Hegel: Three Studies (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

Hegel

Three Studies

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Hegel

Three Studies

Theodor W. Adorno. translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen with an introduction by Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Jeremy]. Shapiro

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The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

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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 form 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 a n 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 0-262-0 1 13 1 -X 1 . Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770- 1831. 1. Title. 11. Series. B2948.A32 13 1993 92-23 1 6 1 193----dc20 CIP

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· :-:-;;· � :!.k that is most radical and, to some, indigestible. Adorno's work is thus a model of a particular way of experi­ encing the world. It is an exp-licit and implicit argEment that �ative exp-erience is the authentic form of experience for those who live in a contradicto!:)':, antagonistic society, an upside-down, _perverted world. That is why Adorno's intention in Hegel and his other work is in large part the preservation, development,· and transmission of a specific relation to experience, which re-, •. lates to what is by relating to what is not, and relates to what is, not by relating to what is. And it is because Hegelian philosophy , is the first articulation of the saturation of experience with neg- .. ativity that Adorno asserts that "these days it is hardly possible for a theoretical idea of any scope to do justice to the experience of consciousness, and in fact not only the experience of con­ sciousness but the bodily experience of the human being, with­ out having incorporated something of Hegel's philosophy." ( "Aspects")

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Introduction

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For an individual living in a contradictory, perverted society, dialectical experience is an essential vehicle for the preservation not only of the truth-the cognitive truth about that society­ but of his or her own identity. That is why negative experience is an expcrience not only of negation but also of affirm
raging against the subject, regresses to a prescientific recording of mere unrelated facts, events, and opinions, a recording of what is most inadequately and contingently subjective. Although Hegel surrenders without reservation to the specificity of his ob­ ject-actually to the objective dynamic of society-he is thor­ oughly immune, by virtue of his conception of the relationshi'p between subject and object, which extends into all substantive knowledge, to the temptation to accept the facade uncritically: there are good reasons why the dialectic of essence and appear� ance is moved to the center of the Logic. This needs to be �e­ membered at a time when those who administer the dialectic in its materialist version, the official thought of the East bloc, have debased it to an unreflected copy theory. Once divested of its critical ferment, the dialectic is as well stilted to dogmatism as the immediacy of Schelling's intellectual intuition, against which Hegel's polemic was directed. Hegel helped Kant's critical phi­ loso h come into its own by criticizing the Kantian dualism of form and content, by drawing t e rigid determinations of dif­ In Hegel'SinterpretatlOn, Fichte as wellth �YE.Cl�"� �.!..��c::�ci�.g_ th�.�bi!��y..�.�.�he m o­ ' ments to a flat, unmediated identity. For Hegel's idealism--;-r eaSo�;-mes a critical re�iilaSen� that criticizes Kant once nts and.�g3- a�v�;��""nthai�ti� �e��fJ!.ti�� sets them in motion. The poles that Kant opposed to one an­ s, rother-form and content, na_t.��_.'!!l:Q�p!!lt,theoiY �������!Il!L
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9 Aspects of Hegel's Philosophy

instead, mediation takes place in and through the extremes, in the extremes themselves. This is the radical aspect of Hegel, which is incompatible with any advocacy of moderation. Hegel shows that the fundamental ontological coiltents that traditional phi': losophy hoped to distill �re not ideas discretely set off from one another; rather, each of them requires its opposite, and the re­ lationship .of all of them to one another is one of process. But this alters the meanin'g of ontology so decisively that it seems futile to apply the word, as many contemporary interpreters of Hegel would like to do, to a so-called fundamental structure whose very nature is not to be a fundamental structure, nDt to be ' fJ7TOX€/,JL€VOV, or substratum. In Kant's sense no world, no constitutum, is pDssible withDJ..!_� !. he s!:!Qjective cOlld.i.li.QJ1.�LQfn:;ClsQn,, �tte CiJriSiituens, and H�gel ;; self-reflectiDn of idealism, similarly, add � ..---:- �.""-.,.. ' that th�;���b-;;· n��;;-.ens �d-;;�-gen�e?a:ti�� co�ditions of . �!:! �,!:l!>j�S�.eng.Jh(!.rJ:!by !.t���3.��I��.,E.9=t3;!:J?str�