## 1. Biographical Sketch




Born on September 11, 1903 as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno lived
in Frankfurt am Main for the first three decades of his life and the
last two (Muller-Doohm 2005, Claussen 2008). He was the only son
of a wealthy German wine merchant of assimilated Jewish background and
an accomplished musician of Corsican Catholic descent. Adorno studied
philosophy with the neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius and music composition
with Alban Berg. He completed his *Habilitationsschrift* on
Kierkegaard's aesthetics in 1931, under the supervision of the
Christian socialist Paul Tillich. After just two years as a university
instructor (*Privatdozent*), he was expelled by the Nazis,
along with other professors of Jewish heritage or on the political
left. A few years later he turned his father's surname into a middle
initial and adopted "Adorno," the maternal surname by which he is best
known.




Adorno left Germany in the spring of 1934. During the Nazi era he
resided in Oxford, New York City, and southern California. There he
wrote several books for which he later became famous, including
*Dialectic of Enlightenment* (with Max Horkheimer),
*Philosophy of New Music*, *The Authoritarian
Personality* (a collaborative project), and *Minima
Moralia*. From these years come his provocative critiques of mass
culture and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949 to
take up a position in the philosophy department, Adorno quickly
established himself as a leading German intellectual and a central
figure in the Institute of Social Research. Founded as a free-standing
center for Marxist scholarship in 1923, the Institute had been led by
Max Horkheimer since 1930. It provided the hub to what has come to be
known as the Frankfurt School. Adorno became the Institute's director
in 1958. From the 1950s stem *In Search of Wagner*, Adorno's
ideology-critique of the Nazi's favorite composer; *Prisms*, a
collection of social and cultural studies; *Against
Epistemology*, an antifoundationalist critique of Husserlian
phenomenology; and the first volume of *Notes to Literature*, a
collection of essays in literary criticism. 




Conflict and consolidation marked the last decade of Adorno's life.
A leading figure in the "positivism dispute" in German sociology,
Adorno was a key player in debates about restructuring German
universities and a lightning rod for both student activists and their
right-wing critics. These controversies did not prevent him from
publishing numerous volumes of music criticism, two more volumes of
*Notes to Literature*, books on Hegel and on existential
philosophy, and collected essays in sociology and in aesthetics.
*Negative Dialectics*, Adorno's magnum opus on epistemology and
metaphysics, appeared in 1966. *Aesthetic Theory*, the other
magnum opus on which he had worked throughout the 1960s, appeared
posthumously in 1970. He died of a heart attack on August
6, 1969, one month shy of his sixty-sixth birthday.


## 2. Dialectic of Enlightenment




Long before "postmodernism" became fashionable, Adorno and Horkheimer
wrote one of the most searching critiques of modernity to have emerged
among progressive European intellectuals. *Dialectic of
Enlightenment* is a product of their wartime exile. It first
appeared as a mimeograph titled *Philosophical Fragments* in
1944. This title became the subtitle when the book was published in
1947. Their book opens with a grim assessment of the modern West:
"Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense as the advance of
thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and
installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth radiates
under the sign of disaster triumphant" (DE 1, translation
modified). How can this be, the authors ask. How can the progress of
modern science and medicine and industry promise to liberate people
from ignorance, disease, and brutal, mind-numbing work, yet help
create a world where people willingly swallow fascist ideology,
knowingly practice deliberate genocide, and energetically develop
lethal weapons of mass destruction? Reason, they answer, has become
irrational.




Although they cite Francis Bacon as a leading spokesman for an
instrumentalized reason that becomes irrational, Horkheimer and Adorno
do not think that modern science and scientism are the sole culprits.
The tendency of rational progress to become irrational regress arises
much earlier. Indeed, they cite both the Hebrew scriptures and Greek
philosophers as contributing to regressive tendencies. If Horkheimer
and Adorno are right, then a critique of modernity must also be a
critique of premodernity, and a turn toward the postmodern cannot
simply be a return to the premodern. Otherwise the failures of
modernity will continue in a new guise under contemporary conditions.
Society as a whole needs to be transformed.




Horkheimer and Adorno believe that society and culture form a
historical totality, such that the pursuit of freedom in society is
inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture (DE xvi).
There is a flip side to this: a lack or loss of freedom in
society--in the political, economic, and legal structures within
which we live--signals a concomitant failure in cultural
enlightenment--in philosophy, the arts, religion, and the
like. The Nazi death camps are not an aberration, nor are mindless
studio movies innocent entertainment. Both indicate that something
fundamental has gone wrong in the modern West.




According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the source of today's disaster is
a pattern of blind domination, domination in a triple sense: the
domination of nature by human beings, the domination of nature within
human beings, and, in both of these forms of domination, the
domination of some human beings by others. What motivates such triple
domination is an irrational fear of the unknown: "Humans believe
themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This
has determined the path of
demythologization ... . Enlightenment is mythical fear
radicalized" (DE 11). In an unfree society whose culture pursues
so-called progress no matter what the cost, that which is "other,"
whether human or nonhuman, gets shoved aside, exploited, or destroyed.
The means of destruction may be more sophisticated in the modern West,
and the exploitation may be less direct than outright slavery, but
blind, fear-driven domination continues, with ever greater global
consequences. The all-consuming engine driving this process is an
ever-expanding capitalist economy, fed by scientific research and the
latest technologies.




Contrary to some interpretations, Horkheimer and Adorno do not
reject the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Nor do they provide a
negative "metanarrative" of universal historical decline. Rather,
through a highly unusual combination of philosophical argument,
sociological reflection, and literary and cultural commentary, they
construct a "double perspective" on the modern West as a historical
formation (Jarvis 1998, 23). They summarize this double perspective in
two interlinked theses: "Myth is already enlightenment, and
enlightenment reverts to mythology" (DE xviii). The first thesis allows
them to suggest that, despite being declared mythical and outmoded by
the forces of secularization, older rituals,
religions, and philosophies may have contributed to the process of
enlightenment and may still have something worthwhile to contribute.
The second thesis allows them to expose ideological and destructive
tendencies within modern forces of secularization,
but without denying either that these forces are progressive and
enlightening or that the older conceptions they displace were
themselves ideological and destructive.




A fundamental mistake in many interpretations of *Dialectic of
Enlightenment* occurs when readers take such theses to be
theoretical definitions of unchanging categories rather than critical
judgments about historical tendencies. The authors are not saying that
myth is "by nature" a force of enlightenment. Nor are they claiming
that enlightenment "inevitably" reverts to mythology. In fact, what
they find really mythical in both myth and enlightenment is the thought
that fundamental change is impossible. Such resistance to change
characterizes both ancient myths of fate and modern devotion to the
facts.




Accordingly, in constructing a "dialectic of enlightenment" the
authors simultaneously aim to carry out a dialectical enlightenment of
enlightenment not unlike Hegel's *Phenomenology of Spirit*. Two
Hegelian concepts anchor this project, namely, determinate negation
and conceptual self-reflection. "Determinate negation" (*bestimmte
Negation*) indicates that immanent criticism is the way to wrest
truth from ideology. A dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment
"discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from [the
image's] features the admission of falseness which cancels its power
and hands it over to truth" (DE 18). Beyond and through such
determinate negation, a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment
also recalls the origin and goal of thought itself. Such recollection
is the work of the concept as the self-reflection of thought (*der
Begriff als Selbstbesinnung des Denkens*, DE 32). Conceptual
self-reflection reveals that thought arises from the very corporeal
needs and desires that get forgotten when thought becomes a mere
instrument of human self-preservation. It also reveals that the goal
of thought is not to continue the blind domination of nature and
humans but to point toward reconciliation. Adorno works out the
details of this conception in his subsequent lectures on Kant (KC),
ethics (PMP), and metaphysics (MCP) and in his books on Husserl (AE),
Hegel (H), and Heidegger (JA). His most comprehensive statement occurs
in *Negative Dialectics*, which is discussed later.


## 3. Critical Social Theory



*Dialectic of Enlightenment* presupposes a critical social
theory indebted to Karl Marx. Adorno reads Marx as a Hegelian
materialist whose critique of capitalism unavoidably includes a
critique of the ideologies that capitalism sustains and requires. The
most important of these is what Marx called "the fetishism of
commodities." Marx aimed his critique of commodity fetishism against
bourgeois social scientists who simply describe the capitalist economy
but, in so doing, simultaneously misdescribe it and prescribe a false
social vision. According to Marx, bourgeois economists necessarily
ignore the exploitation intrinsic to capitalist production. They fail
to understand that capitalist production, for all its surface "freedom"
and "fairness," must extract surplus value from the labor of the
working class. Like ordinary producers and consumers under capitalist
conditions, bourgeois economists treat the commodity as a fetish. They
treat it as if it were a neutral object, with a life of its own, that
directly relates to other commodities, in independence from the human
interactions that actually sustain all commodities. Marx, by contrast,
argues that whatever makes a product a commodity goes back to human
needs, desires, and practices. The commodity would not have "use value"
if it did not satisfy human wants. It would not have "exchange value"
if no one wished to exchange it for something else. And its exchange
value could not be calculated if the commodity did not share with other
commodities a "value" created by the expenditure of human labor power
and measured by the average labor time socially necessary to produce
commodities of various sorts. 




Adorno's social theory attempts to make Marx's central insights
applicable to "late capitalism." Although in agreement with Marx's
analysis of the commodity, Adorno thinks his critique of commodity
fetishism does not go far enough. Significant changes have occurred in
the structure of capitalism since Marx's day. This requires revisions
on a number of topics: the dialectic between forces of production and
relations of production; the relationship between state and economy;
the sociology of classes and class consciousness; the nature and
function of ideology; and the role of expert cultures, such as modern
art and social theory, in criticizing capitalism and calling for the
transformation of society as a whole.




The primary clues to these revisions come from a theory of
reification proposed by the Hungarian socialist Georg Lukacs in
the 1920s and from interdisciplinary projects and debates conducted by
members of the Institute of Social Research in the 1930s and 1940s.
Building on Max Weber's theory of rationalization, Lukacs argues
that the capitalist economy is no longer one sector of society
alongside others. Rather, commodity exchange has become the central
organizing principle for all sectors of society. This allows commodity
fetishism to permeate all social institutions (e.g., law,
administration, journalism) as well as all academic disciplines,
including philosophy. "Reification" refers to "the structural process
whereby the commodity form permeates life in capitalist society."
Lukacs was especially concerned with how reification makes human
beings "seem like mere things obeying the inexorable laws of the
marketplace" (Zuidervaart 1991, 76).




Initially Adorno shared this concern, even though he never had
Lukacs's confidence that the revolutionary working class could
overcome reification. Later Adorno called the reification of
consciousness an "epiphenomenon." What a critical social theory really
needs to address is why hunger, poverty, and other forms of human
suffering persist despite the technological and scientific potential to
mitigate them or to eliminate them altogether. The root cause, Adorno says,
lies in how capitalist relations of production have come to dominate
society as a whole, leading to extreme, albeit often invisible,
concentrations of wealth and power (ND 189-92). Society has come to be
organized around the production of exchange values for the sake of
producing exchange values, which, of course, always already requires a
silent appropriation of surplus value. Adorno refers to this nexus of
production and power as the "principle of exchange"
(*Tauschprinzip*). A society where this nexus prevails is an
"exchange society" (*Tauschgesellschaft*).




Adorno's diagnosis of the exchange society has three levels:
politico-economic, social-psychological, and cultural. Politically and
economically he responds to a theory of state capitalism proposed by
Friedrich Pollock during the war years. An economist by training who
was supposed to contribute a chapter to *Dialectic of
Enlightenment* but never did (Wiggershaus 1994, 313-19), Pollock
argued that the state had acquired dominant economic power in Nazi
Germany, the Soviet Union, and New Deal America. He called this new
constellation of politics and economics "state capitalism." While
acknowledging with Pollock that political and economic power have
become more tightly meshed, Adorno does not think this fact changes the
fundamentally economic character of capitalist exploitation. Rather,
such exploitation has become even more abstract than it was in Marx's
day, and therefore all the more effective and pervasive.




The social-psychological level in Adorno's diagnosis serves to
demonstrate the effectiveness and pervasiveness of late capitalist
exploitation. His American studies of anti-Semitism and the
"authoritarian personality" argue that these pathologically extend "the
logic of late capitalism itself, with its associated dialectic of
enlightenment." People who embrace anti-Semitism and fascism tend to
project their fear of abstract domination onto the supposed mediators
of capitalism, while rejecting as elitist "all claims to a qualitative
difference transcending exchange" (Jarvis 1998, 63).




Adorno's cultural studies show that a similar logic prevails in
television, film, and the recording industries. In fact, Adorno first
discovered late capitalism's structural change through his work with
sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton University Radio Research
Project. He articulated this discovery in a widely anthologized essay
"On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening"
(1938) and in "The Culture Industry," a chapter in *Dialectic of
Enlightenment*. There Adorno argues that the culture industry
involves a change in the commodity character of art, such that art's
commodity character is deliberately acknowledged and art "abjures its
autonomy" (DE 127). With its emphasis on marketability, the culture
industry dispenses entirely with the "purposelessness" that was
central to art's autonomy. Once marketability becomes a total demand,
the internal economic structure of cultural commodities
shifts. Instead of promising freedom from societally dictated uses,
and thereby having a genuine use value that people can enjoy, products
mediated by the culture industry have their use value
*replaced* by exchange value: "Everything has value only
in so far as it can be exchanged, not in so far as it is something in
itself. For consumers the use value of art, its essence, is a fetish,
and the fetish--the social valuation [*gesellschaftliche
Schatzung*] which they mistake for the merit [*Rang*]
of works of art-- becomes its only use value, the only quality
they enjoy" (DE 128). Hence the culture industry dissolves the
"genuine commodity character" that artworks once possessed
when exchange value still presupposed use value (DE
129-30). Lacking a background in Marxist theory, and desiring to
secure legitimacy for "mass art" or "popular
culture," too many of Adorno's anglophone critics simply ignore
the main point to his critique of the culture industry. His main point
is that culture-industrial hypercommercialization evidences a fateful
shift in the structure of all commodities and therefore in the
structure of capitalism itself.


## 4. Aesthetic Theory




Philosophical and sociological studies of the arts and literature make
up more than half of Adorno's collected works (*Gesammelte
Schriften*). All of his most important social-theoretical claims
show up in these studies. Yet his "aesthetic writings" are
not simply "applications" or "test cases" for
theses developed in "nonaesthetic" texts. Adorno rejects
any such separation of subject matter from methodology and all neat
divisions of philosophy into specialized subdisciplines. This is one
reason why academic specialists find his texts so challenging, not
only musicologists and literary critics but also epistemologists and
aestheticians. All of his writings contribute to a comprehensive and
interdisciplinary social philosophy (Zuidervaart 2007).




First published the year after Adorno died, *Aesthetic Theory*
marks the unfinished culmination of his remarkably rich body of
aesthetic reflections. It casts retrospective light on the entire
corpus. It also comes closest to the model of "paratactical
presentation" (Hullot-Kentor in AT xi-xxi) that Adorno, inspired
especially by Walter Benjamin, found most appropriate for his own
"atonal philosophy." Relentlessly tracing concentric circles,
*Aesthetic Theory* carries out a dialectical double
reconstruction. It reconstructs the modern art movement from the
perspective of philosophical aesthetics. It simultaneously
reconstructs philosophical aesthetics, especially that of Kant and
Hegel, from the perspective of modern art. From both sides Adorno
tries to elicit the sociohistorical significance of the art and
philosophy discussed.




Adorno's claims about art in general stem from his reconstruction of
the modern art movement. So a summary of his philosophy of art
sometimes needs to signal this by putting "modern" in
parentheses. The book begins and ends with reflections on the social
character of (modern) art. Two themes stand out in these
reflections. One is an updated Hegelian question whether art can
survive in a late capitalist world. The other is an updated Marxian
question whether art can contribute to the transformation of this
world. When addressing both questions, Adorno retains from Kant the
notion that art proper ("fine art" or "beautiful
art"--*schone Kunst*--in Kant's
vocabulary) is characterized by formal autonomy. But Adorno combines
this Kantian emphasis on form with Hegel's emphasis on intellectual
import (*geistiger Gehalt*) and Marx's emphasis on art's
embeddedness in society as a whole. The result is a complex account of
the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of the artwork's autonomy.
The artwork's necessary and illusory autonomy, in turn, is the key to
(modern) art's social character, namely, to be "the social
antithesis of society" (AT 8).




Adorno regards authentic works of (modern) art as social monads. The
unavoidable tensions within them express unavoidable conflicts within
the larger sociohistorical process from which they arise and to which
they belong. These tensions enter the artwork through the artist's
struggle with sociohistorically laden materials, and they call forth
conflicting interpretations, many of which misread either the
work-internal tensions or their connection to conflicts in society as a
whole. Adorno sees all of these tensions and conflicts as
"contradictions" to be worked through and eventually to be resolved.
Their complete resolution, however, would require a transformation in
society as a whole, which, given his social theory, does not seem
imminent.




As commentary and criticism, Adorno's aesthetic writings are
unparalleled in the subtlety and sophistication with which they trace
work-internal tensions and relate them to unavoidable sociohistorical
conflicts. One gets frequent glimpses of this in *Aesthetic
Theory*. For the most part, however, the book proceeds at the level
of "third reflections"--reflections on categories employed in actual
commentary and criticism, with a view to their suitability for what
artworks express and to their societal implications. Typically he
elaborates these categories as polarities or dialectical pairs.




One such polarity, and a central one in Adorno's theory of artworks
as social monads, occurs between the categories of import
(*Gehalt*) and function (*Funktion*). Adorno's account of
these categories distinguishes his sociology of art from both
hermeneutical and empirical approaches. A hermeneutical approach would
emphasize the artwork's inherent meaning or its cultural significance
and downplay the artwork's political or economic functions. An
empirical approach would investigate causal connections between the
artwork and various social factors without asking hermeneutical
questions about its meaning or significance. Adorno, by contrast,
argues that, both as categories and as phenomena, import and function
need to be understood in terms of each other. On the one hand, an
artwork's import and its functions in society can be diametrically
opposed. On the other hand, one cannot give a proper account of an
artwork's social functions if one does not raise import-related
questions about their significance. So too, an artwork's import
embodies the work's social functions and has potential relevance for
various social contexts. In general, however, and in line with his
critiques of positivism and instrumentalized reason, Adorno gives priority
to import, understood as societally mediated and socially significant
meaning. The social functions emphasized in his own commentaries and
criticisms are primarily intellectual functions rather than
straightforwardly political or economic functions. This is consistent
with a hyperbolic version of the claim that (modern) art is society's
social antithesis: "Insofar as a social function can be predicated for
artworks, it is their functionlessness" (AT 227).




The priority of import also informs Adorno's stance on art and
politics, which derives from debates with Lukacs, Benjamin, and
Bertolt Brecht in the 1930s (Lunn 1982; Zuidervaart 1991,
28-43). Because of the shift in capitalism's structure, and because of
Adorno's own complex emphasis on (modern) art's autonomy, he doubts
both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of tendentious, agitative,
or deliberately consciousness-raising art. Yet he does see politically
engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of
much mainstream art. Under the conditions of late capitalism, the
best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out
its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in
society can no longer be ignored. The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom
Adorno had intended to dedicate *Aesthetic Theory*, are
emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many
other artworks.




Arguably, the idea of "truth content" (*Wahrheitsgehalt*) is
the pivotal center around which all the concentric circles of Adorno's
aesthetics turn (Zuidervaart 1991; Wellmer 1991, 1-35 ; Jarvis 1998,
90-123). To gain access to this center, one must temporarily suspend
standard theories about the nature of truth (whether as
correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic success) and allow for
artistic truth to be dialectical, disclosive, and
nonpropositional. According to Adorno, each artwork has its own import
(*Gehalt*) by virtue of an internal dialectic between content
(*Inhalt*) and form (*Form*). This import invites
critical judgments about its truth or falsity. To do justice to the
artwork and its import, such critical judgments need to grasp both the
artwork's complex internal dynamics and the dynamics of the
sociohistorical totality to which the artwork belongs. The artwork has
an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork's import can
be found internally and externally either true or false. Such truth
content is not a metaphysical idea or essence hovering outside the
artwork. But neither is it a merely human construct. It is historical
but not arbitrary; nonpropositional, yet calling for propositional
claims to be made about it; utopian in its reach, yet firmly tied to
specific societal conditions. Truth content is the way in which an
artwork simultaneously challenges the way things are and suggests how
things could be better, but leaves things practically unchanged: "Art
has truth as the semblance of the illusionless" (AT 132).


## 5. Negative Dialectics




Adorno's idea of artistic truth content presupposes the
epistemological and metaphysical claims he works out most thoroughly
in *Negative Dialectics*. These claims, in turn, consolidate
and extend the historiographic and social-theoretical arguments
already canvassed. As Simon Jarvis demonstrates, *Negative
Dialectics* tries to formulate a "philosophical materialism" that
is historical and critical but not dogmatic. Alternatively, one can
describe the book as a "metacritique" of idealist philosophy,
especially of the philosophy of Kant and Hegel (Jarvis 1998,
148-74; O'Connor 2004). Adorno says the book aims to complete what he considered his
lifelong task as a philosopher: "to use the strength of the
[epistemic] subject to break through the deception [*Trug*] of
constitutive subjectivity" (ND xx).




This occurs in four stages. First, a long Introduction (ND 1-57)
works out a concept of "philosophical experience" that
both challenges Kant's distinction between "phenomena" and
"noumena" and rejects Hegel's construction of
"absolute spirit." Then Part One (ND 59-131)
distinguishes Adorno's project from the "fundamental
ontology" in Heidegger's *Being and Time*. Part Two (ND
133-207) works out Adorno's alternative with respect to the
categories he reconfigures from German idealism. Part Three (ND
209-408), composing nearly half the book, elaborates
philosophical "models." These present negative dialectics
in action upon key concepts of moral philosophy
("freedom"), philosophy of history ("world
spirit" and "natural history"), and
metaphysics. Adorno says the final model, devoted to metaphysical
questions, "tries by critical self reflection to give the
Copernican revolution an axial turn" (ND xx). Alluding to Kant's
self-proclaimed "second Copernican revolution," this
description echoes Adorno's comment about breaking through the
deception of constitutive subjectivity.




Like Hegel, Adorno criticizes Kant's distinction between phenomena and
noumena by arguing that the transcendental conditions of experience
can be neither so pure nor so separate from each other as Kant seems
to claim. As concepts, for example, the a priori categories of the faculty of
understanding (*Verstand*) would be unintelligible if they were
not already about something that is nonconceptual. Conversely, the
supposedly pure forms of space and time cannot simply be nonconceptual
intuitions. Not even a transcendental philosopher would have access to
them apart from concepts about them. So too, what makes possible any
genuine experience cannot simply be the "application" of a priori
concepts to a priori intuitions via the "schematism" of the
imagination (*Einbildungskraft*). Genuine experience is made
possible by that which exceeds the grasp of thought and
sensibility. Adorno does not call this excess the "thing in itself,"
however, for that would assume the Kantian framework he
criticizes. Rather, he calls it "the nonidentical" (*das
Nichtidentische*).




The concept of the nonidentical, in turn, marks the difference between
Adorno's materialism and Hegel's idealism. Although he shares Hegel's
emphasis on a speculative identity between thought and being, between
subject and object, and between reason and reality, Adorno denies that
this identity has been achieved in a positive fashion. For the most
part this identity has occurred negatively instead. That is to say,
human thought, in achieving identity and unity, has imposed these upon
objects, suppressing or ignoring their differences and diversity.
Such imposition is driven by a societal formation whose exchange
principle demands the equivalence (exchange value) of what is
inherently nonequivalent (use value). Whereas Hegel's speculative
identity amounts to an identity between identity and nonidentity,
Adorno's amounts to a nonidentity between identity and nonidentity.
That is why Adorno calls for a "negative dialectic" and
why he rejects the affirmative character of Hegel's dialectic (ND
143-61).




Adorno does not reject the necessity of conceptual identification,
however, nor does his philosophy claim to have direct access to the
nonidentical. Under current societal conditions, thought can only have
access to the nonidentical via conceptual criticisms of false
identifications. Such criticisms must be "determinate negations,"
pointing up specific contradictions between what thought claims and
what it actually delivers. Through determinate negation, those aspects
of the object which thought misidentifies receive an indirect,
conceptual articulation.




The motivation for Adorno's negative dialectic is not simply
conceptual, however, nor are its intellectual resources. His
epistemology is "materialist" in both regards. It is
motivated, he says, by undeniable human suffering--a fact of
unreason, if you will, to counter Kant's "fact of reason."
Suffering is the corporeal imprint of society and the object upon
human consciousness: "The need to let suffering speak is a
condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon
the subject ... " (ND 17-18). The resources available
to philosophy in this regard include the "expressive" or
"mimetic" dimensions of language, which conflict with
"ordinary" (i.e., societally sanctioned) syntax and
semantics. In philosophy, this requires an emphasis on
"presentation" (*Darstellung*) in which logical
stringency and expressive flexibility interact (ND 18-19,
52-53). Another resource lies in unscripted relationships among
established concepts. By taking such concepts out of their established
patterns and rearranging them in "constellations" around a
specific subject matter, philosophy can unlock some of the historical
dynamic hidden within objects whose identity exceeds the
classifications imposed upon them (ND 52-53, 162-66).




What unifies all of these desiderata, and what most clearly
distinguishes Adorno's materialist epistemology from "idealism,"
whether Kantian or Hegelian, is his insisting on the "priority of the
object" (*Vorrang des Objekts*, ND 183-97). Adorno regards as
"idealist" any philosophy that affirms an identity between subject and
object and thereby assigns constitutive priority to the epistemic
subject. In insisting on the priority of the object, Adorno repeatedly
makes three claims: first, that the epistemic subject is itself
objectively constituted by the society to which it belongs and without
which the subject could not exist; second, that no object can be fully
known according to the rules and procedures of identitarian thinking;
third, that the goal of thought itself, even when thought forgets its
goal under societally induced pressures to impose identity on objects,
is to honor them in their nonidentity, in their difference from what a
restricted rationality declares them to be. Against empiricism,
however, he argues that no object is simply "given" either, both
because it can be an object only in relation to a subject and because
objects are historical and have the potential to change.




Under current conditions the only way for philosophy to give priority
to the object is dialectically, Adorno argues. He describes dialectics
as the attempt to recognize the nonidentity between thought and the
object while carrying out the project of conceptual
identification. Dialectics is "the consistent consciousness of
nonidentity," and contradiction, its central category, is "the
nonidentical under the aspect of identity." Thought itself forces this
emphasis on contradiction upon us, he says. To think is to identify,
and thought can achieve truth only by identifying. So the semblance
(*Schein*) of total identity lives within thought itself,
mingled with thought's truth (*Wahrheit*). The only way to
break through the semblance of total identity is immanently, using the
concept. Accordingly, everything that is qualitatively different and
that resists conceptualization will show up as a contradiction. "The
contradiction is the nonidentical under the aspect of [conceptual]
identity; the primacy of the principle of contradiction in dialectics
tests the heterogeneous according to unitary thought
[*Einheitsdenken*]. By colliding with its own boundary
[*Grenze*], unitary thought surpasses itself. Dialectics is the
consistent consciousness of nonidentity" (ND 5).




But thinking in contradictions is also forced upon philosophy by
society itself. Society is riven with fundamental antagonisms, which,
in accordance with the exchange principle, get covered up by
identitarian thought. The only way to expose these antagonisms, and
thereby to point toward their possible resolution, is to think against
thought--in other words, to think in contradictions. In this way
"contradiction" cannot be ascribed neatly to either thought or
reality. Instead it is a "category of reflection"
(*Reflexionskategorie*) , enabling a thoughtful confrontation
between concept (*Begriff*) and subject matter or object
(*Sache*): "To proceed dialectically means to think in
contradictions, for the sake of the contradiction already experienced
in the object [*Sache*], and against that contradiction. A
contradiction in reality, [dialectics] is a contradiction against
reality" (ND 144-45).




The point of thinking in contradictions is not simply negative,
however. It has a fragile, transformative horizon, namely, a society
that would no longer be riven with fundamental antagonisms, thinking
that would be rid of the compulsion to dominate through conceptual
identification, and the flourishing of particular objects in their
particularity. Because Adorno is convinced that contemporary society
has the resources to alleviate the suffering it nevertheless
perpetuates, his negative dialectics has a utopian reach: "In view of
the concrete possibility of utopia, dialectics is the ontology of the
false condition. A right condition would be freed from dialectics, no
more system than contradiction" (ND 11). Such a "right condition"
would be one of reconciliation between humans and nature, including
the nature within human beings, and among human beings
themselves. This idea of reconciliation sustains Adorno's reflections
on ethics and metaphysics.


## 6. Ethics and Metaphysics after Auschwitz




Like Adorno's epistemology, his moral philosophy derives from a
materialistic metacritique of German idealism. The model on "Freedom"
in *Negative Dialectics* (ND 211-99) conducts a metacritique of
Kant's critique of practical reason. So too, the model on "World
Spirit and Natural History" (ND 300-60) provides a metacritique of
Hegel's philosophy of history. Both models simultaneously carry out a
subterranean debate with the Marxist tradition, and this debate guides
Adorno's appropriation of both Kantian and Hegelian "practical
philosophy."




The first section in the Introduction to *Negative Dialectics*
indicates the direction Adorno's appropriation will take (ND
3-4). There he asks whether and how philosophy is still
possible. Adorno asks this against the backdrop of Karl Marx's
*Theses on Feuerbach*, which famously proclaimed that
philosophy's task is not simply to interpret the world but to change
it. In distinguishing his historical materialism from the sensory
materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx portrays human beings as
fundamentally productive and political organisms whose interrelations
are not merely interpersonal but societal and historical. Marx's
emphasis on production, politics, society, and history takes his
epistemology in a "pragmatic"
direction. "Truth" does not indicate the abstract
correspondence between thought and reality, between proposition and
fact, he says. Instead, "truth" refers to the economic,
political, societal, and historical fruitfulness of thought in
practice.




Although Adorno shares many of Marx's anthropological intuitions, he
thinks that a twentieth-century equation of truth with practical
fruitfulness had disastrous effects on both sides of the iron curtain.
The Introduction to *Negative Dialectics* begins by making two
claims. First, although apparently obsolete, philosophy remains
necessary because capitalism has not been overthrown. Second, Marx's
interpretation of capitalist society was inadequate and his critique
is outmoded. Hence, praxis no longer serves as an adequate basis for
challenging (philosophical) theory. In fact, praxis serves mostly as a
pretext for shutting down the theoretical critique that transformative
praxis would require. Having missed the moment of its realization (via
the proletarian revolution, according to early Marx), philosophy today
must criticize itself: its societal naivete, its intellectual
antiquation, its inability to grasp the power at work in industrial
late capitalism. While still pretending to grasp the whole, philosophy
fails to recognize how thoroughly it depends upon society as a whole,
all the way into philosophy's "immanent truth" (ND
4). Philosophy must shed such naivete. It must ask, as Kant asked
about metaphysics after Hume's critique of rationalism, How is
philosophy still possible? More specifically, How, after the collapse
of Hegelian thought, is philosophy still possible? How can the
dialectical effort to conceptualize the nonconceptual--which Marx
also pursued--how can this philosophy be continued?




This self-implicating critique of the relation between theory and
practice is one crucial source to Adorno's reflections on ethics and
metaphysics. Another is the catastrophic impact of twentieth-century
history on the prospects for imagining and achieving a more humane
world. Adorno's is an ethics and metaphysics "after Auschwitz"
(Bernstein 2001, 371-414; Zuidervaart 2007, 48-76). Ethically, he
says, Hitler's barbarism imposes a "new categorical imperative" on
human beings in their condition of unfreedom: so to arrange their
thought and action that "Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that]
nothing similar would happen" (ND 365). Metaphysically, philosophers
must find historically appropriate ways to speak about meaning and
truth and suffering that neither deny nor affirm the existence of a
world transcendent to the one we know. Whereas denying it would
suppress the suffering that calls out for fundamental change,
straightforwardly affirming the existence of utopia would cut off the
critique of contemporary society and the struggle to change it. The
basis for Adorno's double strategy is not a hidden ontology, as some
have suggested, but rather a "speculative" or "metaphysical"
experience. Adorno appeals to the experience that thought which "does
not decapitate itself" flows into the idea of a world where "not only
extant suffering would be abolished but also suffering that is
irrevocably past would be revoked" (403). Neither logical positivist
antimetaphysics nor Heideggerian hypermetaphysics can do justice to
this experience.




Adorno indicates his own alternative to both traditional metaphysics
and more recent antimetaphysics in passages that juxtapose resolute
self-criticism and impassioned hope. His historiographic, social
theoretical, aesthetic, and negative dialectical concerns meet in
passages such as this:



> 
> Thought that does not capitulate before
> wretched existence comes to nought before its criteria, truth becomes
> untruth, philosophy becomes folly. And yet philosophy cannot give up,
> lest idiocy triumph in actualized unreason [*Widervernunft*]
> ... Folly is truth in the shape that human beings must accept
> whenever, amid the untrue, they do not give up truth. Even at the
> highest peaks art is semblance; but art receives the semblance
> ... from nonsemblance [*vom
> Scheinlosen*] ... . No light falls on people and
> things in which transcendence would not appear
> [*widerschiene*]. Indelible in resistance to the fungible world
> of exchange is the resistance of the eye that does not want the
> world's colors to vanish. In semblance nonsemblance is promised (ND
> 404-5). 


Addressing such passages is crucial in the ongoing assessment of
Adorno's philosophy.