argumentation that provides the criteria for
engaging in argumentation at all.
Adorno, on the other hand, is attempting to get the potentials that are embedded in our
everyday engagement with the world, but in a such a way that cannot be reduced to the
conditions for discourse. To get at this, I offer a partial reinterpretation of sections of Dialectic
of Enlightenment which focuses on the centrality of the concept, and thus reiterates the place of
nonidentical thinking in Adorno's thought. Non-identity thinking legitimates the critical stance
toward the particular manifestations and entwinements of that reason with social reality, and
contra Habermas's claims about Adorno, does so through an engagement with everyday

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experience. In other words, while chapter 4 offers a way to bring into view the relationship
between the body and its aversion to suffering and the concepts that human beings have
developed in their social evolution in such a way that experience of a certain sort provides
practical insight into existing reality, here I want to deal explicitly with the question of how
Adorno can account for the possibility of this experience and the potential for meaning that
comes from this sort of experience. In doing so, I provide an answer to the claim that Adorno is
caught in a performative contradiction. The approach below develops Adorno's approach in two
directions. First, through an interpretation of Dialectic of Enlightenment, I show that Adorno
does not claim that enlightenment is the one-sided victory of instrumental reason, which is a
crucial aspect of Habermas' criticism. Rather, as can be seen from the analysis of language in
Dialectic of Enlightenment, enlightenment is from the start a contradictory process. This should
be obvious even from a basic understanding of the theme of the text: enlightenment, in its very
attempts to overcome myth becomes itself myth. Implicit in this claim about enlightenment is
that the attempt to overcome irrationality through reason has, in its actual historical development,
discarded elements that are rational while holding fast to elements of the irrationality it attempts
to overcome. Second, through a development of Adorno's later responses to accusation of
contradiction, I show why Adorno's thought appears contradictory, yet the form of this
appearance is appropriate for understanding a world in which contradiction persists.
Language and Enlightenment
As a first step in reinterpreting Dialectic of Enlightenment, it must be noted that from the
beginning, even in the preface, Horkheimer and Adorno spell out that terms like enlightenment
and truth will be used equivocally. “Both these terms, enlightenment and truth, are to be

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understood as pertaining not merely to intellectual history but also to current reality.”

237

This

already opens the possibility of enlightenment's redemption, that is, its escape from its own
origins in myth. Horkheimer and Adorno, base the reversion of enlightenment into myth upon
the origins of enlightenment in mythology, which as the assertion of power over nature and thus
over the human being's own internal nature, is also domination. Habermas is certainly right that
this claim is made in the text. But, as was already made clear above, the answer for Adorno is
not a return to nature through mimesis of nature, but rather an extension of enlightenment. For,
enlightenment is ambiguous. It contains both the principle of domination, the reduction of
reason to self-preservation, what Habermas calls reason becoming merely instrumental reason,
but also “the prospect of its own alleviation.”

238

The first section of Dialectic of Enlightenment,

“The Concept of Enlightenment,” which, incidentally, Habermas largely ignores in his
interpretation, attempts to keep open this possibility immanently, through reflection on
enlightenment. In this section, Adorno and Horkheimer offer a reflection on the fate of language.
A failure to read this section closely results in two potential misunderstandings. The first is
Habermas' failing. One could read this as the claim that enlightenment, through the development
of language from a “cry of terror called forth by the unfamiliar” through the nominalism of
positivism and radical empiricism, merely advances the project of conquering the unknown, in
Habermas' terminology, the advance of merely instrumental reason. The second is that in
invoking the Jewish ban on naming God, they must be appealing to a pseudo-messianic notion of
redemption and thus a totally implausible philosophy of history. This is the interpretation that
Albrecht Wellmer offers and will be answered after the explication of the account of language in

237

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, xvi.

238

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 32.
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Dialectic of Enlightenment.
This interpretation of language answers to the claim from Habermas 239 mentioned above
that critical theory must be based in intermundane experience or become arbitrary. This account
of language gets at, in focusing on the name, an experience that remains in touch with the
devolution of reason into mere instrumental reason, yet is something different than it. The use of
this prohibition on the use of the name of God captures the possibility of the concept going
beyond the particulars it is supposed to be abstracted from in nominalism. And the particular, the
proper name, implies the uniqueness of the individual that is lost in judgment which invokes the
concept of that thing. Already then, one can see the intermundane experience that Adorno is
attempting to locate, not only in contemporary experience, but in the history of conceptual
thought itself, the potentials for resistance. And here in the name, is at least one source of
resistance. And it is asserted both as an articulation of experience and as a derivation of the
necessity of the concept as something beyond the arbitrary assigning of names, something that
attempts to go beyond what the rejection of metaphysics would make the name. “In this way, the
moment of rationality in domination also asserts itself as something different from it.” 240 The
account of language, while taking the form of an historical account is actually an analysis of
reason, the division of labor, and the potentials that remain within conceptual language.
Horkheimer and Adorno divide their analysis of language into three stages: language as
image, language as symbol, and language as sign. The first corresponds roughly to the use of
language as magic and mimetic representation of nature, as a pre-animistic cry of terror in the
face of nature, in which the name is the thing, before the split between subject and object, before
the split between good and evil, before the split between nature and culture. But, and this cannot
239

Habermas, “The Normative Content of Modernity,” 341.

240

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 28.
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be emphasized enough, this is not the point to which Adorno wishes us to return, for “magic is
bloody untruth...”

241

The second stage, the point at which language “first enters history,”

corresponds roughly to myth and the domination implicit in the control of language by protointellectuals in the division of labor, priests and sorcerers. Here, language is both the thing and
not the thing that it names, it is at once the correspondence to thing it names, but also stands in
for that thing. And it is this dual-nature that provides the first inklings of the ability for
immanent critique, the use of the concept against it's particular application to objects. “The
concept, usually defined as as the unity of the features it subsumes, was rather, from the first, a
product of dialectical thinking, in which each thing is what it is only by becoming what it is not.
This was the primal form of the objectifying definition, in which concept and thing became
separate.”

242

Here there is an obvious reference to Hegel's analysis of the indexicals in which

sense-certainty is established and overcome. In Hegel, the assertion of “this” or “now” already
assumes a universal experience of being which supercedes the sense-certainty of empiricism.
Indexicals are only what they are by becoming what they are not; “this” can take on its role as an
indexical only by being more than the particular “this” used at a specific time and place. For
Hegel, even animals understand the falsity of sense-certainty, in that “they do not just stand idly
in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality,
and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat them up.”

243

Just as the indexical shows the gap between the particular and the universal, language as symbol
opens the gap between the word and the thing it names. But Adorno and Horkheimer link this

241

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6.

242

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 11.

243

G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (New York: Oxford UP, 1977), 65.
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second stage to fear and the acquisition of knowledge, which already asserts itself as the
overcoming of fear. This second stage links linguistic expression to symbolic representation of
the natural world. But, already, as a part of the social world, it emerges in its particularities as a
function of the division of labor, that is, as influenced by power. Now, this is not the same as
Habermas' claim that reason is merely power in Dialectic of Enlightenment, but rather, the claim
that reason is entwined with power, a claim that he can agree to, and which he attempts to
capture through the idea that in contemporary societies, the sources of pathology are the sites in
which the system colonizes the lifeworld. Language, “when it first enters history” is at the
behest of those who control language in the division of labor, those who are responsible for
directing the (symbolic) interaction between non-physical nature, the mana in Horkheimer and
Adorno's language, and the society in which they exist, and thus those who control language are
also responsible for directing the symbolic reproduction of the society itself, the terms of social
interaction within the society. Through this process of the symbolization, differentiation, and
solidification of the undifferentiated mana, the whole of nature is turned into a social creation,
and thus amenable to human control in the first place. But more than this, the social forces
through which nature is made social come to be seen as themselves natural rather than a product
of human labor, language, and consciousness. In this process of the control of mana, the
individuals responsible for the physical labor of the community are placed at the bottom of the
social hierarchy and the social hierarchy is turned into something natural or given.
All along the way in this quasi-evolutionary account of language, Horkheimer and
Adorno do not merely reject enlightenment on the grounds of its emergence from the desire for
self-preservation, its emergence from the tendency to take our own intercourse with nature and
among ourselves under our control. They also attempt to preserve mimesis from the first stage,

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but not in an undifferentiated, unmediated form. That is, they do uncover mimesis as a lost, or
nearly lost aspect of the evolution of reason; there remain elements of reason in what has been
cast away in the social evolution of reason. Through the division of labor, emphasized in the
second stage, which allows for one proto-class to represent its particular claims as universal as
well as natural, we get the third stage of language, mediated by monotheism, in which we finally
get the concept as universal. So, what emerges historically, through the transformation of
mimesis into symbolic control of nature and other human beings, and finally, the emergence of
the universal concept, is the possibility of the universal concept being turned against its
applications to particulars. This interpretation is consistent with the account of mimesis given
above that brings the constellative method and the notion of experience into play. Concepts from
Adorno's later work offer a way to explicate the account of language given in Dialectic of
Enlightenment. But, even in this earlier work, a version of Adorno's constellative method and
the immanent critique of existing societies is captured in the Judaic ban on naming the universal,
god. The universal must be the true universal, not the particular interests of a particular class
posing as the universal through that class' ability to control the presentation of those particular
interests in language. That is until we reach the radical nominalism of positivism, which in
calling the universal a mere place-holder, makes the relation to the particular arbitrary and thus
removes the ground for any dialectical engagement between the subject and object of knowledge.
So in both the earlier, second stage of language as symbol, and the third stage of language as
sign, the possibility of resistance to the justifications given for the division of labor as it stands is
present, so long as the difference between the universal and particular can be recognized and
articulated. For, even at the second stage, the word is both the thing it represents and not that
thing, but something different, that is, a word. Then, in the third stage, the ban on the application

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of the name of god to false gods is a metaphorical presentation of the potentials of resistance
preserved in the universal concept and this naming process offers a model for understanding the
question of validity.
Horkheimer and Adorno take their cue here from the Hegelian dialectic, though absent
Hegel's dependence on the totality to provide the meaning and place for each moment in the
dialectic. But, they refer to the process by which the truth can be redeemed from falsehood as
“determinate negation,” just as Hegel does. This is a rudimentary form of the process of
constructing a constellation of concepts around a particular. This process of constructing a
constellation is detailed in chapter 4. As we saw there, what is required is an engagement with
the particular phenomenon to be interpreted in which both the bodily aversion to suffering and
the relevant concepts are brought into a constellation around the object of investigation, and
through which one can come to an interpretation. In this way, the critique of existing reality is
always to remain immanent. There is no possibility of a critique from the outside of the social
reality in which we exist; for, there is no outside. And this is why the question of the validity of
judgments cannot be reduced to a mere procedure. For, the engagement with the particular
through which the appropriate concepts can be brought to bear will always involve an element of
subjective expression.
So, what Adorno offers is not a procedure for adjudicating the acceptability of norms in a
practical discourse. Rather, the account of the evolution of concepts from their origins in magic
through the ban on naming god, offers a way to get at the rational potentials sedimented in the
evolution of the species. Indeed, even in the culture industry chapter, Adorno points out the
rational potential in names and the process of naming, which, while coming under the control of
the culture industry, still provides a source of resistance. So, while in some phrases, like “this is

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the Hitler youth speaking,” “the last bond between sedimented experience and language...is
severed,” the act of naming remains beyond the totalizing influence of the culture industry.

244

In this way, Adorno's thought shows that even the culture industry's use of language provides a
place for expression. The orientation of the subject toward an object must be open, and this is
captured in the notion of mimesis as it was explicated above. And naming, in particular the
name of god as a model, captures the particularity, the uniqueness of the particular that cannot be
superceded in any interpretation. But, more than this, the subject must engage in expression, not
only in the sense of a subjective articulation of the self, but also in an expression of the
conceptual history of the species which together with merely subjective expression results in an
interpretation of the object.
What makes such an expression adequate to the object can be judged, not through the
ability of the interpretation to be embraced by all those affected, nor by whether it engages norms
that could be so accepted, but rather the subjective orientation to the object, that is, whether the
object is adequately taken into account and subsequently, whether the expression engages the
concepts that are relevant to understanding the object of inquiry. This picture provides, then, an
account of something like validity, but not an account that can provide a procedure for
determining the validity of experience or interpretation. Instead, what I take to have shown is
that while Adorno cannot provide these criteria, he does not give up on the rational potentials of
existing societies, and those which are to be found in the reconstruction of everyday experiences.
While he is pessimistic in the main, this is a methodological commitment that offers a way into
the deeply sedimented rationality of even the seemingly most irrational society, while proceeding
in such a way that the sources of domination, whether of human beings or non-human nature, are

244

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 135.
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clearly revealed. And, yet, it seems the potentials to overcome domination go very deep indeed,
down to the origin of names and the subjective ability to identify with an object, whether that
object is one's own history, another subject, or even an inanimate object.
Adorno's Reply to the Charge of Contradiction
To take this reply to the charge of performative contradiction further, it is worthwhile to
examine Adorno's own response to the claim that he is engaged in a paradoxical enterprise, or
that his position is self-contradictory. In the discussion that followed Adorno's talk,”The
Meaning of Working Through the Past,” he articulates two key ideas for understanding the
question of justification and the charge of performative contradiction. First, note that
exaggeration in theory, the cause of plenty of the seeming contradictions in his thought, is a
necessary form of thought in the contemporary world. For, it reveals what underlies the
appearances and disclaiming that goes on to this day.
[I]n consideration of the by no means optimistic overall picture that I gave, that I perhaps
exaggerated and this exaggeration seems to me to be a necessary medium for social-theoretical
and philosophical presentation, because the moderate, normal surface existence in general
conceals such potentials and because in the face of neutral, average everydayness to indicate the
245
threat lying below it at first blush always has the character of exaggeration.
The claim that Adorno's project is contradictory, then, misses something crucial about our ability
to theorize a contradictory world. If we assume with Adorno, that language itself has not been
left untouched by a reality in which contradictions abound, we can conclude that language too
will be involved in justifying, perpetuating, and covering over these contradictions. Adorno thus
justifies his mode of presentation, his mode of presenting seeming exaggerations, by pointing out
that to be critical of existing reality, in which the extremes are covered over and thus seemingly

245

Theodor Adorno, “Discussion of Professor Adorno's Lecture 'The Meaning of Working
Through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, Appendix I, trans.
Henry Pickford, (New York: Columbia UP, 1999), 305-6.
172

eliminated, one's analysis will always appear contradictory at first glance. The truth about
existing reality, however, is to be found in these very extremes. In this way Adorno reveals the
underlying tendencies of societies, in for example, the concept of nationalism as outlined in
chapter 4. Only by understanding the extremes, can one gain an accurate view of a supposedly
neutral or harmless patriotism.
And, second, in reply to the question of whether in the face of totalitarian potentials in
society, one should emphasize the ideal of justice, Adorno emphasizes that to a certain degree,
the immanent critique of racist politics needs to take up the concept of justice, for that concept
brings into play the relationship of the collective to the individual's interests. But, and here is the
bulk of Adorno's answer, to bring justice into play may just play into the hands of the totalitarian
or racist.
“But at this point I would like to say something that will perhaps surprise you, after I've
spoken so much about enlightenment. For I don't know whether one doesn't end up in a hopeless
position when one goes into these things in the discussion, for instance, to say that certainly it
really is an absolute norm that no one should be killed, but in war people are killed, and there do
exist exceptional situations—which norm, which ethical law contains the ultimate justification
for them? I think when one gets involved in, I would like to say, adolescent discussions, in such
infantile discussions, where the most drastic things are at issue, when one right away asks about
the stars and the absolutely ultimate values, then one is already in the devil's kitchen, and I think
in answer to this a certain minimum amount of enlightenment suffices, namely, when one simply
says, listen, whether one should murder people or not murder people, that's something I won't
discuss, that is a vulgarity I cannot abide—that this is basically also philosophically the higher
standpoint, rather than if one were to derive from a system of ethics, first, second, and third
volume, that is general, specific, and very specific parts, that one should not murder the Jews. I
mean to get involved in a theoretical discussions about whether people should be tortured or not,
let's rather stop that. I think that then certainly in a higher sense breaking off rationality at such
places better serves reason than a kind of pseudo-rationality that erects systems where it is first
246
and foremost a question of immediate reaction.”
In everyday practice, then, the appeal to a first ethical principle would already admit the
possibility of either its violation or the qualification that under certain circumstances, torture is
246

Adorno, “Discussion of Professor Adorno's Lecture 'The Meaning of Working Through the
Past,” 304.
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acceptable. Adorno here takes a stand toward such questions similar to the sort of stand that
Wittgenstein takes toward the global epistemological skeptic: we ought to avoid engagement
with such questions in language which already admits the possibility of on the one hand,
skepticism regarding all knowledge, and on the other the possibility of torture as a just or ethical
way of proceeding. As he puts it in his Lectures on Metaphysics, to engage in such discussion
already claims for reason a realm that is at least partly beyond reason, that is, the immediate
reaction to the suffering of another.

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In the terms of Negative Dialectics, the attempt to derive

a rational principle which would outlaw torture already lets the defender of torture in the door.
That is, it is already on the ground in which torture will be found to be acceptable under certain
conditions. Note, too, the connection with the discussion of mimesis. Adorno there states that
the truth of mimesis as identification, that our affinity with the other is the pre-condition of all
rational knowledge of the other, but that to thus reduce knowledge to the object's affinity with the
subject of knowledge makes the claim untrue, in other words, it risks the reduction of the object
to the categories of the subject, which is precisely what happens in discussions of torture. The
potential object of torture is always reduced to the category of terrorist with knowledge that
could prevent innocents from being killed. And thus, no discussion that claims the absolute
resolution of the problem in terms of rational judgment can avoid the elimination of the impulse
against suffering, the dismissal of the very conditions for the discussants' knowledge of the
object, their affinity with him or her.
It is not paradoxical to claim that the world is irrational and that we possess possibilities
for overcoming this irrationality or even that these possibilities are deposited in the evolution of
irrational institutions and concepts. While this sort of claim may require a unique and seeming

247

Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, 112-9.
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contradictory mode of expression, it does not require that one resort to irrationalism or an
emotivism of a Humean sort in order to explain the possibility of a practical and meaningful
orientation toward the world. For it is clear, not only from Adorno's thought, but even from the
most behaviorist psychology, that reason cannot operate in the absence of emotion.
Part II Honneth and Wellmer
Section I Honneth's Attempt to Redeem Adorno's Thinking
Axel Honneth, who earlier in his career held to the Habermasian interpretation outlined
above, has recently argued that this is not adequate to Adorno's theory and that to understand
Adorno's social theory, we must look at it not as an explanatory sociology, but as a physiognomy
of a failed form of life.

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I generally agree with this turn in Honneth's thinking regarding the

basis of critical social theory. But, since Honneth relies mainly on Minima Moralia—in fact, he
does not cite Dialectic of Enlightenment—and in doing so does not focus on the centrality of the
concept to Adorno's method

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, and since Honneth is not so concerned with replying to the

Habermasian criticism of Dialectic of Enlightenment, I take a slightly different tack here in
unpacking this notion of physiognomy. Adorno's method, even in his inaugural lecture, “The
Actuality of Philosophy,” which Honneth does spend some time interpreting, attempts an
unearthing of the subterranean rationality in actually existing reality through a physiognomy of
the particulars of enlightenment culture. While Honneth does locate the source of normativity in
Adorno's critical theory in actual experience, he places it in what he calls a “supercharged”
concept of suffering. That is, the intermundane experience of suffering needs the additional

248

Axel Honneth, “A Physiognomy of the Capitalist Form of Life: A Sketch of Adorno's Social
Theory,” Constellations 12, no. 1, (2005): 50-64.
249
Though, this focus is implicit in Honneth's explication of Adorno's use of Weber's notions of
constellation and ideal type.
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support of the Freudian categories of neuroses and the wish to be freed from such pathologies in
order to ground the normative claims that the construction of subjects and the freedom of
subjects ought to be different. This account culminates in the claim that childhood and the literal
imitation through which children learn provides a non-conceptual (in Honneth's terminology,
non-cognitive) foundation for not only our practical orientation to others, but for knowledge
itself.

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The problem, then, for Honneth's interpretation of Adorno is not its attempt to reinterpret
Adorno's social theory as a physiognomy. This in fact is similar to the interpretation I offered in
chapter 4 whereby through the constellative method, the historical is to be taken as a symbol of
the natural and the natural as a symbol for the historical. Rather, the problem arises in the move
from this to the attempt to claim that Adorno provides a non-cognitive foundation for both our
practical orientation toward others and theoretical orientation toward the objective world. The
notion of mimesis here makes a return. For, Honneth, in interpreting Adorno is, in essence,
claiming that mimesis, here interpreted as the imitation of others, does provide a non-cognitive,
“reason before reason,” which is supposed to provide the ground for normative criticism of failed
developmental processes as well as the reified appearances those processes take on in public
discourse.
Honneth, then, while essentially accepting the interpretative claim of Habermas, that the
only potential source of reconciliation in Adorno's work is mimesis, gives that a positive spin,
arguing that mimesis is, in a way, the appearance, the sign for the fact that developmentally,
human beings must imitate other human beings to become human beings. And, interestingly,
Judith Butler's criticism of Honneth in her reply to his Tanner lectures is a reformulation,
250

This further step linking mimesis with knowledge and morality is taken in Axel Honneth,
Reification: A New Look at an Old Idea, (New York: Oxford UP, 2010), 62-63.
176

whether she recognizes this or not, of Habermas' claim that Adorno requires a reason before
reason. This is the first problem with Honneth's attempt to redeem Adorno's thinking in this
fashion. It posits the affinity with others as a positive conception of rationality, which, as I
showed at the end of the last section, lets in the door the defender of torture.
Honneth's appropriation of Adorno also fails for another reason. This interpretation of
Adorno cannot make sense of the notion of interpretation that Adorno's philosophy requires.
Honneth moves too quickly from the conception of mimesis or imitative reason to a claim to the
grounding of norms. Instead, mimesis only names the potential orientation toward the object of
inquiry that is required to come to an adequate interpretation and expression. In addition, one
must take seriously the ability of the subject to engage in self-conscious appropriation of
concepts through imagination and memory. Perhaps Honneth intends to capture this ability
through the “super-charged concept of suffering,” but as I have interpreted Adorno, this ability
for experience cannot be reduced to mere psychoanalytic categories, but rather, must also
incorporate the objective possibilities spelled out in chapter 4 and which one might summarize
with the concept of a self-constituting humanity, a solidarity that acknowledges the individual's
connection not merely with her own suffering, but with the suffering of others and the potentials
for overcoming the causes of suffering implicit in the very social conditions that are at the root of
this suffering. If one leans on mimetic or imitative reason without mediation, one is left with
Habermas' criticism above, that one is merely positing a reason before reason in which the ideal
is the linguistic communion with nature.
Section II Wellmer, Messianism, and Utopia
For Wellmer, Adorno
“is only able to construct a connection to social change by interpreting the 'non-violent synthesis'
of the work of art and the configurative language of philosophy—aporetically—as a glimmer of

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messianic light glimpsed in the here and now, an anticipation of reconciliation in the real world.
The critique of instrumental reason cannot do without a philosophy of history based on the idea
of reconciliation; it needs a utopian perspective because it would cease to be conceivable as
critique otherwise. But if history has to become the Other of history in order to escape the
system of delusion that is instrumental reason, then the critique of the historical present moment
turns into a critique of historical being—the latest form of a theological critique of the earthly
vale of tears. The critique of identitary reason seems ultimately to result in a choice between
cynicism and theology—unless we wish to argue for a cheerful acceptance of the regression or
251
disintegration of the self without regard for the consequences.”
The key to answering this claim is in the conditional that makes up the third sentence. The
antecedent here, “if history has to become the Other of history in order to escape the system of
delusion that is instrumental reason,” does not hold, and so the claim that Adorno's work is
merely the latest form a pseudo-theological critique does not follow. The grounds for Wellmer's
claim are the same as those Habermas presents as the source of Adorno's performative
contradiction; this criticism depends on the claim that Adorno is engaged in a groundless, selfundermining critique of instrumental reason. But, as I showed above, that claim does not hold;
the process of coming to an interpretation through an adequate orientation to the object and in
which there occurs an expression of the rational potentials of the species shows that there is a
rational element in Adorno's work. A fuller answer, however, requires more specifics. Given the
interpretation of Adorno explicated in chapter 4 and defended above, what is the status of the
seeming utopian claims in Adorno's work? For, as I pointed out above in replying to Habermas,
Adorno requires a conception of utopia, a relationship between reason and an alternative.
Wellmer is correct in this respect, but incorrect that this utopia can only take the form of the
other of history.
In Adorno's work, utopia is not held out as the other of history as Wellmer claims.

251

Albrecht Wellmer, “The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason
since Adorno,” The Persistence of Modernity, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, Mass: MIT
Press, 1991) 63.
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Mimesis is not merely the outside of reason as it exists. Rather, mimesis in the relevant sense
here, and this should be clear from the discussion of the concept in Section I, Part I, while
articulating the possibility of an openness to the things of the world, an orientation that is able to
respect the object, is also always mediated by reason, language, and the social more generally, as
they actually exist. Yet, this does not dismiss any and all possibility of meaning and a practical
orientation to the world. For, the identification with another is still possible, even if this
identification is mediated by categories as they exist. See, for example, the anecdote regarding
the dramatization of Anne Frank's life in the introduction of the chapter. There, the immediate
identification is mediated by the categories of anti-Semitism. But, even in that form—embodied
in the claim, “Yes, but that girl at least should have been allowed to live”— the possibility of an
alternative is present. The very concepts implicit in such a judgment, life and society, offer the
possibility of reinterpretation of one's own experience. This reinterpretation, if it takes place,
engages the memory and imagination in a self-conscious expression of the contradictions within
the original interpretation, the very process I laid out in chapter 4. To say that such
reinterpretations are rare, or that language, and the categories used to understand the world
frustrate this process is not to say that the process is impossible and thus we must look to the
heavens for redemption. Instead, the potential for redemption is to be found in the very
conditions that make the original claim possible, in the concepts of life and humanity. Adorno
makes this clear in the way he approvingly speaks of Benjamin's “Theses on the Philosophy of
History,” in particular, his claim that the Social Democrats had failed in their conception of
history and their assumption of progress. For the party
“contented itself with assigning the working-class the role of the savior of future generations. It
thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate
as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved

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forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs.”

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For the ideals regarding the future to be meaningful, the suffering of the past must be
acknowledged, claimed, and understood. In the interpretation of Adorno I am offering, the ideals
that would redeem the future are implicit in the past, and can be made explicit through
interpretation and expression. And they must be, or all is truly lost; we really can only be saved
by a god.
The ground for Wellmer's interpretive claim against Adorno comes from the same
supposed insight as Habermas', namely the claim that Adorno (and Horkheimer) are stuck within
a model of knowledge in which a self-positing subject identifies and controls objects. Adorno's
problem from this perspective is the failure to acknowledge the ways in which the subject's
existence is itself mediated, especially by language, which always exists before the subject and
sets the terms of its positing of itself and the objects it would understand through identitary
reason. Adorno's thought “repeats once more that very 'forgetfulness of language' characteristic
of European rationalism, which it had itself in a sense criticized.”

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If this criticism is right,

then the conception of experience that I have argued provides a way to come to an adequate
orientation to reality as well as a way to interpret that reality and finally express that
interpretation in fact merely extends the faulty metaphysics of the subject.
But, I think I have shown not only that Adorno acknowledges this mediation by language,
but also incorporates it into his analysis. It is true that Adorno is not Habermas and does not take
the counter-factual norms implicit in the social-linguistic reproduction of society and the subject

252

Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, trans. Dennis Redmond.
http://dennisredmond.com/ThesesonHistory.html. Accessed July 11, 2011.
253
Wellmer, “The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason since
Adorno,” 64.
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as providing quasi-foundational criteria for guiding the discussions of practical matters and
ultimately a conception of utopia conceived of in linguistic terms, but he does take seriously the
ways in which the subject is already structured by the linguistic system into which it is born.
That is to say, first, that insofar as Adorno focuses on the universal, and its expression in
language, it is clear from the interpretation I have put forward that language has a role in the
construction of the subject. This is clear both in the account of the evolution of language in
Dialectic of Enlightenment summarized above and Adorno's later critique of language as mere
communication. And, as concepts take on a key role in the possibility of experience, language
too, is necessary for experience. But, to take language as a necessary aspect of interpretation and
expression is not to reduce experience to its linguistic aspect.
Part III Human Rights and Experience
To further demonstrate the usefulness and theoretical coherence of both the concepts
spelled out in chapter four, memory and imagination, and those arrived at in this chapter,
orientation, interpretation, and expression, I now turn to a specific contemporary political
problem: human rights. There is a sense in which all rights and claims to rights participate in
reification, that is they fall into the problem Lukaćs' articulates for practical reason and
summarized in chapter 4. The claim that a right has been violated reduces specific acts or
structures of violence and domination and the specific human relationships involved in those
structures and actions into a single, seemingly unchanging conceptual system. And, this
conceptual system is inevitably imbedded in a global society and the society of an individual
nation-state which tend to crystalize human relationships as though they were merely examples
of the concepts at work, and to do so in a detrimental way. But, looking at the struggles over
human rights through the positions I’ve laid out here show up not only the possibilities of the

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“new kind of human,”

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but also the regressions and diversions risked in such struggles. The

attempt to articulate human rights claims in the face of unjust violence, avoidable deprivation,
and repression is the attempt to redeem the possibilities of the species given the current state of
subjectivity, our productive resources, and our conceptual development.
As a preliminary, it is worthwhile to look at how Adorno links the explicit naming of
rights in the charter of the United Nations to the historical experience of the Holocaust.
“Legalities.—What the Nazis did to the Jews was unspeakable: language has no word for it,
since even mass murder would have sounded, in face of its planned, systematic totality, like
something from the good old days of the serial killer. And yet a term needed to be found if the
victims—in any case too many for their names to be recalled—were to be spared the curse of
having no thoughts turned unto them. So in English the concept of genocide was coined. But by
being codified, as set down in the International Declaration of Human Rights, the unspeakable
was made, for the sake of protest, commensurable. By its elevation to a concept, its possibility is
virtually recognized: an institution to be forbidden, rejected, discussed. One day negotiations
may take place in the forum of the United Nations on whether some new atrocity comes under
the heading of genocide, whether nations have a right to intervene that they do not want to
exercise in any case, and whether in view of the unforeseen difficulty of applying it in practice
the whole concept of genocide should be removed from the statutes. Soon afterwards there are
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inside-page headlines in journalese: East Turkestan genocide programme nears completion.”
What Adorno describes here mirrors the events surrounding UN discussions of the genocide in
Darfur and the discussions regarding the genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s. But, Adorno's
take on the International Declaration of Human Rights remains paradoxical. One must name that
which cannot be named, but in doing so, one acknowledges its continuing possibility. Naming it
makes it able to be thought abstractly, and in thinking about it abstractly, ignoring it becomes
more acceptable. Human rights discourse allows for a way of reifying human suffering that was
not possible before the existence of human rights discourse. But, the actual material possibility
of genocide is at the source of the reification; genocide itself is the reification of human
254

Theodor Adorno, “The Problem of a New Type of Human Being,” Current of Music, ed.
Robert Hullot-Kentor (Malden, Mass: Polity Press, 2009).
255
Adorno, “Messages in a Bottle,” 6-7.
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suffering. Only by ridding the victims of their individual humanity could they be eliminated as
though they were specimens. In other words, Adorno's account is only paradoxical in that the
naming of human rights implies their potential existence in practice, which, of course, we have
not achieved. The material inability of humanity to achieve these rights, while we possess the
capabilities for doing so, is the source of the paradox. And so, Adorno's paradoxical expression
here, that we must name the un-nameable, at once keeps available—theoretically, at least,—the
world in which we do not need such a word as “genocide,” while also realizing that we do not
live in such a world, that genocide will continue. But, in addition, the way of expressing this
idea, as a paradox, or seeming paradox anyway, seems designed to demonstrate the claim that is
made explicitly at the outset of the passage: that expression in language risks reification, the
elimination of the particulars of genocide in favor of the abstraction, “genocide,” and so we must
always be aware of the particulars in expressing ourselves with general terms; language itself is
not free, not unaffected by the very social conditions that produce the possibility of genocide.
From this, then we can begin to understand the struggle for human rights in general, and
specific struggles for human rights for what they are: a struggle over the meaning of experience,
both collective and individual. Again, note the straight-forward reading of Adorno's take on the
human rights project: The attempt to name the unnameable and to give thought to those who
otherwise will have no thoughts turned to them. The project of human rights, then, emerges as a
particular historical attempt to engage what I am calling the self-conscious memory with the
tragedy of the Holocaust. Already, then, human rights at their origin are to be seen not as
ahistorical universals that hold across place, but rather the specific attempt to remember the
victims of violence, and the attempt, not to give violence, death, and destruction of human beings
a teleological meaning or purpose—that would be a mere outrage—but at least to remember in

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some institutional sense, that this happened, this person, these people were destroyed. And still
today, human rights struggles take up the responsibility of memory.
Two general insights emerge in understanding human rights in this way. First, their
codification is an historical achievement, conditioned, of course, by their actual violation.
Second, the construction of the concept of human rights is an attempt to make the horrors of the
past commensurable with the present. This implies an orientation to the future as well, to
remember in this sense, then, is at once to emphasize that human rights have not been achieved,
but that their achievement remains a possibility. Human rights, like reason as it has come to
exist, historical reason, the principle of organization of the dominant society is itself antagonistic.
In this sense, they play out the problem of practical reason and the possibilities of practical
subjectivity. In his discussion of Hegel's philosophy of history, Adorno reports the last words of
Franz von Sickingen, a figure who exists at the beginning of the modern period, as “nothing
without cause.”

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For Adorno, these words encapsulate the fate of the individual in the modern

world. The individual is beholden to the course of history, which is determined by forces beyond
his control. And these forces are disconnected from the individual, not just in that they are
beyond any individual's control, but also in their inability to achieve individual happiness, to
meet the interests and needs of individuals. There is no longer a subject for whom this system
exists. Yet, in the struggle for human rights, the attempt is made by these subjects to at once
articulate the past and change the future into one in which at least some possibility for a
meaningful, non-repressive life.
Human rights, then, in the face of these forces and the subjects embedded in this system,
are ambiguous, an aspect of the antagonistic social structure. In actual struggles, for example, the

256

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 318.
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recent revolt in Egypt, it is clear that subjects are capable not only of memory in the sense
mentioned above and explicated more fully in chapter 4, but also imagination in the relevant
sense. That is, contemporary subjects remain capable of experience. Note, with regard to this
understanding of memory, that people in Egypt were not only able to experience their past, but
actively attempted to prevent that past from being institutionally erased. Those participating in
the revolt occupied the offices of the state security apparatus to prevent the destruction of the
records of torture and abuse at the hands of the Mubarak regime. The experiences of torture and
loss were not to be erased. They should be preserved in some institutional form. And the
fundamental demand of the protestors, that Mubarak resign and democratic elections be held,
shows imagination, an attempt to envision a future in which people exercise at least a modicum
of control over their own lives in a realm that had formerly been outside their control.
Note, too, that even some spectators of the revolt engaged in experience in the relevant
sense. Some citizens of the United States in particular, took their own guilt in the Mubarak
regime's torture seriously by applauding the Egyptian revolutionaries and their attempts to
preserve the records of torture of both domestic opponents of the government, but also those who
were tortured on behalf of the United States in its so-called “war on terror.” This requires, first of
all, the identification both with the Egyptian revolutionaries and even the victims of torture, the
very people Americans are told are trying to kill them, an exercise of the imagination. So, these
gestures, while certainly not a full-fledged interpretation of the events in Egypt, at the very least
reveal an orientation that is open to the events, and which has at its core some level of solidarity,
fellow-feeling, even if the expression of this orientation was largely via social media such as
facebook or twitter. The risk in these sorts of expressions is not a failure of orientation, but rather
a failure in interpretation of both the events themselves, and one's own actions in the face of

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those events. I have in mind here the impression that, by leaving a comment or “liking” a
facebook page providing updates and articulating the demands of Egyptians, one has actually
done something. One could continue down the path of memory and imagination, of selfconscious experience by coming to one's complicity in these the very abuses others are
struggling against, but the mere gesture in social media does not rise to this necessarily.
But, there can also be a failure of orientation. And this emerges in the expression. To fail
in this fashion is not merely to portray things that do not exist or do not exist in the particular
configuration that is portrayed. That could be said of any expression that strives to be art. Rather,
the failure of orientation, when it occurs, is clear in an expression that it does not open itself to
the phenomenon.
As an example, Adam Reeder's sculpture, “Evolution of a Revolution”

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illustrates how

an art work can go wrong as expression. It reduces the real struggles of the Egyptian people to
two images. Hieroglyphics and contemporary technology emblazoned with the trademarks of
corporations. Here, we have a case in which the orientation of solidarity at least seems present,
yet which fails on the level of both interpretation and expression. Certainly modern technology
had something to do with the revolt in Egypt. Yet, to reduce it, as this piece does, to the image of
a hieroglyphic Egyptian holding a cellular phone entirely misses the experience of the revolt,
even the experience of the spectator. It turns the potential progress of a people, won through
struggle and suffering, to a caricature in which the Egyptians fit neatly into the story of progress
the West, an in particular, Americans tell about themselves. The piece seems to say: Egyptians
built the pyramids, and then did nothing for thousands of years. That is, until apple, facebook,
twitter, and cellular phones made their revolution possible. Technological progress is equated
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Adam Reeder, The Evolution of Revolution, 2011. http://www.studiorealism.com/wpcontent/uploads/2011/03/egypt_sculpture.jpg. Accessed March 27, 2011.
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with political progress. Political change is brought about not through struggle and suffering, but
through the pseudo-natural advance of technology. And not mere technological progress, but
essentially, the form it has now taken in the so-called developed world, the continual introduction
of new, proprietary gadgets that vaguely promise something about making life easier or better,
but which, in fact, turn out to be largely ways to spend one's time not actually doing anything. In
the end, the piece seems little more than an advertisement, not only for these tools of social
media, but Reeder's own work. Even the form of the piece, sculpture designed to replicate the
hieroglyphic images of the pyramids, but with anachronistic corporate logos interspersed, is
essentially pedantic; it all but gives up the distance from events it might take through its
existence as semblance. It as if the title of the work were enough to give us its content.
Contrast this with Adorno's reflections on Guernica as an example of autonomous art that
simultaneously does not disown its relationship to the society in which it exists.
“In expression they reveal themselves as the wounds of society; expression is the social ferment
of their autonomous form. The principle witness for this is Picasso's Guernica that, strictly
incompatible with prescribed realism, precisely by means of inhumane construction, achieves a
level of expression that sharpens it to social protest beyond all contemplative misunderstanding.
The socially critical zones of artworks are those where it hurts; where in their expression,
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historically determined, the untruth of the social situation comes to light.”
Guernica, with its dissembled human and animal parts, succeeds as expression because it shows
the lie to the fascist struggle for Spain, but also, more generally portrays the effects of the new
phenomenon of total war and the new technology of the bomber.
The summary of Adorno's interpretation of Guernica and the criticism of Reeder's work
above shows that there are better and worse ways of orienting oneself to a phenomenon,
interpreting that phenomenon, and finally expressing that interpretation. These categories are not

258

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 237.
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hard and fast. In the Reeder piece, it seems there is at least a gesture toward the event itself, the
piece might not have acknowledged the Egyptians at all or that there is a continuing struggle for
democratic control in Egypt. Insofar as this is the case, the piece does not completely fail in its
orientation. Yet, it seems to fall into identity thinking, to affirm the society in which it exists and
to thereby disown its own guilt in relation to global society, and with it the guilt of the potential
audience of the piece.

Part IV Concluding Remarks
In this chapter, I have shown that the interpretation of Adorno's work in which I offer a
conception of practical reason does not succumb to the most influential criticisms of Adorno's
project. Adorno neither requires nor endorses a return to nature of the sort implied by Habermas'
criticism that his critique of existing reality requires mimesis as a reason before reason, his
philosophy either depends on irrational foundations or an implausible conception of reason in
which humans must have a communicative relationship with nature. In short, this objection fails
to take seriously the relationship between concepts and mimesis, the social development of the
species. Nor does Adorno's work imply an inevitable performative contradiction. Instead, his
mode of expression is designed to orient us properly to the objects of experience; his expression
is frequently formulated in paradoxical terms because reality itself continues to be contradictory.
Wellmer's criticism that Adorno's normative standpoint, the possibility of a solution to the
problem of practical reason, requires an implausible messianic philosophy of history is merely
the inverted form of Habermas' criticism regarding mimesis. Instead of forcing Adorno's position
into a pre-historical foundationalism, Wellmer's interpretation, while in some ways more
sympathetic to Adorno, forces his work into projecting redemption into the future in a concrete
way. To put this another way, Adorno supposedly fails to ground the possibility of practical

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reason, in the everyday experience of existing subjects. Instead, and this becomes clear in the
discussion of Adorno's conception of language as well as the more general interpretation of
Adorno's conception of experience I offer in chapter 4, the possibilities of overcoming existing
reality remain, even with the damaged subjectivity of contemporary societies, within and
between those very subjects. Experience, as the self-conscious engagement with the past and the
future, bringing into play both the individual's failures and possibilities along with the conceptual
resources of the species, is possible and offers a potential engagement with the social world
which does not merely affirm what exists over and over.

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Chapter 6 Practical Reason, Universality, and Resistance
I have tried to provide a conception of practical reason derived from Adorno's work that
is both theoretically viable and that provides a way of understanding real struggles in the
contemporary world. Generally, critics have taken Adorno's project as purely critical, with no
coherent conception of reason at its heart, and certainly not a conception practical reason. I have
demonstrated, however, not only that Adorno's thinking provides a conception of practical reason
and thus ethical subjectivity, but also that this conception of practical reason is useful in
understanding and criticizing the contemporary world. In the face of the seemingly total
reification of the practical world as described by Lukaćs, but without the potential political and
epistemological agent that can both see through reified second nature and potentially change that
second nature, Adorno turns to a conception of practical reason that is, in essence, a conception
of experience. This conception of experience is very specific, however, in that it requires the
activation of self-conscious memory and imagination. Adorno articulates these interrelated
faculties through the notion of the constellation, a procedure he adapts from Benjamin and that
aims to at once keep open the subject's orientation to the object, yet allow for interpretation of
the object through concepts. This conception of experience also brings Adorno's notions of
mimesis and utopia into play in that the immediate identification with an object allows for an
open orientation to the object. While the notion of utopia, as implicit in aspects of the conceptual
resources the species has developed, namely concepts like freedom, allow for the interpretation
of objects in such a way that a different world, a different society is kept open. Memory, then
connects the suffering body to the conceptual resources of the species, while imagination allows
for the connection to other concepts, and the projection of something different. In this
conclusion, I first relate this conception of practical reason to the critique of idealism. Second, I

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address the question of the universality of the conception of practical reason presented here.
Lastly, and emerging from this question of universality, I address what this conception of
practical reason means for actually existing critical movements.
This conception of practical reason is connected to the critique of idealism that runs
through Adorno's thought. In part, chapter 2 and 3 show that Kant's conception of the practical
subject and its transcendental possibility are inadequate to present social conditions. But, as
should be clear, Adorno is not content to merely criticize the idealist tradition, but rather uses the
very assumptions of idealism against it in order to reveal the possibilities still remaining in its
key concepts like freedom and the imagination. In this vein, I have shown that Adorno's
conception of practical reason merges the key concepts of idealism with the historically
necessary shift to materialism in social theory. The very gaps in Kant's thinking about society
and the sociality of the subject call for reflection upon both the material body and the categories
of materialist social theory. That is, despite general pessimism of this account, Adorno is
attempting to show the possibility of the material redemption of the most optimistic categories of
idealism: freedom and imagination. Not only are there objective material possibilities in the
existing forces of production, but subjective possibilities that are described in the notion of
experience developed here. The hope for overcoming our second nature, our self-constituted hell,
depends on overcoming our self-constituted fear. In the final analysis, Adorno's conception of
practical reason challenges us to overcome the historical form of the principle of selfpreservation. More specifically, the fear that in part drove us to subjugate our instincts and put
off gratification is no longer necessary to provide for the basic needs of people. This is the
essence of Adorno's claim that “there is tenderness only in the coarsest demand: that no one
should go hungry.” The fear of being left to fend for oneself, the fear of being excluded from

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society to such a degree that one ends up homeless, hungry, completely dependent is at root the
fear that keeps people in line. It at once squelches the subject's memory and imagination. It
eliminates the possibility of experience. And, this then is why the experience of one's own
suffering under such conditions must be the starting point for the subjective possibility of
experience. Society, a concept which is developed in the body of the dissertation, implies the
well-being of its members. Here one can see the connection between the conception of practical
reason developed in the dissertation and the social contract tradition, including Rawls; for selfinterest is generally given as the rational motivation for leaving the state of nature and entering a
society, and in Rawls, is assumed in the original position. Even from the basest conception of
reason as the rational pursuit of one's self-interest, the societies in which we live are irrational.
But, the subjective possibility of recognizing this irrationality is the ability to experience in the
sense spelled out in the dissertation. One cannot see the irrationality of the present organization
of our societies without taking seriously the experience of one's own suffering. The idealist
conception of freedom can only be developed in relation to the real material unfreedom of the
individuals in contemporary societies. So, as I've articulated in the idea of non-identity thinking,
and the procedure of the constellation, a connection with the supposed irrational, the body,
underlies the ability to conceive of rational criticism, yet, criticism requires the bringing of
concepts into relation to the object of experience. To be clear again, however, the key here is in
the reflection upon the impulses one has toward the object, not the mere synthesis of emotion
and reason. Solidarity, the social aspect of the experience in this sense, is required for the
intersubjective recognition of the irrationality of existing society. And, in fact, the ability to
actually experience one's own suffering, to reflectively remember and imagine in the sense I've
articulated seems to require the intersubjective recognition of others' suffering. For, without this,

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one appears to oneself as insane in a sane society and faced with the coldness of social relations
in which we exist stays insane or decides to embrace the social isolation that is the mode of
existence in contemporary society.
But, the concept of experience developed here remains somewhat ambiguous. In
particular, it is not clear what concepts are supposed to be brought to bear in a particular
encounter with an object or phenomenon. This conception of practical reason does not provide a
concept or procedure for determining the validity of orientation, interpretation, and expression. I
think the way to articulate this problem is to ask whether this concept of experience is supposed
to be universal, that is, apply to all members of the species, or since, as I have claimed, it is the
attempt to deal with both a geographically and historically specific problem, is it simply the
articulation of the possibilities of the subjects who live under the material conditions of
contemporary capitalism in the form it has taken in the west—essentially, western Europe and
the United States? By addressing the question of universality, I can provide some insight into the
question of what concepts are supposed to be involved in experience by being brought to bear
through the self-conscious engagement of memory and imagination with bodily reactions.
First, there is a strain of universalism in Adorno's thinking, derived from Kant, that
supports the idea that much of what is developed here is supposed to be applicable to the species.
When Adorno speaks of the species, he means the species, not merely some geographic subset of
the species. There are three aspects of this universalism that are relevant. First, there is no people
left that the expansion of capitalism has not touched, if only indirectly. Second, since the
structure of the self will be, in part, a reflection of the structure of society, no subjects are left
untouched by the expansion of capitalism to all corners of the earth. Lastly, and this helps us to
understand Honneth's call for a weak, formal anthropology, the concept of experience and thus

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practical reason developed here implies that certain conditions must be met in order for human
beings to be flourishing.
In relation to the conclusions spelled out above, Adorno takes it that to have overcome
the spell of what exists, we will have abolished want—“and I mean eradicated in all seriousness,
not just on the surface, but for all mankind, universally, and on a global scale.”

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This forms, in

part, the objective condition for experience. But, then, since this objective condition has not been
met, are we not left back at Wellmer's criticism that the utopian impulse of Adorno's philosophy
can only be articulated in an implausible philosophy of history that posits a condition outside of
history in order to criticize history as it has actually occurred? The conception of practical reason
articulated here, then, would only be an articulation of the helplessness of real individuals in the
face of actual history.
What I want to make clear in this regard is that it is not only the body, but also the
conceptual resources of the species available in this conception of practical reason that provide a
connection with real material conditions. These resources eliminate the need for appeal to a
messianic view of history. I've explained this in some detail in chapter 5, but in this context, the
account of language from the Dialectic of Enlightenment provides a way to explain the
universalism of the concept of practical reason advanced here that also then gives an answer to
the question of what concepts are supposed to be brought to bear in particular contexts. I
conclude that only on the assumption of radical nominalism—that concepts are merely place
holders with nothing but an arbitrary connection to the objects they claim to cover—is the
connection between individual experience and the conceptual resources of the species severed,
even under objectively horrid conditions.

259

Adorno, History and Freedom, 183.
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Recall from the account of language in Dialectic of Enlightenment that Adorno and
Horkheimer present language as containing the possibility of overcoming the very conditions of
domination through which language was itself constituted as more than mere mimetic impulse in
the face of fear inducing nature. This is presented as a quasi-evolutionary account of the
development of language. But, we see that even under fascism, the possibility remained of
critique, as the example from the culture industry section illustrates. This has three implications
in the present context. First, the everyday life of individuals, even in present societies, contain
the possibility of, at the very least, understanding their own position as oppressed, dominated.
Second, this possibility is preserved precisely in language, and in two aspects of language: the
name and the concept. Third, that this possibility is preserved in language informs the sorts of
concepts that are supposed to be brought to bear in specific historical struggles.
In bringing these conclusions about the conception of practical reason articulated here
together in conceiving in what sense this conception is universal I want to turn to a final example
from Adorno. Here, in Minima Moralia, Adorno articulates how a certain form—and Adorno
admits, a particularly privileged form—of child's play holds open the objective possibility of a
different second nature, one in which activities are engaged in for their own sakes rather than for
the creation of surplus-value. And, this rehearsal is connected to the objective possibility of
change through expression in language.
“The unreality of games gives notice that reality is not yet real. Unconsciously they rehearse the
right life. The relation of children to animals depends entirely on the fact that Utopia goes
disguised in the creatures whom Marx even begrudged the surplus value they contribute as
workers. In existing without any purpose recognizable to men, animals hold out, as if for
expression, their own names, utterly impossible to exchange. This make them so beloved of
children, their contemplation so blissful. I am a rhinoceros (Nashorn), signifies the shape of the
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rhinoceros.”

260

Adorno, Minima Moralia, 228.
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Initially, what is going on in the play of children in this context is not difficult to understand.
They carry out activities for their own sakes rather than for the sake of their fungibility. They
even carry out in altered form the activities of work. Children, through play that imitates work,
express the possibility of right life, activities engaged in for their own sakes rather than in
subordination to creation of surplus value. But, notice that in the passage above the causal
relation is inverted, the name of the animal itself is what makes children enamored of them; it is
not the love of children that makes the name of an animal a disguised instantiation of Utopia.
Ironically, the left over expressive aspects of the name are precisely the site of resistance, while
the nominalist tendencies in contemporary societies give words the aura of the spell. The
nominalist tendency, and Adorno and Horkheimer give numerous examples of this in
contemporary societies—from the record company naming the pop-star to the trade-marked
names for branded goods—do so by mediating the relationship between word and object with
purposiveness, and in particular, the attempt to manipulate people through language. So long as
elements of the expressive aspect of language remain, resistance can be articulated. And, as was
shown in chapter 5, the universals of the language continue to have this potential to express and
not merely communicate clearly the claims of a person or group. Because concepts like freedom
or the universal “free beings” contain the possibility of expression, they offer the possibility of
saying more than the particulars that are captured by them.
This last insight has clear implications for existing resistance movements. Resistance to
what exists, if it is not to become merely advertisement for itself must connect with both
objective material possibilities and the expressive possibilities of language. Here one can see a
problem with many of the institutionalized resistance movements, whether anti-capitalist,
feminist, environmentalist, anti-racist. They no longer connect with those whom they ostensibly

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speak for and instead look to them or their supporters as potential consumers to be manipulated.
“...the word, which henceforth is allowed only to designate something and not to mean it,
becomes so fixated on the object that it hardens into a formula. This affects language and subject
matter equally. Instead of raising a matter to the level of experience, the purified word exhibits it
as a case of an abstract moment, and everything else, severed from now defunct expression by
261
the demand for pitiless clarity, therefore withers in reality also.”
In the context of social movements who seek to radically alter the status quo, then, several
insights come to the fore. First, these movements might note the possibility or perhaps even the
necessity to separate, if only temporarily in order to articulate experience, both individual and
collective. That is, to remember in the terms of the dissertation. The omnipresent risk for any
solidarity that does survive in the contemporary world is that it will become mere defense of
privilege. Language itself, while preserving possibilities for change, for critique also threatens to
become mere communication, the attempt to clearly label a problem to be solved and thus to
appeal to existing structures to alleviate that problem. In the process, the connection to the
experience that prompted the movement is lost. But, the connection to the potentials of the
species are embedded in language. The tension here, then, is connecting particular experience
and universal concepts like freedom. Given the state of the world, the ways in which particular
people and groups of people are made to suffer in contemporary societies, this is particularly
problematic. The potential exists for connecting, say the self-conscious memory of aspects of
racial oppression to freedom, or society. Yet, it is possible that such oppression is not
experienced as such, not experienced as a disconnect between the notion of freedom and the
suffering imposed by racism. Instead, the terms of this suffering, the ways in which it might be
expressed might be so particular that their experience cannot be connected to these potentials in a
clear way. But, I think, this possibility does not indict the conception of practical reason spelled

261

Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 133.
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out here. In the first place, this is perfectly consistent with the conception of freedom at work in
this conception of practical reason. Freedom cannot be articulated except in connection with
society, and at the very least, in relation with others. This is why I mention the potential necessity
of separatist movements, at least as first step. Secondly, the possibility that particular experiences
of oppression are not able to be immediately connected to the conceptual potentials of the
species is perfectly consistent with the criticism of society underlying the concept of practical
reason articulated here. The problem is not in how I have conceived of practical reason, but
rather the problem of a second nature that has become so reified that even the most universal
concepts through which resistance can be articulated are potentially implicated. Social isolation
is the mode of being in contemporary capitalism.
None of this is to be taken as dictating to actually existing resistance movements. Besides
the obvious fact that very few people will read this, it also follows from how I have conceived of
practical reason here that the potentials of actual movements can only be actualized by those
movements. With the emphasis I have placed on the particular in relation to the universal, and
the rejection of non-identity thinking through Adorno's conception of the constellation, as well as
the place imagination has in this theory of practical reason, it should be clear that general claims
about real resistance to existing conditions of domination are at best exaggerations, and at worst
identity thinking.
I hope then to have made clear a conception of practical reason as a concept of experience
that is present in Adorno's thinking and from this conception offered critical insights into existing
reality. I think that this conception of experience and some of the other ideas developed here
offer several directions for future research including thinking about human rights, the domination
of nature, and the related question of the possibility of a critical theory in the face of resource

198

constraints. At the very least, and consistent with the conception of experience here, I have
expanded what it means to do philosophy under present conditions. And this is no small thing.

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