Adorno, Theodor - Negative Dialectics - 3b - Models World-spirit.pdf - Negativ Dialectics - MKTK

Negative Dialectics

Part III. Models. World-spirit and Natural History. Excursus on Hegel

Tendency and Facts 295-297

What the human understanding, ailing from its own soundness, reacts most sensitively

against, the primacy of something objective beyond individual human beings, in their

coexistence as much as in their consciousness, can be crassly experienced every single

day. One represses that primacy as a groundless speculation, so that the individuals, as if

their meanwhile standardized conceptions were in a double sense the unconditional truth,

can preserve their self-flattering delusion from the suspicion, that it would not be so and

that they live under a doom. In an epoch which shakes off the system of objective

idealism as easily as the objective value-theory of economics, theorems are now

becoming current, with which it is asserted the Spirit has no use for, which seeks its own

security and that of cognition in what is extant as the well-organized sums of immediate

individual facts of social institutions or the subjective constitution of their members. The

Hegelian objective and ultimately absolute Spirit, the Marxist law of value which realizes

itself without the consciousness of humanity, is more evident to the unleashed experience

than the prepared facts of the positivistic scientific bustle, which today prolongs itself

deep into the naïve pre-scientific consciousness; only this latter breaks humanity of the

habit, for the greater glory of the objectivity of cognition, of the experience of real

objectivity, to which they are also subjected in themselves. If thinkers were prepared for

and capable of such an experience, it would shake the foundation of their faith in

facticity; it would compel them to go so far beyond the facts, that these latter would lose

their unreflective preponderance before the universals, which are to triumphant

nominalism a nothingness, the subtractable addition of the compartmentalizing

researcher. That sentence from the initial considerations of the Hegelian Logic, that there

would be nothing in the world, which is not just as much mediated as immediate, is

preserved nowhere more precisely than in the facts, by which historiography swears. No

doubt it would be foolish to try to dispute away with epistemological finesse, that when a

dissident is rousted at six in the morning by the Gestapo under Hitler’s Fascism, this is

more immediate to the individual [Individuum], who experiences it, than the previously

transpiring machinations of power and the installation of the party apparatus in all

branches of the administration; or indeed than the historical tendency, which for its part

blasted apart the continuity of the Weimar Republic, and which does not otherwise reveal

itself than in the conceptual context, committal solely in developed theory. Nevertheless

the factum brutum [Latin: brute fact] of the official onslaught, by which Fascism strikes

at the bodies of individuals, depends on all those moments which are at a distance from

and momentarily indifferent to the victim. Only the most miserable nitpicking could blind

itself, under the title of scientific acribia, to the fact that the French Revolution, however

abruptly many of its acts occurred, meshed with the total trend of the emancipation of the

bourgeoisie. It would have been neither possible nor successful, had the key positions of

economic production not been already occupied by 1789, outstripping feudalism and its

absolutist heads, which from time to time coalesced with the interests of the bourgeoisie.

Nietzsche’s shocking imperative, “What is falling, ought to be pushed” retrospectively

codifies an Ur-bourgeois maxim. Probably all bourgeois revolutions were already

decided by the historical expansion of the class and had an admixture of ostentation,

externalized in art as classicist décor. Nevertheless that tendency would hardly have

realized itself in the historical moment of rupture without the acute absolutist

mismanagement and the financial crisis, on which the physiocratic reformers of Louis

XVI failed. The specific privation at least of the Parisian masses might have ignited the

movement, while in other countries, where it was not so acute, the bourgeois process of

emancipation succeeded without a revolution and at first did not touch the more or less

absolutist form of domination. The infantile distinction between the fundamental cause

and proximate occasion has in its favor, that it at least crudely indicates the dualism of

immediacy and mediation: the occasions are what is immediate, the so-called

fundamental causes are what mediates, what overwhelms, what incorporates the details.

The primacy of the tendency over the facts can be read even in the most recent history.

Specific military acts such as the bombing raids on Germany functioned as “slum

clearing” [in English], retrospectively integrated with that transformation of the cities,

which could long be observed not only in North America, but all across the earth. Or: the

strengthening of the family in the emergency situation of refugees temporarily held the

anti-familial developmental tendency in check, but scarcely the trend; the number of

divorces and of split families increased afterwards even in Germany. Even the assaults of

the conquistadors on ancient Mexico and Peru, which must have been experienced

therein like invasions from another planet, murderously advanced the expansion of

rational bourgeois society – irrationally for the Aztecs and Incas – all the way to the

conception of “one world” [in English] teleologically inherent in the principle of that

society. Such a preponderance of the trend in the facts, which the former always still

needs, ultimately condemns the old-fashioned distinction between cause and occasion to

silliness; the whole distinction, not only the occasion, is superficial, because the cause is

concrete in the occasion. If royal mismanagement was a lever of the Parisian uprisings,

then this mismanagement was still a function of the total, of the backwardness of the

absolutistic “consumption economy” behind the capitalistic income economy. Moments

contrary to the historical whole, which thereby, as in the French Revolution, only

promote such, garner their positional value only in this latter. Even the backwardness of

the productive forces of one class is not absolute but merely relative to the

progressiveness of another. Construction in the philosophy of history requires knowledge

of all of these things. This is not the least reason why the philosophy of history

approaches, as already in Hegel and Marx, historiography just as much as this latter, as

the insight into the essence which, although veiled by facticity, yet conditions such, is

still possible only as philosophy.

On the Construction of the World-spirit 297-300

Even under this aspect, dialectics is no variety of a world-view, no philosophical position,

to be selected from a sample chart among others. Just as the critique of allegedly first

philosophical concepts drives towards dialectics, so too is it demanded from below. Only

the experience which is violently tailored by a narrow-minded concept of itself, excludes

the emphatic concept as an independent, although mediating moment, from itself. If it

could be objected against Hegel, that absolute idealism would recoil as the deification of

that which is, into exactly that positivism which it attacked as reflection-philosophy, then

conversely the dialectics due today would not only be the indictment of the prevailing

consciousness but also capable of matching it, a positivism which is brought to itself, and

thereby indeed negated. The philosophical demand to immerse oneself in the detail,

which does not allow itself to be directed by any philosophy from above, nor by any of its

infiltrated intentions, was already the one side of Hegel. Only its carrying-out in him was

caught tautologically: his manner of immersion in the detail demands that that Spirit

show up, as if by appointment, which was posited as the total and absolute from the very

beginning. The intent of the metaphysician Benjamin was to oppose this tautology, to

rescue the induction, something developed in the prologue to the Origin of the German

Tragedy-Play. His sentence, the smallest cell of intuited reality would outweigh the rest

of the remaining world, attests early on to the self-consciousness of the contemporary

state of experience; all the more authentically, because it formed itself extraterritorially to

the so-called great questions of philosophy, which it befits a transformed concept of

dialectics to distrust. The preponderance [Vorrang] of the total over the appearance is to

be grasped in the appearance, over which dominates, what counts for tradition as the

world-spirit; not to be taken from this tradition, which is in the widest sense Platonic, as

sacred. The world-spirit is, yet is not, is not the Spirit, but precisely the negative, which

Hegel shuffles off from it onto those who must counter it and whose downfall renders the

verdict, that its difference from objectivity would be what is untrue and bad, double-

sided. The world-spirit becomes something autonomous in contrast to the individual

actions, out of which the real total movement of society as well as so-called intellectual

developments are synthesized, and in contrast to the living subjects of these actions. It is

realized over their heads and through these and to this extent antagonistic in advance. The

reflection-concept of the world-spirit does not interest itself in living creatures, which the

whole, whose primacy it expresses, needs just as much as these latter can exist only by

virtue of that whole. Such a hypostasis, robustly nominalistic, was what the Marxist

terminus of “mystified” meant. According to that theory, the demolished mystification

would not however be merely ideology. It would be just as much the distorted

consciousness of the real primacy of the whole. It appropriates in thought the

impenetrable and irresistible one of the universal, the perpetuated mythos. Even the

philosophic hypostasis has its experience-content in the heteronomous relationships, in

which human beings became invisible as such. What is irrational in the concept of the

world-spirit, it borrowed from the irrationality of the course of the world. In spite of this

it remains fetishistic. History has to this day no total subject, however construable. Its

substrate is the functional context of real individual subjects: “History does nothing, it

‘possesses no gigantic wealth’, it ‘fights no battles’! It is rather the human being, the real,

living human being, which does everything, possesses and fights; it is not some sort of

‘history’, which needs human being as a means, in order to work through its ends – as if

this were a person apart – but rather this latter is nothing but the activity of human beings

pursuing their ends.” 1 Those qualities are conferred upon history, however, because the

law of motion of society abstracted from its individual subjects over millennia. It has

degraded them just as really to mere executors, to mere partakers of social wealth and

social struggle, as the fact that, no less really, nothing would be without them and their

spontaneities. Marx emphasized this anti-nominalistic aspect over and over again,

without indeed granting philosophical consistency to it: “Only to the extent that the

capitalist is personified capital, does he have a historical value and that historical right to

existence… Only as the personification of capital is the capitalist respectable. As such he

shares with the treasure-hunter the absolute drive to enrichment. What however appears

in the latter as individual mania, is in the capitalist the effect of the social mechanism, in

which he is merely a cog. Besides, the development of capitalist production makes the

continuous increase of the capital invested in an industrial enterprise a necessity, and

competition imposes the immanent laws of capitalist mode of production on each

individual capitalist as external compulsory laws. It compels him to continually extend

his capital, in order to preserve it, and he can extend it only by means of progressive

accumulation.” 2

“To be with the World-spirit” 300-301

In the concept of the world-spirit the principle of divine omnipotence was secularized

into that which posited unity, the world-plan into the pitilessness of what occurs. The

world-spirit is worshipped like a deity; it is divested of its personality and all its attributes

of providence and grace. Therein a piece of the dialectic of enlightenment fulfills itself:

the disenchanted and conserved Spirit takes the form of mythos or regresses into the

shudder before something simultaneously overpowering and devoid of qualities. The

essence of such is the feeling of being touched by the world-spirit or of hearing its roar

[Rausch]. It becomes the state of thralldom [Verfallensein] in fate. Just like its

immanence, the world-spirit is saturated with suffering and fallibility. By the inflation of

total immanence into what is essential, its negativity is reduced to an accidental trifle.

However to experience the world-spirit as a whole means to experience its negativity.

Schopenhauer’s critique of official optimism registered this. It remained meanwhile as

obsessive as the Hegelian theodicy of what exists in this world. That humanity lives only

in the total imbrication, perhaps only surviving by virtue of it, would not refute

Schopenhauer’s doubts over whether to affirm the will to life. In all likelihood however

there rested, on that which was with the world-spirit, at times also the reflection of a

happiness far beyond the individual unhappiness: as in the relationship of the intellectual

individual talent to the historical situation. If the individual Spirit is not, as would please

the vulgar division into the individuated and the general, “influenced” by the general, but

mediated in itself through objectivity, then this latter cannot always be entirely hostile to

the subject; the constellation changes in the historical dynamic. In phases when the

world-spirit and indeed the totality itself is shrouded in gloom, it is impossible for even

the most gifted to become, what they are; in favorable ones, such as the period during and

immediately after the French Revolution, the average were borne up far beyond

themselves. Even the individual downfall of the individuated, which is with the world-

spirit, precisely because it is ahead of its time, evokes at times the awareness of what is

not in vain. The expression of the possibility, that all could yet be well, is irresistible in

the music of the young Beethoven. The reconcilement with objectivity, be it ever so

fragile, transcends the monotonous. The moments in which something particular frees

itself, without confining others in turn through its own particularity, are anticipations of

the unconfined itself; such consolation shines from the early period of the bourgeoisie

well into its late phase. The Hegelian philosophy of history was scarcely independent of

this, in the sense that in it, already distancing itself, the striking of the hour of an epoch

reverberated, in which the realization of bourgeois freedom blew with such a breath, that

it overshot itself and opened up the perspective of a reconciliation of the whole, in which

its violence would melt away.

On the Unleashing of the Productive Forces 301-303

It is tempting to associate periods of being with the world-spirit, of a more substantial

happiness than the individual one, with the unleashing of the productive forces, while the

burden of the world-spirit threatens to crush humanity, as soon as the conflict between

the social forms, under which they exist, and their forces becomes flagrant. But even this

schemata is too simple: the talk of the rising bourgeoisie hollow. The development and

unleashing of the productive forces are not opposites of the sort which could be ordained

as alternating phases, but are truly dialectical. The unleashing of the productive forces,

the deed of the Spirit which controls nature, has an affinity to the violent domination of

nature. Though it may conceal itself from time to time, it is not to be thought away from

the concept of the productive force and least of all from that which is unleashed; the very

word resonates with a threat. In Capital there is a passage which goes: “As a fanatic of

the valorization of value, it” – exchange-value – “ruthlessly compels humanity towards

production for production’s sake.” 3 In its place and time this turns against the

fetishization of the process of production in exchange-society, beyond this however it

violates the nowadays universal taboo on doubting production as an end in itself. At

times the technical forces of production are hardly restrained socially, but work in fixed

relations of production without much influence on these latter. As soon as the unleashing

of the forces separates itself from the constituting relationships between human beings, it

becomes no less fetishized than the social castes [Ordnungen]; it, too, is only a moment

of the dialectic, not its magic formula. In such phases the world-spirit, the totality of the

particular, can pass over into that which it buries underneath it. If appearances do not

completely deceive, then this is the signature of the contemporary epoch. In periods by

contrast when living beings require the progress of the productive forces or at least are

not visibly endangered by them, the feeling of concordance with the world-spirit likely

prevails, although with the apprehensive undercurrent, that this is only a ceasefire; also

with the temptation of the subjective Spirit, to overzealously run over to the objective one

under the pressure of business, like Hegel. In all of this the subjective Spirit remains a

historical category, too, something originated, self-transforming, virtually transient. The

popular spirit [Volksgeist] of primitive societies, not yet individualized, which

reproduces itself in the latter under the pressure of the civilized ones, is planned by post-

individual collectivism and released; the objective Spirit is then as overwhelming as

much as a naked swindle.

Group Spirit [Gruppengeist] and Domination 302-303

If philosophy were, what Hegel’s Phenomenology proclaimed it to be, the science of the

experience of consciousness, then it could not, as Hegel does to an increasing extent,

sovereignly dismiss the individual experience of the general, which pushes its way

through, as something irreconcilably bad, and acceding to the apologetics of power from

a presumably higher standpoint. The embarrassing recollection of how in committees,

what is inferior ends up prevailing, in spite of the subjectively good will of the members,

renders the primacy of the general evident, for whose disgrace no appeal to the world-

spirit compensates. Group opinion dominates; through adjustment to the majority of the

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