Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 09:48:11 -0400
From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca>
Subject: Re: BHA: Are we hard on Hegel, or what?


Hi Phil, Mervyn, everybody,

I'll respond to Phil's post and then to Mervyn's, but put them both in this one post, since it's all the same topic.  

Phil, you wrote:

> > Now to Adorno this alienation derives from the overconfidence and
> > >complacency of reason which never seems to be adequate to the richness of
> > >experience.  To Adorno, Hegel is implicated in this problem.

To which I responded: 

> > Yes, I think this is right (though it's not *only* reason that is
> > involved).


You then asked:

>Can you give me an example of something else that you think is involved?


I think Adorno would say that alienation is also rooted in social relationships such as class and in the way that we related to the natural world.  It's true though that it is reason -- and at the heart of it abstraction and classification -- that seems to be the ultimate, or at least the most intractable, source.


>It's all in Adorno's THREE STUDIES ON HEGEL, which is short and pretty
>sweet.


I have that, but had a hard time with it.  I will look at it again, though, on your recommendation.  The main reason why I'm not in a position to assess Adorno's reading of Hegel, though, is because I have not read Hegel.  Adorno-wise, what I'm most familiar with is *Negative Dialectics*, *Dialectic of Enlightenment* (with Horkheimer), "Subject and Object" and *Lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason*. 


>it seems to me that our
> > guys reach kind of an impasse here.  As I understand him, Adorno
> > will say that this claim in Hegel's hands is the crux of what he,
> > Adorno, calls the myth of constitutive subjectivity.
>
>I don't actually recall Adorno using the expression "constitutive
>subjectivity" but you may be right.  


On this one tiny point, at least, I *am* (well, almost: it seems it's "fallacy," not "myth").  One statement of it that really struck me is: "To use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity - this is what the author felt to be his task ever since he came to trust his own mental impulses."  It's from p. XX of Negative Dialectics in the Continuum, 1992 edition.  It was actually Martin Jay, who cites it in his short book about Adorno, who drew my attention to it.

I wrote:

   This is why
> > Adorno prefers Kant in certain ways -- because in Kant there is
> > at least the recognition that reason comes up against objective
> > limits.
>
>But you are forgetting that Kant and Hegel use "reason" in completely
>different senses.  As you say, for Kant reason is a purely subjective
>phenomenon, produced by the autonomous individual human ego (at least that
>is my understanding of Kant).  For Hegel, on the contrary, reason is the
>motor force of history and as such is basically objective, though with
>subjective elements.


Hmm.  A certain amount does depend on what we take the various terms to mean.  In this vein, I'm not completely sure what *you* mean by "autonomous individual ego," in relation to Kant's conception of reason.  I would say that Kant regards reason (as he conceives it) as a condition of possibility of individual empirical subjects, rather than as something that is produced by analytically prior subjects.  But still, I would agree with the basic point, which, as I understand you, is that Kant is not an objective idealist, or even a pantheist about reason, if I can put it that way.  For Hegel, as you say, reason is an objective feature of the world, albeit one that is subjectively mediated.

You say that the Reason that Hegel posits as objective "enables us - for the first time in history - to be conscious of our place in the universe."  It sounds as though you see reason in Hegel's hands functioning as a kind of realist backdrop, against which we can see that the subjectivity of the individual is not all.  Is this right?  Or, to put it differently, in your reading of Hegel, reason itself is the non-identical "object" which, if acknowledged, keeps in check an otherwise aggrandizing subjectivity.

I think that Adorno's response would be to say that construing reason as really and truly being objective tells us only that one has reified it.  Taking reason in a reified form to be co-extensive with reality is no less problematic than taking reason construed as a purely subjective faculty to be co-extensive with reality.  It is still a positing of identity between reason and reality.  The advantage of Kant on this point, again, in Adorno's view, is that Kant does *not* take reason to be co-extensive with reality. [My own argument with Adorno here has to do with what he chooses to take from Kant in order to make this point.  I think that he goes about it in the exactly wrong way.  But more on this another time ... ]   Adorno, I think (and me for sure), would say that what we need, ontologically, to counter "the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity" is/are *object(s)*, not objectified reason.  How exactly to do this - to defend "the primacy of the object," as Adorno puts it - is not at all clear, for Adorno, but it is *the* task for a materialist metaphysician.          
     

   And it is not just a question of metaphysics; it relates
> > to the qualifications of Hegel's politics that you introduce.
> > That is, Adorno thinks that it's not just that Hegel happens
> > unfortunately to endorse the Prussian state.  He (along with
> > Marx) would say that an illusory freedom is (at best) [the "at
> > best" part is Adorno on his own] precisely what is expressed in
> > the idea that reason can be co-extensive with being.
>
>That would be true if reason was what Kant means by reason, but Hegel does
>not mean the same thing.


I don't follow you here.


> > In one sense, for Adorno it comes down to Hegel not being a
> > materialist.  It's interesting that this isn't a problem for you.
>
>Maybe it is a problem, but I'm not sure Adorno has found the right answer.
>I suppose for me the biggest problem in philosophy is subjective idealism.
>By that I mean the tendency for the individual human ego to assume that it
>is in a one-to-one correspondence with the whole of reality.  For me, this
>is Kant or Fichte.  Why Kant I hear you say?  Because he assumes that reason
>is located in the individual human ego.

I don't know a *thing* about Fichte, but I really disagree with you about Kant.  Kant is adamant that neither individual subjects nor reason as such are "in a one-to-one correspondence with the whole of reality," as you put it.  I mean, jeeze, even "freedom" escapes the net of reason in Kant!  

>Hegel could be seen as the first modern materialist because he
>is against building artificial walls between what is internal to our minds
>and what is external to them.

It sort of seems like you are pulled in a variety of different directions in your reading of Hegel.  On the one hand, you seem to see reason in Hegel's thought as providing something external with which to counter subjective idealism.  [Though for the purpose of "supplying us (humanity) with a categorial system which is powerfully reflective of the real constitution of the universe, in the sense that it enables us - for the first time in history - to be conscious of our place in the universe," to quote you again, I'm not sure why Aristotle, say, isn't just as good a candidate.  (Or even Plato, for that matter, whose "reason" is arguably even more objective than Hegel's.)]  Also you seem to want to reject the idea that in Hegel reason and reality are (at the time of Hegel's writing) one.  On the other hand, you say what you do just above.  

I think I'm confused about why it is Hegel who you would look to as the best counter to subjective idealism.  Why not Marx, even?  


 > But back to Adorno for a second.  Adorno also suggests that the
> > conception of reason that comes from Hegel is in some sense
> > necessarily totalitarian.  I'm assuming that you don't buy that
> > either!  I'm curious, though, how you think about that aspect of
> > his critique, if you have.

You wrote:

>Hegel's conception of reason is certainly an active and reflective
>conception of reason, as opposed to, for example, Heidegger's passive
>waiting for mysterious clearances.  But totalitarian?  I don't see how
>Hegel's conception of reason is implicated in the imposition of its will by
>one group on another.  Maybe you can explain a bit why you think this, Ruth?


Here I will try to respond to Mervyn, too, who wrote: 

"Does he? I thought Adorno linked totalitarianism with the instrumental 
reason of market society, not with reason as such. On the question of 
freedom and compulsion, according to Jarvis (185f), Adorno was heavily 
indebted to Hegel, and his critique was mainly directed, not against 
Hegel, but against Kant for suppressing 'a necessarily heteronomous 
moment in freedom'."

What I wrote was "Adorno suggests that the conception of reason that comes from Hegel is in some sense necessarily totalitarian."  I should probably amend this to say that for Adorno it's not as though that which is objectionable in Hegel's thought has its roots in Hegel's thought.  It's just that it reaches a one of a variety of different extremes in Hegel's thought.  There is, as Mervyn says, also just as sharp a critique of instrumental reason (I think that's more Horkheimer's term, but no matter; they are awfully close on this), which reaches an extreme in logical positivism.  And, as already noted, there is at bottom a claim that thought itself is necessarily compromised.  As I read Adorno, the critique of Hegel figures more prominently in his critique of scientific marxism and of the former Soviet Union, while the critique of instrumental reason figures more prominently in his critique of scientism period and of capitalism - and probably in his analysis of the holocaust.  This is not to say that there is any kind of neat demarcation.  Just that the critique of Hegel is extended through to the critique of certain strains of Marxist thought.  [In this regard it's kind of ironic, really, that Adorno is thought of as a Hegelian Marxist.]  

I don't think that Adorno's worries are exactly those of Isaiah Berlin, though perhaps there is some similarity.  As I understand Adorno's critique of Kant's treatment of freedom (and I admit that I don't know this as well; I haven't gotten through *Lectures on Morality* yet, which is one place where he sets it out clearly), the problem with Kant is that although his theory registers the fact that we are presently unfree (by relegating freedom to the neumenal realm, where it can be thought but not known or experienced empirically), it makes it seem as though freedom is *necessarily* beyond the reach of experience.  So Hegel helps with this (as does Durkheim, actually).  But if the problem with Kant is that Kant places freedom permanently outside of experience, the worry with Hegel is that nothing remains outside of the scope of reason.  Adorno thinks that both reality and our experience of reality are bigger, richer  ... and ultimately more than reason, even (and also precisely) reason conceived as expansively as Hegel conceives it.  In the works of Adorno that I'm familiar with, the connection to totalitarianism is mostly made in an impressionistic way, but the claim is that the kind of systematic incorporation of everything into the rubric of Reason (itself a closed system) is a deleterious political template, with demonstrated negative effects.  The critiques of Hegel and of logical positivism are very similar, of course, because both are forms of idealism.   

[All of this said, it is important to emphasize that even if Adorno wants to turn in an important way to aesthetic judgement as an alternative, he is also very clear that we cannot dispense with thought, with the capacity for naming and for abstraction.  [WARNING: painfully bad prose immediately ahead!] It is a double edged sword that we cannot help but wield.  The very use of the word "is" implicates us.]

I gotta end this now.  I hope it's clearer, at least, why I attributed to Adorno the position(s) that I did.  It's always so hard to stop once you get started on these exchanges ... I didn't really want to get into a long thing about Adorno, though -- more was curious about Phil's appropriation of Hegel.  Maybe others want to pipe in?

Warmly,
Ruth

    




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