Hegel Three Studies · I Hegel Three Studies Theodor W. Adorno. translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen with an introduction by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jeremy]. Shapiro \\Imi\�\\�\i\il\"t�m .� . 39001101483082 The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England ·" '.�. This edition © 1993 Massachusetts Institute of Technology This work originally appeared in German under the title Drei Studien zu Hegel, © 1963, 1971 Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any fo rm or by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Baskerville by The Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group and was printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. [Drei Studien zu Hegel. English] Hegel: three studies I Theodor W. Adorno ; translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen ; with an introduction by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jeremy J. Shapiro. p. cm.-(Studies in contemporary German social thought) Translation of: Drei Studien zu Hegel. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-262-01131-X 1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770- 1831. 1. Title. 11. Series. B2948.A3213 1993 193----dc20 92-23161 CIP ..�. •. , ......... ..,..·...",...,..'''_''e ... • 11�. I },i . :-::" 7.�� <,f,' · '�: · : :-:- ;;· �:<" For Karl Heinz Haag 337389 Contents Introduction by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and IX Jeremy J. Shapiro Preface XXXv A Note on the Text xxxvii Editorial Remarks from the German Edition XXXIX Aspects of Hegel's Philosophy 1 The Experiential Content of Hegel's Philosophy 53 Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel 89 Notes 149 Name Index 159 Introduction Shierry Weber Nicholsen Jeremy J. Shapiro I salute you from the Petrified Forest of human culture Where nothing is left standing But where roam great swirling lights Which call for the deliverance of foliage and bird. From your fingers flows the sap of trees in flower. Andre Breton, Ode to Charles Fourier The development of critical philosophy and social theory in the twentieth century, especially that of Theodor W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School, has been intimately linked with the appro­ priation and reinterpretation of the thinkers of German Ideal­ ism, most notably, Hegel. Such thinkers as Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jiirgen Habermas, through a critical hermeneutic dialogue with Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, elab­ orated their own theoretical oeuvre and reinterpreted the trends and contradictions of the present historical period through the perspective provided by these nineteenth-century philosophers. At the same time, they made important contributions to our un­ derstanding of these thinkers. To do so, they had to pry the earlier philosophers' thought out of traditional academic, dog- x Introduction matic, and ideological interpretations in order to unfold the core concepts and critique contained in their work. This hermeneutic was continuously elaborated as part of a radical political, cul­ tural, and social critique of advanced capitalism and authoritar­ ian political tendencies. It was undertaken with the explicit conviction that positivistic and one-dimensional thinking was in­ herent in the apparatus of domination in advanced industrial society and that the major nineteenth-century German philoso­ phers, esp-eciall}'in their critigue of narrow Enlightenme!!� and positiYisLthinkil1g, m1l1dh<::lp-J�ythe foundations for a new crit­ ical relationsh1P-!oy:dv,!!!c::�d industrial soc::iety.:. It is quite char­ acteristic that the earliest works of the major thinkers of the Frankfurt School (if we include their doctoral dissertations and Habilitationsschriften) include major studies of Kant, Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Kierkegaard, and that their later works include studies of Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, as well as of Freud and Max Weber, whom the critical theorists saw as the bridge between the philosophical tradition and the social sciences. In addition, they analyzed major twentieth-cen­ tury thinkers, including Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Dewey, Carnap, and Wittgenstein, as philosopher-ideologists. The core of the critical theorists' approach is the immanent critique of ideology. Truth is attained by unfolding both the truth content and the contradictions of thought through linking it to Jhe truth content and contradictions of its social context and commitments. This leads to a historically relativized truthth at is maximally universal precisely through awareness of its historical' and social situation and limitations. The critique of ideology means ' taking theory at its word and at its deed. I-Ience the Frankfurt :, School produced an imposing series of critical hermeneutic studies of social theory and philosophy, most of which are important both as philosophical and sociological works in their own righi: .' Xl Introduction and as valuable contributions to the understanding of other the­ orists.1 No other thinker was as important to this critical her­ meneutics as Hegel. The critical theorists aimed at a dialectical method that was not embroiled in the vagaries of socialist party politics and positivistic or metaphysical interpretations of Marx. In both Hegel and Marx, the dialectical method claimed to pro­ vide a unity of theoretical and practical reason that seemed torn asunder in contemporary civilization and philosophy. And the systematic character of Hegel's thinking promised a possible unification of the human sciences that the critical theorists sought to bring about for the radical understanding of contemporary society through the integration of sociologJ'i.Y�chology, _ eco­ nomics, political science, andJ>l!!!��OJ>Jly. Hegel's own critique of the limitations of the scientificworld view on the one hand and its romantic alternative on the other...,-an intellectual situation that in some ways parallels that of the juxtaposition of twentieth­ century positivism and pragmatism on the one hand and phe­ nomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics on the other­ suggested an analogous critique of these contemporary schools of thought. Hegel claimed, and intended, to be the culmination of Western rationalism, and this made his thought an appro­ priate fo cus for the critique of Western civilization. Above all, �el's fo cus on the negative and the ower of negation and _ p contradiction inherent in thought and reality seemed a key to rescuing the negative from the overwhelming affirmative power of advanced industrial society . Adorno, and Marcuse as well, regarded Hegel, despite his ob­ . vious conservative tendencies, as the true revolutionary thinker­ perhaps more so than Marx-if the negative and dialectical core of this thought could be rescued from its embedded ness in a doctrine of undialectical affirmation, reconciliation, and unifi­ cation. Marcuse, in Reason andRevol ution, published a half-century xii Introduction ago, attempted to articulate the negative, critical, and dialectical core of Hegel's thought and to preserve it in a properly under­ stood Marxism: a Marxism that synthesizes the humanistic core of Marx's early writings, the historical materialism of the German Ideology, and the dialectical analysis contained in Marx's mature economic theory. Marcuse, skeptical of the revolutionary poten­ tial of either social democracy or Leninist communism, never­ theless saw in Hegel a dialectical method that could be the basis for a socialism appropriate to the historical situation of ad­ vanced industrial society. Published during World War II, Rea­ son and Revolution looked toward this humanistically and dialectically regenerated Marxism as a historical possibility after the defeat of Nazism. Adorno, writing after World War II and the stabilization of the domination structure of advanced indus­ trial society following the defeat of Nazism, and after his and Max Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which focuses on capitalist industrialism's ability to eliminate all opposition to the domination of both internal and external nature, sought to re­ cuperate in Hegel the basis for a dialectic of resistance to that power of domination by concentrating on the nonidentical, that which is beyond the domination of reason. In their interpretations of Hegel, both Marcuse and Adorno attempt to provide a philosophical basis for "negative thinking": for thought that desires to free itself from the shackles of the "logos of domination" and to serve as a basis for and interpre­ tation of emancipation in the broadest historical sense-eman­ cipation from class domination, from the "iron cage" of bureaucratic rationality, from the terror world of the concentra­ tion camp, from the "performance principle," and from one­ dimensional thought, administered culture, and deformed experience. Over the half century since the publication of Mar­ cuse's Reason and Revolution, and despite ongoing emancipatory xiii Introduction undercurrents and outbreaks of emancipatory movements, the ability of the universal market society, combined with powerful state formations, to control or absorb opposition and cut off al­ ternatives appears tQ have increased. But as Adorno says in "As­ pects of Hegel's Philosophy," a world integrated through "production," through the exchange rela­ tionship, depends in all its moments on the social conditions of its pro­