sachs-the myth of the given-mcdowell-sellars

Article

The ideology of modernityand the Myth of the Given:McDowell’s equipoise andAdorno’s cognitive utopia

Carl SachsMarymount University, VA, USA

AbstractIn his most recent work, McDowell argues that the oscillation between the Myth of the Given andcoherentism can be avoided only by an ‘equipoise’ between the objective and the subjective.However, I argue that Adorno’s ‘cognitive utopia’ is a genuine 4th option distinct from equipoiseand from the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism. McDowell’s inability toacknowledge the cognitive utopia is traced to his overly abstract conception of the disenchant-ment of nature, in contrast to Adorno’s emphasis on the domination of nature. This difference istraced to their different interpretations of Hegel.

KeywordsTheodor Adorno, ideology, John McDowell, Myth of the Given, nature

Introduction

How does one begin philosophy? In one sense, by thinking about a philosophical prob-

lem. But what makes a problem ‘philosophical’? Here the canon provides an inexhaus-

tible supply of ‘philosophical problems’, to the (we hope) delight of undergraduate

philosophy majors and to the (quite likely) irritation of their peers who need only to sat-

isfy curricular requirements. One’s life as a professional philosopher involves sifting

through those problems in light of one’s own calling. Yet our professional training also

involves a ‘disciplinization’ whereby certain problems come into view as distinctively

philosophical problems, and distinguished from other problems, however pressing and

Corresponding author:

Carl Sachs, Marymount University, Department of Philosophy, Arlington, VA, USA.

Email: [email protected]

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perhaps far more serious, of a ‘non-philosophical’ nature. In other words, how a philo-

sopher is trained influences how she or he regards a set of problems as deserving of the

designation ‘‘‘philosophical’’ problems’, and which problems fall outside of the purview

of philosophy as a discipline.

The contours of the discipline of philosophy exert a powerful, though usually over-

looked, point of divergence between ‘Continental’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy. This point

of divergence bears on what philosophers in both traditions do, and do not do, with

Hegel, who constitutes something of a point of departure between the two traditions: ana-

lytic philosophy constituted itself through its rejection of Hegel, whereas Hegel has

remained, in all the various streams of Continental philosophy, a figure deserving of pro-

found (if sometimes begrudging) respect. Hence the rediscovery of Hegel among analy-

tic philosophers could challenge the very discipline of professional philosophy, since

professional Anglophone philosophy is ‘analytic’ by virtue of its dismissal of Hegel.

As a result, the resurgence of serious interest in Hegel in contemporary analytic philo-

sophy is also blocked. To clarify this ‘blockage’, I will examine the similarities and dif-

ferences between how John McDowell and Theodor Adorno orient themselves towards

Hegel. McDowell has not only written about Hegel but also said of Mind and World that

‘one way that I would like to conceive of this work is as a prolegomenon to a reading of

the Phenomenology, much as Brandom’s forthcoming Making It Explicit . . . is, among,

other things, a prolegomenon to his reading of that difficult text’ (1996: ix).

McDowell and Adorno are linked by their shared interest in how to accept Hegel’s

insights about the articulation of our experience of objects without committing the Myth

of the Given, but without following Hegel all the way into ‘idealism’. McDowell and

Adorno converge where they seek to bring naturalism and idealism into productive

synthesis; they diverge over what they take the synthesis to be and to entail. Whereas

McDowell presents us with a ‘naturalized idealism’ that fully reconciles nature and

reason, but only at the theoretical (hence ‘abstract’) level, Adorno’s naturalistic meta-

critique of idealism brings us to an awareness of how a fully practical, hence fully actua-

lized (or ‘concrete’), reconciliation of reason and nature is obstructed by the particular

shape taken by the domination of nature under late-capitalism.

I begin with McDowell’s diagnosis of the ‘transcendental anxiety’ of modern philo-

sophy, show how he envisions both coherentism and the Myth of the Given as respond-

ing to that anxiety, and why only something like Hegel’s conceptualism offers us the

‘equipoise’ needed to assuage the anxiety (section I). In his account, McDowell’s appeal

to ‘the disenchantment of nature’ looms large, but in a way that reveals a half-hearted

historicism; correcting this requires something much more like Adorno’s ‘the cognitive

utopia’ (section II). The cognitive utopia is an ideal for rational cognition that is enligh-

tened about itself. But the ideal is blocked or prevented from being realized, as indicated

by Adorno’s ‘naturalistic’ interpretation of Kant. Adorno’s interpretation corrects

McDowell’s appropriation of Hegel’s critique of Kant in a way that McDowell himself

ought to appreciate (section III). Whereas McDowell turns to Hegel to avoid the linger-

ing traces of the Myth of the Given in Kant, Adorno goes past Hegel to avoid the linger-

ing traces of constitutive subjectivity that Hegel retains. I shall argue both that Adorno’s

account of the origins of the domination of nature is superior to McDowell’s account of

the disenchantment of nature and that McDowell’s failure to engage seriously with

250 Philosophy and Social Criticism 41(3)



Adorno’s perspective marks a profound limitation on his part – a limitation that can be

traced to his own insufficiency in taking Hegel as seriously as he ought (section IV). In

concluding (section V), I will have shown how a fascinating project of contemporary

analytic philosophy bears within itself traces of the point at which it is tempted to

become, and may thereby refuse to become, something other than philosophy as delim-

ited by the prevailing norms of contemporary academic discourse and practice.

I McDowell’s route from oscillation to equipoise

The revival of philosophical interest in Hegel in analytic, or perhaps better ‘post-analy-

tic’, philosophy has begun to receive sustained attention (Redding, 2007; Maher, 2012).

The spirit of Hegel has been reborn in Pittsburgh, much as the spirit of Aristotle was

reborn in Oxford at the height of ‘ordinary-language philosophy’. But unlike Sellars and

Brandom, McDowell emphasizes that human beings are a peculiar sort of animal, a

rational animal, so that correctly understanding perception and action requires correctly

understanding how our basically animal capacities are saturated with and transformed by

uniquely rational capacities. By reconstructing McDowell’s relation to the idealism of

Kant and Hegel in terms of his relation to naturalism, I hope to show that McDowell’s

synthesis of domesticated idealism and liberal naturalism is not a completely adequate

solution to the problems posed.

To rehearse the well-known narrative: McDowell aims to dissolve what he calls the

‘transcendental anxiety’ (2009a: 243) distinctive of modern philosophy as expressed in

the thought: ‘How is empirical content [of thought] so much as possible?’ (ibid.). We

remain caught in the grip of this anxiety if there can even seem to be a gulf between

thought (what is thinkable) and world (what is the case). If my thought, ‘There is salt

on the table’ is true, then it is the case that there is salt on the table. But for my (and our)

thoughts to be true (or false), they must be about the world as present in my (and our)

experience of it. For this reason, vindicating direct realism requires dislodging the trans-

cendental anxiety that installs an unbridgeable gulf between mind and world. So we must

dissolve the temptations which lure us away from affirming the perfectly innocuous

claim that our judgments, when they are true, do not stop anywhere short of the fact that

things are thus and so. (It is crucial for McDowell that the anxiety that prevents us from

affirming common-sense realism is both transcendental in content and historical in con-

text; I shall return to this below.)

As long as the modern transcendental anxiety remains in place, we will be caught in

an oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism. Since we require reassur-

ance that we are in cognitive contact with the world, and that our judgments are answer-

able to how things are, we look for something in experience not of our own making. In its

most general form, McDowell construes the Myth of the Given as the idea that the space

of reasons is wider than the space of concepts (McDowell, 1996: 7) – a point that will be

crucial in the interpretation of Adorno (section II). The Given is any experienceable con-

tent that plays a justificatory role without having any conceptual structure. As deVries

and Triplett (2000) put it, in the context of explicating Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the Phi-

losophy of Mind’ (published in 1967), the myth is the idea that there be experienceable

content that is simultaneously epistemically efficacious (having a justificatory function)

Sachs 251



and epistemically independent (not deriving its justificatory function from its relations

with any other contents with justificatory functions).

Although the Myth of the Given is typically understood as epistemological – and it

surely is that as well – the Myth (and its criticism) in the Kant–Hegel tradition is best

seen in terms of the right structure for cognitive semantics.1 Whereas epistemology iden-

tifies criteria for normative assessment of evidence, warrant, goodness of inference, etc.,

cognitive semantics identifies the criteria for anything to count as a thought (judgment,

assertion, statement, etc.). McDowell’s concern with cognitive semantics follows Kant

and Hegel – with the intelligibility of thought as such, and, in particular, with the intel-

ligibility of empirical content. As a cognitive-semantic fallacy, the Myth of the Given

posits non-conceptual content by locating those contents as playing their cognitive-

semantic roles and by characterizing the relevant cognitive-semantic roles played,

independently of how those contents function within, or with respect to, judgments –

which, in turn, have their cognitive-semantic statuses partly constituted by their role

in reasoning.2

The recoil from the Myth occurs because, on the assumption that all thinking is dis-

cursively articulated, our access to non-conceptual contents in their cognitive-semantic

roles seems mysterious. Unable to guarantee that we have found the lever of Archi-

medes, coherentism threatens, according to which our judgments do not stand in a

cognitive-semantic relation to the world as experienced. So coherentism undermines that

‘minimal empiricism’ necessary for our judgments to even seem to have empirical con-

tent; ‘the frictionless spinning in the void’ (McDowell, 1996: 11) threatens. On the one

hand, judgments must stand in an epistemic and semantic – McDowell would say

‘rational’ – relation to the world, and not merely a causal one. On the other hand, judg-

ments could have a rational relation with the world only if there were an identifiable

point of contact with the world – some cognitive-semantic content apart from the game

of giving and asking for reasons. Since that criterion seems impossible to satisfy, we are

thrown back onto coherentism, and from thence back into the Given, and so on without

respite. Having a grip on the notion of ‘judgment’ at all requires that we satisfy both con-

ditions at once; the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism arises

because we cannot see how to do so.

With the right distinctions in place, however, McDowell thinks that we can satisfy

both conditions – judgments are externally, rationally constrained by the passive actua-

lization of conceptual capacities in sensory consciousness.3 We should not confuse what

is external to judgment with what is external to experience, nor should we posit non-

conceptual content to explicate the possibility of experience. Rather, perceptual experi-

ence necessarily involves the passive actualization of conceptual capacities – as distinct

from the active exercise of those same capacities in judgment – and so perceptual expe-

rience can be the external and rational constraint on judgment needed to avoid the oscil-

lation. Since the constraint lies in the passive actualization of conceptual capacities,

rather than in their active exercise, it is external to thought; since the constraint involves

our conceptual capacities, it counts as genuinely rational rather than merely causal.4 To

avoid the oscillation we need only accept that ‘receptivity does not make an even

notionally separable contribution to the co-operation [of receptivity and spontaneity]’

(McDowell, 1996: 9). If the contribution of receptivity were even notionally separable




from their cooperation, then we could specify the cognitive-semantic roles of some con-

tents independent of how they function in judgments. So the Myth of the Given assumes

that cognitive-semantic roles can be specified independent of their role in judgments,

even though cognitive semantics just is the articulation of judgments and subjudgmental

contents, as sub-judgmental. We have no grip on any cognitive-semantic roles if we

abstract entirely from all judgmental function, as the Myth requires.

We reject the idea that the space of reasons can be wider than the space of concepts by

accepting that the space of concepts/reasons is wider than the space of judgments (in

which conceptual capacities are actively exercised); conceptual capacities are always

and already at work in the perceptual episodes that permeate the sensory consciousness

of a rational animal. McDowell explicitly identifies his idealism by insisting upon ‘the

Hegelian image in which the conceptual is unbounded on the outside’ (McDowell, 1996:

83; cf. ibid.: 26–9): there is nothing in our experience that utterly transcends all possible

conceptual classification (even if only by demonstrative phrases).5

But how exactly is idealism compatible with vindicating direct realism or therapeu-

tically dissolving the transcendental anxiety of modern thought? McDowell’s response

to this question turns on how he understands the route from Kant to Hegel that goes

through the Transcendental Deduction. On McDowell’s reconstruction, Kant’s cognitive

semantics is undermined by his tacit commitment to non-conceptualism; Hegel’s correc-

tion of this flaw then paves the way for McDowell’s own ‘naturalized idealism’. The

Deduction is supposed to establish ‘equipoise between subjective and objective’

(2009d: 75); as Kant puts it, ‘the conditions of the possibility of experience in general

are at the same time conditions of the possibility of objects of experience’ (CPR

A158/B197; original emphases). Yet Kant failed to overcome the transcendental anxiety

because he retained an independent role for sensible intuitions:

The most Kant might be able to claim universally, about sensibility as such, is that any sen-

sibility – at any rate any sensibility that partners with a discursive intellect in yielding

empirical knowledge – would allow the formation of pure intuitions, reflecting the way the

sensibility is formed as the formal intuitions of space and time reflect the way our sensibility

is formed. But in his picture it remains a sort of brute fact about us – given from outside to

the unifying powers of apperceptive spontaneity, and not determined by their exercise (not

even in the extended sense of being intelligible only in a context that includes their exercise)

that the pure intuitions that reflect the forms of our sensibility are intuitions of space and

time. (2009d: 75–6)

In other words, Kant can show us that any discursive (as distinct from intuitive) intellect

must be joined with sensible (as distinct from intellectual) intuition to yield empirical

judgments, but he cannot account for why sensible intuition must be spatial and temporal.

That our sensible intuition must be spatial and temporal is mere subjective imposition, and

so Kant’s transcendental idealism ‘stands revealed as subjective idealism’ (2009d: 76).

In Kant’s cognitive semantics, our conceptual capacities are constrained by some-

thing non-conceptual, namely intuitional form. This spoils the ‘equipoise’, as McDowell

puts it, at which Kant aimed and which can alleviate the transcendental anxiety. As

McDowell understands Kant’s account:

Sachs 253



. . . our sensibility is the way it is independently of the character of things in themselves, and

independently of our capacity for apperceptive unification, to which it furnishes materials,

[and] that means there is an unassimilated subjectivity, a subjectivity with no balancing

objectivity, within what purported to be the objective side of a proto-Hegelian equipoi-

se . . . corresponding to this unassimilated subjectivity at the putatively objective pole of the

attempted equipoise, there is an unassimilated objectivity, the perhaps non-spatial and non-

temporal thing in itself, left outside the equipoise altogether, and looking as if it would have

to be the genuine article. (2009e: 151)

In other words, Kant fails to achieve the equipoise between thought and experience

because he cannot account for our access to intuitional form; hence he concludes that our

conceptual capacities cannot reach all the way out to how things really are. The Hegelian

alternative is to dispense with non-conceptual content altogether; if there is nothing out-

side the conceptual, then the conceptual itself contains a subjective and objective pole.

This vindicates common-sense realism by guaranteeing that there is no even apparent

gulf between the subjective and the objective.

Importantly, McDowell does not dispense with Kantian intuitions altogether – but his

treatment of them contrasts importantly with Adorno’s. In ‘Avoiding the Myth of

the Given’ (2009f), McDowell both clarifies how conceptual capacities permeate expe-

rience and rejects his previous assumption that ‘to conceive experiences as actualizations

of conceptual capacities, we would need to credit experiences with propositional

content, the sort of content that judgments have’ (ibid.: 258; original emphasis). Instead,

McDowell now distinguishes between discursive conceptual content (what judgments

have) and intuitional conceptual content (what experiences have). Non-discursive,

intuitional content counts as conceptual because ‘every aspect of the content of an intui-

tion is present in a form in which is suitable to be the content associated with a discursive

capacity, if it is not – at least not yet – actually so associated’ (ibid.: 264).6 In other

words, intuitional content is actually conceptual because it is potentially propositional.

Along these lines, McDowell also clarifies that sensibility and understanding are

individually necessary and jointly sufficient for both intuitional content and discursive

content; it is not that each capacity contributes its own distinct content. This clarification

places McDowell significantly closer to Hegel than to Kant.7

If the Myth of the Given holds that the space of reasons extends further than the space

of concepts, and since the unboundedness of the conceptual is needed to avoid the Myth,

then either sensed particulars have no intrinsic cognitive authority, or we must expand

the conceptual to include sensed particulars. McDowell chooses the latter:

If an object is present to one through the presence to one of some of its properties, in an intui-

tion in which concepts exemplify a unity that constitutes the content of a formal concept of an

object, one is thereby entitled to judge that one is confronted by an object with those proper-

ties. The entitlement derives from the presence to one of the object itself, not from a premise

for an inference, at one’s disposal by being the content of one’s experience. (2009f: 271)

The experienced presence of an object entitles us to judge that the object is as presented

because the objectual presentation is itself conceptual, though non-propositional, and




thus accounts for how sensed particulars have rational authority over judgments. The

mutual adjustment of judgments in light of experiences, and vice versa, constitutes

Hegelian equipoise, and equipoise is coherent only if the conceptual is at work in both

dimensions; that is why the equipoise avoids the oscillation, completes the Deduction

and dissolves the transcendental anxiety.

Moreover, dissolving the transcendental anxiety also allows us unproblematically

to accept that ‘rational capacities, and hence availability to apperception, permeate

our experience itself, including the experience we act on unreflectively in our ordi-

nary coping with our surroundings. Such is the form that animal engagement with

the perceptible environment takes in the case of rational animals’ (2009f: 272).

We would now accept that ‘the thinking thing is the rational animal’ (McDowell,

2009b: 274, n. 36), and that ‘a res cogitans is also a res dormiens, a res ambulans,

and so forth’ (ibid.). The identification of the thinking thing with the rational animal

undermines the sheer formality of the Kantian conception of the subject as the sort

of thing that can take up a disengaged or detached attitude towards its own condi-

tions of sensibility.

We need to reconcile reason and nature by acknowledging that our rational capacities

are themselves natural – but not natural in the natural-scientific way of finding nature

intelligible, which consists of constructing testable explanations.8 To do so, we need

to acknowledge the sui generis character of our conceptual capacities, vis-a-vis nature

qua the realm of law (denying ‘bald naturalism’), while on the other hand holding the

door shut against any ‘transcendence of biology’ (McDowell, 1996: 115) (denying ‘ram-

pant platonism’). Whereas bald naturalism dismisses the transcendental anxiety,

acknowledging the sui generis character of our responsiveness to reasons as such risks

conceiving of ourselves as metaphysically split, with ‘disastrous consequences for per-

ception and action’ (ibid.: 108 ff.).

What is metaphysically special, in one sense – the uniquely human kinds of freedom

and obligation – is also metaphysically innocuous, in another sense. This delicate bal-

ance turns on Aristotle’s notion of ‘second nature’, reinterpreted through the notion of

Bildung. Second nature, or Bildung, consists of those capacities or abilities acquired

through training, rather than intrinsic to the kind of thing an entity is. (For example, it

is part of the second nature of a domesticated dog to obey certain commands.) Likewise,

human beings acquire their rational capacities through that particular kind of training

called ‘enculturation’.9 By identifying culture with Hegel’s ‘spirit’ [Geist], McDowell

naturalizes spirit: the dualism between spirit and nature becomes the distinction between

naturalized spirit – the acquired conceptual capacities of the rational animal – and spir-

itless nature.

Importantly, McDowell does not contest the disenchanted conception of nature with

respect to the natural sciences – only that this conception of nature is the whole truth

about nature, because our rational capacities, sui generis though they be vis-a-vis the nat-

ural sciences, are nevertheless actualizations of our distinctive kind of animality. With

the correct picture of our conceptual capacities in a liberated, non-scientistic conception

of nature, we can accept that we are fundamentally animals – rational animals. The result

is a naturalized Hegelian equipoise that satisfies our need for an adequate cognitive

semantics that dissolves the tensions of modern thought.

Sachs 255



I now turn to a serious criticism of McDowell’s naturalized idealism: that he does not

fully understand the historical roots of the transcendental anxiety he aims to dissolve. As

he sees it, the intelligibility of our cognitive access to reality is threatened by the rise of

the natural-scientific conception of nature, according to which nature is ‘disenchanted’

(McDowell, 1996: 70) or ‘the realm of law’ (ibid.: esp. 73 ff.).10 After the rise of the

natural-scientific conception of nature, the operations of sensibility come to be seen

as part of the law-governed causal nexus, and so it seems mysterious how our responsive-

ness to the world as experienced could be a rational response, one answerable to expe-

rience. In discussing the rise of this conception, McDowell points out that, while the

ancient atomists did anticipate the disenchanted conception of nature, for them

. . . the thesis that nature is empty of meaning and value lacks a certain status it has in mod-

ern thinking. It does not figure as another way to formulate a rightly entrenched view of the

kind of understanding aimed at by properly scientific investigation: a view that is not open

to dispute, but part of what one must take for granted if one is to count as an educated per-

son. (1996: 181)

But it is precisely here that a blind-spot in McDowell’s historicism distorts the entire

account, including his appeal to Hegel. On the one hand, he is fully aware that modernity

is marked by the cultural-political status invested in the disenchanted conception of

nature. On the other hand, he lacks any corresponding awareness of the actual historical

and material processes whereby this conception acquired that status, and especially of

the role of science, technology, industry and capitalism in promoting the disenchanted

conception of nature as the legitimizing ideology.11

Without greater historical specificity, McDowell cannot appreciate that the cultural-

political status of the disenchanted conception of nature is itself explained in terms of

what Adorno calls ‘the domination of nature’.12 McDowell provides historicism without

materialism, disenchantment without domination, and so cannot appreciate that Kant’s

failure to achieve equipoise is not an idiosyncratic blind-spot, but, as Adorno shows, a

feature of capitalist modernity that finds expression in Kant. To explain why Adorno

reads Kant as he does, I now turn to Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ and the challenge

it raises to McDowell’s Hegelian solution to the problem of cognitive semantics.

II ‘The cognitive utopia’: Adorno’s quartum quid

One guiding theme throughout Adorno’s work is his Hegelian-Marxist critique of ‘the

fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’ (Adorno, 1973: xx) as an underlying theme of west-

ern culture in general and as culminating in German Idealism in particular.13 Adorno

both explains the origins of constitutive subjectivity in systematically unjust conditions

of political economy and criticizes constitutive subjectivity for failing to understand

itself adequately. Central to his analyses is what Adorno calls ‘the cognitive utopia’.

Here I shall argue that the cognitive utopia is a quartum quid, a ‘4th thing’, in relation

to the three options that figure in McDowell. Whereas McDowell avoids the oscillation

between the Myth of the Given and coherentism by appealing to equipoise, Adorno cri-

ticizes both the oscillation and equipoise. If Adorno is right, then there is a 4th position




that McDowell has not taken into account; if McDowell is right, then Adorno’s position

must collapse into one of the other three. (Here I will only distinguish Adorno’s cogni-

tive utopia from McDowell’s equipoise; what prevents that ideal from being realized –

the domination of nature – will figure prominently in section III.)

Much like McDowell, Adorno aspires to avoid resorting both to the merely given and

to constitutive subjectivity, which has McDowell’s notion of ‘coherentism’ as a clear

parallel. Constitutive subjectivity, which Adorno sees as both the inner logic of western

epistemology and the expression of western bourgeois individualism, holds that all cog-

nitive significance – what can be taken as authoritative by and for us – is grounded

entirely in the capacities belonging to rational subjectivity; no cognitive significance

transcends the subject’s rational powers. But, in its anxiety that it makes no contact with

the real, the subject desperately seeks (in order to control) something simply Given to it.

Adorno discerns this unstable oscillation between constitutive subjectivity and the Given

in Husserl’s phenomenology; on the one hand, the transcendental subject is the sole

ground of all meaning-analysis, and yet at the same time, it commits the Myth of the

Given at a methodological level:

. . . at the Archimedean point of his [Husserl’s] philosophy ultimately, like Bergson,

dogmatically contrasted to scientific procedure in concept formation a differently consti-

tuted procedure, rather than reflecting scientific procedure itself. He could be led to this

abstract negation of the scientific procedure – which first became completely obvious to his

students – by the uncritical acceptance of the positivistic principle, and the cult of the given

and of immediacy. (Adorno, 1982: 115)14

Like McDowell, Adorno also locates in the Kant–Hegel position the resources for

avoiding the oscillation between constitutive subjectivity and the Given. Yet, unlike

McDowell, Adorno contends that constitutive subjectivity threatens even idealism itself,

and so motivates a transition past Hegel to overcome the lingering traces of constitutive

subjectivity that Hegel retains. But how can Adorno avoid both the Myth of the Given

and constitutive subjectivity without committing himself to equipoise? McDowell’s

challenge to Adorno, then, asks how Adorno can avoid all three of Hegelian equipoise,

coherentism/constitutive subjectivity, and the Myth of the Given. What is Adorno’s

quartum quid?

The answer lies in what Adorno calls ‘the preponderance of the object’ (Adorno,

1973: 183) through which he makes substantial what he announces as his attempt ‘to give

the Copernican revolution an axial turn’ (ibid.: xx). The ‘preponderance’ of the object

does not mean that we reject Kant’s reorientation of philosophy from epistemology to

cognitive semantics. Rather, the intelligibility of discourse presupposes that the sensuous

particularity of objects transcends their conditions of intelligibility. The correct cognitive

semantics discloses the ‘non-identity’ of concept and object, in contrast to the ‘identity

thinking’ that has prevailed throughout the history of western culture, became firmly

entrenched in the Enlightenment, and the meaning of which became fully actualized

in the Holocaust.15

In Adorno’s philosophy of history, western philosophy culminates in constitutive sub-

jectivity because it is the furthest development of ‘identity-thinking’, which ‘devalues a

Sachs 257



thing to a mere example of a type or species’ (1973: 146). Whereas all identity-thinking

subsumes the object to the classifying concept, constitutive subjectivity swallows the

object whole, so to speak, so there is nothing left of any cognitive significance other than

rational subjectivity itself. Unlike McDowell, Adorno sees even idealism as vulnerable

to this allegation; ‘the system is the belly turned mind’ (ibid.: 23); Hegelian equipoise is

too close to coherentism for it to do the required work. But, although the subject must

break out of constitutive subjectivity, this cannot be done by mere fiat. Rather, we must

criticize constitutive subjectivity through reflection informed by sociological, historical

and psychological explanations.

When Adorno announces that ‘[t]he matters of true philosophical interest at this point

in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest.

They are non-conceptuality, individuality, and particularity’ (1973: 8), he stresses the

independence of the object that spoils the perfectly symmetrical equipoise at which ide-

alism aims, and indeed seems poised to tumble, however malgre lui, into the Myth of the

Given.16 If McDowell is right, then only Hegelian equipoise fully avoids the oscillation

between coherentism and the Myth of the Given. How does the preponderance of the

object establish Adorno’s quartum quid?

The solution lies in Adorno’s asymmetrical equipoise, what he calls ‘the cognitive

utopia’ (1973: 10), which is grounded in his transformed conception of ‘reconciliation’

or ‘remembrance’: ‘the remembrance that is no longer hostile to the many, which is

anathema to subjective Reason’ (ibid.: 6), a type of cognition that acknowledges (rather

than suppressing or negating) ‘the multiplicity of differences’ (ibid.). Remembrance dis-

closes the possibility of ‘the cognitive utopia’, which would ‘unseal the nonconceptual

with concepts, without making it the same as themselves’ (ibid.: 10). Implicit in Ador-

no’s cognitive semantics is the Kantian thesis that concepts are always general terms, so

that identification of particulars requires non-conceptual cognitive-semantic contents,

even though, on pain of relapsing into the Myth of the Given, we have no independent

grasp on them as such.17

Whereas equipoise obtains between the subjective and the objective poles of the con-

ceptually structured world as held in view, the cognitive utopia obtains between the con-

ceptual and that non-conceptual moment in cognition that Adorno calls ‘mimesis’ (1973:

14) or ‘the somatic moment’ (ibid.: 187, 193, 203).18 The ‘mimetic’ or ‘somatic’

moment of cognition consists of our bodily comportment towards sensible particulars

whereby our norm-governed judgments are exposed to possible questioning. Much like

McDowell, Adorno aims at vindicating and explicating the cognitive authority of sensed

particulars, but with this crucial difference: McDowell distinguishes between the discur-

sive and the conceptual, but identifies the conceptual with the rational, and so extends the

conceptual to include particulars (intuitional conceptual form). By contrast, Adorno

identifies the discursive with the conceptual, and so extends the rational beyond the

sphere of discursivity in order to include sensed particulars.

At this point, the following objection arises: since McDowell’s conception of the

Myth just is the extension of the space of reasons beyond the conceptual, does not

Adorno commit the Myth after all? What prevents Adorno from falling into the Myth

is twofold: the transcendental considerations he brings to bear on the introduction of

non-conceptual (somatic or mimetic) content, and the ‘negativity’ with which he




characterizes it. In appealing to ‘the strength of the subject to break out the fallacy of

constitutive subjectivity’ (1973: xx), Adorno shows that the object’s ‘preponderance’

is grounded in ‘the intentio obliqua of the intentio obliqua, not the warmed-over intentio

recta; the corrective to the subjective reduction, not the denial of a subjective share’

(Adorno, 1998: 250). That is, the cognitive authority of sensuous particulars over con-

ceptual norms is itself justified by reflection on what must be the case in order for those

norms to function as norms. For us to have reasons for revising our social practices, our

norms must be open to experience, which could not be the case if our subjectivity were

constitutive. The sensed particulars must have a kind of cognitive authority over those

norms (under some conditions) without those sensed particulars having any conceptual

status. Hence Adorno says that ‘[t]he name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than

that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to

contradict the traditional norm of adequacy’ (Adorno, 1973: 5). That is, not only are

objects never wholly subsumed under concepts, but also the very process of cognition

leaves a ‘remainder’, a trace of the alterity of the object, which it is the task of philosophy

to recover as traces and assemble into a ‘constellation’ (ibid.: 162–3) to remind us of

what has been lost.19

By reflecting on the conditions of reflection itself, we discover that we could not have

our self-conscious thoughts about experience if there were no non-conceptual compo-

nent – the somatic or mimetic moment – whereby we make genuine cognitive contact

with the particulars that comprise the world-as-experienced.20 Since our cognition of

particulars is posited through reflection on reflection, Adorno expresses himself indir-

ectly or negatively: ‘If the thesis that likeness alone has that capacity makes us aware

of the indelible mimetic element in all cognition and all human practice, this awareness

grows untrue when the affinity – indelible, yet infinitely removed at the same time – is

posited as positive’ (1973: 150). In other words, it is only when the mimetic is ‘posited as

positive’ that one falls prey to the Myth of the Given. His rhetorical appeals to ‘noncon-

ceptuality’, to ‘nonidentity’ and to ‘negative’ dialectics function as indicators of how

cognitive semantics must embody its own awareness of its dependence on non-

conceptual, mimetically recognized sensuous particulars.

That critical reflection thus generates the idea of the cognitive utopia as that which

‘would be nothing other than full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual

reflection’ (1973: 13). The ‘full, unreduced experience’ is our sensori-motor engage-

ments with particulars (the ‘mimetic’ or ‘somatic’ element in cognition); the ‘medium

of conceptual reflection’ is our discursively structured deployment of generals. To trans-

late Adorno’s criticism into McDowell’s language, idealism collapses into coherentism

and cannot rescue us from the threat of ‘frictionless spinning’. The cognitive utopia

would be a transformation of our discursive practices: though individual concepts would

continue to be used to classify and discriminate (since that is just what concepts do), the

judgments in which those concepts figure would be arranged in order to promote, rather

than hinder, an awareness of their insufficiency to accommodate the richness of sensuous

particulars. The cognitive utopia is the rational ‘equipoise’ of the discursive and the

mimetic, rather than the conceptual equipoise of the discursive and the intuitional.21

To transform equipoise into the cognitive utopia, Adorno transforms the concept of

mediation. He objects that Hegel’s concept of mediation turns on an ‘equivocation’

Sachs 259



between the concept of particularity and the particulars themselves: ‘The unity of that

which general concepts cover differs fundamentally from the conceptually defined par-

ticular. The concept of the particular is always its negation at the same time; it cuts short

what the particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly named, and replaces this

with identity’ (1973: 173). ‘Particularity’, as a concept, is itself a general term; it is easily

shown that the concepts ‘particularity’ and ‘generality’ symmetrically depend on one

another. But that does not show that the particulars themselves are symmetrically depen-

dent on concepts, because the concept of particularity is not the same as the particulars

themselves.

Correcting this, we notice that ‘the qualitative difference between subjective and

objective poles of cognition cannot be erased or forgotten just because both are

mediated’ (1973: 173). Though each is mediated by the other, the dimensions of inter-

dependence are fundamentally different. There are two philosophically substantive bases

for this claim. First, subjectivity is characterized by intentionality; if there were no

objects for our intentional acts, then our acts would lack content and a basic condition

of subjectivity would be unfulfilled. If a thinker has nothing to think about, then it does

not really have thoughts and so does not really count as a thinker in the first place. Sec-

ond, subjectivity is necessarily embodied, and even our bodies are ‘objects’ in the sense

of being part of the natural world, subject to time and causation. Though Adorno would

agree that the conditions for the intelligibility of objects lie in the categories and concepts

that we bring to bear on experience, he also recognizes that the existence of subjects

depends upon the existence of objects, not the other way around. This qualitative differ-

ence between the conceptual and mimetic poles of experience cannot be effaced just by

appealing to the mediation of each by the other.

To express this qualitative difference, concepts in the cognitive utopia cannot merely

subsume their objects. A true reconciliation of subject and object, reason and nature,

‘does not annex the alien with philosophical imperialism; rather it would have its happi-

ness in this: that the alien stays, in its permitted nearness, the distant and the different,

beyond its heterogeneity and beyond its own’ (1973: 191). I concur with Finke (2001)

in characterizing Adorno as calling for an ‘enlarged space of reasons’ (ibid.: 175), inso-

far as cognitive authority extends beyond conceptual norms to the sensuous particulars

themselves.22 Our cognition of the sensuous particularity and specificity of things

requires an unacknowledged somatic or mimetic moment. Adorno’s cognitive utopia

does not commit the Myth of the Given – recalling that, for McDowell, the Myth just

is extending the space of reasons beyond the sphere of concepts – because the enlarge-

ment of the space of reasons to include the mimetic or somatic moment of cognition

results from reflection on cognition itself, and so is not merely Given.

III Adorno’s historical-materialist reading of Kant

Having explicated Adorno’s cognitive utopia as a quartum quid – neither coherentism

nor the Myth of the Given nor the perfectly symmetrical relation of Hegelian equipoise –

I now turn to the claim that the cognitive utopia is only an ideal for us because it has not

been realized. Recall that McDowell thinks that the equipoise is available as an intellec-

tual position once we have overcome the oscillation and fulfilled the Deduction. Adorno,




by contrast, thinks that the cognitive utopia must be characterized ‘negatively’, as an

absence, because the necessary conditions for its actualization are prevented by ‘the

domination of nature’. Though much has been written about the domination of nature,

I shall focus on this problematic notion through Adorno’s reading of Kant. Above (sec-

tion I) I showed that McDowell follows Hegel in accusing Kant of subjectivism due to

the unknowability of the things in themselves. Adorno reinterprets Kant’s thesis to show

how the domination of nature obstructs the actualization of the cognitive utopia. The

equipoise is an abstract solution to a theoretical problem – the problem of the transcen-

dental anxiety. The cognitive utopia is a concrete solution to a practical problem – the

problem of the domination of nature, including human nature.

For Adorno, Kant’s subjectivism shows why true reconciliation between reason and

nature, the conceptual and the mimetic, is elusive under existing socio-political condi-

tions. To rescue this truth, Adorno provides a naturalistic meta-critique of what he calls

Kant’s ‘doctrine of the block’: that we cannot know what things in themselves are (or are

like), despite the constraints on how we can and must conceive of them. On Adorno’s

reading, Kant expresses truths that he cannot articulate, and the truth-content of transcen-

dental idealism must be liberated from its own framework. As Adorno puts the doctrine

of the block, ‘our world, the world of experience, really has become a world familiar

to us; the world in which we live has ceased to be ruled by mysterious, unexplained

powers . . . we encounter nothing that is incompatible with our own rationality’ (Adorno,

2001: 110). More emphatically:

. . . [t]he demystification or disenchantment of the world . . . is identical with our conscious-

ness of being locked out, of a darkness in which we are enclosed . . . the more the world in

which we live, the world of experience, is commensurate with us, the less commensurate,

the more obscure and the more threatening the Absolute, of which we know that this world

of experience is only a detail, becomes . . . the more secure we are in our own world, the

more securely we have organized our own lives, then the greater the uncertainty in which

we find ourselves in our relations with the Absolute. (2001: 111)

While Kant says this, there is more to what Kant says than what he says, because ‘in their

objective form theories of cognition are a kind of reflex of the labor process’ insofar as

‘when consciousness reflects upon itself, it necessarily arrives at a concept of rationality

that corresponds to the rationality of the labor process’ (2001: 172). Though Adorno

endorses Hegel’s criticism of the doctrine of the block, he interprets Hegel’s categories

as forms of social labor. Consequently, Adorno maintains that what Kant articulates as

the impossibility of noumenal knowledge also expresses a specific moment within the

historical development of modernity: the moment of realization that nature-for-us is

nature-as-dominated.

Yet Adorno does not regard transcendental idealism as merely a pathology of mod-

ernity; Adorno’s Kant recognizes that ‘science does not necessarily represent the last

word about nature’ (2001: 175) and that ‘the object of nature that we define with our

categories is not actually nature itself’ (ibid.: 175–6), because ‘our knowledge of nature

is really so preformed by the demand that we dominate nature (something accomplished

by the chief method of finding out about nature, namely the scientific experiment) that

Sachs 261



we end up understanding only those aspects of nature that we can control’ (ibid.: 176).

The doctrine of the block, suitably reinterpreted, means that scientific knowledge

requires mutilating objects to fit them into our conceptual scheme, and that since

nature-for-us is nature-as-dominated, then nature-in-itself is other than nature-as-

dominated. This mutilation prevents scientific reason from being aware of, hence unable

to articulate, what it expresses; conversely, a liberated conception of nature would

require the rational critique of reason (and vice versa).

Instead of regarding Kant’s failure to achieve equipoise as demonstrating the need to

abandon non-conceptualism, Adorno sees Kant’s failure to achieve the cognitive utopia

as expressing the domination of nature. Yet what prevented Kant from achieving the cog-

nitive utopia also prevents us from doing so. Though we can better understand what gen-

uine reconciliation of thought and being would require, the cognitive utopia is not merely

a theoretical standpoint at which cognitive semantics comes to rest, but also a practical

condition in which nature (including, importantly, the drives and affects of our ‘inner

nature’) is no longer subjected to systematic violence and control.

We can now understand better why Adorno only indicates the cognitive utopia nega-

tively and says nothing of how it might be actualized. In criticizing the ideology of late-

capitalism, Adorno indicates that the rational, universal, subjective and conceptual

dimension of experience must be reconciled with the affective, particular, objective and

mimetic dimension – and ‘the cognitive utopia’ indicates this reconciled state. But as a

Hegelian-Marxian cultural critic, Adorno maintains that actual reconciliation of reason

and nature would require fundamental transformations in currently existing institu-

tions.23 Under existing conditions, the reconciliation (like the socialist revolution) can-

not be actualized, and so cannot be fully described either. In our historical moment, we

simply cannot know what the reconciliation of reason and nature would look like in con-

crete actuality; any positive description of the cognitive utopia, using the very language

itself shaped by the domination of nature, would therefore be itself a refusal or failure to

acknowledge our historical situation. From Adorno’s standpoint, then, McDowell’s

merely theoretical reconciliation of reason and nature – rehabilitating equipoise as the

actualization of the capacities of a rational animal – is itself, ironically, ideology.24

IV ‘Reconciling’ Adorno and McDowell

Thus far I have explicated McDowell’s argument for Hegelian equipoise to avoid the

oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism, Adorno’s cognitive utopia

as a quartum quid vis-a-vis McDowell, and how the domination of nature explains the

disenchantment of nature. McDowell can be brought into conversation with Adorno

because McDowell problematizes philosophy of mind and epistemology within an

account of modernity, with a sharp eye on the role played by the disenchanted conception

of nature and the transcendental anxiety that it engendered. In contrast to Adorno, it is

clear that disenchantment without domination, historicism without materialism, is

half-hearted at best. I will now turn to three recent attempts to articulate the similarities

and differences between McDowell and Adorno, before concluding the present

assessment.




In his ‘Re-enchanting Nature’ (2002), Bernstein notes a deep convergence between

McDowell and Adorno, and contends that the differences count for less than the simila-

rities between their philosophical projects:

The transcendental separation of nature from the space of reasons, the natural from the nor-

mative, is the disenchantment of nature, nature thus becoming a thing wholly apart from

human activity and meaningfulness; significant activity and meaning, including knowing,

cannot survive the separation, which is precisely what the transcendental anxiety feels and

expresses. Assume that the transcendental anxiety is not narrowly epistemological but also

expresses the pervasive modern anxiety about the possibility of meaningfulness in general,

about whether a wholly secular form of life can be rationally coherent and affectively satis-

fying; then Adorno’s position converges with McDowell’s. (2002: 217–18)

In response, McDowell distances himself from Bernstein’s convergence between his

position and Adorno’s by insisting on a distinction between the activity of professional

philosophers and the task of societal transformation:

It would surely be absurd to suggest that unmasking a scientistic conception of the natural as

a prejudice, at least to the satisfaction of some people, is not a sensible project until, say,

capitalism has been overthrown . . . No doubt loosening the cultural grip of that conception

of the natural in a general way (as opposed to persuading occasional intellectuals that they

need not swim with the currents of their time) and undoing all its deleterious effects on mod-

ern life (as opposed to showing why a certain sort of activity is not an obligation for philo-

sophers) would require social change, and presumably something along these lines is

Adorno’s point. But my purposes do not require such ambitions. (McDowell, 2002: 298)

In short, McDowell contends that the reconciliation between reason and nature, as he

understands it, is wholly independent of the critique of the capitalist mode of production

developed by the Frankfurt School in general and by Adorno in particular.25

In contrast with Bernstein, Short (2007) and Foster (2007) argue that ‘reconciliation’

between Adorno and McDowell leaves out far too much of what is central to Adorno’s

vision of experience and of language. Short construes McDowell as concerned with ‘self-

contained epistemological problems’ (2007: 198) in contrast to Adorno’s interpretation

of ‘epistemology, and indeed philosophy in general, as a text symptomatic of deeply

social and historical ills’ (ibid.). Similarly, Foster (2007) argues that McDowell is vul-

nerable to criticisms similar to those Adorno leveled against Husserl and Bergson. Hus-

serl and Bergson each made an ‘outbreak attempt’: an attempt to side-step constitutive

subjectivity. All outbreak attempts are doomed to failure because ‘the attempt to

describe what is outside of causal-mechanical thinking with classificatory concepts will

end up with the empty husk of the concept in its possession, not the richness of the non-

conceptual’ (ibid.: 94). If the domination of nature affects the very concepts with which

we think, then any positive description of non-dominated nature will itself be ‘contami-

nated’ by those concepts.

Foster regards McDowell as a ‘contemporary break-out attempt’, although McDowell

has sufficient historical consciousness to trace ‘the philosophical problems surrounding

Sachs 263



the relation of mind and world to the growth to prominence of a certain natural-scientific

way of understanding the world’ and call for ‘a re-enchantment of nature that would situ-

ate subjective capacities as an outgrowth of the natural world’ (2007: 167). But Foster

ultimately regards McDowell’s project as yet ‘another failed outbreak attempt from the

confines of the constituting subject’ (ibid.: 168) because he neither grounds the disen-

chantment of the world in material practices of the domination of nature nor reflects

on how the domination of nature shapes the very concepts we use to examine it. McDo-

well’s diagnosis of the disenchantment of nature is historical, but not historical-material;

he does not link disenchantment to domination, as Adorno does, nor does McDowell

examine how the social practices that sustain the domination of nature affect the cogni-

tive semantics through which he diagnoses it.

How far we can go in ‘reconciling’ Adorno and McDowell depends, then, on the fol-

lowing: is McDowell’s focus narrowly epistemological, as Bernstein and Short claim?

And what could motivate the transition from McDowell’s concerns to Adorno’s con-

cerns? As I see it, the difficulty with Bernstein’s argument is this: ‘Assume that the trans-

cendental anxiety is not narrowly epistemological but also expresses the pervasive

modern anxiety about the possibility of meaningfulness in general’ (Bernstein, 2002:

217–18; emphases added). There are two problems with how Bernstein motivates the

transition from McDowell to Adorno: first, that the transcendental anxiety is ‘narrowly

epistemological’ to begin with; second, that the transition from the epistemological to

the cultural-political dimension of that anxiety is an ‘assumption’.

First, McDowell correctly refuses to classify his concern as ‘narrowly epistemologi-

cal’. A merely epistemological theory, in McDowell’s view, focuses on maximally suc-

cessful cognition – when we successfully grasp how things are. But he is much more

interested in what I have been calling cognitive semantics: elucidating the conditions

of possibility of empirical content per se – that our judgments even so much as seem

to be about what is thus and so. In describing the very possibility of empirical content,

McDowell’s concern is not epistemological; he is engaged in a cognitive semantics that

explicates the conditions of possibility for empirical content and in a historical-

therapeutic dissolution of the dualism of reason and nature that has structured modern

thought in light of the disenchantment of nature and made empirical content seem unin-

telligible. But disenchantment without domination, historicism without materialism, is

half-hearted at best. It is that half-heartedness that generates the difference between

McDowell’s abstract but specified reconciliation (‘equipoise’) and Adorno’s concrete

but unspecifiable reconciliation (‘the cognitive utopia’).

Second, the transition from the cognitive-semantic to cultural-political sense of the

transcendental anxiety is not merely assumed. Though there is a real difference between

McDowell and Adorno on the scope of philosophical critique, it can be grounded pre-

cisely in their different receptions of Hegel. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel calls the

reader’s attention to the difference in the type of investigation to be pursued when we

must reflect on the nature of ‘spirit’:

Spirit is the ethical life of a nation in so far as it is the immediate truth – the individual that is

a world. It must advance to the consciousness of what it is immediately, must leave behind

the beauty of ethical life, and by passing through a series of shapes attain to a knowledge of




itself. These shapes, however, are distinguished from the previous ones by the fact that they

are real Spirits, actualities in the strict meaning of the word, and instead of being shapes

merely of consciousness, are shapes of a world. (Hegel, 1997: 265/PhS § 441)

The contrast between ‘shapes of consciousness’ and ‘shapes of a world’ constitutes the

real fault-line between McDowell and Adorno, because it marks the difference between a

transcendental, cognitive-semantic inquiry into the grounds of the intelligibility of our

conceptual frameworks and a historical-material inquiry that encompasses the political

and economic contexts within which conceptual frameworks arise, hold sway and

dissipate.26

Put otherwise: McDowell, in his concern with shapes of consciousness, notices that

conceptual frameworks are intrinsically social and historical phenomena, but only in a

generic sense. Adorno, by contrast, notices that categories such as ‘society’ and ‘history’

need to be made concrete by paying scrupulous attention to the actual ways in which

human beings organize and coordinate their activities – that is, to the details of our polit-

ical and economic lives. McDowell replaces an inadequate cognitive semantics (that of

Kant) with a more adequate one (that of Hegel); Adorno follows through on Hegel’s own

trajectory past cognitive semantics and into the material praxis of culture, politics

and economics – that is, into critical theory. For this reason, Adorno can explain what

McDowell merely notices: how the disenchanted conception of nature became part of

what one must accept in order to count as an educated person.

V Variations on Hegelian themes

To return to McDowell’s response to Bernstein: why should criticizing how the transcen-

dental anxiety of modernity obstructs a correct cognitive semantics depend on criticizing

how advanced capitalist societies promote the domination of nature? The answer is, if

one does not do so, then one is not following through all the way on Hegel’s critique

of Kant, and so one’s project is undermined on the very basis on which it is constructed.

Whereas McDowell superbly criticizes how our conception of empirical content is dis-

torted by the ideology of disenchanted nature, Adorno criticizes the material underpin-

nings of that ideology in our practice of the domination of nature. McDowell can specify

the envisioned reconciliation of nature and reason precisely because he is concerned with

conceptions, which Adorno would regard as abstractions from concrete practices. By

contrast, since Adorno is concerned with the possibility of a concrete reconciliation

between reason and nature, such a reconciliation would require substantial transforma-

tions in how we actually comport ourselves towards nature – indeed, transformations that

would probably require transcending the limits of capitalism.

In conclusion: McDowell’s vulnerability to an Adornian criticism turns on whether

philosophical conceptions can be neatly separated from politics and culture generally.

If they can be separated (even if not ‘neatly’), then perhaps there is no need to carry

through the turn from disenchantment – which is a matter of having the wrong concep-

tions – to domination – which is a matter of having the wrong social practices. But I sub-

mit that such a separation, though constitutive of the self-conception of analytic

philosophy, is antithetical to the spirit of Hegel.27 Rather, we should see domination

Sachs 265



as logically prior to disenchantment, because we can explain disenchantment in terms of

domination: disenchanted nature is how nature is conceptualized due to material prac-

tices of domination. Adorno envisions the reconciliation of nature and reason as a con-

crete reconciliation that requires fundamental social transformation, rather than, as in

McDowell, an abstract reconciliation that involves only an alternation in our concep-

tions. The contrast between Adorno and McDowell reveals a major blind-spot yet

remaining in the Hegel revival currently under way among disciplinized philosophers

in the analytic tradition, in contrast to that interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary theore-

tical activity of which Adorno was such a remarkable exemplar.

Notes

I would like to thank Steve Levine and Brian O’Connor for comments on previous drafts of this

article.

1. For cognitive semantics in Kant, see Hanna (2001: esp. 16–22); for cognitive semantics in

Hegel, see Westphal (2011).

2. This formulation diverges from the deVries and Triplett formulation because of the shift from

epistemology to cognitive semantics. McDowell undertakes cognitive semantics from within

‘the standpoint of experience’ (1996: 41); McDowell does not think that positing non-

conceptual content in a theory of the sub-personal cognitive machinery would commit the

Myth; see McDowell (2009b).

3. Perceptual experience is passive as opposed to active, in McDowell’s vocabulary, because he

follows Kant in thinking of ‘activity’ in terms of freedom. I can freely endorse or withhold

assent from judgments, but I cannot freely endorse or withhold assent from perceptual epi-

sodes – if what I see is a salt-shaker on the table, then I cannot not see that there is a salt-

shaker on the table. My concepts of ‘salt-shaker’ and ‘table’ are passively actualized in how

my sensory consciousness is shaped by the objects experienced.

4. The contrast between (passive) actualizations and (active) exercises is central to McDowell’s

contrast between experience and thought; see McDowell (2009c: 12).

5. There is an uneasy relation between McDowell’s direct realism and his Hegelianism; see Stern

(1999) and Haddock (2008). For McDowell’s relation to Hegel, see Sedgwick (1997), Stern

(1999), J. M. Bernstein (2002), Houlgate (2008) and Westphal (2008). I agree with Houlgate

that ‘for McDowell, the world exercises authority over thought through perceptual experience.

For Hegel, by contrast, the world exercises authority over our perceptual experience through

thought. Thought is the authority that ensures our perceptual experience is of the world, not the

other way around’ (2008: 104). I argue here that McDowell is closer to Adorno than to Hegel.

Adorno shows how perceptual experiences of specific kinds (e.g. of works of art) can disclose

the lack of reconciliation between thought and the world, and in that sense, the world exercises

authority over thought through perceptual experience.

6. Similarly, he now writes that ‘intuitions immediately reveal things to be as they would be

claimed to be in claims that would be no more than a discursive exploitation of some of the

content of the intuitions’ (2009f: 267).

7. Cf. Sedgwick (1997): ‘Hegel in other words agrees with Kant that experience requires the

cooperation of receptivity and spontaneity, but rejects what he believes is a further assumption




Kant associates with our discursivity: namely, that the respective contributions of the two

faculties can be isolated’ (ibid.: 33).

8. In Mind and World, McDowell identifies this kind of intelligibility as ‘the realm of law’, in

which explanations consist of uncovering the laws or law-like regularities that describe some

range of physical phenomena. Since then McDowell concedes that biology is not nomological

as physics or chemistry are; see his response to Macdonald (McDowell, 2006). In light of that

concession, it is not clear what ‘natural-scientific intelligibility’ means.

9. Gaskin (2006) prefers ‘enculturation’ over ‘acculturation’ because the latter suggests the

acquisition of a second culture by someone who is already at home in his or her native culture,

whereas the former is the acquisition of a native culture to begin with.

10. Various objections have been raised that McDowell’s bifurcation of nature into ‘the realm of law’

and ‘the space of reasons’ is too restrictive; see esp. Lovibond (2008) and Macdonald (2006).

11. See Bilgrami (2010) for a concise and accurate summary of this process.

12. Stone (2006) characterizes the ‘domination of nature’ (ibid.: 233) as thwarting the potentiality of

living things and their non-living environments (ibid.). On her view, ‘disenchantment occurs in

the service of domination’ (ibid.: 241), so disenchantment is incoherent as a self-standing pro-

cess. Negative Dialectics proposes ‘an alternative, socially critical kind of re-enchantment

which neither conceals nor perpetuates modernity’s domination of nature’ (ibid.: 243).

13. It is not obvious or uncontroversial how ‘Hegelian’ Adorno is. Hammer notes that ‘while

Lukacs provides Adorno with most of the basic terms of his social analysis, it is ultimately

Benjamin who inspires the construction of his ‘‘critical’’ or ‘‘negative-dialectical’’ response

to this analysis’ (Hammer, 2005: 37). In my view, Adorno is Hegelian by suturing together

Lukacs’ social diagnoses (which are methodologically more neo-Kantian than Hegelian) with

Benjamin’s messianic materialism (which is indebted to Bloch’s anti-Hegelian messianism).

14. Twenty years after Against Epistemology, Adorno makes a similar point:

In general, Hegel’s approach stands in oblique relationship to the program of unmediated

acceptance of the so-called given as a firm basis for knowledge. Since Hegel’s day that pro-

gram has come almost to be taken for granted, and by no means merely in positivism but

also in authentic opponents of positivism like Bergson and Husserl. (Adorno, 1994: 55)

Adorno’s version of the critique of the Myth of the Given applies to Bergson and Husserl no

less than Sellars’ version does to Carnap and C. I. Lewis.

15. This is not to say that the Holocaust was caused by an inadequate cognitive semantics, but

rather that the cultural-political conditions that led to the Holocaust also resulted in an inad-

equate cognitive semantics. For an excellent defense of Adorno’s link between the Enlighten-

ment and the Holocaust, see Bernstein (2001).

16. For Adorno’s rejection of the given, see O’Connor, esp. ‘The given is never given in final

form: thought alone determines what the given comprises’: 2004: 99).

17. Adorno accepts that the contributions of receptivity and spontaneity cannot be ‘factorized’:

‘the sensory and the categorical are not separate ‘‘layers’’’ (Adorno, 1994: 58).

18. As Hammer (2000) nicely puts it:

. . . the epistemological thrust of it [mimesis] is to reconceptualize the Kantian notion of

intuition in terms of an imitative disposition of a self towards the object . . . the subject

Sachs 267



relates non-violently to the object by likening itself to it, by exploiting what Adorno

calls the affinities between its own concepts and that for which they stand. (2000: 84)

19. Consider, for example, how a work of art is not fully captured by any particular description of

it. Adorno would say that all discursively structured experience of objects is essentially the

same as our discursively structured experience of works of art. For the role of ‘reflective judg-

ment’ in Adorno’s theory of cognition, see Bernstein (2001).

20. I admit to interpreting Adorno by means of Will’s transcendental argument for realism (1997),

although Will does not emphasize, as Adorno does, affective states, such as guilt, horror and

awe.

21. In showing how Adorno calls into question both Brandom and McDowell, Bowie (2009) notes

that ‘the line between sentience and sapience, nature and reason, cannot be drawn in any defi-

nite way if one accepts that the ‘‘mimetic’’ moment is vital to the way in which we engage

with the world and the world engages us’ (2009: 15).

22. Finke (2001) thinks that both Adorno and McDowell hold that ‘the point is to extend the con-

ception of the space of reasons to incorporate an extra-conceptual dimension, constituting the

normative framework for the experience of objects in the ‘‘weighty sense’’’ (ibid.: 175;

original emphasis) and that ‘one must acknowledge not only non-inferential constraints upon

thought but also that such constraints can be integrated with the space of reasons’ (ibid.: 180).

However, he then says that, for both, ‘the presentation of particularity from within the con-

ceptual space is itself a requirement set by this conceptual space, in that the expressive role

of the aboutness of thought extends beyond the conceptual or inferential realm in openness

to the world’ (ibid.: 183). This is incorrect as a reading of McDowell – McDowell extends the

conceptual (and so the rational) to include particulars (non-discursive, intuitional form),

whereas Adorno extends the rational (but not the conceptual) to include particulars (the

non-conceptual, somatic affinity).

23. Central to this question of the reconciliation of reason and nature, and the role of philosophy

with regard to that reconciliation, is Adorno’s notion of ‘metaphysical experience’; see Foster

(2007) and Taggart (2009).

24. Ironically, because McDowell took himself to be diagnosing the ideology of scientism: ‘The

problem posed by the contrast between the space of reasons and the realm of law, in the con-

text of a naturalism that conceives nature as the realm of law, is not ontological but ideologi-

cal’ (McDowell, 1996: 78, n. 8). Cf. Hammer (2000):

. . . by representing absolute idealism as a universally ‘true’ theory, McDowell’s posi-

tion inevitably becomes ideological: it falsely sustains the impression that thought does

not, skeptically, impose its own forms upon the object . . . By defending Kant’s distinc-

tion between appearance and the thing in itself (but without metaphysically hypostatiz-

ing it), Adorno . . . broaches the idea that subjective idealism may indeed offer a more

‘correct’ representation of our actual epistemic practices than absolute idealism. (2000:

86)

Along similar lines, Testa (2007) concludes that:

. . . rational criticism ought to be dialectical criticism. This is the aspect of criticity that

is underdetermined in McDowell. And this is not only because he does not explicitly




develop a notion of dialectic, even as he makes use of intrinsically dialectical analysis.

The main reason is that his appropriation of dialectical motifs drops their element of

negativity. The unboundedness of the concept, if sundered from the negativity of

thought, risks being resolved in the pacifying version of a renunciatory quietism, satis-

fied with its internal reconciliation. (2007: 491; original emphasis)

25. Importantly, he acknowledges the affinity between his cognitive semantics and Adorno’s:

‘What annoys Rorty is the centrality to my thinking of the very thing Bernstein thinks I am

not alert to – my insistence that experience mediates an authority objects themselves have over

empirical thought’ (McDowell, 2002: 305, n. 28).

26. On Pinkard’s (2008) reading, a ‘shape of consciousness’ ‘involves the way in which an indi-

vidual is conscious of the natural world around him, how he represents that world to himself,

how he represents himself to himself and to others and how he represents others to himself’

(ibid.: 112) whereas a ‘shape of spirit’ is ‘composed of the common attunements in our prac-

tices and our use of language which, although sometimes explicit, more often than not func-

tion as tacit knowledge . . . a shape of spirit forms the attunements in terms of which those

distinctions between subject and object are drawn in the first place’ (ibid.: 113).

27. McDowell’s tacit endorsement of this separation is one of the points at which he leans heavily

towards the other philosophical deity in his pantheon, Wittgenstein.

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