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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
In summer 1960, Adorno gave the first of a series of lectures devoted to the relation between sociology and philosophy. One of his central concerns was to dispel the notion, erroneous in his view, that these were two incompatible disciplines, radically opposed in their methods and aims, a notion that was shared by many. While some sociologists were inclined to dismiss philosophy as obsolete and incapable of dealing with the pressing social problems of our time, many philosophers, influenced by Kant, believed that philosophical reflection must remain 'pure', investigating the constitution of knowledge and experience without reference to any real or material factors. By focusing on the problem of truth, Adorno seeks to show that Philosophy and Sociology share much more in common than many of their practitioners are inclined to assume. Drawing on intellectual history, Adorno demonstrates the connection between truth and social context, arguing that there is no truth that cannot be manipulated by ideology and no theorem that can be wholly detached from social and historical considerations. This systematic account on the interconnectedness of Philosophy and Sociology makes these lectures a timeless reflection on the nature of these disciplines and an excellent introduction to critical theory, the sociological content of which is here outlined in detail by Adorno for the first time.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Overview
Lectures
LECTURE 1
Notes
LECTURE 2
Notes
LECTURE 3
Notes
LECTURE 4
Notes
LECTURE 5
Notes
LECTURE 6
Notes
LECTURE 7
Notes
LECTURE 8
Notes
LECTURE 9
Notes
LECTURE 10
Notes
LECTURE 11
Notes
LECTURE 12
Notes
LECTURE 13
Notes
LECTURE 14
Notes
LECTURE 15
Notes
LECTURE 16
Notes
LECTURE 17
Notes
LECTURE 18
Notes
Adorno’s Notes for the Lectures
Notes
Editor’s Afterword
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
LECTURE 1
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Philosophy and Sociology
1960
Theodor W. Adorno
Edited by Dirk Braunstein
Translated by Nicholas Walker
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in German as Nachgelassene Schriften. Abteilung IV, Band 6: Philosophie und Soziologie. Herausgegeben von Dirk Braunstein © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2011
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7941-9 (hardback)
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Overview
LECTURE
Are philosophy and sociology mutually incompatible? – Controversy with König and Schelsky (I) – Kant’s influence on phenomenology and ontology – The origins of sociology in Saint-Simon – Psychology in Kant – Against ‘purity’
LECTURE 2
Resistance to philosophy on the part of sociology – Comte’s ‘law of the three stages’ (I) – The origins of sociology in France – Order and progress in Comte – The claim to priority on the part of sociology – Freedom of conscience and national sovereignty – Comte’s conception of institutions – Driven towards dialectics – The concept of positivism – First nature and second nature – Political content of Comte’s argument
LECTURE 3
Social Darwinism – Emphasis on subjectivity – Demand for systematic immanence in thought – The question of the utility of science – ‘Sociological schizophrenia’ – Priority of the social system (I) – Social compulsion – Sociology and philosophy as a dynamic unity
LECTURE 4
Comte’s demotion of philosophy – The appeal of positivism – Comte’s nominalism – ‘The law of three stages’ (II) – The pretensions of speculative thought – Controversy with König and Schelsky (II) – Against the demand for intelligibility – Ordinary language and logic
LECTURE 5
‘Chosisme’ (I) – Sociology addresses the constituted – Durkheim’s critique of ‘Ideas’ in Comte – Durkheim’s critique of Comte’s concept of progress (I) – Durkheim’s critique of Comte’s ‘law of the three stages’ – ‘Collective spirit’ as explanation of social phenomena – ‘Chosisme’ (II) – Reification of society
LECTURE 6
Concepts and observation – Critical generosity – The category of ‘meaning’ – Priority of the social system (II) – ‘Chosisme’ (III) – The concept of ‘understanding’ – Theory of the unintelligible
LECTURE 7
Objective tendency – Mediation between social and individual domains – ‘Chosisme’ (IV) – Durkheim’s critique of Comte’s concept of progress (II) – The dialectic of progress – The violence of progress – The irrationality of rationality – Different modes of mediation in philosophy and sociology
LECTURE 8
A pause in the argument – Concepts of ‘philosophy’ and ‘sociology’ operating at different levels – ‘Hyphen-sociologies’ – Sociology as a recent discipline – Sociology and empirical social research – Max Weber’s definition of sociology – Philosophy and facticity – The provincial situation of Germany
LECTURE 9
Transition to the theory of ideology – Space and time in Durkheim – On the mediation of mind and society – Concept of truth – The conceptual moment in exchange – The ‘natural character’ of the productive process is illusory – Concept of ideology presupposes an understanding of totality – Theory of ideology is philosophical rather than sociological
LECTURE 10
Truth not presentable in isolated theses – Historical development of the concept of ideology (I) – Forces of production and relations of production – Problems of constitution as social problems – Subjectivity in positivism (I) – Difference between Kant and Hume – Subjectivity in positivism (II) – Atomistic character of statistics – Relationship between truth and consciousness – Analysis of motivation
LECTURE 11
Theory of ideology behind the controversy between philosophy and sociology – Historical character of the mind – On the concept of total ideology – Against the all-encompassing suspicion of ideology – Danger of apologetic thought – Changing function of theories of ideologies (I)
LECTURE 12
Changing function of theories of ideology (II) – Slower transformation in the superstructure; ‘cultural lag’ – Apologetic tendencies of civil society – The truth moment of empirical sociology – Organized science and the independence of thought – The possibility of a theory of contemporary society (I) – The irrational character of capitalist society
LECTURE 13
The possibility of a theory of contemporary society (II) – Nominalism incompatible with theory formation – ‘Political distribution’ instead of market society – Social ‘cement’ – ‘Diamat’ – Dialectic not a method – Demand for intellectual freedom
LECTURE 14
Historical development of the concept of ideology (II) – Bacon’s theory of idols – Critique of language – Theory of ideology not a psychology of ‘interests’ – The primal history of modernity – Making a fetish of history – More ideology or less
LECTURE 15
The dissolution of ideologies (I) – Technologies and mass media – Class consciousness – The ‘sceptical generation’ and technological illusion – Scepticism as an attitude (I)
LECTURE 16
Scepticism as an attitude (II) – Different kinds of ideology – Legitimating ideologies – Complementary ideologies – Meaninglessness as meaning – Controversy with Benjamin – Danger of oversimplifying the concept of ideology (I) – Danger of oversimplifying the concept of ideology (II)
LECTURE 17
Theoretical typologies in the social sciences – The ideology of concealment – Concepts created through their extremes – The dissolution of ideologies (II) – Priority of the genetic moment in the concept of ideology – Against the dichotomy of genesis and validity – On mediation – Truth as historical (I); the history in truth – Truth as historical (II); the genetic implications for meaning
LECTURE 18
Against Mannheim’s account of genesis and validity – the genetic aspect of the mind as critical aspect – Against the idea that ‘what has come to be’ cannot be true – Example: logic in the development of music – Historical mediation of Plato and Aristotle
LECTURE 110 May 1960
Ladies and gentlemen,
This series of lectures was announced under the title of ‘Philosophy and Sociology’, and the title itself might give rise to misunderstandings for those of you who are just beginning your studies. I think it is my duty, therefore, to try and clear up such misunderstandings – such potential misunderstandings – here at the start. Since the person who is speaking to you right now occupies a position specifically designated as that of Professor of Philosophy and Sociology,1 some of you might just expect that I should really try – like one of those clumsy and silly protagonists you hear about in fairy tales – to instruct you in philosophy and sociology with a single blow, so that you could somehow pick up both these fields in two hours of lectures a week throughout the semester. But such a thing, of course, is out of the question. It is not feasible in this series of lectures for me even to give you what would generally be called an introduction to philosophy or an introduction to sociology. What I would like to do, by contrast, and in accordance with my overall theoretical conception, is to offer you, with reference to a quite specific point, a kind of model for thinking. For what I should like to unfold for you here is something about the conflict, the problematic, that has historically prevailed in the relation between the two fields of philosophy and sociology, and which is becoming even stronger at the present time, and indeed from both of the sides involved. I should also like to try and explain, for those of you who happen to come from either one field or the other, something about the problem involved in the way these two disciplines have come to be so personally united, as it were, in the case of both Herr Horkheimer2 and myself, here at this university, even though, according to a very widely shared preconception on both sides, they are actually incompatible and have nothing to do with each other. Thus I would like, from a quite specific, critical, and decisive point of view, to shed some light on these two fields; and this, so I believe, will bring us right to a problem, a central one, that is of considerable relevance both philosophically and sociologically speaking, a problem that neither of these disciplines is able to evade. I am talking about the problem of the idea of truth, on the one hand, and the idea that knowledge is essentially determined by social factors, on the other. And I believe that, by starting from this single and central problem, it then becomes possible to shed some further light on the particular fields of philosophy and sociology; thus from this quite specific and expressly chosen perspective you may also – if it is not too presumptuous to expect this – gain a certain point of entry to both fields at once, and, above all, from each of these sides – I must really emphasize this – you may then be able to disabuse yourselves of the prejudice or preconception that, with philosophy and sociology, we are essentially dealing with two at least disparate, if not downright irreconcilable, spheres of thought.
The pressing need for such reflections lies in the fact, on the one hand, that we constantly come across philosophers who react rather naively to the kind of philosophy that seems interested predominantly in social problems by saying: ‘Yes, but there must still be something like a philosophy which is right!’ The idea of being ‘right’ that is at work here is generally taken over without further ado from a very specific and, I have to say right away, limited notion or conception of philosophy; what is understood specifically by philosophy here is the realm of that which immutably persists, of the purely intellectual or spiritual, of the truth that is detached from all human factors or conditions, even though we do not even bother to ask whether the philosophical tradition itself actually corresponds to this concept of philosophy, let alone to raise the more urgent and more radical question of whether, from the substantive point of view, philosophy should submit to this concept of the supposedly correct or ‘right’ philosophy, a philosophy that we could perhaps best define as one in which absolutely nothing happens that essentially concerns us. On the other hand, we find in the field of sociology that many people, and specifically very many young people, who take up this discipline effectively do so because – as we know from America – this is a promising, evolving, and increasingly popular field of study that also offers all sorts of potential applications across a range of professional contexts. In other words, people believe that they can thereby acquire a number of specific skills and forms of expertise, if I may put it that way, which may bring them academic distinction, or fame, or money, or perhaps just a secure professional position – all fine things in their way which, heaven knows, I certainly do not disdain, and which I would certainly not wish to discourage you from pursuing.3 But, in thinking of sociology as a professionalized discipline in this way, many sociologists are tempted to regard philosophical reflection or investigation as some sort of disturbance or obstruction, like sand that has got into the machinery; so we start racking our brains about how it is possible to know social reality, or about the very concept of society, or about the relationship of static and dynamic factors in society,4 or however we may choose to describe these problems, instead of just learning how to construct a questionnaire or how best to set up relevant ‘interviews’, etc., or whatever it happens to be that is required by the sociology of today, which in this sense could justly be described as an appendage of the economic system. Now I believe that in the context of the following lectures I shall be able to show you that sociology must actually call upon philosophy if it wishes to retain any genuinely scientific character for itself, if it really wishes to be anything more than a mere technique; and indeed I believe that those of you who do decide to study a subject like sociology at university level actually expect something more from such studies than mere technical expertise. Yet the resistance to philosophy that we encounter in sociology is not generally equivalent to the belief that we can evade the issue of scientific status simply by appealing to useful techniques of one kind or another; on the contrary, the resistance in question is given a rational justification and buttressed by claiming a greater scientific character for itself. Thus what is distinctive about this sort of critique of philosophy, if I can put it this way, is that it regards philosophy itself as not scientific at all, but as a field which only introduces something alien, arbitrary, and ultimately insusceptible of proof into the proper questions of social science – in other words, as a kind of ancient relic from the chest that we supposedly like to drag around, especially in Germany, but which actually only obstructs the task of elevating sociology to the level of a genuine science modelled on the procedures of the natural sciences. Now today I would simply like to say, by way of anticipation, that I believe this kind of exaggerated claim to scientific status, when it is specifically contrasted with the philosophical approach to things, is essentially reactive in character. In other words, this claim to scientific status, inasmuch as it refuses to go beyond the identifiably given,5 and repudiates the idea of doing so as essentially ‘unscientific’, thereby reveals an inner tendency to regress to a pre-scientific level, and thus to retreat to what we could basically call the social practice of a reporter; and while there is of course nothing contemptible whatsoever about the task of gathering information and recording facts in the field of the social sciences, this process both presupposes certain theoretical elements and requires, if it is to enjoy any scientific dignity at all, further theoretical interpretation. And in this context, as you will see, the concept of philosophy actually signifies nothing other than precisely that. What I hope to do, in the second part of this series of lectures, later in the semester, is to address this complex, or indeed this conflict, between sociology and philosophy specifically as it presents itself from the side of sociology, and I intend to do so not in merely general or abstract terms but with reference to a current controversy of particular relevance to us here in Germany; it is a controversy that is partly connected with a contribution of my own entitled ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’,6 to which Helmut Schelsky, my colleague from Hamburg, has responded in some detail in his essay ‘The Current Position of German Sociology’,7 as indeed has René König in one of his recent essays.8 I shall try and present something of this controversy to you in due course, including my response to the arguments advanced by my two colleagues, so that you will also get a good idea of what is involved in what one might call my defence of philosophy within sociology itself, with specific reference to an extremely concrete and developed sociological analysis.
But for the moment I would like to begin by introducing, in its most general form, the problem with which we shall be concerned throughout this semester, and indeed from every possible angle. We could perhaps put it this way: in Germany there is a philosophical tradition which – understandably or not so understandably – starts from Kant and which, remarkably enough, has continued specifically within those philosophical schools that originally found themselves in a certain opposition to capitalism, in other words within phenomenology and the existential ontology that developed out of it. This whole intellectual tradition – if I may just present it to you here in summary fashion, in an admittedly highly abbreviated and thus rather undifferentiated way that could give rise to all sorts of misunderstandings – ends up in the following situation. For the sake of clarity I concentrate on Kant here, although the same thing also holds for a great deal of modern philosophy, even if it is expressed there in very different terminology and with different points of emphasis. So, if we just stay with Kant for a moment, we can put the matter this way: the principal task of philosophy, according to Kant, is not to tell us anything directly about the essence of things as such, but to exhibit the possibility of knowledge and to determine the limits of human knowledge. But if philosophy is to exhibit the possibility of knowledge, or, to put this in more precise and specifically Kantian terms, to exhibit the possibility of experience in general, then according to Kant’s argument it cannot presuppose any kind of material content which, for its part, derives from experience but must remain ‘pure’, as Kant puts it.9 ‘Pure’ in this sense effectively amounts to reflection on the cognitive function as such – in other words, on something purely intellectual that excludes any reference to real or material factors that might be reflected in this purely intellectual realm, or even form the presupposition of such a purely intellectual realm. In Kant’s philosophy, specifically in the Critique of Pure Reason, this issue takes shape as the problem of what is called ‘constitution’.10 The Critique of Pure Reason is a work that investigates how knowledge is constituted or, in other words, if I can express this once again in a rather abbreviated form, tries to identify the factors or functions through which something like an objective world becomes possible in the first place, and thereby allows insight into the essential connections governing this objective world, whatever it may involve or contain. In the context of this method, however, the objective world itself is regarded as secondary or, in Kant’s terms, as the constituted in relation to the constitutive,11 as that which has been generated or produced over against the purely intellectual and productive principles which make something such as experience in general possible in the first place. And from here the argument then proceeds relatively simply and relatively plausibly: ‘Well, something such as sociology, namely the scientific study of society, or even the sociology of knowledge itself, which investigates the social conditions of consciousness, all this is a kind of knowledge which already moves within the realm of the constituted, the realm of that which has itself been constituted. In other words, the objective world, here society, already belongs to the realm of experience, and the realm of experience itself must be regarded, in accordance with Kantian philosophy, as secondary; the task of investigating it cannot properly belong to philosophy but can only fall to the individual sciences which concern themselves with the relevant field.’ On this line of argument, therefore, philosophy and sociology must appear incompatible with each other, unless we are to engage in a kind of hysteron proteron argument, where first principles are confused with last principles; in other words, knowledge itself would have to be derived from the object to be known, whereas for this whole tradition of thought all material or substantive determinations would already presuppose reflection upon the forms of our cognition or knowledge in general. Now it may perhaps surprise you when I claim that this theoretical outlook, which can generally be regarded as the core element of an idealist philosophical position, is still characteristic, to a very large degree, of so much contemporary philosophy which typically flatters itself for being anti-idealist in character, which constantly assures us, implicitly or explicitly, that it has moved beyond Kant, that it has overcome idealism. Yet I believe that it does not require that much acumen if we consider, for example, the most popular philosophy to have spread within the German universities, namely the so-called existential ontology of Heidegger, to rediscover such lines of thought still at work – albeit through recourse to a much older tradition – under the problematic name of the relationship between ‘being’ and particular ‘beings’, where the latter are supposed to be merely derivative in relation to the former. In the context of Heidegger’s philosophy, ‘being’ is not, heaven forbid, supposed itself to be anything, is not at any cost supposed to be remotely tangible, to be connected with experience or with anything material whatsoever. On the contrary, it is supposed to be that which makes experience in a higher sense possible; or, as Heidegger’s teacher Husserl put it, it is supposed to be available to categorial intuition12 rather than to discursive or scientific concepts of any kind.13 And over against this so-called knowledge of being, any substantive social knowledge, and especially any attempt at social self-reflection, can appear only as a kind of Fall, as a recourse to something secondary, whereas the task is precisely to return to what is first, namely to the concept of being. I may note in passing that I have just drawn your attention, with reference to one small specific model only, to a relationship between idealism and modern existential ontology which I nonetheless believe is of far greater relevance and significance than might initially appear. I believe that it is possible, and indeed even obligatory, to offer a detailed critique of contemporary existential ontology that will show how it is actually an idealism malgré lui-même, or, in other words, an unwittingly covert and thus, if I may put it in this way, miscarried form of idealism.14 But I do not wish to elaborate on this today, as perhaps I shall have an opportunity in the next semester to look at these particular problems in more detail.15 This opposition between philosophy and sociology also crops up in the context of the seemingly concrete theorems of contemporary existential ontology, as we can clearly see from certain remarks of Herr Heidegger from the pre-fascist era, when he once compared the sociologist to someone who just clambers up the façade of a building – the proud edifice of philosophy – and forces his way into the sacred precincts, only to make off with all of its splendid furnishings,16 as Richard Wagner would put it.17 This is basically the same kind of argument to be found in Kant as far as the relation to the empirical realm is concerned, except that Kant, with typically unerring and admirable honesty, proceeded far more gently in relation to psychology, which is something from which he similarly tried to distance himself in his own time, just as existential philosophy tried to distance itself from sociology in ours. When you read Kant, of course, you will find nothing regarding sociology in the sense in which we use the word. Incidentally, I would just like to point out here, if you want to get a good general idea of what is commonly understood by sociology, at least in Germany, that the Mohr publishing house has just issued a reprint of the short introduction to Max Weber’s Economy and Society, which includes discussion of a range of basic sociological concepts.18 I would strongly recommend all of you, if you can, to take a look at this little text. Although I myself do not share the specific conception of sociology that is defended here, I think the introduction to Economy and Society will provide an excellent starting point for those who would like to know – those of you who do not yet know – exactly what we mean when we talk about sociology.
Now I have just said that you will not find the term ‘sociology’ in Kant, a term which did not yet exist in his time and was first used by Auguste Comte,19 about whom we shall have more to say shortly. However, the idea of sociology itself is actually earlier and derives from Comte’s extremely insightful and important teacher, Count Saint-Simon.20 But the principal writings in which Saint-Simon actually lays the foundations of sociology were only composed and began to exercise an influence when Kant was very advanced in years, or indeed only after his death, and he practically knew nothing about them. And the extraordinarily rich body of material on sociological issues that had emerged in the context of the French Enlightenment, especially in the writings of D’Holbach and Helvétius,21 but also among the so-called Ideologists,22 can hardly have been known to Kant either. The creation of sociology as a specific discipline is a relatively late phenomenon. We can say that this discipline comes to reflect upon itself as a kind of science only very late in the day, and there are very particular reasons why this is so – something that I shall also have more to say about in one of the coming lectures. But of course, in substantive terms, we are talking about something here which is already incomparably older, and I think it is actually a very good idea for you to dispose, once and for all, of the notion that sociology is a young science, even though we constantly encounter this claim, and one which is repeatedly defended by sociologists of all people. The precise point of time at which a science becomes independent, expressly reflects upon itself, or sticks a label on itself and the point at which such a science arises are two things which we can distinguish, though not in such a way as to conclude that a science really exists only once it has given itself its own name. And we can indeed say that, in this broader sense, sociology as a discipline is as old as philosophy, and that especially among the greatest representatives of ancient philosophy that separation between sociology and philosophy which will perhaps seem self-evident to many of you is not yet present at all.
When you read Kant you will constantly encounter a vigorous repudiation of psychology, and there is a specific reason for this. For Kant’s philosophy is essentially an analysis of the faculty of knowledge – in other words, of the faculty of human consciousness itself. Now human consciousness, as it presents itself to Kant, is bound up with actual, living human beings, and in a certain sense is also itself a part of the empirical world. The empirical subjects or empirical human beings, as psychology deals with them, form just as much an object of our experience as, for example, are things in space or anything else. But Kant is seeking to identify the constitutive factors of experience in general, and in his analysis of consciousness he cannot properly therefore assume this consciousness insofar as it is itself an empirical fact to which I stand in relation. You have to remember that the British philosophy of his time, which represents one factor in the Kantian parallelogram of forces,23 and particularly the philosophy of Locke and Hume, understood itself as a kind of psychology, as an investigation of the elements of consciousness.24 And the fact that this British psychology, this British philosophy, was empiricist in character, and thus essentially denied the prevailing conceptions of valid knowledge as such, springs directly from the way this philosophy starts from our actually existing and transient empirical consciousness. But Kant wanted something very different; he specifically wanted to salvage eternal truth. But he wanted to salvage this precisely through an analysis of human consciousness. That, of course, is why he was particularly allergic to any conception of consciousness or the mind which would have turned this consciousness into something merely factual, simply into a piece of empirical reality; and that is why – in accordance with Freud’s famous thesis concerning the pathos of the smallest differences25 – he always strove with a quite particular passion to distinguish his own analyses of the mind, of consciousness, or of whatever else it might be, from psychology in the most emphatic possible way. With highly questionable success, it has to be said, for, in spite of Kant’s express and constantly repeated claim (especially in the second account he provides of his theory of knowledge, namely the Prolegomena) that his analysis of consciousness has nothing to do with an analysis of the actually given empirical human mind or empirical human soul,26 it is possible to show that he is nonetheless constantly forced to make use of particular expressions and particular considerations that are undeniably derived from the real actual life of particular individuals, from the psychological life of particular individuals. Thus the famous unity of consciousness, the synthetic unity of apperception, which is ultimately the most important concept in Kant’s whole philosophy,27 essentially derives simply from observing that what is called the ‘I’ is a unity only because it is aware of itself as something identical in the horizon of time – in other words, through the process of recollection, presentation and anticipation. Thus Kant’s principle of identity itself is, if you like, actually drawn from psychology, which is why it also already involves the dimension of time; and, precisely because it is temporal in character, consciousness is determined in the first place as an empirical consciousness. Here I am merely drawing your attention to one side of the issues involved. For we are talking about an extraordinarily complex and many-sided question. Nor with these observations do I simply wish to tie Kant down to a merely psychological thesis. I have already mentioned that the psychological and the anti-psychological themes in Kant’s thought work in some friction with each other, but here I just wanted to show you that the dividing line between pure Kantian philosophy and the realm of psychology is not nearly as clear, as sharp, or as unambiguous as Kant himself intended. And while the full force of the central element in Kant’s critique of reason, namely the deduction of the pure forms of the understanding,28 specifically and originally derives from the way that this deduction clings so closely to the experience of concrete and individual human consciousness, i.e. precisely through a certain proximity to psychology, it is surely remarkable to note that Kant, with his inimitable perceptiveness and his inimitable honesty and intellectual integrity, actually points out that he himself thereby runs the danger of making transcendental philosophy appear to depend upon the empirical; and in a sense one can understand the development of Kant’s philosophy as an ever more emphatic turn against the perspective of psychology. Thus in the Critique of Practical Reason you will discover much more invective against any possible kind of psychological interpretation than you can in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant was not yet quite so strict about these things – and this from a deep sense that any such static and absolute separation of the transcendental sphere of purely intellectual processes from the psychological sphere that involves the temporal embodiment of mind cannot actually be carried out. Now if Kant so strongly repudiated the real individual human subject in contrast to the pure ‘I think’ that accompanies all my representations,29 i.e. in contrast to consciousness as a pure formal unity of experience,30 then he would also clearly have to reject any reflection on society, namely sociology, as having any grounding or constitutive force as far as philosophy is concerned. For society, after all, is in fact something like a functional connection, a functional connection that obtains between individual empirical human beings, which would then indeed also appear as factors within a constituted field of knowledge. When Kant speaks in the Prolegomena of ‘consciousness in general’,31 he does not actually mean – as the expression tends to suggest, and I believe for good reason – the consciousness which distinctively belongs to all human beings; that is to say, he does not mean something social, or a social consciousness, since for Kant the qualification ‘in general’ means consciousness as such, namely a consciousness without which something like an intrinsically coherent experience or an intrinsically valid case of knowledge could never be entertained at all. But in this famous formulation of ‘consciousness in general’ you may notice once again, and by way of anticipation, that it was not so easy for Kantian philosophy either to accomplish this separation from sociology, admittedly a discipline which did not specifically exist as sociology in his time. For what, in the final analysis, is this ‘consciousness in general’? If you try and grasp what this ‘in general’ means, you will probably be able to think only of a consciousness that is not your consciousness, or my consciousness, or anyone else’s consciousness but consciousness in general – in other words, a consciousness common to us all. The logical extension implied by the expression ‘in general’ already includes the ‘we’ in its very meaning, or, if you like, already implicitly includes society, although Kant would not be able to ascribe central philosophical significance to society precisely because it belongs to the realm of the constituted and enjoys a merely derived status. Now Kant certainly did recognize the significance of empirical psychology, and he would – I think it is safe to say – probably also have been able to recognize the significance of an empirical sociology. In the period when Kantian thought developed, which was still the period of Enlightenment and bourgeois culture in its ascendant phase, if I may be allowed to use such expressions, thinkers had certainly already sought to protect the traditional concept of philosophy from being confused, contaminated or conflated with the merely empirical; however, they did not yet display that exaggerated fear of the empirical that has become widespread today and serves in a way to complement that blind enthusiasm for ‘the facts’ and everything empirical which is equally widespread these days. This yawning gulf between extreme fear of the factical, on the one hand, and an intoxication or orgiastic obsession with the facts, on the other, can sometimes make it look as though we of the older generation are the reckless ones, while the younger generation seems to display the sobriety that we sought in vain to acquire.32 But things were not yet like that in Kant’s time. On the contrary, in the context of his critique of reason there is still plenty of room for psychology – and, I might plausibly add, for sociology too – as long as we make the following qualification: ‘All this belongs to the realm of the constituted; none of this may provide your starting point of departure, if you are trying to justify the fundamental principles of philosophy itself.’
In the climate that prevails today around the problem of philosophy and sociology, there has been a quite decisive change precisely in this regard; when I said right at the beginning of this lecture that, in a sense, the Kantian problematic is still directly relevant for us in this connection, I must now correct that claim somewhat or present it in a more nuanced manner. In other words, what we find today is that philosophy is now hardly inclined to allow sociology any room at all, and that both fields have parted from each other in mutual acrimony. They now display a mortal fear of coming into contact with each other and thus I might even say of infecting each other – something it would almost need a Freud to explain. The idea that the sciences must be legitimated as purely and autonomously as possible without borrowing anything from elsewhere is an inheritance from the nineteenth century which has played a very important role in connection with the problematic notion of presuppositionless enquiry,33 a notion that continues to draw on that inherited idea; while philosophy is increasingly thrown back upon its own resources as the sphere of its authority is progressively cut back by the advances of the so-called positive sciences (and it is of the essence of scientific progress that poor old philosophy, which once also embraced geography, medicine and who knows what else, increasingly finds itself robbed of any connection with such fields). The result is that philosophy guards even more jealously the position that it has now at least managed to establish for itself as just one branch among other branches of enquiry, which is why it not only refuses to tolerate any invasions of its own territory on the part of sociology or psychology but even attempts wherever possible to attack these disciplines even in areas where they perhaps seem to be most appropriate. Thus in the Kantian tradition today, insofar as this still survives in Germany, we no longer find that Kantian tolerance towards psychology as a kind of positive science in contrast to philosophy. There is no question of this, and what we find instead is that psychology and especially sociology appear from the start as a threat to the philosophical peace; and where modern existential ontology does pay any attention to psychology or sociology, it specifically tries to do so in a way that gets rid of the empirical salt, of the empirical thorn, and seeks to grasp the psychological realm by means of extremely formal categories that have been purged of any actual concrete meaning. In this connection you might think of the fashion for so-called Daseinsanalyse or ‘existential analysis’,34 a trend which is very pronounced today, in contrast to the psychoanalysis that explores psychical life as a field of concrete experience. Thus we can say that modern philosophers in general, if they are philosophers in an emphatic sense and not simply methodologists like the logical positivists for example, are anti-sociological in outlook – with the exception, I would add, of a very few individuals, some of whom you will find here in Frankfurt. Thus the anti-empirical tendency of philosophy is now extended to fields that have been removed from the realm of philosophy. Where there is still something such as philosophy to be found, it tends to treat sociology negatively and refuses to let it be even in its native territory, so to speak. And in the next lecture you will hear how the reverse is also true as far as the kind of naive sociology which does not reflect upon itself is concerned.
Notes
1
T. W. Adorno was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Sociology in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in 1953; four years later he became Full Professor, a position which he held until his death in 1969.
2
Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) had been Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt between 1930 and 1933. After his return from exile in the USA he held the post of Professor of Philosophy and Sociology from 1949 until 1959.
3
In his lecture course
Introduction to Sociology
delivered in the summer semester of 1968, however, Adorno specifically says that ‘the career prospects for sociologists are not good.’ He continues:
It would be highly misleading to gloss over this fact. And far from improving, as might have been expected, these prospects have actually got worse. One reason is a slow but steady increase in the number of graduates; the other is that, in the current economic situation [Adorno is referring to the period of recession in 1966 and 1967], the profession’s ability to absorb sociology graduates has declined. I should mention something that I was not aware of earlier, and have only found out since becoming closely involved in these matters. It is that even in America, which is sometimes called the sociological paradise, and where sociology does, at least, enjoy equal rights within the republic of learning, it is by no means the case that its graduates can effortlessly find jobs anywhere. So that if Germany were to develop in the same direction as America in this respect, as I prognosticated ten years ago, it would not make a significant difference. (NaS IV.15, p. 9; Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 1–2)
4
See Adorno’s essay ‘On Statics and Dynamics as Sociological Categories’ (GS 8, pp. 217–37), which was first published in this form in 1962, although an earlier version of the piece had appeared in 1956 under the title ‘Observations on Statics and Dynamics’ (See
Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie
, 8/2 [1956], pp. 321–8).
5
Reading ‘nicht’ for ‘wach’.
6
Adorno’s essay ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’ was originally published in Klaus Ziegler (ed.),
Wesen und Wirklichkeit des Menschen: Festschrift für Helmuth Plessner
, Göttingen, 1957, pp. 245–60. In a note to that essay Adorno says: ‘The text which is published here is a revised and expanded version of theses which were originally presented in a discussion between German social scientists which took place on 1 March 1957 at the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt’ (ibid., p. 245). The text can now be found in GS 8, pp. 196–216; see the Editor’s Afterword in GS 9.2, p. 407.
7
See Helmut Schelsky,
Ortsbestimmung der deutschen Soziologie
, Düsseldorf, 1959. In this book Schelsky (1912–1984) engages in detail with Adorno‘s critique of empirical social research (see, in particular, pp. 28f., 50–2, 67–89; see also NaS IV.15, p. 81;
Introduction to Sociology
, Jephcott, p. 105).
8
See René König, ‘On Some Recent Developments in the Relation between Theory and Research’, in
Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology
, Vol. II, London, pp. 275–89. Adorno’s personal library included an offprint of this essay (Nachlaßbibliothek Adorno 5694). See also the letter from König (1906–1992) to Adorno of 7 January 1959 and Adorno’s letter to König of 29 September 1959 (René König,
Schriften: Ausgabe letzter Hand
, ed. Heine von Alemann et al., vol. 19:
Briefwechsel
, vol. 1, ed. Mario König and Oliver König, Opladen, 2000, pp. 506 and 512).
9
See the opening section of the ‘Introduction’ to the
Critique of Pure Reason
: ‘On the Distinction between Pure and Empirical Knowledge’ (Immanuel Kant,
Werke in sechs Bänden
, ed. Wilhelm Weischedl, Wiesbaden, 1956, vol. II:
Kritik der reinen Vernunft
, pp. 45f. (B 1–3);
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan, 1933, pp. 41–3).
10
In his lectures on Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
, delivered in the summer semester of 1959, Adorno discusses this ‘problem of constitution’ in detail and notes that ‘quotidian existence, factuality, is just as much a precondition of the possibility of thinking about mere forms as is its claim that without these forms the contents of experience could not come about at all’ (NaS IV.4, p. 239;
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Polity, 2001, p. 157). This recognition leads Adorno at the end of the lecture to propose
a variation of the famous Kantian project of ‘the critical path that alone is open’. We shall indeed adopt this Kantian project of the critical path. What I have been doing was very consciously carried out in the spirit of an immanent critique of the Critique of Pure Reason. My arguments have been moving within the conceptual apparatus and the lines of thought developed by Kant. At the same time, their aim was to break out of the prison of the so-called problem of what constitutes what. They terminate in the proposition that the dialectical path alone is open. (Ibid., p. 241; Livingstone, p. 159)
11
Adorno ascribes the concepts of the ‘constituting’ and the ‘constituted’ to Kant in other places too (
Drei Studien zu Hegel
, GS 5, pp. 258–69, and
Negative Dialektik
, GS 6, p. 239; see
Hegel: Three Studies
, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA, 1993, pp. 9–22, and
Negative Dialectics
, trans. E. B. Ashton, Routledge, 1973, p. 241). In fact, these specific terms are not actually used by Kant himself. Adorno discusses the concepts in question and the problem he takes to be involved here in lecture 14 of the aforementioned course on the first
Critique
(NaS IV.4., pp. 226–41;
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 149–59).
12
Reading ‘nicht diskursiven’ for ‘den kursiven’.
13
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) distinguished between ‘sensuous intuition’ and what he called ‘categorial intuition’. See
Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke
, ed. H. L. von Breda et al., The Hague, 1956–, Vol. XIX.2,
Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Zweiter Teil
, ed. Ursula Panzer, pp. 657–963;
Logical Investigations
, Vol. II, trans. J. N. Findlay, Routledge, 2001, pp. 271–92. Adorno also refers to this issue in his
Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie
:
We may perhaps surmise that this is one of the causes for Husserl’s effect. His philosophy codifies an objectively historical experience without deciphering it, viz. the withering away of argument. Consciousness finds itself at a crossroads. Though the call to insight [Schau] and the scorn of discursive thought may furnish the pretext for a commandeered world view and blind subordination, it also exhibits the instant in which the correctness of argument and counter-argument disappears, and in which the activity of thought consists only in calling what is by its name. Namely, what everyone already knows, so no more arguments are needed, and what no one wants to know, so no counter-argument need be heard. … Husserlian analyses, and even the paradoxical construction of categorial intuition, remain, in Hegelian terms, completely mired in mere reflection. (GS 5, pp. 212f.; Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo, Cambridge, MA, 2013, pp. 209–10)
14
See Adorno’s remarks in
Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie
:
The notion of the double character of Dasein, as ontic and ontological, expels Dasein from itself. This is Heidegger’s disguised idealism. For the dialectic in the subject between the existent and the concept becomes being of a higher order; and the dialectic is brought to a halt. Whatever praises itself for reaching behind the concepts of reflection – subject and object – in order to grasp something substantial, does nothing but reify the irresolvability of the concepts of reflection. It reifies the impossibility of reducing one into the other, into the in-itself. This is the standard philosophical form of underhanded activity, which thereupon occurs constantly in the jargon. It vindicates without authority and without theology, maintaining that what is of essence is real, and, by the same token, that the existent is essential, meaningful, and justified. (GS 6, pp. 493f.; The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, London, 1973, pp. 120–1)
15
In the following winter semester of 1960/61 Adorno did indeed offer a lecture course entitled ‘Ontologie und Dialektik’ (NaS IV.7;
Ontology and Dialectics
, trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge, 2019).
16
The quotation comes from scene 2 of Wagner’s opera
Das Rheingold
, where Fricka addresses her spouse Wotan in the following words: ‘Concern for my husband’s fidelity, / drives me to ponder in sadness / how yet I might bind him to me / when he is drawn to roam afar: / a glorious dwelling, / splendidly furnished / was meant to hold you here / in tranquil repose’ (Richard Wagner,
Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen
, Leipzig, 1911, vol. 5, p. 215).
17
In a series of lectures delivered in the winter semester of 1929/30 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) had declared that a
transformation of seeing and questioning is always the decisive thing in science. The greatness and vitality of a science is revealed in the power of its capacity for such transformation. Yet this transformation of seeing and questioning is misunderstood when it is taken as a change of standpoint or shift in the sociological conditions of science. It is true that this is the sort of thing which mainly or exclusively interests many people in science today – its psychologically and sociologically conditioned character – but this is just a facade. Sociology of this kind relates to real science and its philosophical comprehension in the same way in which one who clambers up a facade relates to the architect or, to take a less elevated example, to a conscientious craftsman. (Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm von Hermann, Frankfurt, 2004, p. 379; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. Nicholas Walker and William McNeill, Bloomington, IN, 1995, p. 261)
Adorno could not have had direct knowledge of these lectures (which were first published in 1983) but probably heard these remarks on sociology going the rounds.
18
See Max Weber,
Soziologische Grundbegriffe
, Tübingen, 1960 (an offprint from: Max Weber,
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
, 4th edn, ed. Johannes Winckelman, 1956, pp. 1–30). This opening chapter from
Economy and Society
is included in Max Weber,
The Theory of Social and Economic Organization
, ed. Talcott Parsons, New York, 1964, pp. 87–157.
19
On the introduction of the term ‘sociology’ by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), see Adorno’s footnote in the opening chapter of
Soziologische Exkurse
:
The term ‘sociology’ can be found in Comte in his letter to Valat of December 25, 1824 (Lettres d’Auguste Comte à Monsieur Valat, Paris, 1870, p. 158). The term was made public in 1838 in the fourth volume of Comte’s chief work. Up to that point he had designated the science at which he was aiming ‘physique sociale’. He justified the introduction of the new term as follows: ‘I believe that at the present point I must risk this new term, physique sociale, in order to be able to designate by a single word this complementary part of natural philosophy which bears on the postivie study of the totality of fundamental laws proper to social phenomena.’ (Soziologische Exkurse, ed. Theodor Adorno and Walter Dirks, Frankfurt, 1956, p. 18; Aspects of Sociology, by The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, trans. John Viertel, London, 1973, pp. 11–12)
20
Claude-Henri de Rouvoy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), is generally regarded as one of the founding fathers of sociology as a specific discipline. From 1817 to 1824 Saint-Simon was Comte’s student, secretary and confidante.
21
Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) and Paul Thiry d’Holbach (1723–1789) both regarded themselves as followers of John Locke (1632–1704). Like Locke, they espoused the theory of innate ideas and regarded human beings as essentially the products of their environment. In the essay referred to in the previous note, Adorno says that
Thus the left-wing encyclopedists Helvetius and Holbach proclaim that prejudices of the sort which Bacon attributed to man universally have their definite social function. They serve the maintenance of unjust conditions and stand in opposition to the realization of happiness and the establishment of a rational society. … To be sure, the Encyclopedist too did not as yet attain a comprehensive insight into the objective origin of ideologies and the objectivity of their social function. For the most part prejudices and false consciousness are traced back to the machinations of the mighty. In Holbach it is said: ‘Authority generally considers it in its interest to maintain received opinions [les opinions recues]: the prejudices and errors which it considers necessary for the secure maintenance of its power are perpetuated by this power, which never reasons [qui jamais ne raisonne]’ At approximately the same time, however, Helvetius, perhaps the thinker among the Encyclopedists endowed with the greatest intellectual power, had already recognized the objective necessity of what was attributed by others to the ill will of camarillas: ‘Our ideas are the necessary consequence of the society in which we live.’ (Institut für Sozialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse, pp. 164f.; Aspects of Sociology, pp. 184–5)
The quotation is from d’Holbach’s
Système de la nature ou des lois du monde physique et du monde moral
and is cited in German translation by Hans Barth in his book
Wahrheit und Ideologie
, Zurich, 1945, p. 69. In the same essay Adorno quotes a passage from Helvétius,
De l’esprit
, also in Barth’s German translation, p. 62. In this connection, see also Adorno’s
Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre
, GS 8, pp. 457–77.
22
The concept of ‘ideology’ can be traced back to Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836). He used the term in his work
Eléments d’idéologie
(Paris, 1801–15) to describe the exact theory of ideas (in the sense of mental ‘representations’). This Enlightenment theory was expressly taken over by the philosophical ‘School of the Ideologists’ and exerted considerable influence in the French educational system until the doctrine was attacked and discredited by Napoleon Bonaparte. In a passage from the
Soziologische Exkurse
we read that:
Although his dictatorship was itself linked in so many respects to the bourgeois emancipation, Napoleon, in a passage which Pareto cites, already raised the accusation of subversion against the ideologues, even if he did so in a more subtle manner, an accusation which ever since has attached itself like a shadow to the social analysis of consciousness. In this reproach he emphasized the irrational moments – in a language with Rousseauean colorations – to which a continual appeal was made subsequently, against the so-called intellectualism of the critique of ideology … Napoleon’s denunciation charges: ‘It is to the doctrine of the ideologues – to this diffuse metaphysics, which in a contrived manner seeks to find the primary causes and on this foundation would erect the legislation of the peoples, instead of adapting the laws to a knowledge of the human heart and to the lessons of history – to which one must attribute all the misfortunes which have befallen our beautiful France. Their errors had to – and indeed this was the case – bring about the regime of the men of terror. Indeed, who was it who proclaimed the principle of insurrection as a duty? Who misled the people by elevating them to a sovereignty which they were incapable of exercising? Who has destroyed the sanctity of the laws and all respect for them, by no longer deriving them from the sacred principles of justice, the essence of things, and the civil order of rights, but exclusively from the arbitrary volition of the people’s representatives, composed of men without knowledge of the civil, criminal, administrative, political, and military law? If one is called upon to renew a state, then one must follow principles which are in constant opposition to each other [des principes constamment opposés]. History displays the history of the human heart; it is in history that one must seek to gain knowledge of the advantages and the evils of the various kinds of legislation.’ … The later usage too, which employs the expression ‘unworldly ideologues’ against allegedly abstract utopians in the name of ‘Realpolitik,’ is discernible in Napoleon’s pronouncements. But he failed to realize that the ideologues’ analysis of consciousness was by no means so irreconcilable with the interests of the rulers. Already then a technical manipulative moment was associated with it. (Institut für Sozialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse, pp. 166f.; Aspects of Sociology, pp. 187–8)
23
The other ‘force’ was the rationalism defended by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754) as an alternative to British empiricism. Kant sought to overcome both of these schools with his philosophy of transcendental idealism, which claimed that knowledge depended upon both sensible experience and the ‘concepts of the understanding’. For Kant, the opposition between rationalism and empiricism was equivalent to that between dogmatism and scepticism; he was concerned principally with the question concerning the possibility of metaphysics as a science, an idea which dogmatism simply affirmed and empiricism denied. For Kant, genuine metaphysical knowledge is simply knowledge that holds independently of experience and comes about through the formation of pure synthetic a priori judgements. In his view, ‘the dogmatists’ were never able to explain how the formation of such judgements is even possible. See NaS IV.4, p. 89;
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
, Livingstone, p. 56.
24
The description of empiricist philosophy and psychology as the ‘analysis of consciousness’ can already be found in Hegel:
Psychology, like logic, is one of those sciences which in recent times have still derived least profit from the more general cultivation of the mind and the deeper concept of reason. It is still in an extremely poor condition. The turn effected by the Kantian philosophy has indeed attached greater importance to it, even claiming that it should (and that in its empirical condition) constitute the foundation of metaphysics, a science which is to consist of nothing but the empirical apprehension and analysis of the facts of human consciousness, merely as facts, just as they are given. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke
