By Billie Alexopoulos
What follows is a reflection on Adorno’s philosophy, particularly as it unfolds in Negative Dialectics, and an exploration of the pivotal role Hegel plays in shaping his thought. Further along, I consider not only this significance, but also how Adorno’s position—formed through his critical engagement with Hegel and Kant—bears on his reflections on metaphysics. What emerges in the final chapter, “Meditations on Metaphysics”, is an attempt to rescue a non-traditional form of metaphysics after the historical rupture of Auschwitz: a responsibility to think or orient us toward a ‘beyond what is’, without collapsing it into a totalizing system. In this sense, Adorno’s project can be understood as an effort to preserve a space within thought itself—one that resists resignation to the present as it is, to what is violated or ignored in this present, and, in doing so, keeps open the possibility of praxis.
Hegel’s Dialectical Method: What Adorno Appropriates and What He Refuses
Hegel is a crucial reference point for Adorno’s philosophy, a fact that becomes immediately clear in the opening pages of the introduction to Negative Dialectics. Adorno turns to Hegel’s dialectical method as one of philosophy’s most integral modes of thinking, praising its capacity to attend to contradiction and movement within thought. Yet he also subjects Hegel’s system to criticism. Understanding what Adorno adopts from Hegel, and what he ultimately rejects, is therefore essential for grasping the character of Adorno’s own philosophical project. Adorno’s engagement with Hegel centers on the nature and limits of conceptual knowledge. Dialectics, for Adorno, is not simply a method of logical development but a way of thinking about the relationship between concepts and the objects they seek to grasp. What we attempt to know when we conceptualize objects—and the limits of such attempts—determine what dialectical thinking can and should do. Adorno approaches Hegel’s dialectic with a double aim: to preserve its critical power while resisting what he sees as the systematic impulse toward reconciliation that he believes characterizes Hegel’s philosophy.
The following discussion pursues two interrelated goals. First, it clarifies how Adorno interprets Hegel’s dialectical method—what he appropriates from it and what he finds philosophically problematic. Second, it sheds light on Adorno’s own epistemology, which emerges through his critical engagement with both Hegel and Kant. Examining this relationship helps illuminate the distinctive form of dialectics that Adorno develops in Negative Dialectics, along with how this form of epistemology—what we can know—is intertwined with a form of metaphysics he seeks to rescue.
The Limits of Our Knowledge: Adorno’s Epistemology Between Kant and Hegel
Adorno develops a distinctive account of our conceptual apparatus—that is, of what we are capable of knowing. In order to understand what dialectics is for Adorno and how it strays from Hegel’s and what it is meant to accomplish, we must first look toward the structure and limits of our cognition: what happens when we attempt to conceptualize the world around us, and what remains beyond our grasp. Adorno’s position can be understood as situated between two philosophical poles, the epistemological theories of Kant and Hegel. Examining his thought in relation to these two figures clarifies both the limitations Adorno identifies in Hegel’s dialectical method and the elements of it that he seeks to preserve.
Kant’s Epistemological Limit
Adorno agrees with the fundamental claim of Kant that our cognitive apparatus is limited in its attempt to grasp the thing in itself, the radical other, or the objects in nature before conceptual categorization. For Kant, the study of our thought, or the investigations into the necessary conditions for the possibility of our thought, allows us to say something about structures of this thought, but nothing of the being out there—so his theory sets a radical limit to what we can know. This is what Adorno calls Kant’s block of knowing the absolute. He disagrees however with Kant, in terms of the degree to which we can know the object. Adorno rejects the claim that the objects out there (things in themselves) are unknowable to cognition. We may attain glimpses of the thing through our conceptual acts to grasp the objects, but not the object’s entirety or completeness. Adorno rejects the Kantian separation between the noumena and phenomena—the substantial eternal things out there and the insubstantial mere appearances.
The principle of identity, in the conceptual act, appropriates the object (the thing in itself) and molds it under its own logical system or categorization. The qualities or elements that do not fit under the concept that is applied to the object, is left out or discarded by the cognitive mechanism. With every conceptual act toward the intention to know the object, there is always a ‘remainder’: something of the object that resists this act, or the concept’s attempt to grasp it. This is what Adorno calls non-identity. In this sense, we can attempt to know about objects in the world, regardless of their scale—whether it be a political phenomenon of a certain historical period for instance or a mere piece of furniture in front of us—but with every attempt to know it, something about this object will necessarily be left out, and thus its full essence will always be violated or distorted: “No object is wholly known…” (Adorno, 14). For Adorno, Kant is true in “…destroying the illusion of an immediate knowledge of the Absolute…” (Ibid, 140)
These remnants of ‘non-identity’ that resist conceptualization always appear to the systematic theories of thought as contradiction. In its attempt to totalize, the pieces of reality that truly exist, but did not fit the systematic theory will appear as theoretical blocks, that hinder thought’s speculative drive for complete harmony.
Hegel’s Dialectical Thinking
It is this attention to contradiction where Adorno meets Hegel. Dialectical thinking is this very attention to contradiction—investigating it to reveal a deeper truth of a previous superficial knowledge of something. Exemplified in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel believed throughout history, knowledge is on a path to its full realization or actualization. In its attempt and intent to know the world (and for Hegel this also means itself), with each form of consciousness or phases, knowledge finds contradictions internal to its own logic. With each phase of consciousness, these contradictions eventually reveal themselves to be moments of a greater or more complex concept or phase of consciousness, where the contradictions are reconciled and thus dissolved, only with the consciousness and movement to this greater concept. Although Adorno honors Hegel’s dialectical thinking, its specific form as an idealistic dialectic, or a ‘closed’ dialectic, where Adorno disagrees with Hegel. It is Hegel’s idealistic attempt to reconcile the contradictions of knowledge—by making it a mere ‘moment’ in the concept, where Adorno claims Hegel falls into a trap of what he calls identity-thinking. Contradiction is not a mere side of a concept that can be reconciled and thus absolved, contradiction is the mark of what is left out of the object in the conceptual act:
The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy. Contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism was bound to transfigure it into: it is not of the essence in a Heraclitean sense. It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived” (Ibid, 5)
Whereas Kant claimed that we could not immediately know things in themselves, Hegel was on the other side of the epistemological spectrum. Adorno believes that as a repulsion to this limit of knowledge Kant had set, an idealistic will to grasp the whole arose, and it was Hegel’s philosophy that was the manifestation of this impulse. This was “…the will to grasp the whole without any limits being placed on cognition” (Ibid, 62). Hegel attempted through his constructivist philosophy to salvage true knowledge of the absolute of which Kant had taken away the possibility. When reason constructs and thus is the external world, there is no longer the epistemological gap introduced by Kant. But this attempt for totalization and harmony of world (or objectivity) and reason is not successful if the appearance of contradictions in our rational system are seen for what they really are: objects external to our rational system that do not fit into it. Perhaps this idealistic impulse and obeyance of identity thinking was what caused Hegel to stray away from the authentic dialectical mode of thought: the thought that knows what these contradictions really are, and thus refuses to absolve them for the sake of the impulse of totalization or control. Adorno saves the speculative moment from Hegel that works through contradictions, but refutes the moment when they are reconciled (Ibid, 15).
One could place Adorno’s epistemology between these two theoretical poles. Adorno agreed with Kant due to the limits of our cognitive structure as identity-thinking we were not capable of knowing things in themselves completely, and thus was deeply skeptical of the Hegelian idea that the reason and the world can be completely reconciled. He agreed with Hegel that close attention to contradictions reveal to us something deeper about the truth of objects out there, but these are not mere moments of a concept that can be dissolved, but markers that show us what our identity thinking as conceptualization had missed. In this sense, it is these unreconcilable contradictions as non-identity that are the indicators of our epistemic limits. Adorno would say Kant is too doubtful of our cognitive capability toward knowing objects, but Hegel was too optimistic about complete and total harmony with reason and those objects. Adorno takes Kant’s limits and Hegel’s dialectic, and leaves behind the former’s rigid boundaries and the latter’s constructivist idealism. Theoretical primacy is reoriented from the subject to the object.
The Central Modulations of Hegel in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics
The key movements or modulations of Hegel we see in his introduction are as follows: first, a movement from an idealist to a non-idealist dialectic. Adorno appropriates dialectics from Hegel—the importance of and attention to contradiction—but refuses its idealistic closure: the reconciliation of contradiction into unity through sublimation.
Second, a movement from the primacy of the subject that is prevalent in idealistic thinking to the primacy of the object—what he calls the disenchantment of the concept or getting rid of concept fetishism. Rather than thought determining the objects in the world in the Hegelian sense, Adorno insists on the priority of what resists conceptualization. Here we see how important the notion of contradiction is for Adorno. Contradiction is not something to be resolved; it is the sign of non-identity—the indication that the ‘concept does not exhaust the object’. Dialectics, in this sense, is the consistent attention to non-identity, to what is not captured in conceptualization—what escapes identity thinking or our totalizing, coercive mechanism of thought. It is, as he says, an ontology of the wrong state of things. A question that arises here is what Adorno sees as non-identity, or perhaps how it appears when it interacts with thought: there seem to be parts in the text, for instance, where it appears as somatic rather than as a logical contradiction—as pain or suffering. Instances of non-identity, perhaps, are forms of life that do not fit our systems, forms of life that we violate when they do not fit the conceptual or social systems and thus are ignored, and this violation appears as suffering and contradiction in our social world.
Thirdly, we see an attempt to save the speculative moment from Hegel. For Hegel, the speculative is reason’s ability to overcome contradictions by sublating them into a higher unity—an idealistic closure. For Adorno, however, the speculative moment is the drive of thought to push beyond the surface, to penetrate what resists conceptual capture—what he calls the postulate of depth: the negative, that which resists. Adorno believes this is the element of philosophy that does not settle for mere facts or immediate appearance; it seeks to yield to the contradictions of reality, or to what is left out of it. This moment, for Adorno, is essential for depth in thought, preventing philosophy from collapsing into empiricism or positivism. The speculative, Adorno stresses, need not end in Hegelian identity-thinking, where contradictions are resolved in totality or unity. His aim is to free ‘the postulate of depth’ from ideology.
Thoughts on “Meditations on Metaphysics”: A Non-Idealistic Speculative Moment and Opening for Praxis
I’ll move to some thoughts I have on ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’, because I see it as an attempt to salvage this speculative moment from Hegel—a postulate of depth, that isn’t idealistic in its character. This is where he also attempts to translate or transform the absolute, the transcendent or the metaphysical to non-identity: that which is violated and ignored in our systematic or coercive thinking—the other.
It seems like Adorno is offering in this section a kind of historical account, or genealogy, or constellation of our epistemology, to explain why metaphysics has been done away with in his present moment of thinking, but also perhaps to find a way to rescue a form of metaphysics. This begins in section 6 of the chapter I believe. He gives this historical account also to understand what it really is, and how it is misunderstood or misused by thinkers like Kant, moving down to Hegel and contemporary positivists, empiricists, and phenomenologists. He takes us through a narration of these philosophical moments or movements, one influenced by the other, to show how we have ended up with the dissolution of metaphysics. With Kant, metaphysics becomes limited: the critique of reason blocks access to the absolute and restricts knowledge—we can only know mere appearances or the very structures of our thought and the conditions for the possibility of experience. With Hegel, this limitation is resisted, and the absolute is reintroduced, but only through the totalization of thought, where everything is absorbed into the concept and the gap between subject and object which Kant introduced or posed is eliminated. Following the failure of Hegelian idealism, philosophical movements such as positivism, empiricism, and phenomenology he says reacted to this by recoiling or retreating back into subjectivity, so to speak. Metaphysics—with it including universal concepts of freedom, and the good—is dismissed altogether as meaningless, since what cannot be empirically verified is excluded from knowledge. Adorno presents this as a historical sequence—the limitation, absorption, and eventual complete rejection of metaphysics.
With this narrative, he shows us how our rejection of metaphysics in thought is historically conditioned. He reveals the historical grounding for the neutralization and acceptance of what is immanent in the world, and for not desiring to go “beyond it.” Our neutralization—the indifference to metaphysical questions (questions of death, freedom, morality) is not our ‘human nature’, as he says Heidegger or Schopenhauer believed, but rather an existential way of being that is a product of history. It is a symptom, he shows, of bourgeois consciousness.
The loss of metaphysics, or the neutralization of our thinking, for Adorno, is the acceptance of the current or immanent conditions of our life. It is surrendering to suffering, misery, and pain. For Adorno, the way we accept or surrender to these conditions in our thinking is when we attempt to make sense of them—to find “reasons” for why things are the way they are. It is a form of reconciling with our current reality, or justifying it. This is the key point he makes about Auschwitz. After Auschwitz, we can no longer remain in this anti-metaphysical position. We cannot try to make sense of Auschwitz and our current historical social condition; we must resist what is, reality, we must attempt to transcend it—go beyond what is immanent: τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικά (ta meta ta physica)—‘the things after the physical’, beyond the physical—beyond what is. By refusing to accept what is, we refuse to accept what our thinking has ignored in the present world, the non-identity as suffering that is muffled out in our systematic thinking. If thought does not attend to ‘the extremity that eludes the concept’—the aspects of the object or of life that escape conceptualization—Adorno warns that thought then disturbingly comes to share the same function as the musical accompaniment the SS used to muffle the screams of its victims: “If thought is not measured by the extremity that eludes the concept, it is from the outset in the nature of the musical accompaniment with which the SS liked to drown out the screams of its victims” (Ibid, 365).
And this is where he returns to Kant, interestingly. He sees an element of Kant as a framework that may, in a way, save metaphysics. Specifically, he engages Kant’s mundus intelligibilis—the intelligible world. This is the realm of true freedom and morality that cannot be experienced or sensed for Kant. But Adorno claims that this intelligible world can be understood as a model for the metaphysical potential of what ought to be. Rather than an already existing, separate realm—as Kant claims (though Adorno notes that Kant himself was ambivalent about the possibility of its actual existence)—the intelligible world becomes, for Adorno, the realm of freedom, morality, and justice that cannot be seen precisely because it does not yet exist. It is the world, or model of potential, what ought to be, rather than what is.
This realm, Adorno explains, must be viewed as neither empirical nor merely imaginary. Instead, the intelligible must be understood as aporetical: it is the tension between the present world and the possibility of a different one in thought. It represents the potential for freedom and justice that is not yet realized. With the contradictions, the suffering, the injustice of this world, we must think this intelligible realm or metaphysical realm as a form of rescue—as a projection of what could be otherwise. In this sense, Kant’s intelligible world, reinterpreted as aporetical, may be the form of metaphysics that Adorno seeks to preserve. He even calls it the constellation of the human. “What remains venerable about Kant is that in his theory of the intelligible he registered the constellation of the human and the transcendent as no philosopher beside him” (Ibid, 397). Metaphysics, in this sense, attends to the possibility of the transcendence of the world as it is, of rejecting to neutralize it or surrender to it through reasoning or reconciliation. It’s important to note that, in these reflections, he explicitly translates the absolute, or transcendence, as non-identity (Ibid, 406).
And the last word on Hegel: In contrast to Kant, Hegel’s resolution of non-identity into identity represents, for Adorno, a collapse of transcendence into immanence: transcendence is absorbed into the totality of spirit and thereby abolished altogether (Ibid, 402) For Adorno, this transcendent dimension must be reclaimed. His emphasis on non-identity, on the primacy of the object, on the postulate of depth or the speculative moment—the drive to push beyond the surface—and on the limits of conceptual knowledge all serve to preserve this space. In doing so, they resist the neutralization and resignation that would otherwise follow in our common thought from the contradictions, unfreedom, and suffering of the present.
I see this space of the transcendent, the space of ‘it should be otherwise’ in our thought—as a kind of normative space or force without content. Adorno is perhaps pushing for a form of thinking that preserves this transcendental, metaphysical, normative space—a space that does not let us fall into neutralization and indifference, that urges us to attend to non-identity—forms of life that are discarded from our totalizing systems—and that keeps the door open for praxis.
Work Cited
Adorno, Theodore W. Negative Dialectics. Seabury Press, 1973
