Adornos´s misinterpretation of absolute idealism

FERREIRO, HÉCTOR

Berlín

Jornada; 18. Jahrestagung des Forschungsnetzwerks Transzendentalphilosophie / Deutscher Idealismus; 2020

Technische Universität Berlin

Adorno claims that in Hegel´s philosophy "spirit" (Geist) is a "semitheological? notion from which, however, "die Erinnerung an individuelle Subjektivität nicht getilgt werden kann.? (GS 6, S. 48 ?49). Thus, Adorno relates Hegel´s conception of spirit to the ultimately abstract and formal conception of subjectivity by Kant and by the early Fichte of the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre. According to Adorno, subjectivity is not infinite; an "absolute? spirit is nothing but an illusion: the subject has always an object against itself. Similar to the master in his relation with the slave, in its relation to the object the subject becomes what it seeks to dominate and is enslaved by it (GS 6, S. 181) ? in other words: what is non-identical determines what is identical from within and is at the same time something negative against the identical. Thus, although spirit conceived of as the unity of subject and object is supposed to overcome Kant´s subjectivistic account of subjectivity, it is, however, according to Adorno, still a subject (GS 5, S. 29); outside and against subjectivity it always remains a non-conceptual something that cannot be reduced to the subject. The human spirit is not able ? for Adorno that task is as such impossible ? to identify with itself the object that it knows; absolute subjectivity necessarily shows in itself the track of its origin, namely the empirical I. "Setzt daher die Bildung des Begriffs Transzendentalsubjekt oder absoluter Geist sich ganz hinweg über individuelles Bewußtsein schlechthin als raumzeitliches, woran er gewonnen ward, so läßt jener Begriff selber sich nicht mehr einlösen; sonst wird er, der alle Fetische demolierte, selber einer, und das haben die spekulativen Philosophen seit Fichte verkannt. Fichte hat das abstrahierte Ich hypostasiert, und darin ist Hegel ihm verhaftet geblieben. Beide haben übersprungen, daß der Ausdruck Ich, das reine, transzendentale ebenso wie das empirische, unmittelbare, irgend Bewußtsein bezeichnen muß.? (GS 5, S. 263)Along these lines, according to Adorno Hegel´s Logic lacks any content and remains, despite its material pretension, a purely formal theory. Hegel´s Logic should begin instead with the category of "something", not with the category of purely indetermine "being" that is allegedly identical to its negative, that is to say, to "nothing" (GS 6, S. 126). Conceptual activity can never sublate the individuum ineffabile; this always persists beyond that activity as the negative of the concept (GS 6, S. 148). For Adorno, something indeterminate is not nothing, but a non-conceptual content that can not be reduced to the conceptual determinate object and sublated into a complete identity with it (GS 6, S. 175). The non-conceptual content is certainly determined by the universal, but not properly identified with it. This is the main premise of a dialectic ?a negative dialectic? that is specifically different from Hegel´s dialectic. Now, Adorno claims that his criticism of Hegel´s conception of subjectivity as in itself infinite ?as "spirit"? and, further, that his critique of Hegel´s Logic is an immanent critique that derives from Hegel´s own premises (GS 6, S. 40, 322). There are, however, sufficient textual and conceptual reasons to call into question the plausibility of that claim. First, Adorno does not offer a detailed analysis of Hegel´s complex argumentation against the formal conception of subjectivity defended by Kant and the early Fichte, but he rather simply states that Hegel´s philosophy is not able to dissolve the consistency of objectivity in general ?that is to say, from another perspective, the consistency of the "thing-in-itself??, which persists thus in its contrast to human subjectivity as a non-identical negative content. Against Adorno´s claim, Hegel does not seem to have clumsily overlooked that the notion of absolute subjectivity has been partially formed from the finite I; in Hegel´s System, however, spirit cannot be reduced to be the result of a complete abstraction of empirical subjectivity. According to Hegel, the notion of subjectivity obtained by means of mere abstraction is the notion of a still finite subjectivity ?Hegel considers Kant´s "transcendental subject? to be such a notion. On the contrary, Hegel offers different theoretical strategies to distinguish formal and, therefore, finite subjectivity from absolute subjectivity or spirit. In the Logic Hegel seeks to show that the process that explains the determinacy of the object is the same process of the (first merely subjective) thinking of that process; for Hegel both processes are in themselves identical and are in any instance opposed to a pure, extrinsic facticity ?i.e. the alleged non-identical negative something of Adorno´s negative dialectic?; on the contrary, the notion of a pure facticity is demolished by Hegel under the figure of "pure being" as the contradictory and untenable result of an entirely universalized abstraction. The beginning of the Logic, more precisely, the Chapter on Quality, offers the major premise of Hegel´s argument against a radical distinction between facticity, determinacy and thought. Adorno is in principle right in claiming that if the Logic began ?as, for example, Kant´s Logic did? with the category of "something" instead of with the category of "being", it would always remain "something" as a fundament that cannot be sublated by the later conceptual process: "Der Idealismus will nicht sehen, daß ein Etwas, sei´s noch so qualitätslos, darum doch nicht bereits nichts heißen dürfe.? (GS 6, S. 175) But Hegel´s "something", contrary to what Adorno seems to claim, does not lack quality, but, on the contrary, is an internal category of quality itself. Hegel´s Logic begins with the category of "being" ?as scholastic metaphysics already did? for the simple reason that if that not were the case "something" would remain insufficiently explained in its own minimal determinacy. Thus, Adorno´s approach to the category of "something" cannot be taken to be an immanent criticism of Hegel´s Logic, but it rather begins too late for such internal criticism. Hegel begins instead with an analysis of the fundamental category of "being" and, within this frame, examines in an immanent way the relation between ontological categories and the activity of thought of the knowing subject. A complementary argument advanced by Hegel against the conception of human subjectivity as opposed to an extrinsic content can be reconstructed by means of an analysis of his philosophy of subjective spirit. In the philosophy of subjective spirit Hegel attempts to show that the determinacy that affects the knowing subject is a self-determination of that same subject and not something that it receives "from outside?. Contrary to Adorno´s claim, for Hegel the knowing subject is not infinite because it exhausts by its conceptual activity the totality of the object´s determinacy, but rather because the determinate contents that the subject "finds? (vorfindet) are already itself. Adorno attributes to Hegel a radically conceptualist account of perceptual knowledge; Hegel´s position, however, is strictly speaking independent from the debate between conceptualism and non-conceptualism of sense perception. In fact, Hegel reserves a specific role for the pre-conceptual, perceptual content; according to Hegel, human subjectivity is not infinite because its conceptual activity has the alleged capacity to completely reduce perceptual contents to instantiations of conceptualized objects, but because perceptual contents are not extrinsic to the activity of thought, activity that must therefore be conceived as broader than mereley conceptual activity. In other words: for Hegel the "space of reasons? is broader than the "space of concepts?. Like many others, Adorno mistakenly holds the alleged reduction of sensitivity to intelligibility to be the main tenet of absolute idealism; for Hegel, however, the key claim of absolute idealism is the reduction of being to determinacy and only then the reduction of determinacy to self-determinate thought.In my talk I will analyze Adorno´s critical approach to Hegel´s conception of "spirit" and, ressorting to Hegel´s works, I will propose a countercriticism of Adorno´s critique.