adorno, 'the actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 telos ed)
TRANSCRIPT
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
1/11
112 / TELOS
KarlKorsch
Revolutionary
Theory
Edited
by
Douglas Kellner
There
isgrowing
interest
inEuropeand the UnitedStatesin the workof
the major
German
social-political philosopher KarlKorsch. Histhought
provides
an
illuminatingperspective
on the process of
revolution
and
counterrevolution
in
recent history,
and
this
is the first
Englishanthology
of his
mostimportantwritings.Kellner'ssubstantial
introduction,the
first
comprehensive criticalinterpretation
of Korsch to
appear
in English,
examines
hislifeandwork,and
roots
hispolitical theoryin the socio
political contextinwhichitevolved.
384
pages,
14.95
Essayson
Modern
European
RevolutionaryHistory
The
Walter
Prescott
Webb Memorial
Lectures No. XI
EditedbyBedeK
Lackner
and
Kenneth
Roy
Philp
Thiscollectionfocuses
on
variousaspects
of
European
revolutionary
history
from1798 to thepresent. StanleyH. Palmerdiscusses theIrish
Rebellion
of 1798; AnthonyS.
Baker studies
the
careet
of
Frenchtrade
unionorganizer Femand
Pelloutier;
Dennis Reinhartz'
subject
is
Yugo
slavian
revolutionary
MilovanDjilas;
R. R.
Palmer examines
the views
of
European revolutionaries
on the
American Revolution;
and
George
Barr
Carson, Jr.,
writes
aboutthe
Court
of Justice of the European
Economic
Community.
160
pages.
7.95
t
Alienation Praxis and Techne in the
Thought
of Karl
Marx
By Kostas
Axelos
Translated
by
Ronald Bruzina
Originallypublished
in
French
in 1961,
this
is one of the
standard works
on the
question
of
alienation
inMarx.
434
pages,
12.50
University
ofTexasPress
Box 7819
Austin78712
^
INTRODUCTIONT O ADORNO'S
T H E A C T U A L I T YOFPHILOSOPHY
byBenjaminSnow
During the 1960s, Adorno's negative dialect ics
became
identified wi th
the
critical
theory of the Frankfurt Institute, of which he had become the
most illustr ious member. Yet
critical
theory was never a
ful ly
articulated
philosophy meaning the samething for all the membersof the Institute. It
was more of a set of shared assumptions that distinguished their approach
from bourgeois or tradit ion al theory.
1
W i t h i n
this common frame, the
rriethodology of individual members could and did vary. Thus, the term
criticaltheory lacks historical precision, referri ng generally to the Insti tute's
theoretical orientation during the thirty-oddyears of Max Horkheimer's
directorship.
Although Adorno later clearly felt comfortable being called a critical
theorist, he first out lined the dist inguishing characteristics of his own
method seven yearsbefore he becamea full-fledged Institute member. The
occasion was the inaugural lecture marking his entry into the philosophy
faculty of the University of Frankfu rt, The Actualityo f Philosophy, which
remained unpublished
u n t i l
after his death and
appears
in translation
here.
A tthe time (May 1931) Horkheimer hadbeenthe Institute's director for only
a few months, and the new orien tation i ncriticalmethodology that he brought
toitwas just beginnin g to take
shape.
Of course, even then Horkheimer's
ideas
had much in common
w i t h
Adorno's, due to their close personal and
intellectual
frie ndship. They had both moved towardMarxismin the late1920s
but the impact of dialectical materialism led them in different directions.
Horkheimer turne d toward the socialsciences,whileAdorno, insteado fjoining
his friend at the Institute, chose to accept an academicposition.
The you ng Adorno saw himself as a philosopher and an arti st,
2
not a social
scientist, and he was then clearly more excited by the literary criticism of
Walter Benjamin than by the empirical social research projects of die
Frankfurt Insti tute . Nor was the Institute 's evaluation of Adorn o much more
enthusiastic: it isworth noting that two articles which he submitted to the
Institute
journal,
the
Zeitschrift fiir
Sozialforschung, in the 1930s repeatedly
1. As Adorn o noted, the term critical theory was Horkheimer's phrasing. Cf. Theodor W.
Adorno.
Negative Dialectics,
trans. E.B. Ashton (New Y o r k : The
SeaburyPress,
1973) p. 197.
Horkheimer had f irstout line d its distin guishi ng characteristics in his 19S7 article on Tradi tio nal
and Critical Theory, now in his Critical Theory, trans. Matthew J. O'Connell and others(New
Y o r k : Herde r and Herder, 1972). pp. 188-245.
2. As he later recalled in comparing himself to Horkhei mer:
I ,
however, by background
and early devel opment, was an artis t, music ian, yet animated by an impulse to account f or art
and its possibility in the
present,
in which something objective
also
desired expression, the
suspiciono fthe insufficiency of a naiveaestheticprocedure in view of thetendenciesofsociety. In
Theodor W. Adorno, Offener Br i e fan Max Horkheimer, Die Zeit, February 12, 1965, p. 32.
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
2/11
114 / TEWS
failed
to
pass
the review board .
3
An d, although the articles by Adomo whic h
were accepted Zurgesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik (1932) and Ueber
Jazz
(1936)were of lasting importance t o his inte llectual dev elopment,
4
his
major works oftheseyearswere the morestrictlyphilosophicalstudiesofKier
kegaard and Husser l. The
themes
ofjazz and the social condi tion of music re
flected
the Institute's primary concern
w i t h
the question of howgeistige pro
ductsfunctioned to support or challenge thestatus quo. This was something
quite distinct f romAdomo's self-prescribed task:fostering the li quidati on of
idealist philosophy.
Horkheimer believed as firmlyas Adorno that bourgeois philosophy was in a
state
ofdecay,
5
but heseemstohave concluded that i f metaphysics were no
longer possible, then the philosopher had to look to the social
sciences
in order
to
find
truth. Althoughthese
sciences,
in turn,
needed
a
c r i t i c a l ,
speculative
perspective, philosophy as a
separate
discipline was eliminated.
6
For Hork
heimer, the problem of the object tended to dissolve into (Mar xian ) socio
logy,
the problem of the subject into (Freudian) psychology,
7
and critical
theory attempted to explain their interr elations. I n his inaugural lecture as
Institute director, hespokeof the dialectical inter action between theory and
empirical research.
8
Adorno, however, discerned a dialectical
process
within philosophy itself.
Indeed, he had an almost Hegelian
f a i t h
in the immanent logic of philosophy,
i n
its historical development as the unf oldin g of tru th , even if , in very un-
S. A study of Mann hei m went thr oug h two revisions (1954 and 1937) yet
never appeared
i n
the journala
t h i r d
revision was finally published elsewhere.Cf. Theodor W. Adomo, Ueber
Mannheims Wissenssoiiologie (195S), reprint ed in
Prismen
(Frankfurt am M a i n : Suhrkamp
Verlag. 1955). A 1957 article on Husserl, revised by Adomo in 1938. was
never
published, but
copies of both drafts are to be found in Ado mo's estate.
4. In the-1932 artic le and in the more than f o r ty short pieceson music that he published in a
variety of journals and newspapers during the thirties, Adomo
l a i d
the groundwork for an
aesthetic
philosophywhoseformulation occupied him u n t i l his death. (The book manuscript,
Aesthetische Theorie.
was publishe d posthu mously i n 1970 as vol. 7 of the
Gesammelte
Schriften.) This is not tosuggestthat the early musicessaysin the Zeitschrifl far Sozialforschung.
whichcontained
elements
of an
aesthetic
theory as w el las a critical theory ofmassculture, were
insignificant
compared w i t h his book-length philosophical studies; the point is simply that
whereas
the Institut e was more interested i n a (philosophical)sociologyof art, Adomo's primary
concern was in a (sociological) philosophyof aesthetics as w el l as of epistemology.
5. As hestated in 1932, the idealist premise, the ident ity of subject and object, . . . has long
since
collapsed, and w i t h it . the edifice of Hegelian philosophy 'Absolute' philo sophy .. .is a
thing of thepast. (Horkheimer. Hegel und das Problem der Metaphysik. Festschrift far Carl
Grfnberg:
Zum 70. Geburtstag
[ L e i p z i g :
Verlag von C.L. Hirschfeld. 1932], p. 192.)
6.
Horkheimer's f a i t h that the social sciences could
answer
the traditional
questions
of
philosophy through empirical
research
was not something Adomoshared. Against this tendency,
Adorno, as, he later recalled, trie d to strengthen the anti-positivis tic. speculative bent of
Horkheimer. (Theodor W. Adomo, Offener Br i e f an Max Horkheimer, op. cit. p. 32.)
7. These two theories, he f e l t , provided a formulation of the old [philosophi cal]
questions
more appropriate to the state of our
present
knowledge (Max Horkheimer, Die
grgrns3rtige Lage der Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben
eines
Inst ituts fQr Sozialforschung
[1931], Sorialphilosophische Studien: Aufsdtxi, Redtn und Vortrage, 19)0-1972, ed. Werner
Brede [Frankfurt am
M a i n :
Athenaum Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag. 1972], p. 43.)
8. He advocated .. .a continuous dialectical penetrati on and development between
philosophical
theory and the practice of the single scientific disciplines. . .
Ibid.,
p. 40.)
INTRODUCTION TO ADORNO
/
115
Hegelian fashion, he believed that truthc r i t i c a l l ychallenged thecourseofhis
tory rather than merging w i t h i t. Convinced that social contradictions ap
peared
w i t h i n
the materialo fphilosophy in a mediated fo rmand that the p h i l
osopher, l ike the artist, had to be absolutely modern, graspingthesecontra
dictions in their most curr ent and (in an age of disint egration) t heir most
antagonistic manifestations, Adorno took up the strugglesbequeathedby the
preceding generation ofphilosophers. Byplacing
himself
w i t h i ntheir ranks, he
pressed the antinomies of their theories to the point where the dialectical
negation of idealism might be achieved.
9
This challenge
f rom
w i t h i n , on the
basis
of philosophy's own in herent, historically developed logic, i n order to
break out of bourgeois idealism and into revolutionary materialism was what
Adornomeantby immanent criticism and it constituted the
substance
o fhis'
c
idea of a logic of disintegr ation.
This program bound Adorn o to Benjamin more t han to Horkheimer. Al
though Horkheimer, too, claimed that i fbourgeois theory were to be effectively
challenged it had to be f rom
w i t h i n ,
to hi m this
meant
simply that bourgeois
theory could not be dismissed by merely adapti ng an external, anti-bourgeois
metaphysics.
Rather,
one had toexposethe gap between bourgeois theory and
its own reality. In his
essays
Horkheimer confronted bourgeois concepts(of
justice, reason,indivi dualism)
w i t h
the actualit y of bourgeois society (its in
justice, ir ration alism, monopoly capitalism), pointed to the discrepancy
between the potential affluence of
present
productive forces and the existing
scarcity, and demonstrated thatLebensphilosophie, for example, betrayed its
ownintento fprotestbecause,in functioning as a support for the societal status
quo, it converged w i t hthe very positivism it attacked.
10
But unlike Adorno,
Horkheimer did not get deeply inv olved in the t echnical controversies o f con
temporary philos ophy. Hence, although almost all his articles in the Zeit-
schrift
fiir
Sozialforschung during the 1930swere critiques of bourgeois philo
sophy, they were notthemselves philosophical in the strict
sense
of the term.
Keeping one foot outside the discipline, he traced
themes
and
concepts des
criptively through the his tory of the bourgeois e ra his knowledge of history
was far superior to Adomo'sso that thei r social function might be reve aled.
12
9. As he wrote in his inaugural speech: Only an essentially undialectical philosophy, one
which
aims at ^historical tru th, could maintain that the o ld problems coul d simply be removed
by forgetting them and starting fresh f ro m the begin ning. Onl y in the strictest dialecti cal
communication w i t h the most
recent
solution-attempts of philosophy and of philosophic
terminology
can a real change of philosophical consciousnessprevail.
10. For an English summary of Horkhei mer's writi ngs of the early 1930s. see M a r t i nJay, Tht
Dialectical
Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research,
1923 1950
(Boston:
L i t t l e ,
Brown, 1973), pp. 44-65.
11 . Horkhei mer's prime concern wasIdeologiekritih. i.e. , how it was that (bourgeois) views
v a l idi n
themselves
and t heoretical and
aesthetic
works of undeniably high quality can in certain
circumstances operate
ideologi cally.. . . (Hor khei mer, Notes on
Science
and the Crisis [1932],
in Critical Theory, op. cit., p . 7.) Ado mo, convinced as he was that the social
inv a l id i t y
of
bourgeois thought was manifested
immanently,
would not
have
held that such thought could be
v a l id in itself; at the same time, he believed that ideology, correctly interpreted, was the
source
of truth.
12. The distincti on can be illustrated by comparing Adomo'scritical analysis of the con cept
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
3/11
11 6
/ TELOS
INTRODUCTION
TO ADORNO / 117
Horkheimer thus moved between theory and society, point ing out corres
ponding
structures i nconsciousnessand reality in a manner similar to that of
the early Lukacs (and to Lukacs' teacher W i l h e l m Dilthey, whose work
Horkheimerappreciated).
13
By
contrast, Adorno attempted quite l i t e ra l l y to
make the structure ofbourgeois society
visible
in the
very
words of the bourgeois
texts: dialecticalexegesis, that was more Sprachkritik than Ideologiekritik,
more critical interpretation than theory.
14
The difference between Adorno's and Horkheimer's methods
implied d i f
ferent grounds for determining a theory's
va l id i ty .
Horkheimer's arguments
rested on principles of
moral
rectitude
1S
indeed, pr inciples developed by the
very bourgeois society that he was attacking. As he explained: I f we take
seriously the ideasbywhichthe bourgeoisie explains its own orderfree ex
change, free
competition,
harmony of interests, and so onand i f we
fol low
them to theirlogical conclusion, they manifest their inner contradiction and
therefore their real opposition to the bourgeois order.
16
The transcendent
element of
idealism
whichallowed a moral dis tinc tion between the is and the
ought remained essential to Horkhei mer despite his advocacy of empiri cal re
search.Adornowouldlaterrecall, w i t h
y ou
theprimary
thing
was indign ation
over injus tice, and he noted that Horkheimer was indebted to the Judaic ethics
of hisfa m i ly as
well
as bourgeois enlightenment principles for this impu ls e.
17
of
history
w i t h
two of Horkheimer's early
essays.
Adorno's approach, out line d in his 1932 speech
to theKanlgtsellschafl in Frankfurt (in Adorno , Die Idee der Naturgeschichte. Gesammelte
Schrifltn, vol .
1, pp. 345-365). was to juxtapose the ant ithet ical
concepts
of
nature
and history in
such
a
way that neither was posited as the foun dation of an affirmative philosophy of history. His
argument was dialectical and polemical rather t han descriptive . By contrast, in a 1930 essay,
AnfSnge der bOrgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie, Horkheimer's approach was to outline t he
historical development of the bourgeois concept of history from Machiavelli to Vico and Hegel,
identifyingboth its progressive and
regressive elements
w i t h regard to their ideological function.
Hi s program for a theory of history, outli ned inanother
speech
delivered to the Kantgesellschaft.
suggested
that the p roblem, while formerly the concern of the metaphysician, c ould not
best
be
dealt w i t h by Marx's s cientific theory and (Freudian ) psychology. (See Geschichte und
Psychologic [1932],reprinted in Max Horkheimer, Kritische Theorie: Erne Dokumentation, ed.
A l f r e d
Schrsidt [Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verl ag, 1968], vol. 1, pp. 9-30.)
IS . His aim was to point out the common structural characteristics of wel l known
developments in modern history. (Max Horkheimer, Egoismus und Freiheitsbewegung,
Kritische Theorie,
op.cil.,
vol. 2, p. 106.) For a discussion of Horkheimer 's evaluat ion of
Dilthey,his
criticisms
asw el las the points of
agreement,
see Jay, TheDialectical Imagination, op.
at.,
p p. 48-53.
14.
Ricoeur's description of Marx. Freud and Nietzsche as practitioners o f an art of
interpreting as an
exercise
in suspicion, a hermeneutics of demystifi cation, applies just as
wel l to Adomo. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans.
Dean
Savage
(New Haven : Yale University
Press.
1970). p. 33.
15. When , for example, Hor kheimer criticized the
acceptance
of what had historically
evolved as
second
nature, he was concerned not only that, as a suprahistorical eternal
category it was in fact incorrect, but that, in regard to moral
w i l l ,
i t was a sign of contemptible
weakness. In Horkheimer, Tradition al and Critical Theory, op. at., p. 210.
16.
Ibid.,
p. 215. italics
added.
Cf.
also
Max Horkhcimer (alias Heinrich Regius),
Ddmmerung: Notixen in Deutschland (Zurich: Verlag Oprecht und Helbling. 1934). p. 193.
where he writes : The chasm between the moral
standards
which the Europeans have
acknowledged
since
the advent of Christianity, and
those
which
theseEuropeans
in fact practice,
is immeasurable.
17. Adomo, Offener B r i e f an Max Horkheimer. op. cit., p . 32.
I f the impulse for Horkheimer's social criticism was an ethical, quasi-
religious humanism, Adorn o was primarily concerned
w i t h
the problem of
truth.For
him,
notissuesofrightorwrong,but judgments of true or false were
thenecessaryground for the
validation
of theory. In an era when metaphysics
had lost all legitimacy, Adorn o kept asking the metaphysical quest ion; just as
in
an era whichhad proclaimed God dead, Horkhei mer refused to dismiss the
moral
problem of good and e v i l .
1 8
Adorno,
the metaphysician
w i t h
no fa i th in metaphysics; Horkheimer, the
moralist
wi th
no
belief
in
Divine
Providence: to describe the m thus may in
fact
express
what
separated
their intellectual
paths
not
only
in the 1930s, but
throughout their lives as
w e l l .
1 9
The difference accounts for Horkheimer's
greater concern
w i t h
the gap between imputed and empirical prole tarian
consciousness,
20
for he considered that in the modern e ra, moral praxis was
necessary
political
praxis. Indeed, the fail ure of the proletar iat to achieve
revolutionary
consciousness became the focus of the Institute's research
during
the first
decade
of Horkheimer's directorship,
21
whereas Adorno's
overridinginterest in the questions of the truthof theory or the va l id i tyof art
as
issues
totallyremoved fromthe question of prole tariatconsciousness caused
the very idea of a collective revolutionary subject t o drop out of this the ory .
22
S t i l l ,
the polari ty between metaphysician and moralist should not be
stressed too strongly, as it was never categorical. Their work was essentially
complementary, and
became
increasingly so after 1938. Even if Adorno's
18. Adorno was st i l lstrugglingw i t hthe question of the possibility of metaphysics i n the final
chapter
of
Negative Dialectics.
Cf. Horkheimer's
statement
in 1934: I di d not know how far
metaphysicians are correct;
perhaps there
exists
somewhere
an especially compelling
metaphysical system or fragment. But I do know that metaphysicians are usually onlyminimally
impressed by that which torments and
afflicts
human beings. (Max Horkheimer,
Ddmmtnmg,
op.
cit., p. 86.) Horkheimer's moral concern f or physical suffering (of animals as w el l as human
beings) as
opposed
to Adorno's more cerebral orientation is illustrated by Adorno's recollection:
Onceyou
[Horkheimer]
said to me that I perceived animals as human
whereas
you sawhumans
as animals. There is something to that. (Adorno . Offener Br i e f an Max Horkhei mer. p. 32.)
19. As Adorno wrot e: the tension between the
poles
from whence we
came
did not
disappear,
and grew to be
f r u i t f u l
for us. Ibid.
20 . Here, as elsewhere, Horkhe imer was closer to the early Lukacs of History and Class
Consciousness.
He viewed the intellectual's role to be the articulat ion of imputed class
consciousness,
although, like Adorno . he refused to sanction Party control of the intellectuali
theoretical work. See Horkheimer. Tradit ion al and Critical Theory, op. cit., pp. 221-224.
2 1.
In his inaugu ral address as director he wrote: the discussion concerning society
crystalizes gradually and w i t hincreasing clarity around one question, namely the question of the
connection between the economic lifeof society, the psychic development of the indiv iduals, and
transformations in the cultural realm. In Horkheimcr, Die gegenwSrtige Lage der
Sozialphilosophie und die Aufgaben
eines
Institute for Sozialforschung (1931), Soiialphilo-
sophische
Studien,
p. 43. The problem led Horkheimer, as it did
Wilhelm
Reich (see hit
Massenpsychologie des Faschi smus (Kopenhagen: Verlag
f l l r
Sexualpolitik, 1933]), to
merge
Marxist social theory w i t h Freudian psychology: What needs to be examined is how the
psychologi cal mechanism evolved whereby it is possible for the tensions between social classesto
remain latent,
tensionswhich,
due to the economic situation,
press
toward
conflict.
Horkheimer.
Geschichte und Psychologie (1932), Kritische Theorie, op. cit., vol . 1. p. 21.
22 . Althou gh neither saw theory as subservient to political praxis, for Adorno the relation
between the two was more high ly mediated, and developments in theory remained more
self-contained.
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
4/11
118 / TELOS
INTRODUCTIONTO ADORNO / 119
original choice was to
teach
philosophy rather than to j o i n Horkheimer's
Institute, he acknowledged f rom the first the.
dependence
of his k i n d of
philosophy on the findings of social science research,
23
just as Horkheimer
considered speculative theory indispensable to the processo fresearch. One
was doing sociological philosophy ; the othe r, philosophical sociology.
Moreover, Horkheimer
shared
Adorno's interest, if not his preoccupation ,
with
the
task
of establishing a new gro und for dialectical, materialist
theory.
24
In fact, Adomo's correspondence makes it clear that hope of
collaborating w i t h Horkheimer on this
task
was one reason why Adorno
finally
decided in 193 8
25
to
j o i n
the Institute in the United
States.
I tis interesting that the description ofcriticaltheory whichappeared in the
Institute's journal in 1941 (in the first Englishissue)reflected Adorno's more
rigorous conception of immanent criticism,
26
as we l l as a very Benjaminian
notion
of the inductive method of arriving at t ru th ,
27
indications that the
change in the Institute's theory at that time was much the result of a power
shift fo l lowin g Adorno's arrival as it was a
response
to w o r l d events, while
Adorno's own position remained remarkably consistent over t ime .
28
This is not tosuggestthat Adorno had no new ideasafter the age of t h i r t y .
Thethemeof domination whichbecamecent ral i n his writings after 1940 was
23. In his 1931 speech,translated
here,
Adomo noted that philosophy wou ld . .
.have
to
take
its specific disciplinary material preponderantly
f r o m
sociology
24. In
a
1932
essay,
Horkheimer, re ferring to the
tasks
philosophy had s t i l l to do, reflected
thesamespirit of philosophy which Adorno had arti culated i n his inaugural address the
year
before: Itis
also
fu l l y possible to
present
theresultsof empirical
research
in such a way that the
l i fe
of the objects
comes
to expression on al l
sides.
(Horkhei mer, Hegel und das Problem der
Metaphysik,
in Krilische
Thtorit, op.cit., vol . 2. p. 195.)
25. As he wrote BenjamininJuneof that
year:
Furthermore, the literary
plans
of Max and me
art now taking on a very
concrete
f o r m . It is
as
good as set that we
w i l l
first
of all write
a
long
essay together on the new open-ended
f o rm
of the dialectic. We are both totally f u l l of the
pl an ... Letter. Adorno to Benjamin,
June
8, 1938 (Fran kfu rt am M a i n ,Adorno Estate).
W i t h
the outbreak of war, however, this
essay,
part of a proposed
gTeat
materialistic logic, was put
aside in favor of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, the themewhich more adequately
expressed
their shock at the barbarism of Auschwitz and Hiroshi ma. When Ador no
f i n a l l y
wrote his
essay
on the new f o rm of the dialecti c in 1966 (Negative Dialectics), it was all by himself. Thu s,
Dialectic
of Enlightenment was. in a
sense,
a preliminary study for Negative Dialectics, as a
comprehensive analysis of the history of the Enlight enment and how it had ru n amok: one had to
know what had
gone
wrong w i t h
Reason
in order to
redeem
it.
26. [OJwi ng to the fact the concept is to be formedunder theaspectof the historical totali ty
to which it pertains, sociology should be
able
to develop this changing [social] pattern f rom the
very content o f the concept instead of adding specific
contents
f ro m witho ut. In Max
Horkheimer, Notes on Instit uteActivities, Studies in Social Science, 9:1 (1941), p. 125.
27. The method was described as indu ctiv e, not in the tradit ional
sense
of collecting
individual experiences u n t i l
they attained the weight of universal laws, but of seeking the
universal w i t h i n the particular, not
above
or beyond it ; because society
is
a 'system in the
materialsense that every single social field or relati on contains and reflects in various ways the
whole itself. Ibid.
28. It should be noted that the mature Ad orno was not uncri tical of his own early efforts. In a
note to the 1966 repri nti ng of his Kierkegaard study, he said that he now foun d the book too
affirmative,
too
hopeful. In reprinting his early musicessayshe
sometimes
altered
sections
which
teemed
inexcusably idealistic (see. e.g., his
note
to Moments Musicaux [1964]). But it is
st i l l
remarkable that Adorno could publishso many ofhisearly
essays
alongside his mature works
with l i t t l e
or no revision.
heavily indebted to the Institute's theoretical and empiri cal work durin g the
1930son the problem of authority
29
work which Adorno carried further in
his contribution to The Authoritarian Personality. Nor didthose ideaswhich
remained
constant
in his theory emerge fu l l - b lown l ike Minerva out of his
youthful
head; one has the
sensef rom
his early writings that his formulat ion
of concepts precededhis ownful l understanding of their potentialitie s. Only
afteryearsofworking w i t hthem was he
able
to develop out of theirabstract
possibilities a f u l l ,
concrete
meaning.
The goal of transcending idealism by leading its concepts via their own
immanent logic to the point of self-liquidation was one idea to which Ad omo
kept returning. As he wrote in the
preface
toNegative Dialectics: To use the
strength of the subject to break throug h the fallacy of constitutive
subjectivitythis is what the author felt to be his
task
ever sincehe came to
trust his own mental impulses.
30
This was the impetus for his major study on
Husserl, ZurMetakritik der Erkenntnislheorie,
31
and it was the
task
which he
first proposed for philosophy in his inaugural lecture.
Indeed, it is tempting to suggest that Adomo may have had this latter
document before hi m when he was w r i t i n g the introduction to Negative
Dialectics, so great is the
similarity
of their philosophical intent.
32
The
Actuality of Philosophy must be viewed therefore as a key document for
introducing the most important concepts in Adorno's thought and of the
negative dialectics int o which his philosophy evolved.
29. Studien tiber Authoritat und Familie, ed. Max Horkh eime r (Paris: Fel ix Alcan , 19S6).
We may note, however, that criticism of the domination of nature was already explicit in
Adorno's Kierkegaard study (writ ten between 1928 and 1933), and that it played
a
role in his
critique of Wagner,
also
written before Adorno joined the Institute,
whereas
in the
year
Adorno
published his Kierkegaard book, Horkheimer could
st i l l
write: For tru e human freedom is not to
be
equated
either
w i t h indeterminateness
or
w i t h mere
arbitrariness; instead, it is identical
w i t h
c
the domination of
nature
w i t h i n and without us through rational decision. In Max Horkheimer,
Zum
Problem der Voraussage in den Sozialwissenschaften (1933), reprinted in Horkhe imer,
Kritische Theorie vol. 1. op. cit., p. 117.
30. Adorno, Negative
Dialectics,
p. xx.
3 1 .
Writ ten 1934-37. and revised and published in 1956.
32. In an editor's note to the
first
(posthumous) pu blication of the address, Tiedemann
commented that this and several other early
essays,
unus ually progTaramatic for Adomo' s
thinking. introduced motifs and ideaswhich anticipate something l ike a companion
piece
to
Negative
Dialectics.
R ol f
Tiedemann, Editorische Nachbemerkung. in Adorno,
Cesammeltt
Schriften,
op.cit.,
vol . 1, p. 383.
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
5/11
TH E
ACTUALITY
OF
PHILOSOPHY
/ 121
T H E A C T U A L I T Y
O F
P H I L O S O P H Y *
by Theodor W. Adorno
Whoever choosesphilosophy as a profession today must
first
reject the
i l l u s ion that earlier philosophical enterprises began
w i t h :
that the power of
thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real. No justifying reason
could rediscover itse lf in a reality whose order and fo rm suppresses every
claim
to
reason;
only
polemically
does
reason present
itse lf
to the knower as
total
reality,while onlyintracesand ru ins is it prepared to hope that it
wi l l
ever come
across
correct and just reali ty. Philosophywhich presentsreality as
such today only veils reality and eternalizes its
present
condition. Prior to
every answer, such a
function
is already
i m p l i c i t
in the question that
questionwhichtoday is called radical andwhichis really the leastradical of
a l l : the quest ion of being (Sem) itself, as expressly formulated by the new
ontological
blueprints,
1
and as, despite all contraditions, fundamental to the
idealist systems, now allegedly overcome. This question assumes as the
possibility
of its answer that being itse lf is appropriate to thought and
available toi t,that the idea ofexistingbeing{des Seienden) can be examined.
Theadequacyofthinkingabout being as atotality,however, hasdegenerated
and consequently the idea of existing being has itse lf become impervious to
questioning, for the idea could stand
only
over a round and closed reality as a
starin clear
transparence,
and has nowperhapsfaded
f rom
viewfor all time,
ever since the images of our l i fe are guaranteed through history alone. The
idea of being has become powerless in philos ophy; i t is nothi ng more than an
empty form-pri ncipl e whose archaic dignity helps to cover any content
whatsoever. The fullness of the real, astotality,
does
not let
itse lf
be subsumed
under the idea of beingwhichmight allocate meaning to it ; nor can the idea
ofexistingbeing beb u i l tup out of elements of
reality.
It [the idea of being] is
lostfor philosophy, and thereby itsclaimto the totalityof the real is struck at
its
source.
The history of philosophyitse lfbearswitness to this. The crisis of idealism
comesat the
same
time as a crisis in philosophy's pretensions to totality. The
autonome ratio
[autonomous reason]thiswas the
thesis
of every idealistic
systemwassupposedto be capable of developing the concept of reality, and
This
speechwas deliver ed by Ado mo May 7, 1931, as his inau gura l lecture to the philosophy
faculty of the Univer sity of Frankf urt where he taught
u n t i l
19SS. The to pic of Adorno's f irst
seminar was Walter Benjamin's book, Ursprung des deulschen Trauerspiels (completed in 1925
and published in 1928), a study which Benjamin intended as his Habilitationsschrift but which
was rejected by the academic es tablishment. Ado rno's
speech
reflects strongly the influence of
Benjamin'sTrauerspiel study. It was to
have been
dedicated to Benjamin in published f o r m , but
the planned publication did not take place. The speechwas found in Adorno'sestate after his
death and appears for the
f irst
time in vol. 1 of his CesammeUe
Schriften.
1. Adornoisreferring to M a r t i nHeidegger's Sein und Ztit (1927),whichby 1931 had
made
a
significant
impact w i t h i n academic circles.
in fact all reality,from ou t of itself. This thesishas disintegrated. The Neo-
Kantianismof the Marburg School,which labored most strenuously to gain
the content of reality
from
logical categories, has indeed preserved its
self-contained fo rm as a system, but has thereby renounced every right over
reality
and has
withdrawn
int o aformalregion inwhichevery determination
of content is condemned to v i r tu a l l y the farthest point of an unending
process.
W i t h i n
idealism, the position opposed to the Marbu rg School,
Simmel's Lebensphilosophie
w i t h
its psychologistic and irrat ionali st orien
tations, has admittedly maintained contact
w i t h
the reality
w i t h
which it
deals, but in so doing has lost all
claim
to make
sense
out of the empirical
w o r l d
whichpressesin upon it , andbecomesresigned to thel i v i n g as a
b l i n d
and unenlightened concept of nature which itvainly attempts to raise the
unclear, illusory transcendence of the more-than- life . The southwest-
German School of Rickert,
finally, which
mediates between the extremes,
purport s that its values represent more concrete and applicable philo
sophical crit eria than the ideasof the Marburg School, and has developed a
method which sets empirical reality in relation, however questionable, to
thosevalues. But the locus and
source
of the values remains undetermine d;
they li e between logical necessity and psychologicalm u l t i p l i c i t y somewhere,
not bindingw i t h i n reality, not transparent w i t h i n themind, an ontology of
appearanceswhichis as l i t t l eable to
bear
the question of value-from-whence
as that of value-for-what. Working apart f rom the attempts at grand
resolutions of idealist philosophy are the scientistic philosophies, which give
up f romthe beginning thebasicidealist question regarding the constitution
of
reality and,
st i l l w i t h i n
the frame of a propadeutics of the separate,
developed disciplines, grant va l id i tyonlyto the natural sciences,and thereby
mean topossesssecureground in the given, be it the unity ofconsciousness
{Bewusstseinszusammenhang), or be it the research of the separate
disciplines.
Los ing contact
w i t h
the historical problems of philosophy, they
forgot
that in every assumption their ownstatementsare inext ricably bound
tohistorical problems and the history ofthose problems, and are not to be
resolved independent of them.
Inserted into this situation is the effort of the philosophic spirit which is
known
to us inpresent day under the name of phenomenology: the effort,
fo l lowin gthe disintegration of the idealistsystemsand w i t h the instrument of
idealism,
the autonome ratio, to gain a trans-subjective, bindi ng order of
being.It is thedeepestparadox of all phenomenological intent ions that, by
means
of thesamecategories produced by subjective, post-Cartesian thoug ht,
they strive to gain just that
objectivity
which these intentions originally
opposed. It is thus no accident that phenomenology i n Husserl took precisely
its starting point f rom transcendental idealism, and the late products of
phenomenology are all thelessable to disavow thiso r i g i n ,the more they try to
conceal it . It was the authentically productive and f r u i t f u l discovery of
Husserl more import ant t han the exter nally more effective method of
Wesenschau [essential intuition]that he recognized in the meaning o f the
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
6/11
/ TEWS
concept of the non-deducible given (unableitbaren Gegebenheit), as
developed by the
positivist
schools, the fundamental problem of the relati on
ship between reasonand
reality.
He rescued f rom psychology the concept of
the originally given in tu i t ion , and in the development of the descriptive
method ofphilosophy,hewonback a certainty ofl i m i t e danalysiswhich had
longbeen
lost in the
separate
disciplines. But i t cannot be denied and the
factthat Husserlexpressedit so openly isproof o fhis great and clear honesty
that every one of the Husserliananalysesof the givenrestson an im pl ic i t
system of transcendental idealism,whichHusserlultimately formulated: that
the jurisdiction
o f
reason (Rechtsrechnung der Vernunft) remains the court
of
f i n a l
appeal for the relation between
reason
and reality and that therefore
al l Husserlian descriptions belong to the domain of this reason. Husserl
purified
idealism
from
every
excess
of speculation and brought i t up to the
standard of the highest reali ty
w i t h i n
its reach. But he didn't burst it
[idealism]
open. As
w i t h
Cohen and Natorp, his domain is ruled by the
autonomous mind, w i t h the import ant difference, however, that he has
renounced the claim of the productive power of mind, the Kantian and
Fichtean spontaneity, and resigns himself, asonlyKant
himself
had done, to
takepossessionofthesphereofthatwhichis adequately w i t h i n his reach. The
traditional inte rpre tation of philosophical history of the last t h i r t y
years
would
l ike
to understand this self-resignation of Husserlian phenomenology as
its l i m i t a t i o n , and views it as the beginning of a development which leads
ultimately to the plan of working out just that order of being which in
Husserl's description of the noetic-noerriatic relationship could be
only
formally l a id out. I must e xp l ic i t l y contradict this interpretation. The
transitionto material phenomenology has onlyapparentlysucceeded, and
at the price of that certainty of the findings which alone provided the
legitimacy
of the phenomenological method. I f
in
MaxScheler'sdevelopment
the eternal,basictruths alternate i n sudden changes,to be exiled
f in a l l y
into
, the powerlessness of transcendence, then one can certainly recognize the
tirelesslyquestioning impulse of a thinking which
takes
part in
truth only
i n
moving
from error to error. ButScheler'spuzzling and disquieting develop
mentneedsto be understood more rigorously than as the fate of an individual
mind. On the contrary, it indicates that the transit ion of phenomenology
from
the formal-idealist to the materi al and objective region cannot succeed
w i t h
continuity or totalassurance, that instead the images of transhistorical
truth, whichat one time [Scheler's] philosophy projected so seductively onto
the background of closed, Catholic theory, became confused and disin
tegrated as soon as they were sought for in just that reality , the compre
hension of which was in fact precisely what constituted the program of
materialphenomenology. Scheler'slast changeof directionappears to me
to
possess
its authentic, exemplary va l id i ty i n his recognition of the gap
between the eternal ideas and re ality, the overcoming of which led
phenomenology to enter the materialsphere,as itse lf material-metaphysical,
and thus he abandoned reality to a b l i n d impulse(Drang) w i t h a relationship
TH E
ACTUALITY OF
PHIWSOPHY
/ 123
tothe heaven ofideasthat is dark and problematic, andleavesroom foronly
the weakest t race of hope. W i t h Scheler, material phenomenology has
dialectically
revoked itself.Only the metaphysics of the impulse is
left
over
f rom the ontological design; the only remaining eternity over which his
philosophy has disposal is that of a boundless and u ncont roll ed dynamic.
Viewed under the
aspect
of this self-revocation of phenomenology,
Heidegger's theory alsopresents itse lf differently than is apparent from the
pathos of the beginningwhich is responsible for its external effect.
W i t hHeidegger, atleasti n his publishedwritings,the question of objective
ideasand objective being has
been
replaced by the subjective. The challenge
of
materi al ontology is reduced to the re alm of
subjectivity, w i t h i n
thedepths
of which itsearchesfor what it was not able to locate in the open fullness of
reality.I t is thus no accident, in thephilosophical-historical
sense
aswe l l ,that
Heidegger
falls
back on precisely the latest plan for a subjective ontology
produced by Western thinking: the existentialist philosophy of Soren
Kierkegaard. But Kierkegaard's plan is irre parably shattered. No f i r ml y
grounded being hasbeenable to reach Kierkegaard's
restless,
inner-subjective
dialectic;
the last depth which opened up to it was that o f the despair int o
whichsubjectivity disintegrated, an objective despair which transformed the
design of being w i t h i n subjectivity into a design of h e l l . It knows of no
other way to
escape
this hellish
space
than by a leap int otranscendence
whichremains an inauthentic and empty act of thought, itse lfsubjective, and
whichfinds its highest deter mination in the paradox that herethe subjective
mind must sacrifice itse lf and retain belief instead, the contents ofwhich,
accidental for
subjectivity,
derive solelyf rom the
Bib l ic a l
word. Onlythrough
the assumption of an essentially undialectical and historically pre-dialectical
ready at hand (zurhanden) reali ty is Heidegger able to evade such a
consequence. However, a leap and an undialectical negation
(Negat)
of
subjective being is also Heidegger's ultimate justification,
w i t h
the sole
difference that the analysis of the existing there (Vorfindlichen), whereby'
, Heidegger remains bound to phenomenology and breaks in principle w i t h
Kierkegaard's idealist speculation, avoids thetranscendenceofbelief whichis
grasped spontaneously
w i t h
the sacrifice of subjective mind, and instead
recognizes solely the transcendence to a vitalist thus being (Sosein): in
death. W i t h Heidegger's metaphysics of death, phenomenology seals a
development
which
Scheler already inaugurated
w i t h
the theory of impulse.
I t cannot be concealed that phenomenology is on the verge of ending in
precisely that vitalism against which it originally declared battle: the
transcendenceof death
w i t h
Simmel is distinguished
f rom
Heidegger's solely
in
that it remains
w i t h i n
psychological categorieswhereasHeidegger
speaks
in
ontological
ones.However, in the material itself, for example in the analysis
ofthe anxiety phenomenon, itwouldbe hard tof ind asureway to distinguish
them.
I n
accordance
w i t h
this interpre tation of the transition of phenomeno
logy into vitalism, Heidegger could evade the second great threat to
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
7/11
12 4
/
TELOS
phenomenological ontology, that posedby historicism, only by ontologizing
time itself, i.e., putt ing it fo r thas thatwhich constituted theessenceof man
whereby the
effort
of material phenomenology to discover the etern al i n man
paradoxically dissolved: as eternal, only temporality remained. The claims of
phenomenology are satisfied only bythosecategories, f rom the absolute rule
of
which phenomenology wanted thought to be exempt: mere subjectivity
and
mere
temporality.
W i t h
the concept of thrownness (Geworfenheit),
which is set fo r th as the ultimate conditi on of man's being, l i fe by itse lf
becomesas b l i n d and meaninglessas only it was inLebensphilosophie, and
death is as incapable of alott ing a positive meanin g
here
as there. The
claim
ito totality made by thought is thrown back upon thought itself, and it is
finally shattered there too. A ll that is needed is an understanding of the
narrowness of the Heideggerian existentialcategoriesof thrownness , anxiety,
and death,
which
are in fact not able to banish t he fullness of what is
l iv ing ,
and the pure concept of l i f e completely
seizes
the Heideggerian ontological
blueprint. If appearances are not deceiving, then
w i t h
this further
development, phenomenological philosophy is preparing for its own final
disintegration.
For the second time, philosophy stands powerless before the
question of being . It can no more describe being as free-standing and funda
mental than it was able earlier to develop it f rom out of itself.
have discussedthe most recent history of philosophy, not for a general
intellectual history orientation, but because only out of the historical
entanglement of questions and answers
does
the question of philosophy's
actualityemergeprecisely. And that simplymeans,after the failure of efforts
for
a grand and to tal philosophy: whether philosophy isitse lfat all actual. By
actuality
i$ understood not its
vague
maturity or immaturi ty on the basis
of no n-binding conceptions regarding the general int ellectual situ ation, but
much more: whether, after the failur e of the last great efforts, there exists an
adequacybetween the philosophic questions and the possibility of their being
answered at al l; whether the authentic results of the recent hi story of
these
problems is the essential unanswerability of the cardin al philosophic
questions. The question is in no way rhetorical, but should be taken very
l i t e ra l l y .
Every philosophy which today
does
not depend on the security of
current intellectual and social conditions, but instead upon truth, sees itself
facing the problem of aliquidationof philosophy. Thesciences,particularly
the logical and mathematical sciences, have set about the liquidation of
philosophywith an
earnestness
which hardly ever existed before. Thi s
earnestness is so significant because the
separate
sciences, including the
mathematical natural sciences, have long since rid themselves of the
naturalistic conceptual
apparatus
that, in the 19th century,
made
them
inferiorto idealist theories of knowledge, and theyhavetotally annexed the
contents ofcognitivecriticism.
W j t h
the help ofsharpened, c r i t i c a l ,cognitive
methods, the most advanced logic
I am thinkingof the new Vien na School
as it proceeded
f rom
Schlick, and is now carri ed on by
Camap
and Dubislav
in close connection
w i t h
Russell and the logical analystsis atte mpting to
THE ACTUALITY OF PHILOSOPHY
/
125
keep all authentic, wider-r eaching knowledge of experience in exclusive
reserve, and tries tosearchfor all propositions which in any way reach out
beyond the circle of experience an d its relativity, solely in tautologies, i n
analytical
propositions. Acco rdin g to this, the K anti an question as to the
constitution ofa priori synthetic judgments would be utterly meaningless,
becausethereis absolutely no such thing as thisk i n d
of
judgment; every move
beyond that which is veri fiable by the power of experience is preven ted;
philosophy becomes solely an occasion for ordering and controlling the
separatesciences,without being allowed to append anythi ng essential from
itse lf
to the ir findings. Associated as complement and supplement to the ideal
of such absolutely scientific philosophynot, to be sure, for the Vienna
School, but for every viewwhich wants to defend philosophy f rom the claims
of
an exclusively scient ific methodwhilein fact itse lf recognizing that this
claim
is a concept of philosophy as an art f o r m , whose lack of bin din g force
before t ru th is excelled only by itsunfamiliarity
w i t h
art and its ownaesthetic
in fe r io r i ty . Itwouldbe better just to li quidate philosophyonceand fora ll and
dissolve it into the particular disciplines than to come to its aid w i t h a poetic
ideal
which means nothing more than a poor ornamental cover for faulty
thinking.
I t must be said here that the thesis that all philosophic questioning in
principle can be dissolved into that of theseparate
sciences
is even today in no
way
so philosophically presuppositionless as it
makes
itse lf
out to be. I
would
simply
l iketo recall two problemswhichcould not be mastered on thebasisof
this thesis. First, the problem of the meaning of the given itself, the
fundamental category of all empiricism,whichmaintains the question of the
accompanying subject, which in turn can only be answered historico-
philosophically,
because the subject of the given is not ahistorically iden
tical and transcendental, but rather assumes changing and historically
comprehensible forms. This problem is not even posed in the frame of
empirio-criticism,
including the most modern, but instead it naivelyaccepts
the Kant ian point of departure . The other problem is familiar to it, but
solved only arbit rari ly and wit hout any stringency. The problem of the
unknown
consciousness,
the alien ego, can be
made accessible
for empirio-
criticism only throug h analogy, composed subsequently on the basisof
one's
ow n
experience,
whereas
in fact the empirio-cri tical method already
necessarily assumes unknown consciousness in the language it has at i ts
disposal. Solely by posing
these
problems, the theory of the Vienna School is
drawn into precisely that philosophic continuity f rom which it wanted to
distance itself. Yet thatsaysnothing against t he extraordinary importance of
this School. I view its significance less in that it might have successfully
converted philosophy intosciencethan in that its rigorous formulation of the
scientific in philosophysharpens the contours of the contents of philosophy
not subject to logic and the separate sciences. Philosophy
wi l l
not be
transformed into
science,
but under the pressure of the empiricist attack it
wi l lbanish from itse lfall questioningwhich,as specifically scientific, belongs
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
8/11
12 6
/ TELOS
THE ACTUALITY OF PHILOSOPHY / 127
of
rightto theseparate
sciences
and clouds philosophic questioning. I do not
mean tosuggestthat philosophy should give up or even slacken that contact
w i t hseparate
scienceswhich it has f in a l l y regained, and the attainment of
whichcounts among the most fortunate results of the most recent intel lectu al
history.
Quite the contrary. Philosophy wi l l be able to understand the
materialcontent and concretion of problemsonly
w i t h i n
thepresentstanding
of the separate sciences.I t wi l l also not be allowed to raise itse lf above such
sciences
by accepting their results as finished and medit atin g upon them
f rom asafedistance. Rather, philosophic problems wi l llie always, and in a
certain
sense
irredeemably, locked
w i t h i n
the most specific questions of the
separatesciences. Philosophy distinguishes itse lf fromsciencenot by a higher
level of generality, as the banal
view
st i l l today assumes, nor through the
abstraction of its categories nor thr oug h the nature of its materials . The
central difference lies far more in that the
separate
sciences accept their
findings, atleasttheirf in a land
deepest
findings, as indestructible and static,
whereas philosophy perceives the
first finding
which it lights upon as a sign
that
needs
unriddling. Plainly pu t: the idea of science (Wissenschaft) is
research; that of philosophy is interpr etation . In this remains the great,
perhapsthe everlasting paradox: philosophy persistently and w i t h the claim
of truth, niust proceed interpretively
without
ever possessing a sure key to
interpretation; nothing more is given to it than
fleeting,
disappearing traces
w i t h i nthe riddle figures of thatwhichexists and their astonishing entwin ings .
Thehistory
o f
philosophyisnothingother than the history of such entwinings.
Thus it
reaches
so few results. It must always begin anew and therefore
cannot do
without
the least thread Which earlier times have spun, and
throughwhich the lineature isperhapscompletedwhichcould transform the
ciphers into a text.
I t
follows,then, that the idea of interpretation in no way coincides w i t h the
problem
of meaning,
w i t h
whichit is mostly confused. It just is not the task
of philosophy to present such a meaning positively, to portray reality as
meaningful and thereby ju s t i fy i t. Every such justification of that which
exists is prohi bited by the fragmentation in being itself .Whileour images of
perceived
reality
may very
we l l
beGestalten, the
w o r l d
i nwhichwe
l ive
is not;
it is constituteddifferently than out of mere images of percept ion. The text
which
philosophy has to read is incomplete, con tradict ory and fragmentary,
and much in it may be delivered up to b l i n d demons; in fact
perhaps
the
reading of it is our task precisely so that we, by reading, can better learn to
recognize the demonic forces and to banish them. At the
same
time the idea
of
interpretationdoesnot mean tosuggesta second, asecret w o r l dwhichis to
be opened up through an analysis ofappearances.The dualism of the in t e l l i
gible
and the
empirical,
as was formulated by Kant and only f rom the post-
Kantianperspective was attributed to Plato, whose heaven ofideas st i l l lies
undisguised and open to the mindthi s dualism is better ascribed to the idea
of researchthan that of interpretationthe idea ofresearch, which
assumes
the reducti on of the question to given and known elements where n oth ing
would seem necessary except the answer. He who interprets by searching
behindthe phenomenal w o r l dfor aworld-in-itself(Welt ansich) whichforms
its
foundation and support,
acts
mistakenlyl ikesomeonewho wants to f ind in
the riddle the reflection of a beingwhich lies behind i t, a being mirrore d in
the
riddle,
inwhich it is contained. Instead, the
function
of
riddle-solving
is
to l igh tup the
riddle-Gestalt
l ikelightningand tonegateit(aufzuheben), not
to
persist behind the riddle and imitate it. Authenti c philosophic interpre
tation does
not meet up
w i t h
a
f ixe d
meaningwhichalready lies behind the
question, but lights it up suddenly and momentarily, and consumes it at the
same
time.
Just
as riddle-solving is constituted, in that the singular and
dispersed elements of the question are brought into various groupings long
enough for them to close together in a figure out ofwhichthe solution springs
fo r th , whilethe questiondisappearssophilosophy has to
bring
its elements,
whichit receives from thesciences,into changing constellations, or , to say it
w i t hless
astrological and
scientifically
more current expression, into changing
t r i a l
combinations,
u n t i l
they
fal l
into a figure which can be read as an
answer, while at the same time the question disappears. The task of
philosophyis not tosearch for concealed and manifest in tent ions of reali ty,
b.ut to interpret unin tentional reality, in that, by the power of constructing
figures, or images Bilder), out of the isolated elements of reali ty, it
negates
(aujhebt) questions, the exact arti culat ion ofwhich is the task of science,
2
a
task to
which
philosophy always remains bound,
because
its power of
illumination
is not able to catch
fire
otherwise than on
these
solid
questions.
Here one can discover what
appears
as such an astounding and strange
a f f in i ty exist ing between interpret ive philosophy and that type of thinking
which most strongly rejects the concept of the intentional, the meaningful:
the thinking of materialism. Interpret ation of the un intent ional through a
juxtapositionof theanalyticallyisolated elements andilluminationof the real
by
the power of such inte rpre tation is the prog ram of every authent ically
materialist
knowledge, a program towhich the materialist procedure
does
all
the more justice, the more it distances itse lf from every meaning of its
objects and thelessitrelatesitse lfto ani m p l i c i t ,quasi-religious meaning. For
long
ago, interpretation divorced
itse lf from
all questions of meaning or, in
other words, the symbols of philosophy are decayed. I f philosophy must learn
to renounce the question oftotality, then it implies that it must learn to do
withoutthe symbolicfunction, in
which
for a long time, at
least
in idealism,
the particular appearedt orepresent the general. It must give up the great
problems, the size ofwhich once hoped to guarantee the totality, whereat
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
9/11
128 / TELOS
TH E
ACTUALITY
OF PHILOSOPHY / 129
Construction out of small and unintentionalelements thus
counts
among the
basic
assumptionsof philosophic interpret ation; turn ing to the refuseof the
physical w o r l d (Abhub der Erscheinungswelt) which Freud proclaimed, has
va l id i ty beyond the realm of psychoanalysis, ju st as the tu rn in g of progressive
social philosophy to economics has va l id i ty not merely due to the empirical
super iori ty of economics, but just as much because of the immanent
requirements of philosophic interpre tation itself. Should philosophy today ask
about the
absolute
relationship between the thi ng-in- itse lf and appearance,
or, to
grasp
a more current formulation, about simply the meaning of being,
it would either remain formal and unbinding, or it would split itse lf into a
multitude of possible and arbit rary world-view positions (weltanschaulicher
Standpunkte).
Suppose, howeverI give an example as a thought experiment , wi thout
suggesting its actual feasibilitysuppose i t were possible to group the
elements
of a social analysis in such amannerthat the way they
came
together
madea figure which certainly
does
not lie before us organically, but which
must firstbe posited: t he commodity structure . This would hardly solve the
thing-in-itself
problem, not even in the
sense
that somehow the social
conditions might be revealed underwhi ch the thing-in-itself problem came
into
existence, as Lukacs even thought the solut ion to be;
3
for the tr uth
content of a problem is in principl e different f romthe his torical and psycho
logical
conditions out of
which
it grows. But it might be possible that,
from
a
sufficient
construction of the commodity structure, the thing -in-it self
problem absolutelydisappeared. L i k easourceofl i g h t ,the historical figure of
commodity and ofexchangevalue may free the fo rmof a reality , the hidden
meaning of which remained closed to invest igation of the thing -in-it self
problem, because there is no hidden meaning which could be redeemable
f rom its one-time and first-time historical appearance. I don't want to give
any material
statements
here, but only point out the direction for what I
perceive as the tasks of philosophic interpretation. But even simply the
correct formulation ofthesetaskswou ld establish several things concerning
those questions of philosophic principle, the explicit expression of which I
would
l ike to avoid. Namely this : that the funct ion which the trad iti onal
philosophic inqu iry expected f rommeta-historical, symbolically meaningful
ideas is accomplished by inner-hi storically constituted, non-symbolic ones.
W i t h this, however, the relationship between ontology and history woul dalso
be differently posited, i n principle , without thereby allow ing the device of
ontologizing
history as totality in the fo rm of mere historicity, whereby
every specific tension between int erpret atio n and the object would be lost,
and merely a masked his torici sm wou ld remain. Instead of this, according to
my
conception, history would no more be the
place
f rom which ideas arise,
stand out independently anddisappearagain. On the contrary, the historical
images(geschichtliche Bilder) woul d at the same time be themselves ideas,
the configuration of which constituted uninten tional tr uth (intentionslose
5. Cf. Georg Lukacs. Ceschichti und Klautnbeumiilstm (1923).
Wahrheit), rather than that tr uth
appeared
in history as intention.
But
I break off the thought here: for nowhere are general statementsmore
questionable than in a philosophy which wants to exclude abstract and
general statements and requires t hem only in the necessity of transition.
Instead, I would l ike to point out a second essential connection between
interpretive philosophy and materialism. I said that the riddle's answer was
not the meaning of the riddle in thesensethat both could exist at thesame
time. The answerwas contained w i t h i n the riddle, and the riddle portrayed
only
its own
appearance
and contained the
answer
wi th in i t se l f
as intention.
Far more, the answer stands in strict antithesis to the riddle,needs to be
constructed out of the riddle's
elements,
anddestroysthe riddle, which is not
meaningful, but
meaningless,
as soon as theansweris decisively given to it.
The movement whichoccurs in this process is executed in
earnestness
by
materialism. Earnestness means here that the answer does not remain
mistakenly in the closed
area
of knowledge, but that praxis is granted to i {
The in terpre tation of given reality and its abolition are connected to
each
other, not, ofcourse,in the sensethat reality isnegatedin the concept, bu t
that out of the construction of a configuration of reality the demand for its
[reality's] realchangealwaysfollowspromptly. Thechange-causing gestureof
the riddle
process
not itsmere resolu tion as such provides the image of
resolutions to which materialist praxis
alone
has access. Mater iali sm has
named this relationship
w i t h
a
name
that is philosophically certi fied:
dialectic. Only dialectically, it seems to me, is philosophic interpretation
possible. When Marx reproached the philosophers, saying that they had only
variously interpreted the w o r l d , and contraposed to them that the point was
tochangeit, then the
sentence
receivesits legitimacy not only out ofpolitical
praxis, but also out of philosophic theory. On ly in the annih ilati on of the
question is the authenticity of philosophic interpretation first successfully
proven, and mere thought by itse lf cannot accomplish this [auth ent icit y]:
therefore the annihil ati on of the question compels praxis. It is superfluous to
separate out
e xp l ic i t l y
a conception of pragmatism, in which theory and
praxis entwine
w i t h
each other as they do in the dialectic.
am clearly
conscious
of the
impossibility
of developing the program which
presented youan impossibilit y whichstems not only f rom the l im i t so f
time, but exists generally, because precisely as a program it does not allow
i tse lfto be worked out incompletenessand generali ty. Nevertheless, I clearly
sec i t as my duty to give you several suggestions.First: the idea of philosophic
interpretationdoesnot shrink back f rom that liquidationof philosophy which
to meseemssignalled by the collapse of the last philosophic claims to totality.
For the st rict exclusion of all ontologicalquestionsin the traditionalsense, the
avoidance of invarian t general concepts, also perhapsthe concept ofman, the
.exclusion of every conception of a self-sufficient to tali ty of min d Geist), orof
a self-contained history of
mind ;
the concentration of philosophicquestions
on
concrete
inner-historical complexes f rom w hich they are not to be
detachedthesepostulatesindeed becomeextremely similar to a dissolution
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
10/11
13 0 / TELOS
THE ACTUALITY OF PHIWSOPHY / 131
of thatwhichhas
long
been called philosophy. Whereas (at least the
offic ia l)
lcontemporary philosophic thinking has
long
kept its distance f rom
these
demands, or in anycasehas att empted to assimilate them
singly
in a watered-
down f o r m ,
one of the
first
and most actual tasks
would
appear to be the
radical
criticismof the
ruling
philosophic thinking. I am not
afraid
of the
reproach ofu n f r u i t f u l negativityan expression which Gottfried Kelleronce
characterized as a gingerbread expression (Pfefferkuchenausdruck). I f
philosophic
interpr etation can in factonlyprosper
dialectically,
then the
first
dialectical
point of attack is given by a philosophywhichcultivates precisely
those
problems whose removal
appears
more pressingly
necessary
than the
addition
of a new answer to so many old
ones. Only
an essentially
undialectical
philosophy, onewhichaims at ahistoricaltruth,
could
maintain
that the old problems
could simply
be removed by forgetting them and
starting fresh f rom the beginning. In fact, the deception of beginning is
precisely
that
which
in Heidegger's phi losophy comes under
criticism first
of
a l l . Only in the strictest dialectical communication
w i t h
the most recent
solution-attempts of philosophy and of philosophic terminology can a real
changein philosophicconsciousness
prevail.
Thiscommunicat ion
wi l l
have to
take its specific scientific material preponderantly
from
sociology and, as
the interpretive groupingprocess demands, crystalize out the small , unin
tentional elements which are nonetheless st i l l bound to philosophic
material.
One of the most
powerful
academic philosophers of the present [Heidegger]
issaid to have answered the question of the relationship between philosophy
and sociology somewhat l ike this: while the philosopher is l ike an architect
wh o presentsand develops the bluepr int of a house, the sociologist is
l ike
the
cat burglar who climbs the walls f rom outside and takes out what he can
reach. I wquld be inclined to acknowledge the comparison and to int erpr et
positively
the
function
he gave sociology for philosophy. For the house, this
bi g house, has
long
since decayed in its foundations and threatensnotonlyt o
destroy al l thoseinsidei t,but tocauseall the things to vanishwhichare stored
w i t h i n it. much ofwhich is irreplaceable. I f the cat burglar
steals
these
things, these
singular, indeed often half-forgotten things, he
does
a good
deed, provi ded that they areonly rescued; he wi l lscarcelyholdonto them for
long,
since they are for him
only
of
scant
worth.
Of course, the appreciati on
of
sociology by philosophic inte rpre tati on requires some limitations. The
point
of interpretive philosophy is to construct keys, before which
reality
springs open. As to the size of the key categories, they are specially made t o
order. The old idealismchosecategories too large; so they di d not even come
close to
f i t t in g
the keyhole. Pure philosophic sociologismchooses them too
small;
the key indeed
goes
in , but the door doesn't open. A great number of
sociologists carry nominal ism so far that the concepts become too small to
align the others w i t h themselves, to enter w i t h them
into
a constellation.
What
remains is a vast, inconsistent connect ion of simple this-here deter
minations, whichscoffs at every cognit ive orde rin g and in no way provides a
critical criterion. Thus, for example, the concept ofclass is n u l l i f i e d and
replaced by countless descriptions of
separate
groups so that they can no
longer be arranged
into
overlapping unities, although they i n fact appear as
such in
empirical reality.
Similarly,one of the most import ant concepts, that
of
ideology,
4
is robbed of its cutting
edge
by
defining
it formally as the
arrangement of contents of consciousness in regard to particular groups,
without
allowingthe question to arise any longer as to the truth orfalsityof
the contents themselves. This sociology classifies itse lf as a k i n d of general
relativism,
the generality of
which
can be no more recognized by philosophic
interpretationthan can any other generality, and for the correction of
which
philosophy possessesa
sufficient
means in the dialectical method.
I n regard to the manipu lation of conceptual material by philosophy, I
speak purposely of grouping and
t r ia l
arrangement, of constellation and
construction.Th e
historical
images, which do not constitute the meaning of
being(Dasein) bu t dissolve and resolve its questions are notsimplyself-given.
They
do notl ie
organically
ready in
history;
not showing
(Schau [Husserl])
or
i n t u i t i o n is requ ired to become aware of them. They are not
magically
sentby
the gods to be taken in and venerated. Rather, they must be produced by
human beings and are legit imated in the last analysis alone by the fact t hat
reality
crystalizes about them instriking conclusiveness (Evidenz
[Husserl]).
Here they divorce themselves cen trally f rom the archaic, the mythic
archetypes
Urbilder)
which
psychoanalysis lights upon, and
which
[ L u d w i g ]
Klages hopes to preserve as categories of ouf knowledge. Should they be
equivalent to them in a hundred characteristics, they
separate
themselves at
the poin t wherethose[archetypes] describe t heir fatali sticorbit in the heads
of
human beings. Thehistoricalimages are manageable and comprehensible,
instruments of human reason, even there where theyseemtoalign themselves
objectively,
as magnetic centers of objective being. They are models, by
meansofwhich theratio, examining and testing,approachesa
reality
which
refuses
to submit to laws, yet can imitate the pattern of the model every
time,
provided
that pattern is
imprinted
correctly. One may seeherean attempt to
re-establish that o ld concept of philosophywhichwas formulated by Bacon
and passionately contended around the time ofLeibniz, a conceptionwhich
idealism
derided as a fad: that of thears inveniendi [art ofinvention].Every
other conception of models
would
be gnostic and indefensible. But the
organon of thisars inveniendi is fantasy. An exact fantasy; fantasy which
abides strictly w i t h i nthe materialwhichthesciencespresent to
i t,
andreaches
beyond them only in the smallest
aspects
of their arrangement: aspects,
granted, which fantasy itse lf must originally generate. I f the idea of
philosophicinterpretationwhichItriedto develop for you isva l id ,then it can
be expressed as the demand to answer the questions of a pre-given
reality
each
time,
through a fantasy which rearranges the elements of the question
without
goi ng beyond the circumference of the elements, the exactitude of
which has its control in the disappearance of the question.
4.
Adorno is referring to K a r l Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (1929).
-
7/27/2019 Adorno, 'the Actuality of philosophy' (1931; 1977 Telos Ed)
11/11
132 / TELOS
THE
ACTUALITY
OF
PHILOSOPHY
/ 133
know fu l l
we l l
that many, perhapsmost of you are not inagreement
w i t h
what I am presenting here. Not only scientific thinking but, st i l l more,
fundamental ontology contradicts my conviction as to the curre nt tasksof
philosophy. But
thinking which
aims at relations w i t h the object, and not at
va l id i ty isolated in itself, is accustomed to prove its right to exist not by
refuting
the objections which are voiced against i t and which consider
themselves irrefutable, but by its fruitfulness, in the
sense
i nwhich Goethe
used
the te rm. Nonetheless, may I
st i l l
perhaps
address
a word to the most
current objections, not as Ihaveconstrued them, but as the representativesof
fundamental ontology formulate them, and as they
first
led me to formulate
the theory according to which, up u n t i l then, I had proceeded solely in the
praxis of philosophic interpretation.
The central objection is that my conception, too, isbased on a concept of
man, a bluepri nt of Being Entwurf des Daseins); only, out of b l i n d anxiety
before the power of history, I allegedly shrank f rom puttingthese invariants
fo r th clearly and
left
them clouded; instead I bestowed upon historical
facticity, or its arrangement , the power which actually belongs to the
invariant, ontological first principles, practiced idolatry w i t hhistorically
produced being, destroyed i n philosophy every permanent standard,
sublimated it into an aestheticpicturegame
Bilderspiel).
and transformed
the-prima philosophia [philosophy of first principles] intoessayism.
'
Inresponse, I can relate to these objections only by admitting of their
content, but I defend it as philosophically legitimate. I
w i l l
not decide
whether a particular conception of man and being lies at t he baseof my
theory, but I do deny the necessity of resorting to this conception. It is an
idealist demand, that of an absolute beginnin g, as only pure t hought byitse lf
can accomplish. It is a Cartesian demand, whichbelieves itnecessarytoraise
thinking to the fo rm of its thought presuppositions and axioms. However,
philosophy which no longer makes the assumption of autonomy, which no
longer believes reality to be grounded in the ratio, but instead assumesalways
and forever that thelaw-givingof autonomousreason piercesthrough a being
which is notadequate to it and cannot be l a id out rationally as a total i ty-
such a philosophy
wi l l
not go the entire path to the ration al presuppositions,
but instead
wi l l
stop therewhere irre ducible reality
breaks
in upon i t. I f it
proceeds
furthe r in to the region of presuppositions, t hen it
w i l l
be able to
reach them onlyformally,and at the price of that reality inwhich its actual
tasks
are l a i d .The break-in of what is irredu cible, however, occurs concrete-
historically
and thus it is historywhichretardsthe movement of thought to its
presuppositions. The product ivi ty of thinking is able to prove itse lf only
dialectically, in historicalconcreteness. Both thought and history come into
communication w i t h i n the models. Regarding efforts to achieve a fo rm
for such communication , I gladly put up
w i t h
the reproach ofessayism. The
English empiricists called their philosophic writingsessays, as did Leibniz,
because the power of freshly disclosed reality, upon which their thinking
struck, continuously forced upon them the risk of experimentati on. Not u n t i l
the post-Kantian century was the risk of experimentation lost, along
w i t h
the
power of reality. Thus f rom a fo rmof great philosophy theessaybecame an
insignificant fo rm of aesthetics, in
which
a concretion of interpretation
nonetheless takes refuge as appearance (Schein), over which authentic
philosophy, in the gran d dimensions of its problems, has long since lost
disposal.
If ,
w i t h
the disintegration of all security
w i t h i n
great philosophy,
experimentmakesits ent ry; i f it thereby ties onto the l i m i t e d , contoured and
unsymbolic interpretations ofaestheticessays,then thatdoesnot
appear
to be
condemnable, provided that the objects are
chosen
correctly, that they are
real. For themind Geist) is indeed notcapableof producing or grasping the
totalityof the real, but it may be possible topenetratethe det ail, to explode in
miniature the mass of merely existing reality.
Working Papers in Cultural Studies 10
ON IDEOLOGY
The first part of the 1977 issue wi l l analysedifferent concepts of ideology
with in
the marxist tradition. The theorists considered wi l l include Gramsci,
Althusser, and Poulantzas. A
series
of
case
studiesare presented in the second
part. These involve the ideologicalaspectsof the crisis in education, a critique
of
sociological notions ofworking
class
' community ', and a commentary on the
problems of ideology in marxistaesthetics.
AVAILABLE APRIL
977
1.75
CENTRE FOR
CONTEMPORARY
C U L T U R A LSTUDIES
UNIVERSITYOF
B I R M I N G H A M
B I R M I N G H A M
15
: