Adorno,Hegel, and Dialectic

This article explores critical theory's relations to German idealism by clarifying how Adorno's thought relates to Hegel's. Adorno's apparently mixed responses to Hegel centre on the dialectic and actually form a coherent whole. In his Logic, Hegel outlines the dialectical process by which categories – fundamental forms of thought and reality – necessarily follow one another in three stages: abstraction, dialectic proper, and the speculative (famously simplified as ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’). Adorno's allegiance to Hegel's dialectic emerges when he traces the dialectical process whereby enlightenment reverts to myth and human domination over nature reverts into our domination by nature. However, Adorno criticizes Hegel's dialectic as the ultimate form of ‘identity thinking’, subsuming unique, material objects under universal concepts by using dialectical reason to expand those concepts to cover objects utterly. These two responses cohere because Adorno shares Hegel's view that dialectical contradictions require reconciliation, but differs from Hegel on the nature of reconciliation. For Hegel, reconciliation unites differences into a whole; for Adorno, reconciled differences co-exist as differences. Finally, against Habermas who holds that Adorno cannot consistently criticize the enlightenment practice of critique, I show that Adorno can do so consistently because of how he reshapes Hegelian dialectic.     

Nonidentity,Negative Experience and the Pre‐Reflective Cogito

This paper contributes to the current academic debate on the nature of embodied, intentional consciousness, specifically the attempt to inaugurate a rapprochement between phenomenological existentialism and critical theory. This is accomplished through a critical comparison of the concepts of negative experience and nonidentity in Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics and Jean‐Paul Sartre's early phenomenology. By comparing how each engages with Hegel, I suggest that Sartre offers a broad, anthropological account of negative experience and nonidentity helpful to critical theorists but that there remains a critical deficit which Adorno's more restricted—and political—sense of nonidentity remedies. Sartre's anthropological portrayal of ‘persistent negation’ worries Adorno but I suggest that it can be understood as a pragmatic presupposition for problem‐solving rather than as a transcendental condition of experience.     

The I and World history in Hegel

In this paper, I investigate the relations between the notion of the I and the conception of World history in Hegel’s philosophy. First, I address Hegel’s account of the I by reconstructing its phenomenological and logical development from consciousness to self-consciousness through recognition with the other and arguing that the project of the Philosophy of Right is normative, as it provides an account of the logical process of affirmation of the I as the normative source of the realm of objective spirit. I then argue for an account of World history as the self-conscious development and liberation of the I in time and objectivity, and I consider Hegel’s philosophy of history in light of the Philosophy of Right as the historical emergence of the I through the forms of objective spirit in history. Finally, I focus on two of the allegedly most problematic issues related to Hegel’s conception of World history: the nature and very possibility of an ‘intersubjective consciousness’ and the notion of ‘World spirit’. I conclude by outlining how the conception of World history, if reconstructed in light of Hegel’s conception of the I, can have previously unnoticed political implications.     

From Kant to Sade: a fragment of the history of philosophy in the Dialectic of Enlightenment

In this paper, I set out (1) to consider the extent to which Horkheimer and Adorno's account of the transition from Kant's philosophy to key features of the novels of the Marquis de Sade in the Second Excursus of their Dialectic of Enlightenment can be viewed as a fragment of the ‘history of philosophy’ and (2) to explain this account in a way that allows us to ask whether it succeeds in establishing a necessary connection between Kant's philosophy and Sade's novels. In connection with (2), a particular problem emerges. This problem concerns the role played by a non-instrumental form of reason in Horkheimer and Adorno's attempt to establish an essential connection between Kant's theoretical philosophy and Sade's novels, in which the practical implications of the theoretical employment of reason allegedly become explicit. It will be shown that, despite appearances to the contrary, an employment of reason of the relevant type is not identified by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason.     

Adorno on Kant,Freedom and Determinism

Abstract: In this paper I argue that Adorno's metacritique of freedom in Negative Dialectics and related texts remains fruitful today. I begin with some background on Adorno's conception of ‘metacritique’ and on Kant's conception of freedom, as I understand it. Next, I discuss Adorno's analysis of the experiential content of Kantian freedom, according to which Kant has reified the particular social experience of the early modern bourgeoisie in his conception of unconditioned freedom. Adorno argues against this conception of freedom and suggests that freedom is always conditioned by our embodiment and by our social and historical situation. Finally, I turn to Adorno's criticism of Kant's discussion of freedom and determinism in the Critique of Pure Reason and argue that while his philosophical argument against Kant fails, his metacritical argument remains suggestive. Scepticism about freedom arises when the standpoint of theoretical reason encroaches upon the standpoint of practical reason and assimilates persons to things.     

Between Causes and Reasons: Sellars,Hegel (and Lewis) on “Sensation”

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Sellars’ and Hegel’s treatment of ‘sensation’ – a notion that plays a central role in the reflections of both authors but which has garnered little scholarly attention. To disentangle the issues surrounding the notion and elaborate its role, function, and fate in their thought, I begin with a methodological question: what kind of philosophical argument leads Sellars and Hegel to introduce the concept of ‘sensation’ into their systems? Distinguishing between their two argumentative approaches, I maintain that Hegel offers what I broadly label a ‘transcendental’ argument for ‘sensation,’ which he presents in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit and in the corresponding Lectures, whereas Sellars introduces the notion of sensation for what I term empirically ‘explanatory’ reasons. Next, I closely analyze Hegel’s and Sellars’ theories of sensation to produce a textually supported and conceptually coherent reading of their views on the notion. To clarify my methodological distinction and its stakes in Hegel’s and Sellars’ I will reference Lewis’ notion of the given.     

The Artwork and the Promesse du Bonheur in Adorno

Adorno's saying that ‘art is the promise of happiness’ radiates into every corner of his work from his aesthetic theory to his critical theory of society. However, it is much misunderstood. This can be seen from the standard answer to the question: in virtue of what formal features do art works, according to Adorno, promise happiness? The standard answer to this question suggests that the aesthetic harmony occasioned by the organic wholeness of the form realized in the artwork contrasts with and throws into relief the antagonistic nature of society. The trouble is that this answer is flatly incompatible with Adorno's historicism and central components of his aesthetic modernism, including his critique of classicism, and his negativism. I propose a re‐interpretation of Adorno's thesis that art is the promise of happiness that overcomes these difficulties.     

Jenson,Hegel and the Spirit of Recognition

This article engages the pneumatology and account of divine freedom found in Robert Jenson's Systematic Theology. It raises a novel set of questions about Jenson's account of divine freedom, which bears on persistent questions regarding the nature of G.W.F. Hegel's influence upon Jenson. While most engagements with Jenson take for granted what it is to be ‘Hegelian’, this article foregrounds the diversity of contemporary Hegel interpretation. It argues that Jenson's account of divine freedom would profit from a stronger dose of Hegel's philosophy – specifically, Hegel's account of mutual recognition – provided that Hegel is interpreted along the lines of the non‐traditional school of Hegel interpretation. The article concludes with a brief constructive sketch of a Jensonian pneumatology conceived along these lines.     

Beyond Art and Beauty: In Search of the Object of Philosophical Aesthetics

This article deals with the ambigous situation of philosophical aesthetics, which now seems to have lost its proper object. Moreover, Arthur C. Danto has popularized talk of an end of art, in which he ties that end to the end of any aesthetic master narrative. Comparing modern and medieval approaches to art, this paper tries to reformulate the question of philosophical aesthetics, which has to be understood in a hermeneutical way. Taken in a heuristic manner 'art' and 'beauty' remain the principal aesthetic categories able to keep the understanding of what belongs to aesthetics open to different historical approaches.     

Nietzsche on Generosity and the Gift-Giving Virtue

Generosity and gift-giving are important themes in Nietzsche's philosophy. This essay focuses on Nietzsche's idea of the gift-giving virtue which is explicitly discussed at the end of Part One of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I begin with a critical discussion of this section, and then I consider three different interpretations. Finally, I look at some ways in which the idea of the ‘gift-giving virtue’ may be understood in terms of spiritual generosity, leading to ‘sovereignty’ as its ultimate goal. Throughout, there are important comparisons to be made between Nietzsche's account of generosity and the traditional viewpoint.     

Experiences,Seemings, and Perceptual Justification

Several philosophers have distinguished between three distinct mental states that play a role in visual recognition: experiences, propositional seemings, and beliefs. I clarify and offer some reasons for drawing this three-fold distinction, and I consider its epistemological implications. Some philosophers have held that propositional seemings always confer prima facie justification, regardless of a particular seeming's relation to experience. I add to criticisms of this view in the literature by arguing that it fails to solve a version of the ‘problem of the speckled hen’. A more promising view holds that propositional seemings confer justification only when appropriately related to experiences. I offer advice for developing such an account.     

Critique and resistance: Ethical,social‐theoretical,political? On Fabian Freyenhagen's Adorno's Practical Philosophy

Fabian Freyenhagen's impressive reconstruction of Adorno's ‘practical philosophy’ provides a convincing defence of the possibility of making normative claims about the social world we live in without justifying these claims in terms of the right, the good, or human nature. More specifically, and more controversially, Freyenhagen argues that the normative resources Adorno's critique relies on are provided by a negative Aristotelianism. In this paper, I argue that this approach underestimates the extent to which Adorno follows the model of immanent critique, I highlight the socio‐theoretical underpinnings of what Freyenhagen calls Adorno's ‘ethics of resistance’, and I discuss the risk of overstating the danger of co‐optation that collective political action faces.     

Competing Accounts of Progress: The Redemptive Purpose of Memory in J.B. Metz and Theodor Adorno

What unifies the accounts of history and progress presented by Adorno's Critical Theory and Metz's political theology? I show: (i) that both resist the ‘magic spell’ of an Enlightenment totality on whose strength the violent excesses of modernity have been built; (ii) that both accomplish this resistance by memory of victims or the ‘losers of history’; and (iii) that both hold out hope for the possibility of progress in time. However, the two accounts differ in important ways. These differences stem from: (i) the transference of historical subjectivity from homo emancipator to the God of Jesus’ passion; (ii) the role of the ‘eschatological proviso’ in guaranteeing theological futuricity; and (iii) the fullness of Metz's eschatological justice as compared to Adorno's conception of progress as the mere ‘avoidance of catastrophe’. This project brings the work of one of the most influential social critics of the twentieth century into dialogue with that of a politically engaged theologian of the same historical‐cultural context. In doing so, I hope to suggest the theological richness of Metz's approach but also the significant contributions of dialectical criticism to the practice of theology in the modern era.     

Hegel,the Trinity,and the ‘I’

The main goal of this paper is to argue the relevance of Hegel’s notion of the Trinity with respect to two aspects of Hegel’s idealism: the overcoming of subjectivism and his conception of the ‘I’. I contend that these two aspects are interconnected and that the Trinity is important to Hegel’s strategy for addressing these questions. I first address the problem of subjectivism by considering Hegel’s thought against the background of modern philosophy. I argue that the recognitive structure of Hegel’s idealism led him to give the Trinity a decisive role in his philosophical account. Next, I discuss the Trinity by analysing the three divine persons. This analysis paves the way for the conclusion, where I argue that the Trinity represents a model for re-thinking the ‘I’ in a way that overcomes a ‘naïve realist’ and a ‘subjective’ account of the self. I suggest that Hegel’s absolute idealism can be conceived as an approach to the ‘I’ that considers the role of acts of mutual recognition for the genesis of self-conscious thought, and that the Trinity is the Darstellung of the relational and recognitive structure of the ‘I’.     

Reflections from a damaged discipline: Adorno,religious radio,and the critique of historical reason

The Psychological Techniques of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses (Adorno, 2000) echoes Adorno's analogous critique of the culture industry by detecting an ideological effect, prior to any given content, intrinsic to the form of radio religion. Notwithstanding the text's narrowness, I argue that Adorno's analysis of Thomas' ‘fait accompli technique’—presenting claims as previously established certainties—was both typical of his work and insightful for issues in cultural criticism. First, it refused subjectivist reductions of sociological effects to false consciousness. Second, it warned that historicism runs the risk of repeating the fait accompli when it treats what exists empirically as the only possible reality, or when it treats empirical givens as representatives of a future redemption. I argue that Adorno's dismissal of religious radio was consistent with his critique of positivism, and that the Thomas study models an historicist methodology that refuses, against its own logic, to reduce otherness to its own categories.     

Comments on Fabian Freyenhagen,Adorno's Practical Philosophy

In this paper, I offer some critical comments on Fabian Freyenhagen's book, Adorno's Practical Philosophy. Although I am largely in agreement with many of his arguments about the value of Adorno's negativism for contemporary critical theory, I raise a few critical questions that are grouped around the following three headings: immanent critique, objectivism, and skepticism. My primary aim in pursuing these questions is not to haggle over fine points of Adorno interpretation but rather to consider how these three issues bear systematically on the vision for critical theory that Freyenhagen has put forward.     

Hegel on Kant's Analytic–Synthetic Distinction

In this paper, I argue, first, that Hegel defended a version of the analytic/synthetic distinction—that, indeed, his version of the distinction deserves to be called Kantian. For both Kant and Hegel, the analytic/synthetic distinction can be explained in terms of the discursive character of cognition: insofar as our cognition is discursive, its most basic form can be articulated in terms of a genus/species tree. The structure of that tree elucidates the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. Second, I argue that Hegel has an interesting and so far unexplored argument for the analytic/synthetic distinction: Hegel argues that the systematic relationship between concepts expressed in a genus/species tree can only be expressed through synthetic judgments. Third and finally, I explore some of the implications that the arguments in the first two parts of the essay have for understanding the way in which Hegel differs from Kant. I argue that Hegel accepts Kant's point that discursive cognition cannot be used to cognize the absolute. However, Hegel thinks that we can, nevertheless, cognize the absolute. I explore the character of this non‐discursive cognition and argue that we can understand Hegel's glosses on this form of cognition—as simultaneously analytic and synthetic and as having a circular structure—through contrasting it with his account of discursive cognition. As a consequence, I argue that we must give up on attempts to understand ‘the dialectical method’ and ‘speculative cognition’ on the model of discursive cognition.     

Realizing the Good: Hegel's Critique of Kantian Morality

Although the best‐known Hegelian objection against Kant's moral philosophy is the charge that the categorical imperative is an ‘empty formalism’, Hegel's criticisms also include what we might call the realizability objection. Tentatively stated, the realizability objection says that within the sphere of Kantian morality, the good remains an unrealizable ‘ought’ – in other words, the Kantian moral ‘ought’ can never become an ‘is’. In this paper, I attempt to come to grips with this objection in two steps. In the first section of the paper, I provide an initial reading of the objection, according to which Hegel agrees with Kant's formulation of the realizability problem but disagrees with the specific Kantian solution, namely, with the Kantian idea of the highest good and the doctrine of the postulates. In the second section, I go on to argue that this reading is potentially too superficial and offer a more far‐reaching interpretation whereby Hegel is ultimately targeting fundamental distinctions (between, for instance, reason and sensibility) of Kant's moral theory. I end by employing these more far‐reaching results of Hegel's objection to sketch some features of Hegel's alternative ethical view.     

THINKING THROUGH KIERKEGAARD'S ANTI-CLIMACUS: ART, IMAGINATION, AND IMITATION

What place do imagination and art have in Christian existence? This paper examines this question through the writings of Kierkegaard's pseudonym Anti‐Climacus: The Sickness Unto Death and Practice in Christianity. I focus on the latter work in particular because it best illustrates the importance of imagination in following after (Efterfølgelse) Christ in imitation, which Anti‐Climacus presents as the proper task of faithful Christian existence. After outlining both his critique and his affirmation of the imagination, I then consider what role the notion of ‘Christian art’ might play in his account of the imitation of Christ. Anti‐Climacus gives a severe critique of Christian art, insofar as it disposes the viewer to detached observation and admiration – rather than imitation – of Christ. However, an earlier passage in the same text gives a provocative yet cryptic indication of the sort of art that would not succumb to this danger. Taking a cue from the phenomenology of Jean‐Luc Marion, I draw out this suggestion and argue for the important role that visual art can play in imitating Christ. The final section illustrates this point briefly with three paintings: Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion, Hans Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, and Albrecht Dürer's Self‐Portrait (1500).