Geistig experience against mere “science”

In his essay on “The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy,” Adorno notes that it is precisely the conception of Geist in post-Kantian German idealism that he is interested in, because it is this concept alone which adequately encompasses the dialectic of subject and object which is so important to him. This has applications at the levels of both

ontology and epistemology. The shift is one from a mere epistemological subject to Geist; and there is a corresponding move from a conception of philosophy as a science, to a form of critical philosophical practice which is based upon geistig experience.

Adorno’s conception of a philosophical geistig experience obviously owes much to Hegel’s own conception of experience. Hegel’s description of the path from natural consciousness to science (or, alternatively, from reflection to speculation) emphasizes the relationship between experience and development and change. Hegel shows the reader how consciousness may change itself, through its own power of “going beyond,” in contradistinction to Kant who deduces the universal laws or limits of thought. Consciousness thus has a history, in both its form and its content.

Adorno, however, in discussing the significance of this form of experience, makes it clear that he is not adopting Hegel’s own concept of experience. In a characteristic move, he reads Hegel’s philosophy as a philosophical expression, as a riddle that needs to be deciphered, as well as reading it for content:

My theme is the experiential substance of Hegel’s philosophy, not experiential content in Hegel’s philosophy. What I have in mind is closer to what Hegel, in the introduction to his System of Philosophy, calls the “attitude of thought to objectivity” . . . I am interested in . . . the Hegelian spirit, the compelling force of the objective phenomena that have been reflected in his philosophy and are sedimented in it . . . My inquiry is concerned with what [Hegel’s] philosophy expresses as philosophy, and this has its substance not least of all in the fact that it is not exhausted by the findings of individual disciplines’ (H 296/54- 5).

Adorno assesses the timeliness of his attempt to rescue the concept of experience, noting that the Kantian emphasis on what is immediately given has only increased in strength, as the “omnipresent mediating mechanisms of exchange” have taken over our social world. In Adorno’s estimation, the Kantian conception of subjective experience underlies diverse modes of thought, from positivism to phenomenology, and he views his work as

the recuperation of a conception of a form of experience which accords with Hegel’s understanding of the priority of dialectic and mediation. “At the present time Hegelian philosophy, and all dialectical thought, is subject to the paradox that it has been

rendered obsolete by science and scholarship while being at the same time more timely than ever in its opposition to them” (H 297/55).

Hegel’s philosophy is thus significant for its mode of expression as well as for its theoretical substance. The conception of science put forward by empiricist positivism, which has come to dominate the sciences according to Adorno, relies upon the notion of a pure sensible experience, which in Kantian fashion is effortlessly taken up and

presented to the intellectual capacity of the mind. Adorno’s argument against this form of scientific conception is based upon his reading of Hegel’s (and Fichte’s) critique. The notion of a geistig experience is derived from the move towards a substantiality that we discussed in the previous section, which was pioneered by the post-Kantian idealists, and which goes fundamentally beyond a constitutive subjectivity, to the objects themselves, to a recognition of “what is not itself one with cognition” (VND 122/82). Such a mode of experience, which constitutes Adorno’s model for philosophical thought in general, is characterized as “a full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflexion” (ND 25/13; VND 122/82). It is “unreduced” because it reflects on and transcends the “reduced” experience of empiricism, and in doing so, it dialectically rescues the intention of empiricism, by working from the bottom up, rather than from the top down.

In terms of content, at the core of the Hegelian philosophy, according to Adorno, is the notion of experience, which is integrally related to the dialectic as the “unswerving effort to conjoin reason’s critical consciousness of itself and the critical experience of

objects” (H 258/9-10). A key move for Hegel, as we’ve seen, is the discovery of the mediation which is inherent within any immediate. For experience, this means that that which is immediately perceived is debunked through a critical reflection (i.e.,

consciousness establishes the object through negation/determination, and then comes to see itself doing so). Since there is no more strictly inaccessible sphere of noumena, everything which exists is spiritual, i.e. mediated by spirit, and the perceiving

consciousness must always take this into account. As Hegel famously demonstrated in the first chapters of the Phenomenology, consciousness may not experience the pure particular, but always finds the universal at the same time.

Adorno, on the other hand, complains that Hegel’s understanding of dialectical experience ultimately relies too much upon reconciliation, upon identity. But this critique stems from an understanding of the negativity of the antagonistic system of society, and a commitment to the experience of it. Hegel’s “negation” is not negative enough, because it posits an identity of subject and object, and consequently forgets the fundamental difference between idea and reality (ND 329/335). Hegel’s version of experience contains an account of the critical education of consciousness, but it remains limited, in Adorno’s opinion, simply because it overcomes the Kant’s limitations only by presupposing identity (ND 162/160). The failure to account for the radical nonidentity of the object produces a “reduced” form of subjectivity and experience.

There is a tension here between the version of Hegelian philosophical critique that Adorno wants to appropriate, and his transformation of it through his own immanent critique. For all of its insight, the critique of Kantian and scientific thought performed by Hegel must now be modified; its materialist core must be brought out. Adorno claims

that there is an element of Hegel’s philosophy which is unconscious, that it does not properly understand itself, and it is ultimately this element — and not its own self-

understanding — which separates it from the heritage of Enlightenment rationalism. It

articulates a “new expressive need” which is “more important even than Enlightenment’s self-critique, the emphatic incorporation of the concrete subject and the historical world, or the dynamization of philosophical activity” (H 304/64). This is the need to articulate aspects of our experience of the social world which are not captured by individual scientific pursuits, or by scientific reason itself. Rather than simply inquiring into the conditions of possibility of experience or of the validity of scientific knowledge, Hegel represented a trend which sought to reflectively examine the limits which had been placed on knowledge, which made it so obviously incongruent with experience. Adorno wants to reflexively apply a form of Hegelian critique to Hegel himself.

The “experience of consciousness,” which is followed in the Phenomenology, is Adorno’s model for the social experience of modernity. The turn towards content constitutes the “doubling” of the subject of consciousness in post-Kantian philosophy. Hegel thematizes the relationship between the naïve consciousness which directly knows its object, and the critical reflective consciousness which examines the naïve

consciousness. The limits of the naïve consciousness are then overcome through this process of splitting and reflection. The finite, limited consciousness is grasped in its finiteness by a critical consciousness which posits itself as infinite, as able to achieve the absolute. By viewing the critical limitations of the limited, scientific consciousness, the doubled subject understands the relationship between consciousness and its objects; it sees its own failures; and it is the contradiction between these two aspects of

consciousness which drives philosophical thinking. “Contradiction, proscribed by logic, becomes an organ of thought: of the truth of logos” (H 311-2/73).

The naïve consciousness, which Adorno refers to as a scientific consciousness, is the Kantian mode of thought which alienates subject from object, form from content. It is myopically concerned only with its own rules and procedures, with the ways in which it handles objects. The critical Hegelian turn through this doubling of consciousness, is also the materialist moment in which the content of thought is considered in its relationship to the subject. The experiential content of Hegel’s philosophy is then this moment of dialectical contradiction. His attention to the suffering of the alienation of subject and object, consciousness and world, forms the basic experience that moves his philosophy. He recognized that it is only through this second reflection that

consciousness can realize its own untruth, that thought can move beyond itself. “This says more about his reflection of reflection than the irrationalist gestures into which Hegel sometimes let himself be misled in his desperate attempts to rescue the truth of a society that had already become untrue. Hegel’s self-reflection of the subject in

philosophical consciousness is actually society’s dawning critical consciousness of itself” (H 313/74-5).

This highlights an additional reason for the contemporary significance of the experiential content of Hegelian philosophy. Adorno claims that Hegel’s thought in fact foreshadowed the rise of society as a total system. “Dialectical contradiction is

experienced in the experience of society . . . ; it is in the dialectical contradiction that there crystallizes a concept of experience that points beyond absolute idealism. It is the concept of antagonistic totality” (H 316/78). It is at this point that Adorno again

launches his social critique. Capitalist society, as an antagonistic totality, reflects, has an “affinity” with, the conception of antagonistic totality in Hegel’s thought. Adorno’s critique is then not just a realization about the character of contemporary society, it is just as much a realization about the status of Hegelian philosophy. The experience that is had by subjects in contemporary capitalist society is captured, presciently, by Hegel’s dialectical philosophy, which now contains the key for an understanding of our society. This might appear a strange result, as it has little or nothing to do with Hegel’s actual analysis of society, but stems directly from his conception of dialectical contradiction. Hegel’s understanding of what Adorno terms “reification,” of the necessary dialectical relationship of immediacy and mediation, has come to describe the relationship of consciousness to its social surroundings. The necessary principle of division or

alienation, which Hegel attributed to the natural consciousness, is then related in a much more specific way to its social context. Such divisions were the source of the

contradictions that drive Hegel’s dialectical philosophy forward, and their concrete versions are just as much the motor of social development.

The key, as before, is the necessary ubiquity of mediation. Just as the subject as consciousness is always already mediated by the universals of thought and logic, the concrete human individual is always already mediated by society. The apparently primary individualism of the subject of capitalism is analogous to the apparent primacy of the conscious subject of philosophical reason. But the category of totality is essential to each case. For consciousness, it is the whole of the absolute through which diremption and mediation are understood. And for the social subject, it is the totality of a society which structures social antagonisms. Each whole is only constituted through its

contradictions. However, the spheres of the social and the conceptual, which Adorno often seems to be analogically relating are in fact related in a much more determinate manner. Because of the turn towards content performed by Hegel, we know that knowledge is never pure in itself, but it always centrally related to its content, and its content is always already social. In effect we have the social moving in both on the side of the subject/form and on the side of the object/content. The forms of thought are social because they are always already mediated by universality — a universality which is essentially related to the social sphere, rather than to some transcendental-logical world. The content of thought, what it is that we are thinking about, is always already social because it has been constituted through the social process of history.

This explains what it is about the concept of experience as dialectical contradiction that, according to Adorno, “points beyond absolute idealism.” Absolute idealism breaks down the apparent immediacy of both the subject and the object of knowledge. It does not rest with appearance and tradition. For Adorno, the crucial limitations of absolute idealism lie in its failure to critique the totality itself (H 323/86). Adorno believes that Hegel’s critical advance over Kant lay in his transcendence of dualism; but at the same time he laments the loss of the Kantian “discontinuity” between phenomena and

noumena. “Hegel thought away the difference between the conditioned and the absolute and endowed the conditioned with the semblance of the unconditioned. In the last analysis, by doing so he did an injustice to the experience on which he drew” (H 323/86). In other words, in Hegel’s philosophy, the very movement towards a reconciliation of subject and object, universal and particular is the negation of the foundational

experience of dialectical contradiction — a move which presages the actual withering of experience in contemporary capitalist society.

Such a philosophical, or geistig, experience begins phenomenologically with that which is given to consciousness, and it must find contradiction where seemingly none exists, in the pacified totality. Through its receptivity to the object, it begins to witness the dialectical contradiction which exists between thought and its object. The

contradictions that seem to inhere within thought are “reproductions” of the

contradictions that objectively exist between thought and its objects (thought’s “other”). And it is the very attempt to think in terms of producing judgments of identity that reveals these contradictions in thought itself. The identities which we take for formal are in reality speculative (i.e., in Adorno’s sense, riven with contradiction).

Thought, by sinking itself in that which initially confronts it, in the concept, and

becoming aware of its immanent contradictory [antinomisch] character, clings to the idea of something which would be beyond contradiction. The opposition of thought to what is heterogeneous to it reproduces itself in thought as its immanent contradiction. Reciprocal critique of the universal and particular, identifying acts which judge whether the concept does justice to that with which it concerns itself [dem Befaßten], and also whether the particular fulfills its concept, are the medium of the thought of the nonidentity of particular and concept (ND 149/146; my translation).

The effort of thought to negate its object takes the form of a judgment which is aware of its identification and the remainder. Adorno believes that his conception of experience is more critical than that of Hegel because it remains committed to reality’s contradictions and to its own aporia. Its task is to “lend a voice to its unfreedom” (ND 29/18), by sheer negation and revolt. Not content to progress dialectically up Hegel’s ladder to the absolute, Adorno’s version of experience continually recognizes the significance of nonidentity.

This geistig character of the given encompasses not only the mediation of the object through Geist, but also importantly, the corporeal nature of the subject, and the

experience of suffering of the individual (O’Connor 2004, 71f.).

The allegedly elemental facts of consciousness are more than merely this. In the

dimension of pleasure and displeasure, that which is corporeal [Körperliches] rises up to it [consciousness]. All pain and all negativity, the motor of dialectical thought, are the often mediated, sometimes unrecognizable, shape of the physical, as all happiness aims for sensible fulfillment and acquires its objectivity in it . . . In subjective, sensible data, this dimension — for its part that which contradicts spirit in it — is weakened, as it were, to its epistemological after-image (ND 202/202; my translation).

Here Adorno emphasizes the material basis of subjectivity and its significance. The motor of the dialectic is in fact in the physical realm, in the pain of the feeling organism. Such feeling becomes “data” for consciousness, but its real origins remain fundamental to it.

The transition towards content then includes not only the priority of the object in its mediation, but also the physical nature of the subject and its social context. Knowledge and being are united through subjective experience. Adorno here takes the despair of consciousness in the Phenomenology and transforms it into a bodily sensation, a form of physical suffering. Adorno’s dialectic moves from the force of this suffering, which is both mental and physical; the “radical difference” of body and mind stems only from the subject’s abstractions (ND 202/202).

The role of “theory,” as something of a bridge between a scientific and a dialectical cognition, is to prevent ideology from setting in, or more precisely to undermine it once it has. Theory “corrects the naivety of its self-confidence, without it however having to sacrifice the spontaneity, at which theory, for its part, aims” (ND 41/30-1; my

translation). Thought requires both passivity and spontaneous activity, it must be able to “overshoot the object,” since it no longer pretends to be one with it (ND 39/28). Adorno

characterizes this moment as the growing independence of thought, vis-à-vis the object, which is denied by Hegel’s total mediation. The subject realizes through its experience of pain and negativity that the subject and the object cannot and will not be reconciled, and the demands upon it only increase in their antagonism.

Such an account contains significant contradictions. Adorno remains committed to a Hegelian recognition that everything is always already spiritual; however, he also

upholds the stringent negation of the subject, the “resistance of thought to the merely existing” (ND 31/19; my translation). The Kantian roots of Adorno’s conception of the nonidentity of subject and object are perhaps clearest in his occasional comments on the subject’s freedom. In order to perform its duties of articulating the priority of the object – a task which consequently discloses the subject’s own fullness – consciousness must contain a moment of freedom. This moment is not achieved, but rather appears to stem from its own powers as a material subject. Adorno’s theory of the subject thus contains its own form of duality, which consciousness must recognize but not create:

Theory and geistig experience require their interdependency. It does not contain answers to everything, but rather reacts to world which is false to its core. Theory has no

jurisdiction over what would be carried away by its spell. Mobility is essential to consciousness, [and] no accidental quality. It means a doubled mode of behaviour: that from within, the immanent process, essentially dialectical; and a free one, just like one stepping out from the dialectic, unattached. Both however are not merely disparate. The unregulated thought has an elective affinity to the dialectic, which as critique of the system, remembers what would be outside the system; and the power, which the dialectical movement releases in cognition, is that which revolted against the system.