Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory: Critical Theory in Philosophical Context (Renewing Philosophy)

Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory

Philip Walsh

Renewing Philosophy General Editor: Gary Banham Titles include: Kyriaki Goudeli CHALLENGES TO GERMAN IDEALISM Schelling, Fichte and Kant Keekok Lee PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTIONS IN GENETICS Deep Science and Deep Technology Jill Marsden AFTER NIETZSCHE Celine Surprenant FREUD’S MASS PSYCHOLOGY Jim Urpeth FROM KANT TO DELEUZE Philip Walsh SKEPTICISM, MODERNITY AND CRITICAL THEORY Martin Weatherston HEIDEGGER’S INTERPRETATION OF KANT Categories, Imagination and Temporality

Renewing Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–91928–9 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Also by Philip Walsh (Co-ed. with Davis Schneiderman) RETAKING THE UNIVERSE: WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory Philip Walsh

© Philip Walsh 2005 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2005 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–1814–7 ISBN-10: 1–4039–1814–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walsh, Philip, 1965– Skepticism, modernity, and critical theory / by Philip Walsh. p. cm.—(Renewing philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1814–7 1. Skepticism – History. 2. Criticism (Philosophy) – History. 3. Frankfurt school of sociology – History. I. Title. II. Series. B837.W35 2005 149⬘.73—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne.

2004059129

To my parents, Nigel and Ann Walsh

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Contents

Series Editor’s Preface

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction

1

Part I Skepticism and Modern Philosophy

11

1 Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 1.1. Hegel’s 1801 essay on skepticism: The philosophical context 1.2. Ancient versus modern skepticism 1.3. Ancient skepticism and Hellenistic philosophy: The historical context 1.4. Hegel and the evolution of ancient skepticism 1.5. Arch[ and telos

13 15 17 21 28 31

2 On the Origins of Modern Skepticism: Descartes, Doubt and Certainty 2.1. Cartesianism as a modern problematic 2.2. Doubt and subjectivity 2.3. The Cartesian conception of worldhood 2.4. The stages of doubt and the Cogito

35 36 38 41 45

Part II Skepticism and Idealism

53

3 The Question of Legitimacy: Skepticism, Law and Transcendental Idealism 3.1. The need for legitimacy 3.2. The demand for a deduction 3.3. Re-enter empiricism: The questions of fact and right 3.4. Critique and metacritique in the two deductions 3.5. Metacritique and reflection 3.6. Reflection, antinomy and the legitimation of experience

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55 55 58 60 64 66 72

viii Contents

4 Hegel and Self-Completing Skepticism 4.1. Skepticism and the idea of a system 4.2. Completion and the absolute standpoint 4.3. Phenomenology against Science 4.4. Evading the Absolute

76 77 82 88 97

Part III Skepticism and the Critique of Modernity

101

5 Skepticism, Nihilism and the Crisis of Rationality 5.1. The critique of philosophy 5.2. Nietzsche, Weber and the antinomies of reason 5.3. Enlightenment as self-completing nihilism 5.4. Dialectic of Enlightenment as critical prelude to Negative Dialectics

103 104 107 116

6 Negative Dialectics and the Fate of Critical Theory 6.1. Hegel and critical theory 6.2. Reading Lukács 6.3. Critical theory as negative dialectics: Methodological reflections 6.4. Metacritique of systems 6.5. Against identity 6.6. Block and the mourning of metaphysics

127 127 128

Notes

146

Select Bibliography

170

Index

176

119

134 136 141 143

Series Editor’s Preface For some time now the question of the philosophical understanding of modernity has been a problem of pressing concern. From the inquiries of Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to the work of Theodor Adorno, the nature and conception of modernity has been thought to pose serious questions to understanding the place and role of philosophy in relation to the experiences that come to occupy a central place within this modernity. Once put in this form we see the ineluctable emergence of reflexivity as a question that thought places before itself in its endeavour to comprehend its expression of an experience it appears both to capture and to fail to render comprehensible. The comprehension of a particular temporality as that which captures a set of problems that philosophers can and do recognize as having a long history poses for us the difficult problem of how to unite the understanding of something specific within historical experience with the linkage we can see it to have with the philosophies of previous ages. This is another aspect of the problem of modernity. In this work, Philip Walsh addresses the second question I have posed by thinking modernity in relation to skepticism. By placing the question of modernity as part of an account of the role of skepticism in the history of thought’s attempt to grapple with its own conditions, Walsh suggests one way of managing the first question above: that is, by showing the linkage between the modern and its predecessors in terms of how there is a unifying sceptical endeavour that nonetheless dirempts in terms of its particular ostensible focus. This is an ambitious and important approach to the questions thrown up in thinking modernity as a philosophical category that enables the placement of this philosophical category within the register of experience, a register central to the notion of this category, since without it there would be no connection of the philosophical trajectory traced with the historical/temporal form it alleges to be both formative of and formed by. A central task of the series Renewing Philosophy is to demonstrate the importance of specifically philosophical investigations for comprehension of the conditions of modernity, and hence this book squarely fits within the remit of this series. In articulating an account of the traditions of skeptical thought from the ancient world to the post-Cartesian realm of modernity, this work decisively outlines one of the important ix

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Series Editor’s Preface

modes of active thought-experience required to comprehend the position within which contemporary reflection is implicated. The particular way in which this path through modernity is traced follows from the grasping of the reflexive relation between thought and experience as that which precisely marks modernity itself. In questioning the narrative here outlined the reader must find the question of their own experience as part of what must both match and be matched by what is here set forth if the claims contained within the work are to be evaluated in a true spirit. This indicates that the path of reading this work is a necessarily difficult one. However, if the difficulty in question is one which is connected to the problem of what is meant by enlightenment in an age of increased detachment and indifference to reflection, then the experience of this difficulty is one that may yet enable the Owl of Minerva to point the way towards a new light. GARY BANHAM

Acknowledgements Much of the background research for this book was carried out at the University of Warwick in the 1990s and I would like to thank the faculty of the Departments of Sociology and Philosophy for providing the intellectual climate for this work to take place. The guidance of Gillian Rose, Howard Caygill and Robert Fine was instrumental in bringing the pieces of this project together and Marilyn Moskal and Kyriaki Goudeli provided encouragement and support along the way. I am also grateful to Gary Banham and Gilda Haines who helped see this work through to its conclusion. The students who have attended my upper-level sociological theory classes at Cortland College over the past three years (often unbeknown to them) provided a forum for testing out many of the ideas developed in this work, and I salute them. Finally, I am indebted to Nicola East for her patience, strength, wisdom and heroic help with editing.

xi

“Contradiction is the rule for truth, non-contradiction for falsehood.” (Thesis from Hegel’s Habilitation, 1801)

Introduction

Among social theorists, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is generally thought to be primarily Marxist in inspiration, and its connection to philosophy is often presented as antagonistic, or at least secondary.1 This perception was particularly strong in the 1960s and 70s, when critical theory was viewed as a primary inspiration behind the rise of the worldwide radical social movements that came to be known as the New Left, and Marx’s exhortation to unite theory and practice came to occupy center stage in the reception and interpretation of the writings of the critical theorists. However, over the last two decades, the philosophical core of the most influential themes developed within critical theory has become clear, and has generated a significant quantity of what is customarily designated philosophical scholarship.2 The shift is also illustrated in the increasing appreciation of the work of Theodor W. Adorno, who, among the members of the first generation theorists, was the most overtly concerned with philosophy, and especially with the philosophical program inherited from the German idealist tradition that culminates in Hegel. In this respect, Adorno’s work can be viewed as somewhat divergent from the other prominent Frankfurt School theorists and – certainly with respect to its consistent emphasis on the need for philosophy – it has a problematic relationship not only with the work of the other prominent first-generation members of the School, Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer, but also with that of Jurgen Habermas.3 Indeed, the differences between Adorno and Habermas, and symbolically between the first and second generation of critical theorists, have formed something of a terrain marker in the landscape of critical theory commentary, with Adorno often being framed as maintaining an allegiance to a tradition of metaphysical and epistemological inquiry, and Habermas calling for 1

2

Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory

a ‘post-metaphysical thinking’. The real differences are no doubt more complex and nuanced than this, but the shift in emphasis is real enough. This book is primarily concerned with the influence of philosophical skepticism on the critical theory research paradigm. Therefore, it concerns one element of an interdisciplinary and evolving research project, the definition of which may be said to comprise three separate components: (1) A conception of human beings and human society that is strongly historicist; (2) a commitment, nevertheless, to an emancipatory view of knowledge defined by the tradition of modern Marxist sociology; (3) a conception of reason derived from the tradition of modern European philosophy, and from Hegel’s philosophy in particular. The argument that undergirds the book is that we cannot come to terms with this third element of the critical theory project without a retrospective understanding of the question of skepticism, since the skeptical moment is an indispensable theme within Hegel’s conception of reason. Now, to claim that Hegel’s conception of skepticism is important for critical theory seems, initially at least, an extraordinary claim to make, particularly in the light of recent attempts to redefine the basic orientation of theory away from epistemological inquiry and towards the more modest goals defined by the ‘mistrust of meta-narratives’. Indeed, the claim seems to concern what has become, for some, an obsolescent, or at least problematic, field of inquiry, both within critical theory and within modern philosophy in general, that is, epistemology itself. Indeed, to assert the importance of skepticism to critical theory is to risk being convicted of lapsing from one of the founding premises that the critical theorists took over from Hegel – the critique of the idea that the future and fate of the sciences rests on the success of a ‘pure’ realm of a priori inquiry into the nature of knowing, which would act to guarantee and legitimate the special sciences. The success of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s basic assumptions on the grounding role of a theory of knowledge is thought to be seminal to the rise of social theory, and to the very idea of critical theory. This interpretation of Hegel’s significance is central to the sympathetic re-working of Habermas’s project that has been put forward by Garbis Kortian. According to Kortian, Marx’s critique of Hegelian idealism is the second stage in the development of a metacritical project that begins with Hegel’s critique of Kant and culminates – or at least reaches its current resting place – in the work of Habermas himself, who has selfconsciously presented his work as part of the same development. Each member in this series subjects the previous one to a reflexive critique

Introduction

3

that has had the effect of problematizing the presuppositions and self-conception of philosophy so-called. A direct line of descent from the Phenomenology of Spirit to Critical Theory may be established because it was Hegel himself who set out the metacritical argument as part of his explication of the concept of speculative experience. The argument was formulated as a radicalization of the Kantian critique of knowledge and was to lead to the dissolution of all epistemology.4 If the key result of this process has been the decay of epistemology, both in its foundational role within academic philosophy and as a point of reference for the methodology of the social sciences, insofar as skepticism is concerned with the problems of the nature of the world and our knowledge of it, it does not survive the demise of epistemology as a genuine field of inquiry. Different versions of the argument against epistemology, but issuing in the same conclusion, have been propagated by, among others, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Jean-Francois Lyotard.5 Needless to say, a major theme of this book is to take issue with both the above line of argument and with its conclusion. Kortian’s and Habermas’s historical accounts of the development of metacritique simplify the role of key figures in the series and obscure the meaning of the key concept of metacritique itself. In particular, Hegel’s role in this series is problematic. The interpretation of Hegel as simply a critic of Kant misconstrues Kant’s own role in the displacement of foundational epistemology, together with the role played by Hume’s and Descartes’ legacies, as well as that of other key players within this debate, including such post-Kantian figures as J.G. Hamman, G.E. Schulze and Fichte. More importantly, perhaps, it ignores the roots of Hegel’s own critique of the critical project, which need to be distinguished from what Kortian and Habermas have come to identify as metacritique. In terms of the conclusions of those who question the relevance of epistemology, there can be no question of reverting to some illusion of philosophical suzerainty over the notion of a theory of knowledge. Nevertheless, poststructuralist, pragmatic and sociological farewells to that notion in the name of ‘anti-foundationalism’ have proved to be premature and, in a variety of ways, ineffectual. An initial important step in the argument here is to disrupt conventional understandings of the meaning of skepticism, which tend to limit it to a narrow set of goals and functions. An overview of the role of skepticism in the epistemological disputes within modern European

4

Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory

philosophy, together with an indication of the fault lines along which various conceptions of skepticism fracture, is rehearsed here. This approach will also allow us to set in place the philosophical dramatis personae of the book, together with an overview of its structure. In modern philosophy, skepticism is associated strongly with the account of knowledge and the moral philosophy presented by Hume. Hume’s skeptical empiricism is generally acknowledged as materialist and progressive, in tune with the overall thrust of Enlightenment values and of liberalism as a political and moral philosophy. It is hard-nosed, opposed to metaphysical system-building and directs attention to the empirical limits and constraints on knowledge. Hume’s skepticism is intent on dispelling metaphysical falsehoods for the purpose of achieving those few, certain empirically grounded factual truths that are available to rational beings. Kant appears to have a similar view of the role and function of skepticism. In the section of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled “The Antinomy of Pure Reason,” Kant distinguishes a ‘skeptical method’ which is directed against false controversies – against the tendency to pursue questions that cannot, in principle be resolved – from another species of skepticism: “a principle of technical and scientific ignorance, which undermines the foundations of all knowledge, and strives in all possible ways to destroy its reliability and steadfastness.”6 An appropriate Enlightened skepticism, then, according to both Hume and Kant – and as will be spelled out in Chapters 1 and 3 of this book – is one that takes metaphysics and speculation as its object, and advances the claims of experience against them. Yet the skeptic’s claims to the priority of experience have also to be weighed against the rationalist version of skepticism, that is, Cartesian doubt. Descartes’ deployment of doubt against the senses and the claims of experience, as will be shown in Chapter 2, has been quite as influential as a model of skepticism, and as a check against what might be thought of as the latent imperialism of empiricism. Yet these models of skepticism retain a deep faith in reason. For rationalists, empiricists and Kantians, skepticism is really the handmaid of rationality; its true purpose, whether deployed against metaphysics, sensation or the excesses of either, is to uncover falsehood and illusion, to unify reason and to resolve disagreement. This modern conception of both reason and skepticism, as I argue in Chapter 1, is quite different from skepticism as it originally appeared as a mature philosophical doctrine in the tradition of the Ancient Hellenistic skeptics. The Ancient conception of skepticism will also be shown to be central to Hegel’s initial argument in the Phenomenology, which represents a quite different

Introduction

5

and radical path. For Hegel here demands that we take seriously the skepticism towards the epistemological circle that must confound any attempt at a critique of reason. He contrasts the manner in which the knowledge relation has come to be conceived, either in its use as an ‘instrument’ or as the ‘medium’ by which the object is brought into contact with a subject. These constructions approximate to two forms within which Kant had posed the critical problematic, but also anticipate models which have been pursued in various forms within twentieth century philosophy and social theory. If the conception of knowledge as instrument is privileged, the object is potentially distorted into what it is ‘for us’, leading towards a subjective idealism. This side of the dilemma has been taken up by analytical philosophers in the form of positivism, but also by post-positivists influenced by the linguistic turn. It tends to retain a Kantian residue by taking language as a faculty which fixes meaning, in the same sense in which Kant understands the activity of the understanding. On the other hand, if, in Hegel’s terms, the receptivity of the subject is emphasized, the medium assumes ascendancy over the object, resulting in variants of objective idealism or realism. This horn of the dilemma has been taken up wherever the determining power of culture, ideology or society has been emphasized, or where the ‘myth of the given’ is propagated. Either approach is fraught with problems, the recognition of which Hegel accurately foresaw would lead to a radical disconnection between philosophy and the emerging social (and natural) sciences. This disconnection expresses itself, according to Hegel, in the conclusion that epistemology is itself a mistake, in which the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science (Wissenschaft), which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, [implying that] it is hard to see why we should not turn around and mistrust this very mistrust.7 This step in Hegel’s argument, in the Introduction to the Phenomenology, is usually taken to be the metacritical moment, when the standpoint of critique turns back against itself. Hence his remark that this fear takes something – a great deal in fact for granted as truth, supporting its scruples and inferences on what is itself in need of prior scrutiny to see if it is true. To be specific, it takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition.8

6

Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory

This suspension of the problem at the level not of the relationship between the knower and the object, but between the knower and its own knowing, is then seen as a precursor to the ‘solution’ implied by the Absolute, that is, that the non-identity of subject and object on which the impasse is premised may be unproblematically replaced by an assumption of their identity. This interpretation, therefore, takes Hegel’s apparently metacritical approach to be in the service of an absolute system of knowledge,9 which transcends a relation to the faculties, and is “with us, in and for itself, all along, and of its own volition.”10 But if Hegel here assumes the Absolute, and thus substitutes transcendence for both critique and metacritique, this seems to contradict many of his other pronouncements made in the Introduction and Preface to the Phenomenology. For, as I argue in Chapter 4, Hegel specifically rejects such an approach, claiming instead that a consistent critical stance must evolve out of what it criticizes. Hegel expresses this movement not, in fact, in terms of critique or metacritique at all, but – as English readers of Miller’s translation of the Phenomenology are apt to miss – as what he calls self-completing skepticism (sich vollbringende Skeptizimus), a device which is presented as the ‘method’ of the Phenomenology.11 Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology, if it is taken seriously then, represents a radicalization of skepticism that takes it beyond the ‘handmaid’ role that it had previously assumed in modern philosophy. But it also opens a Pandora’s box; for it offers no guarantee that reason can revert to its hard-won role as the legal guarantor of truth, freedom and universal ethics that it had attained in Kant’s critical philosophy. A true Hegelian skepticism, indeed, as I argue in Chapter 5, has affinities with Nietzsche’s perspective on Kantian critique – and contains seeds that may germinate in surprising and self-destructive ways. This argument culminates in Chapter 6 in a reading of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, understood as an attempt to carry through Hegel’s skeptical program consistently, but in a manner that ultimately convicts Hegel of violating his own strictures. Adorno’s commitment to a ‘negative dialectics’ will be shown to derive from the relationship to Hegel’s self-completing skepticism. That relationship provides an anchor for the book as a whole. However, while its appropriate presentation requires significant theoretical priming and historical groundwork, it will be seen that the issue of skepticism, once understood in appropriate context, raises issues that fall outside the purview of strictly philosophical inquiry. It instantiates problems concerning the nature of modernity in general, and the critical theory approach to a critique of modernity, understood philosophically,

Introduction

7

historically and sociologically. Infused throughout the book, therefore, is a narrative of the entwinement of modernity and skepticism, an entwinement, however, that resists any linear interpretation. Modern skepticism, thought of historically, is sometimes presented as an outgrowth of the Enlightenment’s undermining of traditional theology and scholasticism,12 and therefore, as having a purely negative function. By coupling skepticism with its assumed opposites – faith, dogma, certitude – it is easy to hang on it a narrative of modernity and enlightenment, understood as the retreat from tradition, anthropomorphization and irrationalism. Such narratives have a perennial appeal as largescale frameworks and descriptions of processes (e.g., de-divinization, detraditionalization, etc.) that are thought to be useful in coming to terms with the concept of modernity itself. Since skepticism is often understood as simply the power of negation (as the motor force encountered in the ‘de-’ of the above formulations), it is then simple enough to slot it into a linear narrative of the overcoming of fear, myth and authority associated with the Enlightenment. In contrast, this book takes seriously the central argument of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the self-conception of modernity-as-Enlightenment hangs on deluded notions of the meanings of myth and rationality. Hence, any attempt to construct easy oppositions of modernity to pre- or post-modernity should be resisted. Yet this does not negate the need for an understanding that situates modernity as a project bounded by certain spatio-temporal, structural and cultural presuppositions, together with specific moral, political and civilizational ideals. A secondary theme of the book is therefore, to situate the meaning of skepticism within such a framework. Thus, the structure of the book breaks down into three linked projects. First, the meaning and significance of skepticism has to be reconstructed and, to some extent, rehabilitated through historicizing it. The break in the history of skepticism between its ancient and modern forms is given special attention in Part 1 of the book. The key differences between the two traditions and their significance for an understanding of modern philosophy and of modernity are here reconstructed. In Chapter 1, I expound on the important elements of ancient skepticism in the context of Hegel’s early essay on skepticism, and his critique of Hume’s perspective as the basis for the self-completing skepticism promised in the Phenomenology. In Chapter 2, I explore the rationalist thread of modern skepticism by tracing the emergence of the concept of doubt in Descartes’ major writings. Part II of the book is concerned with skepticism as a principal theme within the development of German idealism. This section consists of

8

Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory

two chapters that together trace the course of that development. In Chapter 3, I show that Kant’s understanding of Hume leads him to associate the problem of skepticism with the problem of legitimating experience. I then interpret Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories of the understanding in terms that involve a radicalization of Hume’s skepticism. The convergence of skepticism with the problem of legitimacy inaugurates a significant shift in its meaning, which I show to be central to understanding the development of post-Kantian philosophy. Fichte’s elaboration of Kant’s reflexive epistemology leads to Hegel’s own conception of a self-completing skepticism as the proposed method in the Phenomenology, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 4. Part III of the book is concerned with the view held by the principal members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School that of those who sorted through the implications of Kant’s critical defense of reason, it was Hegel and Nietzsche who saw most clearly both its vulnerabilities and its future emancipatory possibilities. In Chapter 5, I turn initially to Nietzsche’s relationship to Kant, and discuss his diagnosis of the crisis of modernity, not as one of skepticism, but of nihilism. Nevertheless, the two problems are shown to be related, and to be bound up with the key concerns of the critical theory research program, as it emerged from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Chapter 6 is concerned with Adorno’s notion of a negative dialectics. The continuity with Hegel’s skepticism will be shown to be relevant to a number of important issues addressed within Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, including his relationship to Lukacs’ work, the problem of philosophical systems, the problem of identity-thinking and the future of philosophy. A note on the methodology of the work is also relevant here. Throughout, I maintain both a separation and elision of history and philosophy – an equivocation that we owe to the insights of Hegel’s historical perspective: that philosophy does not exist as a timeless set of fundamental questions to which there is a single answer, but exists as culture or ‘spirit’, and therefore reflects fundamental qualities of the social reality within which it arises. Nevertheless, it is able, as philosophy, to grasp its own self-relation to that reality. This is the essence of Hegel’s famous remark, the materialist implications of which have been often under-appreciated, that [P]hilosophy …, as the thought of the world, appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its complete state. The lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent

Introduction

9

from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey on grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized by the grey in grey of philosophy.13

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Part I Skepticism and Modern Philosophy

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1 Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism

Scholarly interest in ancient skepticism has been resurgent in recent years. What had previously been dismissed as an obscure and eccentric offshoot of Stoic teachings has now come to be accepted as a subtle and challenging set of doctrines that has exerted a considerable, if somewhat hidden, influence on the course of modern philosophy.1 This general revival of interest in the three main schools of Hellenistic philosophy, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism reveals, perhaps, as much of the character of our own age as it does of the Hellenistic age itself.2 Nevertheless, and in spite of the revived attention, ancient skepticism still remains resistant to our historical and philosophical understanding,3 due to several factors, not the least being that contemporary skepticism as a philosophical topic is generally considered to be the theoretical province of the analytic tradition, and this tradition is not renowned for its historicist or hermeneutic sensitivities. The key doctrines of ancient skepticism have often been presented with an inadequate respect for the historical context within which they arose and evolved; sins of interpretation already identified by Hegel in 1801 in his own investigation and interpretation of ancient skepticism. The purpose of this chapter is not to intervene in disputes between specialist scholars in this area, but to place the tradition of ancient skepticism into the historical context of skepticism in general. This will allow a greater understanding of the range and types of skepticism, of how skepticism became important to German idealism and how Hegel both applied and altered the meanings of skepticism that he inherited. Three themes provide the guiding threads for this chapter. First, there is the contrast between ancient on the one hand, and modern empiricist skepticism on the other. This contrast is propounded through a reading 13

14 Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory

of the dispute between Hegel and his contemporary, G.E. Schulze, as this is staged in Hegel’s 1801 essay on skepticism. The dispute captures the key elements of both what Hegel believes is important in ancient skepticism, and what is problematic about its modern form. A second theme concerns the influence of both ancient and modern skepticism on Hegel’s development of the ‘method’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This argument will be fully developed in Part II, but key elements, including such issues as the importance of the motivation of skepticism, the meaning and role of belief, and the question of the ends of skepticism, will be explored here. A third theme concerns the distinctive nature of modern empiricist skepticism, and its complicity in the crisis of reason that became central to the Frankfurt School critique of modernity. Again, this theme is only initiated here, and pursued in full in Part III. The general argument of this chapter also provides a bridgehead to the discussion of doubt in Chapter 2. Hegel’s interest in ancient skepticism was strong enough for him to explore its significance within three works that conscribe the three major phases of his thought: In an early essay written for the Critical Journal of Philosophy in 1801, entitled “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy, Exposition of its Different Modifications and Comparison of the Latest Form with the Ancient One”; in a key chapter in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled “Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy Consciousness”; and in the later Lectures on the History of Philosophy, first presented in 1816. Some of his comments concerning skepticism in the introductions to both the Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia Logic must also be understood in connection to ancient skepticism, as must some elements within the Science of Logic. Of these works the Lectures are of least interest.4 They present ancient skepticism in the context of Hellenistic philosophy in general, and, contrary to Hegel’s earlier discussions, merely as a subordinate offshoot of Stoicism. The description of ancient skepticism offered in the Phenomenology presents a cultural interpretation, taking the movement as coeval with Stoicism and analyzing the relationship between Hellenistic philosophy in general and early Christianity.5 The 1801 essay is more strictly philosophical; it is presented as a critique of a major strand of post-Kantian philosophy, the empiricism of G.E. Schulze, and contains important reflections on the differences between ancient and modern skepticism, as well as several observations on the nature of skepticism in general that were to become important to the method used in the Phenomenology. These themes from the early essay will form the basis for the discussion in this chapter.

Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 15

1.1. Hegel’s 1801 essay on skepticism: The philosophical context The 1801 essay must be understood as operating within two fairly complex frames: (1) A long-term dispute, that still persists, over the correct interpretation of the significance of the ancient skeptical tradition and (2) the intricate argument over the interpretation of Kant’s epistemology that dominated the German philosophical scene in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and which is also still a topic of vigorous dispute. Both a background to and an overview of the 1801 essay are therefore necessary in order to understand its significance. G.E. Schulze’s Aenesidemus was published anonymously in 1792. Titled after the ancient skeptic of that name, Aenesidemus was the first sustained empiricist attack on Kant’s critical philosophy. Schulze refined his argument in a supplementary work, Critique of Theoretical Philosophy, published in 1801. Although it is ostensibly directed against Karl Reinhold – a central figure in the early reception of the Critique of Pure Reason – Schulze’s work raises a number of key objections to Kant’s system that have subsequently been reiterated in various forms, and bear the marks of the modern skeptical tradition that derives from Hume. In addition to the central issue concerning the vulnerability of Kant’s system to skeptical attack, Schulze – somewhat unintentionally – opened a subordinate area of controversy through his interpretation of the key doctrines of ancient skepticism. He titles his work after the ancient skeptic Aenesidemus, and presents the argument in terms of an exchange between him and an enthusiast of Kant’s system (“Hermias”). As Aenesidemus, a self-anointed renegade who opposed the purportedly ‘dogmatic skepticism’ of the later Academy, had invigorated ancient skepticism by appealing to the doctrines of its founder Pyrrho, so Schulze raises the spectre of Hume against the perceived dogmatism inherent in Kantian critique. Schulze criticizes Kant not for his initial resolution of submitting all our beliefs to a free and open examination of reason,6 but for not following through on the implications of this resolution. If reason is to be consistent with its own principles, it must subject its own practice to the same rigorous procedure: it must freely and openly examine the instrument with which it intends to proceed freely and openly. Therefore, the critique of reason must become a critique of critique, or a metacritique. Schulze’s originality lies in the direction in which he takes this argument, which, he claims, leads back to Hume’s skeptical dictum not to carry the use of reason beyond the limits of experience in attempting to

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explain the grounds of experience. Therefore, the reversion to Hume’s skepticism towards anything that is not a ‘matter of fact’, immediately apprehended in consciousness, or a ‘relation of ideas’, that is necessary, a priori but only analytically true, is presented as the only rational standpoint to occupy if one wishes to take the ambitions of a critique of reason seriously. As Frederick Beiser expresses it, in his characterization of Schulze’s argument, “[i]f there is indeed a single central thesis of Aenesidemus, then it is that … if all criticism must become metacriticism, then all meta-criticism must become skepticism.”7 In other words, when critique turns reflexively back upon itself and questions its own premises, it discovers that it can have no justification for its own mode of proceeding other than to merely assert the principles of critique. Since such an assertion is dogmatic, the critical philosophy founders on its own foundationlessness. This metacritical objection does not originate with Schulze. It was first lodged by J.G. Hamann, whose influential, mystical response to Kant has been viewed as the first stroke of the Counter-Enlightenment.8 It became the basis of both Herder’s historicism and F.H. Jacobi’s claim, later developed by Nietzsche, that the inner impulse of Kantian critique points towards nihilism.9 Schulze’s distinctive perspective derives from his claim that this metacritical argument against Kant is modeled on the form of ancient skepticism presented by Aenesidemus. On Schulze’s understanding, Aenesidemus’s position is a result of his criticism of the Academic skeptics, who claim that ‘everything is uncertain’. This proposition must itself be understood as uncertain, and therefore is self-canceling, since it includes itself in its own pronouncement. As a result, Aenesidemus – again, according to Schulze – attacks any claim that goes beyond immediate consciousness, and thereby attributes certainty only to the facts of appearances. Kant’s mistake is parallel to the ancient Academics’, and therefore Aenesidemus’s skepticism – an affirmation of bare appearances and a suspicion of all attempts to go beyond those appearances – is the only rational response to Kant’s critical philosophy.10 How are we to understand Schulze’s skepticism in relation to Hegel’s own development? There is no question that Hegel was deeply influenced by aspects of Schulze’s argument, despite the scorn he appears to pour on its key elements in the 1801 essay. First, Schulze’s metacritical claim against Kant is reproduced in the opening gambit of the Phenomenology, in which the very idea of a critique of reason is shown to be internally incoherent for precisely the same reasons.11 Second, Schulze’s appeal to ancient skepticism forced Hegel to examine the whole question of the relationship of previous philosophies to contemporary

Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 17

ones, and to conceptualize the history of philosophy, perhaps for the first time, both as a single unity, and as a series of distinct shapes. Both these elements are apparent in the form of Hegel’s indictment of Schulze in the 1801 essay, which involves not simply an attack on the logical basis of Schulze’s metacritical skepticism, but also on his interpretation of the tradition of ancient skepticism,12 together with a lengthy presentation of his own interpretation. This latter exercise is particularly notable, since Hegel’s interpretation of ancient skepticism raises absolutely fundamental questions which become crucial for understanding his mature philosophy concerning the nature of reason, belief, doubt and other key concepts associated with both the empiricist/idealist dispute and with the nature of modern epistemology in general. I trace the details of Hegel’s argument in the order in which they appear in the 1801 essay, emphasizing both the historicist dimension of Hegel’s argument and the connecting lines between the concerns of the essay and the skeptical method of the Phenomenology: I discuss first Hegel’s critique of Schulze’s interpretation of the ancient skeptical tradition, second his discussion of the correct interpretation of that tradition and third, his analysis of the relationship between skepticism and the history of philosophy.

1.2. Ancient versus modern skepticism By the time Hegel published the 1801 essay on skepticism, Aenesidemus had already come under serious attack from Fichte, who published a review of it in 1797.13 Fichte’s central criticism was that the work willfully misconstrued Kant’s first Critique as transcendental psychology. It then made illegitimate use of Hume’s skepticism as a means to eliminate the transcendental element, culminating in a dogmatic realism. Hegel’s criticisms of Schulze are more sophisticated than Fichte’s, and emphasize the differences between ancient and modern skepticism.14 At the beginning of his essay Hegel promises to “deal with the relationship of skepticism in general, and of this form in particular [the skepticism of Schulze], to philosophy; the different modifications of skepticism will define themselves automatically according to this relationship.”15 This unusual way of expressing his purpose anticipates a key element of Hegel’s approach in the Phenomenology, where the different shapes of spirit are intended to present themselves only as they appear, and define themselves in relation to each other,16 without reference to any external authorial intent. Hegel also lays emphasis on the relationship between philosophy and natural consciousness in the 1801 essay. This too anticipates an aspect

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of the Phenomenology, which has a double-layered structure in which the claims of natural consciousness – Hegel’s term for experience – are examined at each stage in relation to the kinds of philosophical reflection that derive from those claims. But Hegel’s concern in the 1801 essay is to contrast the manner in which ancient and modern empiricist skepticism each conceive of the relationship between reflection and experience. There is an overarching historical narrative to this contrast, for Hegel presents the historical evolution of skepticism in terms of a decline – from its ancient ‘noble’ roots, in which skepticism is turned against the dogmas of ordinary experience, to the modern empiricism of Schulze, in which experience is turned against philosophical skepticism.17 This narrative, however, also bears on more general issues, indeed on “the communal degeneration of philosophy and of the world in general,”18 by which Hegel registers the altered nature of both modern philosophy and modern experience. The shift, or decline, exemplifies the process by which skepticism, which originally formed a fundamental unity with philosophy, becomes separated from it, and gradually turns against it. Hegel’s key criticism of modern empiricist skepticism, is its lack of selfconsciousness with respect to the appeal to immediate experience. Both Schulze and Hume base their skepticism on that appeal, and direct it against speculation and reflection. They are correspondingly dismissive of what Hume dubs the “excesses” of Academic skepticism,19 which is premised on a rejection of the veridical status of immediate experience. Hegel’s indictment of Hume and Schulze is not simply that they play experience off against reflection, but that in so doing, they distort the actual nature and meaning of experience itself, by assuming it to be immediate. Therefore, the purported humility of empiricism in its appeals to immediacy is really a cloak for an underlying dogmatism, in which ‘immediacy’ is constructed and subordinated in accordance with a preconceived agenda or plan. As Adorno points out, in his study of Hegel’s conception of experience [i]n schools of philosophy that make emphatic use of the concept of experience, in the tradition of Hume, the character of immediacy – immediacy in relation to the subject – is itself the criterion of that concept. Experience is supposed to be something immediately present, immediately given, free, as it were, of any admixture of thought and therefore indubitable. Hegel’s philosophy, however, challenges this concept of immediacy, and with it the customary concept of experience.20

Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 19

Hegel issues this challenge in various places and in various ways. In the Introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel notes that empiricism, in common with other modes of philosophy, proceeds with an instrumental model of the relationship between reflection and experience. When reflection takes experience as its object, its action “does not let [its object] be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it.”21 In the 1801 essay, this same criticism is made directly in relation to Schulze’s claim in Aenesidemus, that the existence of what is given within the compass of our consciousness has undeniable certainty; for since it is present in consciousness, we can doubt the certainty of it no more than we can doubt consciousness … . [W]hat is given in and with consciousness we call an actual fact [Tatasche] of consciousness; it follows that the facts of consciousness are what is undeniably actual, what all philosophical speculations must be related to.22 Hegel points out that these notions of ‘certainty’, ‘doubt’, ‘actuality’ and indeed the ‘facts of consciousness’ themselves are not concepts embedded within ordinary experience, but only become available once we begin to reflect on experience. Hence, they are concepts of reflection, and are mediated by the reflective consciousness that presents them. Therefore, they cannot be ‘immediate’ in the sense that Schulze claims. Moreover, the presentation of certainty, doubt, actuality and so forth as universal forms of experience is problematic. Hegel believes that such concepts of reflection are neither necessary nor invariant, but both contingent and historically specific. Schulze and Hume, in attributing such concepts to an assumed universal ‘natural consciousness’, therefore distort both the historicity of ordinary experience and of philosophical concepts of reflection. Indeed, according to Hegel, the relationship between skeptical empiricism and natural consciousness as one of straightforward subject and object, is itself specific to modern philosophy. Ancient skepticism, by contrast, had a highly developed sense of its own fallibility and a quite different relationship with what it took to be ‘natural consciousness’. For ancient skepticism, and in sharp contrast to modern skeptical empiricism, the form and content of experience, in common with the skeptic’s own pronouncements on experience, are all equally uncertain. Another set of differences between ancient and modern skepticism emerges from Hegel’s critique of Schulze’s interpretation of Aenesidemus. Aenesidemus’s ‘renegade’ status turns on an apparent break with the Academic skeptics, and Schulze’s account of that break is, as Hegel

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points out, historically inaccurate. Schulze attributes to Aenesidemus the view that the standpoint of Academic skepticism becomes reflexively self-canceling. In fact, Hegel points out, Aenesidemus criticizes the Academics for not being reflexive enough, since they formulated their skepticism as propositions per se, and therefore as affirmative expressions. Both Aenesidemus and the Academic skeptics insist on the selfreferential character of their pronouncements, and the fact that this is demanded by reason. Indeed, a distinguishing characteristic of all ancient skepticism is its self-consciously reflexive nature, which is the basis of Schulze’s claim that it is ‘self-canceling’. According to Hegel, however, it is precisely the relentlessly reflexive character of ancient skepticism that saves it from the kinds of self-contradiction that arise from the fixed standpoint of modern instrumental philosophizing, and which constitutes the ‘freedom’ of ancient skepticism. Hegel traces Schulze’s false presentation of this stance as self-canceling to a characteristically modern understanding of the nature of belief and doubt, which reveals both an insufficiently historicist perspective, and a dogmatic refusal to examine its own presuppositions. Indeed, belief and doubt are the terms of modern, but not ancient, skepticism. While we have come to associate doubt and skepticism to the point where they are practically synonymous, it is worth noting that the original Greek meaning of skepsis is associated with ‘inquiring’ or searching; the etymological origins of ‘doubt’ are associated with hesitation and fear. Sextus Empiricus, whose writings, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, are the main source of our knowledge of ancient skepticism, uses the term skepsis most often in opposition to dogmatism. The term dogma is usually translated as ‘belief’; but ancient skepticism understands by this term not so much an individual mental state, to which might or might not be attached a reason or a cause, nor does it understand it as a universal mental operation, embedded in human consciousness by nature in the same manner as physiological desires such as hunger and thirst. Rather, it takes belief to constitute an evolved attitude of consciousness towards the world, and it opposes such an attitude as unhealthy, or not in accordance with Nature, and liable to induce disquietude and disturbance.23 By contrast, modern skepticism is generally taken, as is the case with Schulze, to be raising questions with respect to knowledge, truth or certainty and, since belief is considered (either implicitly or explicitly) merely the ‘vehicle’ for such concepts, it is usually understood as unproblematic as a concept per se. For this reason, the opposition between belief and doubt does not occur in ancient skepticism. Hegel makes this point in several places. In the 1801 essay, he remarks that “the German term

Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 21

Zweifel [or the English ‘doubt’] used about ancient skepticism is always awkward and inappropriate”;24 in the introduction to the Phenomenology, he characterizes doubt as a modern concept of reflection, derived from Cartesianism25 and in the Encyclopedia Logic, he remarks that: [h]e who only doubts still clings to the hope that his doubt may be resolved, and that one or other of the definite views, between which he wavers, will turn out solid and true. Skepticism properly so called is a very different thing; it is complete hopelessness about all which understanding counts stable, and the feeling to which it gives birth is one of unbroken calmness and inward repose Such at least is the noble Skepticism of antiquity.26 A final general difference between ancient and modern skepticism has been brought out by Leo Strauss. He remarks, although in a different context, “skepticism has always seen itself as, in principle, coeval with human thought. … For the skeptic all assertions are uncertain and therefore essentially arbitrary.” It is therefore opposed to “that modern tradition which tried to define the limits of human knowledge and which therefore admitted that, within certain limits, genuine knowledge is possible.”27 This universalism, as will be shown, is a consequence of a certain mode of reasoning among the Ancients, and not, as Strauss implies, simply arbitrary. Now, these general comparisons clearly point to some fundamental reorientation in the meaning of skepticism and its relationship to thought in general. We can now pick out four general themes within which this reorientation can be discerned: (1) the relationship between reflection and experience; (2) the implications of reflexivity; (3) the relationship between belief and doubt; (4) the tendency towards universality. These themes will reappear in later chapters as points of orientation in considering the nature of modern skepticism. In order to sharpen these themes, I here examine their development within the ancient skeptical tradition, first providing an overview of the ancient skeptical tradition as a whole before examining the context within which it arose in the first place, as a reaction to both Epicureanism and especially Stoicism, and then discussing its-own independent evolution.

1.3. Ancient skepticism and Hellenistic Philosophy: The historical context Ancient skepticism, as a tradition, exhibits a greater differentiation in terms of its evolution than either Stoicism or Epicureanism. The

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evolution of the tradition can be encapsulated within the ideas of the five main thinkers; from Pyrrho, its founder, through Arcesilaus and Carneades – the Academic skeptics – to Aenesidemus, who turned against the Academy in the name of a return to Pyrrhonism, and Sextus, the recorder of the tradition, who associates himself with Aenesidemus’ ‘return to Pyrrho’. Each of these skeptics adapt their philosophies both to their predecessors and to key elements of the two earlier Hellenistic schools, Stoicism and Epicureanism. It is worth noting that Hegel’s dispute with Schulze concerning the interpretation of ancient skepticism is not an isolated case, since the key tenets of ancient skepticism have been, and still are, a source of major disagreement between scholars. A principal reason for this disagreement is that the sources of ancient skepticism are both indirect and unreliable. Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism contains information on the skeptical thinkers of the academy, and on Pyrrho himself, but are principally the work of a disciple and conflict in some respects with other sources, such as Cicero’s Academica and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of rominent Philosophers.28 However, no writings of Pyrrho, of Arcesilaus, Carneades or of Aenesidemus exist, for the simple reason that they wrote nothing themselves, considering the act of recording their teachings to be in conflict with those teachings. The obscurity of the tradition has led to confusion with respect to the content of the ancient skeptical teachings, their significance and their evolution. It is not surprising then that Hegel’s own interpretation of ancient skepticism is problematic in places. What little commentary there is on the scholarship underlying Hegel’s 1801 essay on ancient skepticism is somewhat contradictory. H.S. Harris takes Hegel’s reference to the decline of the tradition to be a simple comparison between the ancient ‘noble’ form of skepticism and its degraded modern counterpart.29 But this seems too simplistic since Hegel is at pains to distinguish the individual ancient skeptics from each other, especially on the question of the relationship between academic skepticism and Aenesidemus’s later ‘Pyrrhonism’. Michael Forster, in his study of Hegel and skepticism, on the other hand, argues that the issue can be reduced to Hegel’s understanding of the evolution of the 17 skeptical ‘tropes’ recorded by Sextus, the first ten of which are said to have been formulated by Aenesidemus, and the later seven by his disciple, Agrippa.30 However, Hegel’s general remarks on the decline of ancient skepticism, and his discussion of how the tropes fit into this general framework, exhibit a more complex understanding of its significance for the confrontation with Schulze. In fact, Hegel classifies skepticism into three phases. First, there is a skepticism that

Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 23

is “one with philosophy.” Second there is a skepticism that is self-sundered from it [which] can be divided into two forms, according to whether it is or is not directed against Reason. The genuine ancient skepticism sets itself into striking contrast with the shape in which Sextus presents to us the skepticism that is cut off from philosophy and turned against it. To be sure, the authentic skepticism does not have a positive side, as philosophy does, but maintains a pure negativity in relation to knowledge, but it was just as little directed against philosophy as for it; and the hostile attitude that it adopted later against philosophy on the one hand and against dogmatism on the other, is quite separate.31 Apart from the criticism of Sextus offered here, suggesting a more complex view of how ancient skepticism evolved than a simple ancient/modern opposition, Hegel thinks that the decline is to be identified with skepticism gradually tending towards the form of metacritique that Schulze presents, at least with respect to its antagonistic attitude towards philosophy. The development of this tendency is associated with the evolution of the tropes, but Hegel appears to think that the earlier tropes were developed by the Academics, and the later ones by Aenesidemus or his disciples. Hegel then, understands the tradition he is considering to begin with Pyrrho himself in the latter’s deployment of Socratic dialectic in a novel direction. Its middle period, representing a break, is dominated by the Academics, Arcesilaus and Carneades, and its later form, also marked by a break, is represented by Aenesidemus and Sextus. Ancient skepticism is closely associated with the two other Hellenistic schools, Stoicism and Epicureanism. All three schools have, of course, exerted profound influence over the modern philosophical tradition; however, and remarkably, as Martha Nussbaum has noted, they are virtually absent from the works of all major innovative twentieth-century thinkers.32 Only recently, in the wake of a revival of interest in Greek ethics, have they received renewed attention. Given the anti-metaphysical thrust of twentieth-century philosophy in general, this is surprising, since, from its beginnings, Hellenistic philosophy was ‘worldly’, in the sense of grappling with complications in human life, and not as disengaged academic contemplation, or as a Platonic seeking for Truth outside the realm of human affairs. This gives the Hellenistic schools an original emancipatory content and a primary interest in eudaimonia that is distinct from both Plato and Aristotle. Eudaimonia is often translated as ‘happiness’, but this does not capture the complex overtones of the

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term. Most informed accounts associate it strongly with health, which leads Nussbaum to characterize the Hellenistic schools’ teachings in general as ‘therapeutic philosophy’.33 Under this metaphor, as medicine treats the body, so philosophy, as the Epicureans, Stoics and Skeptics conceive it, treats the soul. As medicine, in contrast to the inert sciences of nature, is an “engaged, immersed art, an art that works in pragmatic partnership with those it treats”,34 so Hellenistic philosophy understands eudaimonia as contextualized within the contingencies of human interaction, and human welfare to consist in the relationship of the individual to her environment and to others. The role of the Hellenistic philosopher is to enter into discourse with the patient, working with, rather than simply instructing, her. All three schools attracted followers in the period from the middle of the fourth century until the first century BC. Although influenced in varying ways by Plato and Aristotle, they were also responding to the increasing cosmopolitanism of the age. The rise of Alexandrian imperialism in the East, the decline of the Athenian city-state and the rise of Rome produced the elements of what has been characterized as the first ‘world system’, centered on the Mediterranean. Such a system injected alterity into all it encompassed. Emergent ideological, economic and cultural flows impacted local religions and customs, dispersing preservationist, progressive and, in time, reactionary attitudes towards social and political institutions in complex ways.35 Epicureanism may be understood, in certain respects, to be a reactionary movement.36 Its ethics are directed against the confusion, stress and disturbance of luxury and urban life, and teach the need to divest oneself of worldly ties associated with possessions, social striving and externally originating desires. The means to virtue and a life of eudaimonia is to seek tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from corrupting forms of social convention. Epicureanism, therefore, seeks to adjust those faculties that lend themselves to invasion from without, namely desire and belief. In their practical lives, individuals may, through therapeutic teaching and self-cultivation, come to distinguish healthy, internally oriented from unhealthy invasive desires, thus augmenting their powers of choice and self-direction. Such a faculty of ‘distinguishing’ entails a corresponding distinction (which anticipates Rousseau in important ways) between those beliefs that are natural and intrinsic, from those that are distorting and socially derived. The path that Epicurus, and later Lucretius, recommends in order to develop this faculty is one that begins from the perspective of the child or the healthy animal; those who wish to cultivate healthy beliefs and desires unimpeded by social

Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 25

prejudices and pressures must first seek this perspective. However, the attainment of such a beginning does not involve the self-divestment of beliefs, prejudices and desires, in the Cartesian manner. Rather, Epicurus suggests that it requires the careful, rational monitoring and anticipation of certain bodily states that are conducive to its cultivation. Epicureanism is the forerunner of both Stoicism and skepticism, and its relative simplicity stands in counterpoint to the ambivalence of the later philosophies. This ambivalence is germinal to Stoic ethics. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, Stoicism both valorizes the individual by “interiorizing moral life with its stress on will and law”37 at the same time as it potentially diminishes him by detaching him from those moral and political environments that traditionally fostered the recognition of individuality. For, according to Stoic ethics, the the good man is a citizen of the universe; his relation to all other collectivities, to city, Kingdom or empire is secondary and accidental. Stoicism thus invites us to stand against the world of physical and political circumstance at the very same time that it requires us to act in conformity with nature. There are symptoms of paradox here and they are not misleading.38 This dialectic of individuality and cosmopolitanism has constituted the philosophical undertow of modern Republicanism in its influence from Machiavelli to Arendt. Its presence in imperial Rome, above all, testifies to its appeal as a philosophy aimed not only at a patrician elite – but to all private citizens.39 This is no doubt the crux of Hegel’s point when he characterizes Stoicism, “whether on the throne or in chains,” as a “universal form of the World Spirit [that] could only appear in a time of universal fear and bondage, but also a time of universal culture.”40 The Stoic position on ethics and politics stems quite directly from its epistemological commitments, which form the bridge to the skeptic reaction. Ancient skepticism may be understood to have arisen in response to the dogmatism of the Stoics’ epistemology, and this is reflected in a common vocabulary and interests.41 Stoics, in common with the Epicureans, emphasize the need for distinctions to be made between certain kinds of belief and desire, which are states of mind that human beings acquire from their perceptions of their environments and activities. Certain beliefs and desires are ‘true’ or ‘real’, but many others are brought about through the influence of social custom, prejudice or opinion. Therefore, for Stoics, distinctions must be made about ‘that

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which appears’ (to phainomenon) to us. Perceptions of the true and the real are guaranteed by a certain type of informed assent to appearances that is known as katalepsis. This assent is distinguished from another type that is formed through opinion (doxa) and which, as in Epicureanism, is associated with social conformity. Katalepsis is a ‘performative’ assent, performed out of a free will unmotivated by external factors and which arises as a kind of intellectual intuition. The wisdom that Stoic philosophy brings is the ability to surrender one’s subjective convictions, prejudices and particularly emotions in order to withhold or admit assent accordingly. The purpose of this wisdom – and in this Stoicism follows Epicurus – is that it brings about a state of the mind free from disturbance, a state described as ataraxia. While Skepticism grew out of a critique of the abstract and subjective nature of the Stoic criterion of katalepsis, its early inspiration rested on strong appeal to the character of Pyrrho of Elis (c.365–c.270 BC). Although Pyrrho is credited as the founder of the tradition of ancient skepticism, he developed his ideas from the Democritean philosopher, Metrodorus.42 Metrodorus represents the link in the relationship between the skeptical tradition and Socratic dialectic. His key pronouncement, according to Cicero’s Academica, is that “none of us knows anything, not even whether we know anything or not.”43 This pronouncement is an extrapolation of the attitude of the Socrates of Plato’s early dialogues, but may be distinguished from it in two senses. First, it has none of the ironic nuance with which Socrates deployed it; it is meant seriously as a basic dictum.44 Second, it is deployed as a principle for following a certain agoge, or way of life. This is intended to distinguish it from polemics, or an haeresis,45 a concept which, in denoting strong opinion (the term is the Greek root of ‘heresy’), implies a school or a sect. Haeresis is also translated as ‘doctrinal rule’, and agoge as a line of reasoning or an education. The opposition became increasingly important during the course of the development of ancient skepticism, culminating in the break between Aenesidemus and the Academy. Pyrrho, in adopting and following this agoge therefore, lived ‘a life without belief’. He did not take disciples or formalize his teaching as a set of rules. His outlook was expressed in pithy phrases, such as ‘no more one than another’, or ‘I decide nothing’, or ‘everything is incomprehensible’, which may be understood as early formulations of the skeptical technique of epoch[ by which, in direct opposition to the Stoic idea of katalepsis, one ‘withholds assent’ from all appearances. The meaning and practice of epoch[ is subject to different interpretation by modern scholars; however, its distinction from the concepts of doubt and certainty

Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 27

must here be emphasized, since this forms another principal site of the difference between ancient and modern skepticism. The distinction between epoch[ and doubt is central to the dispute between Hegel and Schulze. The latter interprets epoch[ as intended to establish certainty with respect to the facts of bare appearances, but also to cut off further reflection on the nature of both the underlying reality and the mind that reflects on its apprehensions. Hence, Schulze notes that “they [the ancient skeptics] admit that there is cognition through the senses and a conviction thereby of the existence and of certain properties of things subsisting on their own account.”46 Hegel argues (correctly) that this interpretation rests on an apparent distinction between appearance and reality that is simply not acknowledged by ancient skepticism. While modern empiricist skepticism “always brings with it … the concept of a thing that lies behind and beneath the phenomenal facts …, ancient skepticism holds back altogether from expressing any certainty or any being.”47 Appearances are not to be identified with existence, since such identification may only occur once assent is granted to an impression, and it is this assent that the skeptics withhold through the act of epoch[. Therefore, there is no cognition (Erkenntis) through the senses as such, according to Hegel’s understanding of ancient skepticism; only an involuntarily ‘being affected’, and this, so far from attributing certainty to that effect, rather is “designed as the smallest possible tribute that could be paid to the necessity of an objective determining [world].”48 For Hegel, then, epoch[ is to be distinguished from doubt insofar as the process of doubt involves the disturbance of already deeply held convictions about the way the world actually is; in other words, doubt is deployed against belief and certainty, and makes sense only in that context. But the practice of epoch[ is intended to suspend our questions about appearances, without going beyond them; it is therefore to be understood as a kind of check on the activity of belief, a block to seeking what underlies appearances, or rather of the distinction between appearance and existence. The Ancients’ attitude towards appearances is therefore that of azetetos – that which is not in question, not that which is not in doubt. Both epoch[ and azetetos are therefore keys to distinguishing ancient skepticism from the two main modern forms of skepticism. On the one hand, the empiricism of Schulze and Hume conforms to the modern tradition that Strauss identifies as primarily concerned with establishing limits – both on knowledge and on skepticism. On the other hand, Cartesian skepticism, through the activity of doubt, as I shall argue in Chapter 2,

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involves ‘losing the world’, which implies both its earlier possession and a complex machinery of gain and loss that is entirely alien to ancient skepticism.

1.4. Hegel and the evolution of ancient skepticism Hegel’s account of the core concepts of ancient skepticism in the 1801 essay is followed by his explanation of its evolution beyond the ‘lifephilosophy’ of Pyrrho and gradual decline into what he takes to be the scholasticism of Sextus’ skepticism.49 The first step in this process was the formalization of Pyrrho’s aphorisms into a coherent, though wholly negative doctrine. The single most important figure in this process was Arcesilaus, a younger contemporary of Pyrrho, who became head of the Middle Academy around 273 BC, and established the first ten ‘tropes’ of skepticism. Arcesilaus’ tropes form the core of a skeptical doctrine that consistently stresses cultural differences over the nature of truth, justice and the good, pointing to divergences among geographically and historically separated peoples as the basis for maintaining a skeptical perspective. This perspective is characterized, above all, by a consistent rejection of beliefs as such. Cicero says of Arcesilaus: “it is possible for a man to hold no beliefs, and not just possible but actually essential to the wise man. To Arcesilaus this view seemed true, as well as honourable and worthy of the wise man.”50 Arcesilaus’ teachings are also distinguished by the method of equipollence or isosthenia, the practice of placing arguments and counterarguments into contact with each other in order to show the impotence of both. The method itself was not unique to Arcesilaus’ school; Plato’s Parmenides represents, perhaps, the most famous variant on the technique, and the Peripatetics and Protagoras advertised similar approaches in their exercises in rhetoric and polemic.51 However, Arcesilaus’ originality lay in his attaching a teleological element to this method: The value of deploying equipollence as a method lay in its capacity to produce epoch[, understood as the absence of belief, which was to be viewed as an end in itself. Arcesilaus then argued that the universalization of epoch[, the resignation to the fact of the undecidability of everything, leads to the state of ataraxia, which, in common with other Hellenistic philosophies, remains as a telos representing the highest good. However, Arcesilaus’ stance, as distinct from Pyrrho’s, opens up the problem of reflexivity in a manner which was quickly seized upon by opponents, and which becomes another key element in the debate between Hegel and Schulze. For Arcesilaus’ doctrine of the

Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 29

undecidability of everything, as his Stoic opponents pointed out, had a hidden dogma – a covert decision; namely its resolve about that very undecidability. The problem sets the stage for the later developments within the tradition. The most successful set of responses to the accusation of dogmatism against the skeptics is set forth by Carneades, Arcesilaus’ successor as head of the Middle Academy in the mid-second century BC. Carneades represents a compromise between the formalism of Arcesilaus and the aphoristic form in which Pyrrho presented his ideas. According to Diogenes Laertius’s account, Carneades demonstrated the practice of isosthenia without making clear its ultimate purpose, and thus evading the charge of setting up dogmas. Carneades’ consistency and brilliance, for example in a famous sojourn in Rome in 155 BC, where he spoke one day presenting a convincing argument in favour of justice, and on the next, shocking his audience by arguing convincingly against it, attested to the viability of the goal of achieving universal epoch[. At the same time, Carneades’ refusal to ground his practice in overt dogmas, or to clear up contradictory assertions, deflected the charge of dogmatism. According to Cicero (although accounts of Carneades’ teachings conflict), Clitomachus, Carneades’ successor and closest follower, himself had never been able to find out what Carneades believed.52 We encounter an ambiguity here. For Carneades, it appears that isosthenia is the sole interest and end of skepticism, while for Arcesilaus it is a means by which one achieves epoch[. For Carneades, however, the practice of isosthenia is not a techne, that is, an art or science organized into a body of knowledge pursued for concrete ends. It is simply an ability to bring appearances and thoughts into opposition53 with each other. It is not a special skill, and it is not pursued to achieve ataraxia per se. Indeed, if it were aligned with the pursuit of ataraxia, this would require a defense of the desirability or inexorability of that goal, in the manner of that put forward by Arcesilaus. Nevertheless, the consistent practice of isosthenia points towards epoch[ even if that goal is not consciously aimed at. Therefore, it seems reasonable to suppose, as David Sedley has argued, that Carneades’ oblique attempts to bring all assertions into opposition with each other without overtly preaching epoch[, was only possible in fact because Arcesilaus had already established epoch[ as an end.54 The problem of ends in general, and the relationship between the ancient skeptical method (isosthenia) and the goal (epoch[), comes more explicitly to the center of skeptical concerns in the third stage of its development, in the ideas of Aenesidemus and his disciple, Sextus. This stage is marked by the fact that the Stoic retort that the skeptics had an

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implicit dogma in their practice of non-assent was treated as a threat that required an explicit defense, a defense taken up by Aenesidemus. Aenesidemus, whom Schulze takes as the model for his own brand of skepticism, is credited with formulating the later seven tropes, and presenting his philosophy as a new version of Pyrrhonism.55 The later tropes are formal guides to practicing isosthenia. The first ten tropes are prescriptions for the wisdom of epoch[ based on reflections on the diversity of the organization of the senses, of situations, distances and places, of educations, customs, faith and of prejudices. The later seven tropes, however, present the argument for epoch[ through logical constructions directed against certain chains of reasoning, such as the aporiae of infinite regress and circularity. They are, therefore, metacritical tropes, and in this respect are representative of the manner in which skepticism turns away from its original object, experience, and towards reflection. The later tropes are therefore not representative of the ancient tradition as a whole, and, indeed, Aenesidemus may be interpreted not as defusing but exacerbating the power of the Stoic retort to the skeptics. For by meeting the Stoics on their own battlefield, so to speak, and asserting certain reasons as the basis for pursuing a skeptical line of thought, Aenesidmemus entangles the skeptical perspective in the problems of its own beginning or foundation. Aenesidemus restates the Stoic objection to Arcesilaus’ teachings and then distinguishes ‘Pyrrhonism’ from those teachings, since “the Academy is distinct from the Pyrrhonist logoi … just in this one particular, that they formulate the incomprehensibility [of everything] as an assertion.”56 Aenesidemus, in refusing to assert his skeptical conclusions per se, thereby tries to evade the charge of selfcontradiction. But according to Hegel, this metacritical attack on the academics is unjustified: This formal [ formell ] semblance of an assertion it is, which the [academic] skeptics are regularly teased about; it is thrown back at them, that if they doubt everything, then this ‘I doubt’, ‘it seems to me’ etc., is certain; so that the reality and objectivity of the thinking activity is held against them, since they hold firm to the form of positing in every positing by thought, and in this way show up expressed activity as involving dogmatism. … At this rate, it must even befall Pyrrho to be given out as a dogmatist by someone. … [T]he skeptics made clear that their phonai ‘all is false’, ‘nothing is true’ ‘neither more than the other’ were self-referential; and that the skeptics, in the utterance of their slogans … were affected, not giving an opinion, or making an assertion about an objective being.57

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Aenesidemus’ attack on the Academics then, parallels Schulze’s attack on Kant, by requiring that ‘thinking activity’ give an account of its own subjectivity before that of which it thinks can be taken as a legitimate object of inquiry. This returns us to the dilemma presented in the introduction to the Phenomenology concerning the motivations or purpose of inquiry, to which two further concepts that emerged from ancient skepticism are important.

1.5. Arch[ and telos In the same way that Carneades’ silence concerning the ends of his skepticism reveals a recognition of the problem of motivation, the later Pyrrhonists deploy an unusual form of equivocation in response to the same difficulty. For Sextus and Aenesidemus, ataraxia is presented as the end of skepticism, and epoch[ as the means by which this is accomplished. This appears to commit the skeptic to a dogmatic method of deciding in advance to operate in accordance with a principle (arch[58) which will bring about a particular foreseen end (telos). Yet this commitment is not what it seems because of both the unusual nature of the telos that the skeptic aims for, and the arch[ according to which this aiming occurs. According to Sextus, ataraxia is indeed the end that the skeptic aims for, but it arises ‘naturally’, in a manner that is not foreseen from the practice of epoch[, but occurs, as it were, quite by accident. Sextus characterizes ataraxia as following from epoch[ “as the shadow follows the body.”59 As an example, he cites the experience of the painter, Apelles, who, having been unable to properly render the appearance of foam on a painting of a horse, threw his sponge at the canvas in frustration, and marked the canvas in precisely the desired way, thereby unintentionally achieving his aim. The movement from epoch[ to ataraxia is supposed to happen in the same way; when one gives up the desire to achieve eudaimonia through knowing, one accidentally achieves it. Nussbaum describes the process as follows: Ataraxia just comes by chance, tuchikos, as a result of a process [the skeptic] is following out of some non-dogmatic motivation – say, because it is his trade. He does not seek it out, he does not believe in it: it just happens to him. Since it happens as an unexpected result, we do not have to attribute any commitment to him in order to explain his actions. Apelles did not have a desire to make a certain sort of effect by tossing the sponge. He just threw it out of frustration, and

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the effect came by lucky coincidence. Just so, ataraxia comes to the Skeptic; it is like a shadow that follows the suspension of belief. He is passive to it.60 The serendipitous and hidden manner in which this transformation takes place involves the recognition of the problem of the skeptic’s telos. Any concrete determination of the relationship between procedure and purpose would incorporate commitment to and belief in a telos, which is what, on pain of relapsing into dogmatism, the skeptic seeks to avoid. But is the skeptic’s practice possible? Can an activity, a thought, or a system of thinking occur without a predetermined goal in mind? And does not the idea of removing a telos itself incorporate a telos? Nussbaum argues that the skeptic’s practice is indeed tenable: “To have a telos or goal in the usual way – to strain the bow of one’s life towards it as a target – is a recipe for disturbance. What the Skeptic has done is not so much to introduce a rival account of the telos as to undermine the whole notion of reaching for a telos.”61 Thus the skeptic, by practicing epoch[ not according to a strict principle or arch[ but as an agoge, arrives at a state that was not foreseen, but which just happens to conform to the Hellenistic conception of the good life. By contrast, Hume explicitly denies the possibility of the Ancient skeptical epoch[: Man must act, reason and believe. … For all discourse, all action would cease and men remain in a state of total lethargy were [the Pyrrhonist’s] principles to be universally adopted. … When he wakes from his dream he will be the first to join in the laughter against himself and to confess that all his objections are mere amusement.62 As Burnyeat points out, however, Hume offers no real argument to counteract the Ancient skeptical epoch[, but simply asserts the necessity of living according to the need for action, reason and belief.63 However, the question of whether or not the ancient skeptic’s equivocations over his arch[ and telos are successful or not is less to the point than is the insight that lies behind it: the realization that the motivations of the philosopher are a key component of any doctrine. This highlights again the reflexivity that is at the core of ancient skepticism, and which distinguishes it (according to Hegel) from its modern counterpart. Understood in a broader context, the problems of arch[ and telos press also on more fundamental matters. With respect to the issue of Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology, it can be seen that the question is in fact crucial to the whole design and purpose of the work. For the

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claim that Hegel makes for the work is that it is driven not by the attempt to comprehend experience through reflection as such, but is generated, in some sense, by the concept of experience itself. This, as I shall argue in Chapter 4, is presented as a critique of the subjectivism of Kant’s starting point, the arch[, from which he imposes his own order and harmony on experience and reflection. For Hegel, an externally imposed arch[ – “the concern with aim and results”64 – introduces a flaw at the site of entry into a system which will then affect the arrangement of all elements of that system. Philosophy can only apprehend the true structure of experience, in both its historically situated and invariant forms, if it surrenders its ambition to impose concepts of reflection upon experience, and allows reflection and experience to be apprehended together as a symbiotic form; this apprehension is the speculative idea. The device that Hegel uses to disengage the notion of an external arch[, linked to a specific telos, from the structure of the Phenomenology is self-completing skepticism. The need for such a device arises from the same considerations that are present in the ancient skeptics’ attempted disengagement of their skeptical practice from the notions of arch[ and telos. Hegel is therefore also claiming that the devices typical of modern skepticism are in fact less able to encounter these problems than are the attitudes of the Ancients. This is particularly the case with respect to the attitude of doubt, in its deployment by Descartes and by Hume, and this is the basis on which Hegel’s criticisms of the shortcomings of the concept of doubt are constructed. As I shall argue, it is characteristic of modern skepticism that its anxieties and dissatisfactions are not genuine; that it targets objects (knowledge or existence) in order to arrive at the ‘truth’, the ‘certainty’ or the ‘legitimacy’ either of objects themselves or of our knowledge of them. As such, modern skepticism typically approaches its object with a specific arch[ and telos, from which it cannot then detach itself. Nevertheless, as I argue in Chapter 6, Hegel’s attempt to employ a consistent, non-dogmatic skepticism cannot be maintained, and this is the basis of Adorno’s rejection of the Hegelian speculative idea. In this respect, Hegel’s own remarks on the failures of ancient skepticism can also be turned against his own skeptical method: In this extreme … [which] grew into a subjectivity of knowledge, which directed itself against knowledge, skepticism was strictly bound to become inconsistent; for the extreme cannot maintain itself without the opposite; so pure negativity or subjectivity, is either

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nothing at all, because it nullifies itself at the extreme, or else it must at the same time be supremely objective.65 Hegel’s view of the significance of ancient skepticism is therefore to be understood in terms of its association with the concepts of contradiction and reflexivity, with its dissociation from the concept of doubt and in the equivocation involved in understanding the relationship between arch[ and telos. The stage is therefore set for exploring the way in which these insights impact modern skepticism.

2 On the Origins of Modern Skepticism: Descartes, Doubt and Certainty

The fundamental difference in orientation between ancient and modern skepticism, drawn by Hegel in terms of the superiority of the former, is not restricted to modern empiricism, but includes its antipode, rationalism. Indeed, modern empiricist skepticism, while it is opposed to the conclusions and approach typical of rationalism, nevertheless is concerned with the same framework of problems, of which the constitution of the external world provides the central pillar for the modern philosophical problems of freedom, rationality and God. That framework has its origins in Cartesian doubt. But doubt does not give rise to modern ‘solutions’ to the problems raised by ancient skepticism; rather, it is concerned with quite different questions, which are, to a great degree, incommensurable with the framework within which ancient skepticism arose. The acknowledgment of such incommensurability is part of the basis and rationale for the historical method of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in its attention to the context in which the main problems within philosophical traditions arise, as well as with the different respective answers to those problems. In this chapter, I am concerned neither to reduce the problem of Cartesian doubt to a simple historical account – either as a genealogy or as part of a social phenomenology of modernity; nor, by the same token, shall I take Cartesian doubt as an invariant problem that arises inevitably from the natural exercise of an ahistorical form of reason – an example of what might be called the ‘myth of the given’ in the generation of philosophical problems. Rather, as the original form of a distinctively modern problematic, Cartesian doubt will be analyzed here as an index of modern skepticism and modern consciousness.

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2.1. Cartesianism as a modern problematic ‘Modern philosophy’ begins with Descartes, and with Cartesian doubt, as the difficulty that sets the scene for the most fundamental epistemological and ontological problems of the modern age. The fact that the problem posed by Cartesian doubt – the existence of the external world – is a distinctively modern one has often been noted, but the implications and significance of this for an understanding of modernity in general are subject to widely divergent interpretations. While even a partial exposition of such an understanding is beyond the scope of concern here, we can identify some important currents that shed light on the critical theory interpretation of modern rationalism, and the role of Cartesian doubt in that interpretation. Miles Burnyeat has noted that ancient Greek skepticism, and indeed Greek philosophy in general, does not know the problem of proving the existence of the external world. Rather, [t]he problem which typifies ancient philosophical enquiry in a way that the external world problem has come to typify philosophical enquiry in modern times is quite the opposite. It is the problem of understanding how it is possible to be nothing or what is not, how our minds can be exercised on falsehood, fictions and illusions. The characteristic worry, from Parmenides onwards, is not how the mind can be in touch with anything at all, but how it can fail to be.1 For ancient skepticism, this worry narrows down to the problem of error, and how to develop the appropriate means of avoiding it. The fact that Cartesian doubt, unlike ancient skepticism, poses the external world as a problem registers the fact that world has to be explicitly objectified. Such a heightened sense of ‘worldhood’ can be understood to be co-originary with the emerging awareness of ‘space’ and ‘place’ that accompanied the scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 However, it can also be understood to point in the opposite direction, toward the increasing loss of the experience of the world, the problem of alienation as this was later made explicit by Hegel and Marx, and the concomitant sense, explored by Heidegger, that subjectivity has supervened over the priority of being. Indeed, twentieth century ontology has identified Cartesian rationalism as the nodal point of the subjectivization of philosophy, indicative of the loss of access to the immediate experience of being. The first generation of critical theorists also, while rejecting both the ontological language of Heidegger, together

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with the inherently conservative and (for Adorno) foundationalist, orientation of his philosophy, nevertheless identify the rise of modern rationalism with the polarization of subject and object, and as coinciding with the modern experience of reification.3 Descartes’ thought is both a symptom and an agent of these changes. For, in the judgment of both Heidegger’s ontology and critical theory, Descartes’ rationalist metaphysics is primarily mathematical in orientation and inspiration, and the Cartesian ‘ideal’ constitutes the reduction of the content of experience to abstract forms. While Adorno takes up this issue in the context of the problems of alienation and reification, as they had been formulated by Hegel and Marx, he inherits this perspective from Georg Lukács, who, like Heidegger, was influenced by the distinctive neo-Kantianism of German philosophy in the 1920s.4 In the central essay of History and Class Consciousness, “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Lukács traces the distinguishing characteristic of the correlation between the emergence of the modern commodity economy and the rise of abstract mathematical reason as a philosophical ideal. From systematic doubt and the Cogito Ergo Sum of Descartes, … there is a direct line of development whose central strand, rich in variations, is the idea that the object of cognition can be known by us for the reason that, and to the degree to which, it has been created by ourselves. And with this, the methods of mathematics and geometry … become the guide and the touchstone of philosophy, the knowledge of the world as a totality. … The question why and with what justification human reason should elect to regard just these systems as constitutive of its own essence (as opposed to the ‘given’, alien, unknowable nature of the content of those systems) never arises. It is assumed to be self-evident.5 Apart from its implications for understanding the relationship between mathematical form and the content of the world, Lukács’ critical remark also suggests a further important distinction between ancient skepticism and modern Cartesian doubt While Cartesian doubt is ‘radical’ in its systematicity, and therefore in a sense more far-reaching than ancient skepticism, it is also more dogmatic, inasmuch as it fails to examine its own motivations to doubt in the first place, assuming that these are selfevident. Therefore, the interrogative, suspicious and defensive tenor of Cartesian doubt may be, as Hegel suggests in the Introduction to the Phenomenology, merely a ruse, a sleight of hand used to manufacture the grounds for a dogma already clearly foreseen and embraced prior to

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the skeptical ruse being introduced.6 By contrast, the problem of motivation, as this is expressed in terms of the tension between arch[ and telos, renders ancient skepticism less radically subjective and more authentically self-interrogating than modern Cartesian doubt, which is based on a private, preformed resolution that prejudges its own result. The contrast may be heightened by considering the form of Cartesian doubt as a method, as a means to a particular end, which, as seen in Chapter 1, was regarded as susceptible to the charge of dogmatism by the Ancient skeptics. The suspicion of an externally imposed method replicates the problem of subjectivity at the level of reflection, and it is an integral part of Descartes’ method that doubt is not viewed as a generally applicable practice, but as a method undertaken by a particular individual subject. Therefore, the method of doubt itself, and not simply the certainty that it ‘produces’, is tied up with the emergence of the Western philosophical and cultural definition of the atomistic self and its defining qualities – self-awareness, self-direction of the will and the other qualities that have come to express the idea of the ‘I’ as a ‘special subject’. The method of doubt, and not simply the concept of doubt itself, therefore, marks a definitive shift in the evolution and meaning of skepticism. The nexus of this shift can be located in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. Here I will first be concerned to expound on some aspects of the use of the concept of doubt in this work, with particular reference to its motivations. This will shed light on the meaning and significance of Cartesian doubt as a distinctively modern thought-form. This objective, however, cannot be abstracted from the emergence of the methodological and dialectical counterpart of doubt, the idea of certainty. The discussion here will first elucidate the meaning of doubt and certainty and the dialectical relationship between them in the Meditations. This will preface an analysis of the method of doubt that is presented, and the role of the concepts of performativity and self-evidence in the formula that Descartes uses to overcome his radical doubt, the Cogito ergo Sum. I shall then draw some conclusions regarding the specific character of Cartesian doubt, and its general significance for the evolution of skepticism.

2.2. Doubt and subjectivity The establishment of the ‘I’ as a special subject is as important to Descartes’ decision to doubt as it is to the specific consequences of that doubt. The Discourse on Method and Meditations both present this decision in the context of the importance of the mathematical, and of the contrast

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between mathematics and other disciplines. In the Discourse, Descartes initially considers the virtues of the various studies he had undertaken at his Jesuit college, and expresses his dissatisfaction with many of them on the basis of their impracticality or incompleteness. He remarks, however, that “[a]bove all I enjoyed mathematics, because of the certainty and self-evidence of its reasonings” and that “I was astonished that on such firm and solid foundations nothing more exalted had been built.”7 The “certainty and self-evidence of its reasonings” therefore, together with its capacity to act as a foundation for the other sciences, privilege mathematics as a special case of the application of reason. Self-evidence and certainty themselves are not initially subjected to evaluation, but in the Meditations, Descartes introduces his desire for certainty as a highly personalized goal. Similarly, in the Discourse, having introduced the method of doubt as the process by which he hopes to arrive at certainty, Descartes notes that the “mere resolve to divest oneself of all of one’s former opinions is not an example to be followed by everyone”8 and that it should be done, if at all, only once in a lifetime. It is therefore a pure project of the self, the value of which is contextualized strictly within the horizon of individual existence.9 As a consequence, Descartes’ inaugural decision to doubt takes the form of meditation – a written interrogation of the self by the self, and in which the relationship between author, text and reader takes an unusual form. The actual experience to which the textual recounting refers is one to which the reader is not merely invited to listen, or to be instructed, for the meditation is not, as Harry Frankfurt points out, a narrative, but an exercise in which the reader must engage.10 Thus Descartes insists in the Preface that no-one should read the work “except those who are willing to meditate seriously with me”.11 The reader is thereby drawn into an apparent de-subjectivization of the textual form that disperses the authority of the author, and invests the reader in a community of inquiry. Descartes therefore defines the beginning of his inquiry as an intentional act – the subjectively willed desire to give up previous opinions in order to achieve specific ends. The act is undertaken privately and uniquely, as a special project confined within a certain context. The decision is taken not on the basis of any considerations of differing opinions, or indeed on any explicitly reasoned basis, but as a point of entry into a system of reasoning; it may therefore be understood as an arch[, inaugurating a particular realm within which a particular inquiring attitude is legitimate – a realm defined in terms of the private musings of the philosophizing subject.

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This arch[ points to the fact that the goal is not in fact a community of inquiry, but the dissolution of such a community. J.M. Bernstein develops this point to argue that, in the Meditations, “the authoritative ‘we’ has been dissolved into many ‘I’s’, each now responsible for itself …, rehearsing [a] dissolution of personal authority necessary to establish the transcendental authority of the self,” and that this is accomplished for the purpose of “transferring the place of authority outside any community and into the now unsure hands of the individual reader.”12 The programmatic form of Descartes’ initial skepticism therefore privatizes the concerns of the skeptical subject by decree, setting them within a designated, subjective boundary. The emphasis on the concepts of selfevidence and certainty, together with the inauguration of the individual subject as the locus of a transcendental inquiry, turn the initial threads of the spiraling course of the modern ‘philosophy of the subject’.13 Certainty and self-evidence are obviously not equivalent concepts, and in fact play quite different roles within Descartes’ investigations. The desire for certainty is what initiates the transcendental inquiry, while self-evidence becomes the goal to which that desire is oriented. The concept of certainty requires an initial elucidation beyond its conventional meaning. A contemporary instrumentalist conception of knowledge would define the concept of certainty as follows: certainty has no direct reference to objects. Its use as a concept modifies the form which our knowledge of objects takes, and therefore certainty may be understood as only a species within the broader genus of justification, understood as the basis on which a belief is held. In other words, since knowledge is a conjunction between subject and object, we can never have certainty of an object, although we might have certain knowledge of an object. The ascription of certainty as a species of justification is what allows the transition from belief to a particular type of knowledge,14 and its use in relation to knowledge therefore refers only to the manner in which the knowledge has been obtained.15 This way of conceiving of knowledge as derivative from belief, and of justification and certainty as determinations of belief, depends on the worldview that Descartes created to challenge the elements that defined the horizons of the Ancient and Scholastic-Medieval worldview. This challenge may be said to comprise three elements: First, in raising the issue of certainty as a problem, Descartes does not attempt to regain the ontological security of Scholasticism but, by redefining it in subjective terms, introduces a rupture into the meaning of worldhood itself. Second, Descartes re-situates the meaning of skepticism not by opposing it to belief, as in ancient skepticism, but within a dialectical relationship

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to certainty, through which it takes the form of doubt. Third, through the techniques deployed in his methodical doubting, Descartes poses the problem of truth in terms of the problem of the subject. Aspects of these elements, which do not exhaust the meaning of certainty but are key components for understanding its role in modern philosophy, have been explored in relation to the emergence of modernity by various theorists. I here rehearse three interpretations of the meaning of the turn toward certainty that Descartes inaugurates. Each of these interpretations, by Peter Sloterdijk, Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, accentuate distinct elements of that turn which adumbrate themes taken up by the critical theorists in their understanding of both rationalism and modern philosophy in general. These respective perspectives also allow some further differentiation of the relationship between Cartesian doubt, certainty and self-evidence.16

2.3. The Cartesian conception of worldhood In The Order of Things, Foucault examines the role of Cartesian doubt in bringing about the shift from a Medieval-Scholastic ‘logic of resemblance’ to that of a modern ‘logic of representation’.17 The four principle categories of resemblance distinctive of the scholastic worldview – convenience, emulation, analogy and sympathy – are constitutive of relationships of closeness that inhere within a world in which the objects are primary, and the subject secondary. The world is understood essentially as a system of relationships, involving spatial juxtaposition, emulation, imaging, mirroring and sympathy. The mind that interacts with these relationships is engaged in a process of “drawing things together, in setting out on a quest for everything that might reveal some sort of kinship attraction, or secretly shared nature within them.”18 The categories of resemblance depend on a conception of the being and qualities of things as marked or signed on their surfaces, and through which their affinity with one another may be discerned. This signature of things means that the world must be already given as a finite totality, and the task that remains to she who wishes to know it, is to decipher, to uncover, the connection of a thing with that totality. With the shift from resemblance to representation, the forms of relating are replaced by categories that operate through identity and difference, which are the ordering terms of the faculty of comparison. Foucault notes that Descartes’ critique of resemblance is carried out “not by excluding the act of comparison from rational thought, nor even by seeking to limit it, but on the contrary by universalizing it and thereby giving it its

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purest form.”19 Universalizing the act of comparison, both centralizes the system of knowledge around the subject, and allows its containment, and therefore the complete enumeration of its contents.20 Foucault notes that the old system of similitudes, never complete and always open to fresh possibilities, could, it is true, through successive confirmations, achieve steadily increasing probability; but it was never certain. Complete enumeration, and the possibility of assigning at each point the necessary connection with the next, permit an absolutely certain knowledge of identities and differences.21 The emergence of the category of certainty, then, coincides with a priority of the subject to the object, and the process of universal comparison brings about the possibility of certainty by redefining the world in terms of our knowledge of it. As such, universal comparison also underpins the idea of a system, as an internally generated, self-supporting structure. Scholastic-Aristotelian metaphysics seeks for truths that hold for all things generally, of beings qua beings; Cartesian metaphysics, on the other hand, seeks, through identification and analysis, for truths that hold for all possible objects of knowledge. Worldhood then becomes secondary to its own conceptualization within the subject; hence the replacement of relationships that draw things together with those which hold them in suspension around the subject. This forms a point of origin from which we can also trace the idea, as Lukács expresses it, that only what has been created by the human subject (either as individual or as social) can be known by the subject. This, as Vico had pointed out, is what lends both mathematics and history the special quality of allowing certainty because their object is one that is created rather than discovered, and created by the same impulse that now seeks to know. Thus, the subjectivization of the medium within which things can be brought into the realm of knowledge, brings with it a claim to certainty based on the identity of production and producer. A more overtly materialist explanation for Descartes’ concern with certainty emerges from Sloterdijk’s account of rationalism in the context of the history of cynicism that he traces from its Greek origins to the Enlightenment in the Critique of Cynical Reason. Within this framework, the social content of Descartes’ motivation to doubt and desire for certainty is simply as an excrescence of the decline of the feudal order: Rationalism and mistrust are related impulses, both bound tightly to the social dynamic of the rising bourgeoisie and the modern state. In

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the struggle of hostile and competing subjects and states for selfpreservation and hegemony, a new form of realism bursts forth, a form that is driven by the fear of becoming deceived or overpowered. Everything that ‘appears’ to us could be a deceptive maneuver of an overpowering evil enemy. In his proof through doubt Descartes goes so far as the monstrous consideration that perhaps the entire world of appearance is only the work of the genius malignus, calculated to deceive us. The emergence of the enlightening, insightful perspective on reality cannot be comprehended … without the deep penetration of suspicion and fear about self-preservation to the very roots of the modern will to know. An overpowering concern with certainty and an equally irresistable expectation to be deceived drive modern epistemology on to search at any price for absolute and unshakeably secure sources of certainty.22 Sloterdijk’s account poses the problem of motivation historically, as incomprehensible outside the context of the political insecurity of Descartes’ time.23 However, the interstices of that connection are rather reductively absorbed to a generalized social phenomenology. A more satisfactory explanation, though with a similar materialist orientation, emerges from Arendt’s discussion of the significance of Cartesian doubt in The Human Condition. Arendt characterizes Descartes’ concern with certainty as a response to the crisis of faith within seventeenth-century European culture. This crisis was not driven primarily by religious factors, and its scope was not restricted to the religious sphere alone.24 Rather, as Arendt presents it, the crisis derived from a double process of alienation – from the earth and from the world. Earth alienation stems from the challenge to the testimony of the senses and of reason presented by Galileo’s use of the telescope.25 But, during the same period, a world alienation ensued, in the form of the radical changes in individual consciousness brought about by the Reformation, and which Max Weber, in his essay on the Protestant Ethic, diagnoses under the aspect of ‘this-worldly asceticism’.26 While Arendt (rather unconvincingly) maintains that the convergence of the two trends is coincidental, assuming that denial of this would implicate it as “one of the many coincidences that make it so difficult for the historian not to believe in ghosts, demons and Zeitgeists,”27 she nevertheless points to the mutual inter-formation of the two processes. Arendt’s account of the importance of the telescope goes beyond what is usually cited, that is, the challenge to the geocentric universe and the laying of the foundations of universal natural law through abolition of

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the division of the world into the spheres of the heavens and the earth.28 Rather, what became possible through this instrument, “at once adjusted to human senses and destined to uncover what definitely and forever must lie beyond them,”29 is its application to the possibility of mentally adopting an Archimedean point outside the earth. From this point, nature can be viewed not as it is ‘given’, but “under conditions won from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside nature itself.”30 The surveying capacity of the human mind that only then became possible, is able to both shrink locale, or earth-space, to the same extent that it can expand the human universalizing ability, to “think in terms of the universe while remaining on earth.”31 A parallel process of alienation takes place in the social world, as the ethic of innerworldly asceticism, together with the economic changes that followed the expropriation of church and common property in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shifted the gravitational centers of life away from their traditional bases, in kinship, land and work, and replaced them with the alienated social forms of nation-state, propertylessness and wage-labor.32 The Cartesian innovation that followed the discovery of the Archimedean point (a discovery that paradoxically diminishes humanity in terms of its cosmological significance, but augments its terrestrial power) was to place this vantage point inside the subject, as the special universalizing ability that allows humanity to free itself from given reality,33 and thus open up the possibility of a universal doubt encompassing the ‘loss of the world’.34 The dramatic manner in which this universalization is, as it were, captured in motion, through Descartes’ graduated descent into the three stages of doubt, should not obscure its motivating springs. Thus while it is true that, as Arendt notes, “the outstanding characteristic of Cartesian doubt is its universality, that nothing, no thought and no experience, can escape it,”35 this inclusivity is precisely what allows certainty to emerge as the necessary outcome of radical doubt. It is also what decisively separates Cartesian doubt from ancient skepticism, for it destroys the assumption that that which appears can evade the test of being subject to investigation as a possible object. In other words, the doctrine of universal doubt is fatal to the idea of azetetos. What is substituted is the idea that truth can only be won through the aggressive application of the individual will to the dissolution of appearances, and their incorporation into the subject under the supervision of the sensus communis,36 capable of organizing experience, time and space from the point of view of the individual subject, which is at the same time a universal subject.

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In a perceptive discussion, highlighting the novelty of this component of Cartesian doubt, John McDowell points out that: In ancient skepticism, … how things seem to us is not envisaged as something there might be truth about, and the question whether we know it simply does not arise … whereas Descartes extends the range of truth and knowability to the appearances on the basis of which we naively think we know about the ordinary world. In effect Descartes recognizes how things seem to a subject as a case of how things are; and the ancient skeptics’ concession that appearances are not open to question is transmuted into the idea of a range of facts infallibly knowable by the subject involved in them.37 It is only through the opening up of appearances to doubt that the distinctively modern nightmare of possibly ‘losing the world’ – a possibility broached by Descartes in the three graduated stages of doubt presented in the Meditations – emerges. The nightmare of losing the world is not a projection of the fear of death, or the fear of the loss of salvation, but involves obliteration of the continuum within which both life and death and immanence and transcendence had previously coexisted. While the Medieval worldview devalues the world of Man, subordinating it to heaven, neither the Scholastics not the Ancients conceive of its being ‘nothing’. But perhaps it is only the emergence of the world as an object-that-we-could-come-to-lose that is responsible for the modern experience of its apparent certainty. For doubt and certainty seem to be related in an intimate way that secures their special status as determinants of a distinctively modern orientation to the world. This can be seen in the second dimension of Descartes’ Meditations, the proposed solution to the problem of the external world through the notion of self-evidence in the Cogito ergo Sum.

2.4. The stages of doubt and the Cogito Descartes famously descends through three stages of doubt in order to arrive at a situation where he is confident of the single certainty of his own existence. I shall here frame the universalizing process that accompanies this descent before drawing out three alternative readings which situate the roles of reason and self-evidence in this process. Descartes’ application of his radical method consists of universalizing doubt by entertaining the possibilities of, respectively, error, illusion and deception. These possibilities are present to consciousness qua

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philosophizing subject. Descartes first considers the fact that his senses have failed him in the past,38 and infers from this that he cannot therefore place his faith in them in this specific circumstance. However ubiquitous though, the errors of the senses are not generalizable; it does not follow from the fact that under certain circumstances in the past where my senses have failed me that they are now at present failing me. This is because error is eminently correctable through reflection, or it is immanent to the meaning of being in error that it can be recognized as such by the intellect, which is not involved in the process of perception per se. The second stage of Descartes’ doubt, entertaining the possibility that he is dreaming from the fact that he has had dreams which represent to him a state of affairs taken as true which turn out not to be so, corresponds to the notion of illusion. The experience of this stage constitutes a more systematic process than simply being in error. This stage of doubt is directed towards the process of representation itself – it is internal to the subject. The senses, while not the immediate object of this stage of doubt, are included in it, since it doubts their products – the evidence that Descartes is himself sitting by the fire, wearing a dressing-gown, and so on. This stage of doubt is therefore formal; it problematizes the veridical status of any possibly experienced state of affairs of the world or relations to the world. It is in this sense that it is to be understood as illusion rather than error. The potential for correction becomes likewise problematic since dreaming is a case where not only the senses, but the whole intellect is involved in the illusion, and there is therefore no space in which reflection on the situation and consequent correction of belief could inhere. It does not, however, entail losing the world, for, as Descartes goes on to point out, only specific states of affairs of the world and relations to the world are thereby called into question, not the presence of the world itself, or indeed certain general characteristics of it, the so-called simple universals – colour, number, and other such. In introducing the genius malignus as the third stage of doubt, Descartes engages in a far more radical suspicion; for if he is being universally and systematically deceived, then he can no longer be assured of the concepts through which the scope of error and illusion could be limited. The potential for correction is correspondingly restricted. The argument from dreaming leaves the subject still free to be aware of the possibility of error, even if it does not allow correction. Universal deception closes that loophole. The intervention of the genius malignus extends the scope of the loss because it invades and occupies the subject’s consciousness. The genius malignus does not act on the subject from outside, but enters into consciousness and makes use of the

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subject’s conceptual capacity to distinguish the difference between reality and illusion in order to undermine the conditions of the possibility of believing anything. The genius malignus constitutes the original form of the concept of ideology. What unites the entertainment of each of these three dubious possibilities is their affecting the means by which indubitable beliefs might be obtained.39 Thus the doubts made possible by consideration of the failings of the senses impact upon the process by which sensory knowledge is obtained. Similarly, those derived from the possibility of dreaming impact upon the process by which knowledge of reality is gained, namely, the formal elements of experience; and doubts derived from the genius malignus upon logic and the conditions of the possibility of knowledge. In drawing up these possibilities, therefore, Descartes problematizes the very notion that indubitability can arise from a process or a means in general. Once again, it is worth comparing Descartes’ treatment of the problem with the ancient skeptical approach. The tendency for the impulse to correction of error to shift towards self-envelopment is also encountered in ancient skepticism. Sextus presents it as an antinomy striking for its anticipation of the implications of the modern form of the problem: [I]f the mind apprehends itself, either it as a whole will apprehend itself, or it will do so not as a whole but employing for the purpose a part of itself. Now it will not be able as a whole to apprehend itself. For if as a whole it apprehends itself, it will be as a whole apprehension and apprehending, and, the apprehending subject being the whole, the apprehended object will no longer be anything. … Nor, in fact, can the mind employ for this purpose a part of itself. For how does the part itself apprehend itself? If as a whole, the object thought will be nothing; while if with a part, how will that part in turn discern itself? And so on to infinity.40 Sextus does not propose a resolution to this antinomy; it is itself to be merely apprehended, and added to the arsenal of techniques to be deployed against dogma. For Descartes, the resolution of the antinomy leads to the notion of self-evidence in the Cogito ergo Sum. The conventional interpretation of Descartes’ Cogito ergo Sum argument divides it into two steps. First, the method of doubt functions as a process of elimination, yielding the ‘I think’: whatever remains indubitable after the process is complete is immune from doubt, and the only thing remaining is the medium within which the process is itself carried out; this can

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then be called certain. Second, the ‘I think’ then functions as a premise in a deduction that then reveals the consequent, sum, as also certain. This interpretation gives the formula cogito ergo sum the status of an inference – the premise yielded through the process of elimination then renders the consequent certain. The problem with this reading, as has often been pointed out, is that the inference is not a syllogism, and indeed Descartes is quite aware of this potential misunderstanding. In the Replies, he notes that “when someone says ‘I think therefore I am or I exist’, he does not deduce existence from thought by syllogism but, by a simple act of mental vision, recognizes it as something self-evident.”41 This ‘simple act of mental vision’ is a term that corresponds to the word ergo, and is not to be understood as a conventional logical expression. Its function in the formula is subject to several interpretations. For Heidegger, the Cogito ergo Sum expresses neither an inference nor a process or means per se, but an assertion of the primacy of existenz to thinking. In the essay “Modern Science, Mathematics and Metaphysics,” Heidegger inverts the inferential interpretation of Descartes’ formula: “The formula which the proposition sometimes has, ‘cogito ergo sum’, suggests the misunderstanding that it is here a question of inference. That is not the case and cannot be so. … The sum is not the consequence of the thinking, but vice versa; it is the ground of thinking, the fundamentum.”42 Hence, for Heidegger, Cartesian rationalism, the supposed origin of the subjectivization of western metaphysics, can be reclaimed for the project of fundamental ontology.43 But Heidegger’s reading depends on inserting the quite unclear notion of ground, the fundamentum, into the formula. What relationships are produced by giving priority to this notion of ground? It might be said that sum is the ground for any arbitrary activity of the self. Thus Descartes’ Epicurean contemporary, Pierre Gassendi criticizes Descartes for failing to explain why ‘I am walking’, ambulo, could not be substituted for Cogito, thus calling into question the special relationship between thinking and being that is presumed in the formula.44 Descartes responds to Gassendi that it is not walking as such that would deliver any consequent relevant to existence, but only the utterance, or the representation ‘I am walking’, and the dubitability of such an experience had already been called into doubt through the argument from dreaming.45 But Descartes’ response then suggests that it is not the relationship between the activity of the self and the existence of the self that is the primary site of indubitability, but the nature of the activity, which, when it truly is indubitable, then yields indubitability to ‘I am’

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when thought. On the understanding suggested by Heidegger, the indubitability of Sum is what gives truth to Cogito. Hence, “the I as the positer is co- and pre-posited as that which is already present, as the being.”46 But then the specificity of the fact that Descartes doubts in the first place loses its significance, and the relationship of ground that sum is supposed to fulfill (on Heidegger’s reading) has no special relationship with ‘I think’. Heidegger’s understanding of the meaning of the logical concept of ground is also difficult to square with the form of argument offered either in the Discourse, where Cogito ergo Sum is first enunciated, or the Meditations, where, although the formula never actually appears, it is still the activity of thinking that allows the utterance ‘I am’. In an influential interpretation of Descartes’ formula, Jaatko Hintikka claims that it presents not an inference, or a reference to an underlying set of ontological relationships, but is only meaningful as an enactment of that which it expresses. This he calls the performative aspect of the Cogito ergo Sum. The function of the word cogito in Descartes’ dictum is to refer to the thought-act through which the existential self-verifiability of ‘I exist’ manifests itself. Hence the indubitability of this sentence is not strictly speaking perceived by means of thinking (in the way the indubitability of a demonstrable truth may be said to be); rather, it is indubitable because and in so far as it is actively thought of.47 Hintikka’s interpretation denies that the ergo involves a logical connection of propositions per se or, more generally, refers to the quality of being a means to an end. The separation of means and ends runs contrary to the meaning of self-evidence. According to Hintikka, if the cogito ergo sum is construed as inference, its validity rests on the ‘existential inconsistency’ of the denial of its consequent, namely, ‘I don’t exist’. Existential inconsistency cannot be treated within the form of logical declarative sentences since it “automatically destroys one of the major purposes which the act of uttering a declarative sentence has.”48 Therefore, the cogito ergo sum should be understood ‘performatively’, as being true by virtue of actually being thought, rather than by virtue of the process by which conventional knowledge is obtained.49 The performative interpretation of the Cogito ergo Sum highlights the problematic meaning of ergo. If ergo is conceived merely as a means – logical or otherwise – by which sum is obtained, then it becomes subject to the threat posed by the third stage of hyperbolic doubt. In other words, ergo is intended to express the immediacy of the relationship

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between thinking and being that obtains in the particular case of the Cogito ergo Sum. The hyperbolic stage of doubt consists in the genius malignus’ total possession of the faculties of the thinking subject. It therefore intervenes not only in the relationship between self and world, but also in that of the self to itself. This latter relationship, the notice that the mind takes of its own activity is itself an activity, or rather a founding/grounding act of self-envelopment – pure activity – which opens up the possibility of complete knowledge of the world. It is therefore a subjective arch[ that allows the possibility of a system of knowledge. If this way of understanding the Cogito ergo Sum points towards pure activity, another interpretation points in the opposite direction. Descartes’ reference to a ‘simple act of mental vision’ through which the transition from Cogito to sum is completed is invoked in the third Meditation, in which Descartes introduces the distinction between what I am led to believe through the ‘natural light’ (lumens naturale) and what “Nature taught me to think … [through] a spontaneous impulse.” He goes on to note that whatever is revealed to me by the natural light – for example that from the fact that I am doubting it follows that I exist, and so on – cannot in any way be open to doubt. This is because there cannot be another faculty both as trustworthy as the natural light and also capable of showing me that such things are not true. But as for my natural impulses, I have often judged in the past that they were pushing me in the wrong direction when it was a question of choosing the good, and I do not see why I should place any greater confidence in them in other matters.50 What Nature leads one to believe is here associated with an active power, an impulse similar to bodily instinct. The natural light, in contrast, has no power to conceive or to construct representations in itself; it only recognizes the validity of those links in a chain of reasoning to which the need for certainty is attributed, the recognition of the truth of the existence of God and of the validity of the Cogito ergo Sum. As such, the natural light is the vehicle that delivers certainty rather than truth. In another influential reading of the Meditations, John Morris contrasts the function of the natural light to the other faculties by pointing to its passive orientation.51 In the Regulae, Descartes distinguishes between a number of different powers of the mind, including reason, understanding, intuition, imagining and judgment. What these have in common is

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their character as a ‘grasping’ or active movement. Morris describes the passive function of the natural light as that which “simply gives a click of recognition when a truth is brought before it.”52 Whatever the status of the judgment that leads one to adduce truth on the basis of deductive reasoning, of mathematical intuition or of natural reason, these judgments must themselves be subordinate to the truth-revealing passage from ‘I think’ to ‘I am’, and this passage cannot be a function of a faculty per se. The natural light therefore takes on a special significance that distinguishes it in kind from any other capacity of the mind, and consists instead in a mysterious other force, reminiscent of the Platonic logos that impresses upon the subject–object relationship in such a way that the most extreme imaginings are unable to resist it. The author of the Meditations can conceive of the possibility of a genius malignus who could be in control of mathematical reason, but not of one who has power over the natural light. In other words, we should understand the Cartesian subject to be passive with respect to the natural light, and in this respect it becomes something supremely objective, presented as a ‘faculty’, but experienced as an alien force. The interpretation of the Cogito ergo Sum as pure activity anticipates Fichte’s attempt to construct a presuppositionless system, while the concept of the natural light points toward an objective idealism, that ‘produces’ the relationship of subject and object, anticipating elements of Hegel’s system. The interpretations presented by Hintikka and Morris, then, clarify themes which are present, but latent, in Descartes’ Meditations, and which come to the fore in the elaborations on the problem of the subject within German idealism. A concluding perspective on the contrast between ancient skepticism and Cartesian doubt is revealed in Rousseau’s remarks in Émile, in the “Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” Rousseau here recounts the experience of the Vicar’s expulsion from the priesthood, a trauma that leads him to see the ideas that I had of the just, the decent and all the duties of man overturned by gloomy observations. I lost each day one of the opinions I had received. … [Finally] I was in that frame of mind of uncertainty and doubt that Descartes demands for the quest for truth.53 The experience of doubt is here given a wholly different cast. It is arrived at not, as Descartes recommends, through explicit strategy, but tuchikos – through accident. But the experience yields neither tranquility nor a pathway to certainty, but chaos and pain. Rousseau goes on to express his

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disillusionment with the dogmatic and mutually mocking arguments of supposedly skeptical philosophers, and concludes that “the only thing we do not know is how to be ignorant of what we cannot know.”54 Rousseau thereby demands the presence of a ‘block’ to the reflexive impulse of knowing, a block that reappears, as I argue in Chapter 6, in Adorno’s attempt to revert behind the idealistic orientation of Cartesian philosophy. That reversion can only be carried out, however, by encountering the contradictions of skepticism as they reappear within post-Kantian idealism.

Part II Skepticism and Idealism

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3 The Question of Legitimacy: Skepticism, Law and Transcendental Idealism

If the concept of certainty forms the axis around which Descartes’ thought revolves, the notion of law lies at the center of Kant’s conception of critique. As Descartes’ chosen form of philosophical presentation in the Meditations is intimately connected with his conclusions, so the inquisitorial form of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in which reason is subjected to a legal examination of its titles, is not simply a contingency of style or method – one technique among others equally well suited to Kant’s purposes. Kant considers the form of his own work to be the activity of reason criticizing itself, or of reason bringing its claims before its own tribunal in order to be assured of their legality.1 This legal metaphor registers that the standpoint of reason – the subject that is examining its own claims – is a public persona. That is to say that we are no longer presented with the resolutions of the ‘I’ as a special subject that characterized Descartes’ investigations, but with a type of collective rationality which draws its example from the law practiced within the modern state and civil society. This law is universally binding on all rational individuals and treats of the characteristics that are common to all rational individuals. This relocation of the rational subject within the field of law is central to Kant’s reformation of philosophical method in accordance with the ‘Copernican revolution’. The reformation centers on the question of legitimacy and reaches its decisive point in the demand for a transcendental deduction of the concepts of the understanding.

3.1. The need for legitimacy The Copernican revolution is sometimes taken to refer to the reassertion of the role of the subject in Kant’s theory of experience. Strictly speaking, 55

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however, it refers to his revamping of philosophical method, by proceeding not on the assumption “that all our cognition must conform to the objects,” but “[making] trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our cognition.”2 According to Kant, it was Hume’s skeptical challenge to the doctrine of natural necessity that awoke him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’, and forced him to reconsider his entire approach to the problems of metaphysics. However, Kant’s response to Hume did not involve an argument to the effect that Hume had misunderstood the implications of his own empiricism, that “although all our cognition commences with experience, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience.”3 Rather, as I shall demonstrate here, it is at least a key component of Kant’s response that it consists in showing how the empiricist method is inadequate in explaining the possibility of human understanding once it is brought before the tribunal of reason. This critique of method appears in the introduction to the transcendental deduction in the first Critique, where Kant defines the opposition between a method based on the question of fact (quid facti), the physiological derivation of the sources of human knowledge provided by Hume, and the quaestio quid juris – a juridical method. Kant argues that the quid facti method is inadequate to its task on the basis of certain unexamined assumptions about the nature of our faculties, that these assumptions are themselves traceable to the unexamined standpoint from which the question issues, and which are not so much invalid as illegitimate. In other words, Kant’s objection to the quid facti method is made on the basis of a reflexive step – a step which, I shall argue, is reproduced within the trajectory of German idealism that runs through Fichte to Hegel. I first rehearse some general reflections on the connection between legitimacy and reflexivity before discussing Kant’s juridical method directly. Legitimacy usually expresses one form of the relation between an authority and what it authorizes. It does not constitute such a relation, for illegitimate authority is possible, but describes one particular form of this relationship – one which, of course, given the political events of the time, had recently come under intense scrutiny. Kant’s general ambivalence toward the events of the French Revolution was tempered by his deep admiration for Rousseau’s political theory, and the preponderance of legal metaphors throughout the first Critique bear this imprint.4 Rousseau’s concept of the general will, as this is expounded in the Social Contract, provides the foil for Kant’s conception of the link

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between legitimacy and reflexivity: When the whole people decrees for the whole people, it is considering only itself; and if a relation is then formed, it is between two aspects of the entire object, without there being any division of the whole. In that case the matter about which the decree is made is, like the decreeing will, general. This act is what I call a law. … On this view we at once see that it can no longer be asked whose business it is to make laws, since they are acts of the general will.5 The reflexivity of the general will is the touchstone from which Kant takes his bearings in the transcendental deduction in the first Critique. For the deduction is an attempt to establish the universal human right to possession of the objectivity of the concepts of the understanding – a right bestowed by law rather than by force or decree. As with Rousseau, however, the relationship must be guaranteed for ‘us’ by ‘us’, or it is not a ‘true’ law. In other words, at the very root of Kant’s thinking in the first Critique there is a notion of ‘we’, an implicit challenge to the subjectivization of knowledge inaugurated by Descartes. At the same time, however – and this concern goes to the heart of the relationship of critical theory to German idealism – the ‘we’ must be considered problematic, as potentially ideological. As Adorno points out, in his study of Kant’s first Critique, Kant’s use of the word ‘we’, which constantly recurs whenever he talks about the faculty of cognition … obviously refers to something that is already constituted; that is to say the faculty of cognition we are discussing here is tacitly ascribed to already-existing, actual real human subjects, individual persons. It may be said then that Kant has already anticipated, has already presupposed, the very thing that ought to emerge from the Critique of Pure Reason.6 The vexed question of the subject in the transcendental deduction will be encountered here and further taken up in the Chapter 4, where Hegel’s treatment of it in the context of skepticism becomes the model for the critical theory perspective on the notion of the constituting activity of the subject. We should also note that the meaning of legitimacy is tied up with the idea of a deduction per se. The literal meaning of the term ‘deduction’, as Kant uses it, is not, as might be assumed, logical, but legal. Dieter Henrich calls attention to this aspect. “The literal meaning of ‘to deduce’ (in Latin) is: ‘to carry something forth to something else.’

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In this very general sense it is not restricted to derivations within a discourse, for one ‘deduces’ a river by digging a new riverbed.”7 In Kant’s time, the term ‘deduction’ had both a logical and a legal usage, though the latter was by far the more common. A legal deduction writing (Deduktionsschriften) was intended to justify controversial legal claims, on the basis of the way in which a claim had originated, and it was always published under the auspices of government, that is, publicly, not those of publishing houses. Thus, according to Henrich, “The process through which a possession or a usage is accounted for by explaining its origin, such that the rightfulness of the possession or the usage becomes apparent, defines the deduction.”8 In late- eighteenthcentury Konigsberg, most deduction writings involved claims to inheritance of territories or titles and their style would have been familiar to Kant.9 One way of understanding the purpose of the transcendental deduction, which will be central to the account provided here, is therefore as a legal inquiry into the origin of the legal title to objectivity possessed by the concepts of the understanding as human capacities.

3.2. The demand for a deduction The question of legitimacy is made explicit in the well-known passage that introduces the justification for the transcendental deduction. Here Kant remarks Jurists, when speaking of rights and claims, distinguish in a legal action the question of right (quid juris) from the question of fact (quid facti); and they demand that both be proved. Proof of the former, which has to state the right or the legal claim, they entitle the deduction. … [There are] usurpatory concepts, such as fortune, fate, which, though allowed to circulate by almost universal indulgence, are yet from time to time challenged by the question quid juris. This demand for a deduction involves us in considerable perplexity, no clear legal title, sufficient to justify their employment, being obtainable either from experience or from reason.10 The last sentence of this passage is ambiguous, for the perplexity could be understood in two ways. On the one hand, as a methodological problem regarding the appropriate faculty to be employed in offering a possible proof of subjectively deployed concepts, be they either usurpatory or pure a priori. On this understanding – the conventional one – the passage is a reformulation of Hume’s skepticism towards either empiricist or rationalist explanations of the objectivity of the causal relation.

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Neither experience nor reason offers us satisfactory proofs of its validity, so it must be taken as (on a par with the usurpatory concepts) “a mere fantasy of the brain.”11 On the other hand, the perplexity could equally well refer to the strangeness of the demand for a deduction de jure. Why should anyone demand a legal proof of our possession of these concepts? Such a question had never been posed before Kant, let alone offered as a means to securing a defense of the form of certainty associated with inferential judgment. It is this species of perplexity, which, it should be noted, is prior to any specific judgment on the success or otherwise of the transcendental deduction, that is of interest here. In the section following the introduction of the question of legitimacy, Kant presents his argument for the necessity of a transcendental deduction. He notes that the pure a priori employment of the concepts of the understanding is to be distinguished in kind from the employment of empirical concepts. While the latter are dependent, in their acquisition and use, on the objects of experience, the former relate to objects in general, independently of all experience. The difference in kind between these two sets of concepts also has this further consequence: that a proof of the objective validity of the latter must also be of a different form from the proof of the former. Indeed, Kant remarks that a proof of the objective validity of empirical concepts does not really demand a deduction, since “we always have experience ready at hand to prove their objective reality,”12 and such immediate relation to objective reality renders the question of their objective validity redundant. In this sense, empirical concepts do not require a deduction as such, but only a derivation – an explanation of their source, rather than of our possession of them in conjunction with their source. The fact of the difference between the two sets of concepts then, necessitates a difference in the form of proof demanded. The difference does not however, at least initially and in itself, according to Kant, necessitate the demand. Thus he says, “but now even if the sole manner of a possible deduction of pure a priori cognition is conceded, namely that which takes the transcendental path, it is still not obvious that it is unavoidably necessary.”13 Kant then goes on to explain how such a demand does arise, which turns out to be on the basis of two rather obscure sets of considerations. The first is expressed by drawing a comparison of the a priori form of external intuition, space – which grounds the legitimacy of knowledge of geometry – with the pure a priori concepts of the understanding. These latter are “not grounded in experience and cannot exhibit any object in a priori intuition on which to ground their synthesis.”14 The second consideration, which is derived from the first, is that their lack of immediate grounding in experience means that a priori

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concepts might overstep their applicability to the object, making them prey to ‘merely subjective’ employment beyond the conditions of sensibility. The fact of this possibility is what generates the demand for a proof that the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the experience of objects. It is on these bases alone that the “reader must be convinced of the unavoidable necessity of such a transcendental deduction.”15 How are ‘we’, as readers, to understand Kant’s attempt to persuade us that such a deduction is necessary? If we consider Kant’s ostensible argument, as recounted above, and extrapolate it in accord with strands expressed elsewhere in the deduction, we can see that the basis for a demand for a deduction rests on a certain skeptical perspective. This skepticism concerns the legitimacy of the realm of experience itself, and not our right to conceptually possess specific objects of experience. In other words, the lack of an object given through intuition, on which we could ground the synthetic activity of the pure concepts of the understanding, means not only that their objective validity is called into question, but that key constitutive elements of objective reality also become problematic.16 While it is not properly explained in this section, Kant clearly has this broader skeptical problem in mind when he notes that with the possibility of a merely subjective employment of the concepts of the understanding, the concept of space is also thereby “rendered ambiguous,”17 and this is borne out in the course followed by the deduction itself. For here Kant attempts to show (amongst other things) both that and how unity – a basic constituent of what objective reality could be for us – can be conferred on the forms of space and time through the synthetic self-relating function of the transcendental unity of apperception.18 This broader question concerning the issue of objective reality stems from a universalization of Hume’s skepticism, but this universalization affects both the objective and the subjective sides of the form in which Hume expresses his doubts. We shall see that the demand for a transcendental deduction arises from the same source as the justification offered by the course of the deduction itself, namely, the identity of the subject. In arguing for this we have to take a detour through the question of Kant’s relationship to Hume.

3.3. Re-enter empiricism: The questions of fact and right In an article concerning the relationship between Kant and Hume, Manfred Kuehn quotes Lewis White Beck’s remark that “it is a scandal

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of philosophical scholarship that after nearly two centuries the question must still be debated: What was Kant’s reply to Hume’s ‘question.’ ”19 However, Kuehn goes on, “[i]t is perhaps even a greater scandal that the true extent of Hume’s ‘question’ for Kant has never been investigated satisfactorily, and that Kant’s conception of Hume’s problem has never been formulated in its entirety. For, only after it has been decided what the question for Kant was, can we hope to evaluate the answer or solution.”20 ‘Scandals’ of this kind rarely match in true gravity the outrage of their reporting. This is partly because they are not properly amenable to resolution and the substance of the scandal tends to reflect the interests of the age in which it appears rather than the presentation of the problem itself ‘in its entirety’. It is true, however, that commentators’ focus on the relationship has generally been far too narrow.21 Kuehn gives some fresh legs to the problem when he notes that “Kant clearly felt that he was the executor of Hume’s philosophical will. This means, however, that Kant was not primarily concerned with ‘answering’ Hume or refuting skepticism. His critical philosophy is in a fundamental sense a justification of Hume’s principle,”22 where Hume’s principle is understood as the dictum “not to carry the use of reason dogmatically beyond the field of possible experience.”23 It is the sense in which the basic tenets of the first Critique express the continuation of Hume’s skepticism that is of interest here. Besides exposing the intentional substructure underlying the transcendental deduction, the exposition of this continuity will shed light on the more general orientation of modern skepticism. This theme emerges from the broader context of the relationship between Hume and Kant suggested by Kuehn. According to Kant, the doubts which Hume raised concerning the objectivity of causality are merely a special case of the more general difficulty of justifying our experience of the world in all its most fundamental forms. The universalization of Hume’s mitigated skepticism at the level of the objects of experience is, however, only the first stage of a process by which Kant initiates a radical questioning of philosophical method, thereby extending the force and range of Hume’s skepticism. In the Prolegomena Kant relates the course of his thinking that leads from Hume’s initial doubts. He remarks: I therefore first tried whether Hume’s objection could not be put into a general form, and soon found that the concept of the connexion of cause and effect was by no means the only idea by which the understanding thinks the connexion of things a priori, but rather that

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metaphysics consists altogether of such connexions. I sought to ascertain their number, and when I had satisfactorily succeeded in this by starting from a single principle, I proceeded to a deduction of these concepts, which I was now certain were not deduced from experience, as Hume had apprehended, but sprang from the pure understanding.24 The ‘single principle’ mentioned here is not expounded on. However, the line of Kant’s thinking, read into the format of the first Critique, implies that he means the derivation of the table of categories from the table of judgments. This strategy is exemplative of a more general approach, which has been characterized as ‘regressive’ or as an ‘analytic’ (as opposed to a synthetic) method.25 The validity and a priori status of the categories is assumed and the form that the transcendental deduction must take derived from this assumption. There are, however, well-known problems with the attempt to deduce the categories from an analysis of the structure of our knowledge of objects through the forms of judgment.26 Put simply (and apart from the fact that Kant simply takes the table of judgments as read from Aristotle) the attempt is inadequate because it reduces the central aim of the deduction to being merely an attempt to justify the objective validity of the categories, ignoring the broader skeptical thrust of the implications drawn out above, namely, the issue of objective reality. The course of this argument is pursued more consistently in the Prolegomena, where the certainty associated with mathematical judgments is assumed and transcendental grounds are then constructed for it. If such a proof is construed as successful then the ground is thereby laid for proving the objective validity of the pure concepts of the understanding associated with perception and natural science, since their synthetic character does not differ in kind from the connections made between objects through mathematics. Seen in this light, we can say that the explanation of the role of the categories offered in the Prolegomena generalizes Hume’s problem only on the objective side, extending the range of objects to which Hume’s skepticism is applicable. This extension takes place through adopting the transcendental standpoint – asking after the conditions of the possibility of a mode of knowledge or its object. In altering the form of inquiry thus, Kant subjects mathematical judgments to Humean skepticism, and there is a line of thinking in the first Critique that suggests that he thinks that in so doing he has refuted Hume, and successfully established the grounds for transcendental idealism. Thus he says “if he [Hume] had had our

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problem in its generality before his eyes, he would have comprehended that according to his argument there could also be no pure mathematics, since this certainly contains synthetic a priori propositions, an assertion from which his sound understanding would surely have protected him.”27 However, as the argument in the introduction to the transcendental deduction, as recounted above, makes clear, the role of the categories in the formation of knowledge renders all such convictions problematic, since the forms of intuition themselves, necessary constituents of mathematical knowledge, become potentially subject to misuse. As such, the argument in the Prolegomena does not materially change the form of the problem as Hume expressed it; it merely generalizes it. Henrich summarizes the difficulty as follows: [Kant must show first] what the nature of a category actually is, given that it is always at the same time related to a synthesis of intuition. And [second] it must then be shown that such categories must exercise synthetic functions in intuition itself. … It is easily shown that the proof of the validity of the categories must enter into the explanation of the possibility of their relation to intuition. At the only place where Kant separates the two investigations from each other [in section 20 of the transcendental deduction], he was compelled to propose a proof of validity which fails to satisfy strict demands: he has to proceed at this point from the assumption that we are in possession of synthetic a priori judgments concerning all objects of sensibility and that these judgments stand beyond all doubt in virtue of their employment in mathematical natural sciences. But this was the very presupposition which Hume called into question.28 Therefore, any attempt on Kant’s part to prove the need for a transcendental deduction from a consideration of the status of the categories in general will be less than satisfactory, because it will always rely on a preconceived notion of their transcendental and a priori status. In other words, the argument in the Prologemona is based on the quaestio quid facti, and the question of legitimacy remains not only unanswered but unasked. For Kant to address the question of their legitimacy, and for us to extract the source of the demand for legitimacy, the proof must issue from an analysis of the subject.29 For the question of right is not about what degree of conferred objectivity is warranted of the categories (the issue of their validity), but by what right do the categories define what is to be an object (for us) at all (the issue of objective reality). Once the

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understanding is considered in the context of its status as lawgiver – as ascribing objective rules to the formation of Nature and not merely operating in conformity with laws already given – the task of the transcendental deduction becomes decisively oriented towards the ‘synthetic authority’ of the subject; and this includes both the subject of experience and the subject who reflects on experience. In Kant’s attempts to do this in the first Critique we find a more satisfactory extension of Hume’s problem.

3.4. Critique and metacritique in the two deductions It is the emphasis accorded to the transcendental unity of apperception – the basic reflexive constituting principle of experience – in the second edition deduction that is of paramount importance for the inquiry here; for the shift from the question of fact to the question of right is a reflexive constitutive step. Hume, on Kant’s understanding, had shown conclusively that no derivation of the objectivity of causality could be obtained via the quid facti method – by showing its descent from experience. But he delivered this verdict on the basis of the question of fact itself. In demanding a justification for Hume’s method, therefore, I take Kant to be extending Hume’s skepticism rather than charging him with being hyper-skeptical and attempting to ‘refute’ him.30 We can therefore express this demand as a skeptical objection to the quid facti method of deriving the title from experience, since such a method takes no account of the standpoint from which experience is called upon as witness to the issue. The emphasis on reflexivity in Kant’s objection to Hume identifies a genuine problem in Hume, and does so from a skeptical perspective. In this context it is worth returning briefly to Schulze’s attack on Kant. Schulze expresses his objections in the form: ‘All criticism must become meta-criticism; all meta-criticism must become skepticism.’ Schulze’s meta-criticism is therefore directed against Kant’s standpoint in the first Critique. The key point of weakness, as he and also Schopenhauer understand it, is the status of the causal relation and the relation to the thing-in-itself. For if the causal relation is merely a category imposed by the subject on the manifold of intuition, then the relationship between the manifold and the thing-in-itself cannot itself be causal. Kant attempts various strategies to solve this problem, principally in the A deduction, including the notion of the ‘affinity’ of intuitions to their object and the reformulation of the thing-in-itself as the ‘transcendental

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object ⫽ x’. These, however, are ad hoc measures, accommodations to Kant’s fear of being branded a subjective idealist. The central difficulty, of which the problem of uncaused effect is in fact only one aspect, is the claim of the subject – the standpoint of the method in the Critique – to know that which the content of the work claims cannot be known. The way out of this difficulty, taken, incidentally, by both Schulze and Schopenhauer, was to reinstate the notion of causality as the fundamental determinant of order in the world and in the subject, culminating in, in Schulze’s case, a return to empirical realism, and, in the case of Schopenhauer, an objective idealism of the will.31 Neither thinker, in this respect, is interested in the problem of reflexivity beyond using it as a tool to prise off the stopgap lid that Kant unsuccessfully attempted to place on the critical philosophy. Unsurprisingly, both Schulze and Schopenhauer are dismissive of the second edition of the deduction, in which the issue of reflexivity comes to the fore. In the second edition of the transcendental deduction, the problem of the uncaused affectation of the senses is effectively ignored, and Kant focuses almost exclusively on deducing the categories from the original synthetic unity of apperception. However, the second edition also reveals, albeit dimly, Kant’s awareness of the methodological problematic that his critics raised. In a letter to a colleague in 1793, Kant remarks that the deduction in the second edition utilizes a ‘synthetic method’, in conjunction with the exposition of the function of apperception, as opposed to the ‘analytic’ method in the A version. However, he accords no further significance to the synthetic method other than its advantage in “clarity and facility.”32 This latter remark is inconsistent with the weight of significance that hangs on the notion of synthesis throughout both deductions, but Kant was unable, or unwilling, to remark further on the meaning of a synthetic method. It goes beyond my intention here to provide a detailed exposition of the manifold meanings of the concept of synthesis as Kant employs it.33 However, in the second edition, deduction, synthesis and apperception are shown to be essentially inseparable. Thus Kant says: “I am therefore conscious of the identical self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me in an intuition because I call them all together my representations, which constitute one. But that is as much as to say that I am conscious a priori of their necessary synthesis, which is called the original synthetic unity of apperception.”34 A method that utilizes synthesis must therefore make appeal to a similar subjective organizing principle, one which is not subject to the same problems of self-reference endemic to Hume’s standpoint.

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3.5. Metacritique and reflection Kant’s inauguration of the question of right is intended to supplant the question of fact. It is not simply a metacritique of empiricism, but rather implies the necessity of a deduction of the subject who reflects on experience; who initiates the process of deduction itself by posing the question quid juris. The question of right is, therefore, a response to the lack of self-consciousness operating in Hume’s empiricist method. But here we encounter the underlying problematic of the question of right that was raised by the later German idealists – that the tribunal of reason itself lacks legitimacy. The sense in which the legal deduction in the first Critique culminates in a crisis of reason itself in the form of an irresolvable antinomy in the concept of law has been explored by Gillian Rose in her Dialectic of Nihilism.35 She discusses the extent to which Kant’s legal language actually corresponds to jurisprudential categories and the manner in which these categories express existing legal and structural contradictions within civil society. There is an affinity between the structure of the Kantian rational subject and the process of law, as it is administered within the modern courtroom. “Cross examination reveals the purportedly impersonal authority of Reason to be an ensemble of the three fictitious persons of the law: the judge, the witness and the clerk of the court.”36 This situation is demonstrative of the general form of Kantian critique, with ordinary experience, or ‘natural consciousness’ appearing as a witness who is interrogated by reason, who also takes up the position of the judge. Natural consciousness is not the initiator of these proceedings; they are brought by reason within the court of reason, although it is the possessions of natural consciousness that are being questioned. The issue then becomes whether reason is a legitimate representative of natural consciousness. In other words, from where does the challenge against the claims of experience derive? Rose then considers the underlying problem that Kant tried to resolve: the litigant who appeals to reason as judge is reason itself, a contradiction that expresses the aporetic nature of this situation or what Rose calls the antinomy of law: The recourse to justice has revealed an antinomy in the idea of justice itself: between the claim to justice – the universal meaning of deduction and justification – first called on, and the justice claimed, the demand that this case – the case of justice itself – be treated as a particular case.37

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From this perspective, it can be seen that the question of why a deduction should be demanded resolves into the question of the authority of the questioner – in other words who is demanding the deduction.38 Two perspectives may be said to emerge from these considerations. The first, which I shall encounter in Chapter 5, leads in the direction of a postKantian nihilism, and is summed up in Nietzsche’s comment in Beyond Good and Evil, that [i]t is high time to replace the Kantian question “how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” with another question: “why is belief in such judgments necessary?” – that is to say, it is time to grasp that, for the purpose of preserving beings such as ourselves, such judgments must be believed to be true; although they might of course still be false judgments!39 From this perspective, the demand for a transcendental deduction can be understood to be itself misconceived and should be jettisoned. A second perspective recognizes that the demand for a deduction has a certain unexamined arch[, but seeks to uncover it and to show that arch[ is itself legitimate. This second perspective evolves out of an attempt to ground the standpoint of the subject involved in producing the deduction. In other words, it attempts to deduce the legitimacy of the thoughtform underlying, or the methodology involved in, the transcendental deduction. This perspective originates in Fichte’s epistemology. Schopenhauer criticizes Kant for allowing his taste for symmetry to overwhelm his logical sense.40 This symmetry is evident everywhere in the first Critique, and not least in the idea of an Architectonic, the “art of constructing systems … since systematic unity is [that] which first makes ordinary cognition into science”;41 It appears in the duplication of the table of judgments in the table of categories, the derivation of the principles of the understanding from the headings in the tables, the derivation of the Ideas of Reason from the logical functions of syllogism, and so forth. These elements all combine to give the impression of a lacuna that arises in conjunction with the considerations above. This is, essentially, why did Kant not provide a transcendental deduction of method? Or more precisely, a transcendental deduction of the concepts he uses in his method, namely the concepts of reflection. This is basically the way in which Fichte saw the problem, and the project of the Science of Knowledge of 180242 is, essentially, to provide a legitimation for the demand for a legitimation of the subject’s right to possession of experience. In this sense, Fichte’s project is (as he claimed)

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the logical completion of Kant’s double task, of both posing the question of right, and attempting to show that the question is necessary. The perspective of the Science of Knowledge can therefore be seen to be continuous with the same skeptical theme that arises out of Kant’s objection to Hume. This can be seen if we pursue the issue starting from Kant’s comments on reflection that appear in the first Critique. The concepts of reflection are introduced abruptly at the end of the Transcendental Analytic, in the rather obscure form of an appendix, entitled “The Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection.” The section is introduced with the following remark: Reflection does not have to do with objects themselves, in order to acquire concepts directly from them, but is rather the state of mind in which we first prepare ourselves to find out the subjective conditions under which we can arrive at concepts.43 The state of reflecting requires a conscious act by which we turn our attention away from the objects of experience and towards that state of mind within which objects of experience are presented. Kant also suggests in the Amphiboly that reflection is implicit or an involuntary process that enters into thinking before ‘thinking’ – and especially the process of philosophical thinking – takes place. There is a sense here, that is never satisfactorily explained in the corpus of Kant’s writings, that the act of reflection is not merely the preserve of the philosopher, comprising a methodological tenet, but actually underlies the faculty of understanding itself.44 In Kant’s Logic, reflection is explained as that process by which concepts are derived, but only with respect to their form.45 This process necessarily involves the activities of comparison and abstraction. Hence reflection is here understood as part of the process by which representations are converted into concepts. In the Amphiboly, this is given a more concrete explanation: “All judgments, indeed all comparisons require reflection, i.e., a distinction of the cognitive power to which the given concepts belong.”46 The concepts which in turn allow for such distinctions comprise identity and difference, agreement and opposition, inner and outer and matter and form. These concepts are not concepts of the understanding; on the contrary, they underlie the categories of the understanding as grounds for their employment. They are distinguished further by the fact that they operate conjunctively as opposed pairs, comprising identity and difference, agreement and opposition and so forth. This entails that the basic medium of their function is in the act of comparison, and that

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this act is prior to “constructing an objective judgment”; therefore, “[o]n this ground it would seem that we ought to call these concepts, concepts of comparison.”47 However, as Kant then makes clear, the ‘mere act of comparison’ is only a logical reflection. The form of reflection that allows it to prefigure the understanding, is, by contrast, transcendental reflection: “The action through which I make the comparison of representations in general with the cognitive power in which they are situated, and through which I distinguish whether they are to be compared to one another as belonging to the pure understanding or to pure intuition, I call transcendental reflection.”48 Kant then goes on to apparently contradict his contention that reflection does not concern itself with objects themselves when he says that Transcendental reflection, however, (which goes to the objects themselves) contains the ground of the possibility of the objective comparison of the representations to each other, and is therefore very different from the other, since the cognitive power to which the representations belong is not precisely the same.49 This is because the primary function of transcendental reflection is to “assign to a concept either in sensibility or in pure understanding, its transcendental place.”50 The principal significance of Kant’s elusive remarks on reflection for the discussion here is the tendency for transcendental reflection to overstep the opposition between having a merely ‘methodological’ and a properly functional role – actually determining the sphere within which representations become determined as representations, thus becoming what they are for-a-self. But for Kant, reflection is still constrained by the presence of the thing-in-itself as the ultimate source of our representations. Thus, when Fichte disposes of Kant’s prevarications on the ultimate source of a sensuous intuition, by declaring it too to be a concept, generated out of the philosopher’s stance towards experience, transcendental reflection becomes not only the ‘common root’51 of our faculties of understanding and intuition, but also of their objects. Without entering into a full scale discussion of the role of reflection in Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, it is worth drawing attention to the consistency of Fichte’s extrapolation of Kant’s basic position on reflection. Fichte recognizes that the ambivalent role of reflection, as it is expressed in the Amphiboly, has serious consequences for the attempts to limit the realm of knowledge, and especially Kant’s attempt to demonstrate that

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the self as it is in itself is unknowable. If the function of reflection is to provide the transcendental location of the various representations that are given to us by assigning them to their appropriate faculty, then all representations – intuitions, concepts and the ‘I-think’ that virtually accompanies the synthesis of concepts with intuitions – are determined through the intervention of this more fundamental faculty, that of transcendental reflection. Thus reflection is the tool of objectification by which a field of inquiry is established.52 But how are we to determine whether the concepts of reflection are subjective or objective? Is there not the same difficulty here that was encountered in the question of the need for a transcendental deduction of the categories, namely, of the concepts of reflection being prone to ‘merely subjective’ employment and overreaching their remit? For Kant, the activity of experience is made the object, through reflection, which the Critique attempts to account for. Experience as activity is the product which the unity of consciousness and the activity of judging and synthesis brings about. Similarly, the concepts of reflection are activities that bring about the identification of synthesis, judging and apperception as objects for inquiry for ‘the philosopher’. Thus, as Fichte expresses it, we have a ‘double series’ of representations: There is, first, the consciousness the philosopher is observing, and, second, the philosopher’s own observations.53 If the legitimacy of the philosopher’s standpoint can be established, he can then proceed to establish the legitimacy of experience. The basic thrust of Fichte’s thinking is that the concepts of reflection are products of the self, conceived of as a causa sui, thus requiring no further grounding element, and no distinction between subjective and objective on which the skeptical concern about subjective concepts overreaching their remit could gain purchase. Reflection, the act of self-reverting, by which the self makes itself its object, is therefore, for Fichte, an act of intellectual intuition, “the immediate consciousness that I act, and what I enact; it is that whereby I know something because I do it.”54 Intellectual intuition is therefore an intrinsically performative notion. It is only in this coming to be aware of the self as simultaneously both subject and object that, according to Fichte, transcendental idealism can be ultimately grounded. The intellectual intuition of the self, or the ‘absolute positing of the ego’, as Fichte expresses it, thus functions as the nodal point from which the legitimation of experience issues. “Intellectual intuition is the only firm stand-point for all philosophy. From thence we can explain everything that occurs in consciousness; and moreover, only from thence.”55 Once the act of intellectual intuition

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has been performed, the second series of representations – the activity of experience – can be legitimately objectified and, indeed, can be grounded in the same act of self-reversion. The difference between the two series is that apperception is not itself an object for experience, and only becomes so on the basis of Fichte’s ‘first postulate’: “Think of yourself, frame the concept of yourself; and notice how you do it.”56 Fichte’s ensuing ‘deduction’ of the legitimacy of experience depends on the necessity of apperception as synthetic – as positing a non-ego in the act of positing the ego. I am here only concerned with the extent to which Fichte manages to escape the problem raised regarding the necessity of the demand for a deduction. Fichte thinks that successfully establishing the absolute foundations of philosophical form in transcendental reflection allows a deduction from an identical subjectobject, which, as such, is immune to questions regarding its ‘merely subjective’ status. However, the skeptical problem of the necessity of the demand for a deduction concerns the site of entry into reflection, and hence the motivation for the ‘act of self-reverting’ by which the transcendental standpoint is achieved. Fichte attempted in various ways to encounter this problematic, including presenting his thought in a succession of ‘popular’ treatises in which he attempted to ‘compel the reader to understand’. In the Science of Knowledge, the problem is expressed as follows: Now to me, at least, this whole procedure of the philosopher appears very possible, very easy, very natural, and I can scarcely conceive how it should appear otherwise to my readers, or how they should find anything strange or mysterious therein. Everybody, one hopes, will be able to think of himself. He will become aware, one hopes, that, in that he is summoned to think thus, he is summoned to something dependent on his self-activity, to an inward action, and that if he does what he is asked, and really affects himself through self-activity, he is, in consequence, acting.57 But what if the subject cannot, or will not, submit to the authority here invoked; will not respond to this summons? This indeed instantiates Fichte’s paradoxical contribution to the evolution of skepticism as we are considering it. The extrapolation of Kant’s aims in the transcendental deduction in accord with his underlying agenda leads ultimately to a perfectly consistent but, from Kant’s Rousseauian perspective, fatal conclusion: That only she who reflects on experience – who performs the required act of self-reversion to which she is summoned by authority, or

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however we understand the identity of ‘the philosopher’ in the second introduction to the Science of Knowledge – can legitimately (or ‘truly’) experience. The hypostatization of reflection constitutes a key theme in Hegel’s critique of Fichte. But Hegel frames that critique in terms that recall a principal theme of the ancient skeptical tradition, namely, the question of the relation between philosophical consciousness – understood as reflection – and experience, or natural consciousness. This topic bears some further investigation and enters into the roots of the Kantian antinomies, and consequently into Hegel’s dialectic.

3.6. Reflection, antinomy and the legitimation of experience The relationship between reflection and experience in the first Critique is governed by the format of the tribunal proceedings. Natural consciousness is called as witness to its own inquisition. This is apparent in the aims of the deduction where, as Henrich has argued, it is one criteria of its success that it justify the ordinary person in claiming the right to have experiences in a well-founded way at any time. It does not establish any claims to exclusive knowledge on the part of a few. … The knowledge and use of the categories as a priori concepts presupposes neither philosophical analysis nor even the conscious pursuit of scientific knowledge.58 Henrich appropriately dubs this the ‘Rousseauian criterion’, in an acknowledgment of the democratic ambitions of the first Critique. Fichte too may be understood as centrally concerned with the legitimacy of the experience of the ordinary person (what Hegel refers to in the Phenomenology as ‘natural consciousness’). Yet Fichte’s insistence that natural consciousness (in a manner not dissimilar from the reader of Descartes’ Meditations) has to be ‘enrolled’ into the process of legitimating its own experience, carries specifically modern authoritarian implications, the details of which I will discuss in Chapter 4.59 As a preface to this discussion I return to the Kant–Hume relationship, which again contains the germ of this problematic as it unfolded during the course of German idealism. In both the Treatise of Human Nature and the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume is at pains to distinguish his point of view from skeptical idealism. He never denies the existence of constant conjunctions of

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events, or of external objects generally. What is doubtful, rather, is the abstraction made from experience through which universality and necessity are attributed to events and series of events. But Hume did not then affirm the irreducibility of experience to reflection. Rather, in the Inquiry, he expresses the problem in terms of an antinomy between ‘reason’ and ‘natural consciousness’: Do you follow the instincts and propensities of nature, may [the skeptics] say, in assenting to the veracity of sense? But these lead you to believe that the very perception or sensible image is the external object. Do you disclaim this principle, in order to embrace a more rational opinion, that the perceptions are only representations of something external? You here depart from your natural propensities and more obvious sentiments; and yet are not able to satisfy your reason, which can never find any convincing argument from experience to prove, that the perceptions are connected with any external objects.60 The significant aspect of this remark is the antinomian form in which Hume expresses it. The opposition between ‘natural’ and ‘rational’ opinion is here understood as fundamental and irresolvable in itself. Natural consciousness is inadequate in the face of the demands of reason, but reason departs from its ‘natural propensity’ at the high cost of then finding itself divided against itself, that is, embedded in a further antinomy. This antinomy is not, however, Hume’s final position on this issue. Instead, he invokes the faculty of habit to explain not only the subjective origin of the concept of causality, but also the origin of the tendency to ascribe universality and necessity to what is in fact only a pattern of repetition. The faculty of habit or custom is, therefore, deployed to explain how both natural consciousness and reason are equally unable to discern the ‘true’ state of affairs. I argued above that the standpoint from which Hume was able to recognize the subjective faculty of habit as the origin of such delusion remains entirely unexamined. His skepticism, therefore, is mitigated by the dogmatic belief in the legitimacy of the quid facti method. For, in line with this method, it is the interpretation of the above antinomy – attributing the derivation of objective causality to the faculty of habit – that is dogmatic. The original antinomy as it stands, however, closely resembles the Ancients’ method of isosthenia. It does not decide on the matter at issue, but expresses the fundamental conflict between consciousness and its abstraction in thought.

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Hume’s motivation, in utilizing the antinomian form, of course, is not innocent. By way of contrast with the inference that the causal relation is based on habit, Hume affirms his dogmatic commitment to the necessary truths of both mathematics and natural science. In the “Antinomy of Pure Reason” in the first Critique, Kant derives the four antinomies directly from natural consciousness, that is, the four groups of categories of the understanding. The antinomies constitute the necessary illusions into which the understanding falls in its attempt to deploy the categories beyond the realm of experience. In demonstrating their illusory status, Kant makes use of what he identifies as a skeptical method, a “method of watching, or rather provoking, a conflict of assertions, not for the purpose of deciding in favour of one or the other side, but of investigating whether the object of controversy [itself] is not in fact a deceptive appearance.”61 The skepticism that is operative in the antinomies is therefore both active and passive; it is responsible for activating the assertions of the understanding to bring them into the realm of reason, sets them in conflict with each other, and then contemplates their mutual destruction. The active moment of this skeptical subject, from which is derived Kant’s insight that an object beyond the realm of experience is ‘empty’, therefore constitutes an arch[. It takes the four groups of categories that constitute the structure of experience as given, and inserts them into predetermined oppositions. Therefore it makes use of the assumption that the categories of the understanding exhaust the range of conceptual forms under which experience can occur. The result is a drastically diminished field of what could count as legitimate experience, and the regulation of contradiction under the authority of the table of judgments. Hence, the antinomies are based on an unquestioned and abstract assumption as to the conceptual structure of experience. As such, the attempt to legitimate the claims of ordinary experience is accompanied by a prescribed limit on any claim to exceed the categories, a prescription that cannot itself be legitimated. Indeed, the skepticism of Hume’s antinomy (taken by itself without the overlaid interpretation) anticipates Hegel’s critique of the Kantian antinomies, which leads him to the claim that all experience is in itself contradictory. This chapter has been concerned with Kant’s attempt to justify the objectivity of knowledge through an investigation into its legitimacy. We examined Kant’s development of Hume’s skepticism in terms of the universalization of its objective and subjective sides and saw how this bears on issues of philosophical method and of the realm of experience in general. Kant’s extrapolation of Hume’s skepticism leads him to engage

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with the problem of the necessity of the demand for a deduction, and this culminates in the question of the identity of the subject who is demanding it. This formulation of the issue, which I elaborated on in relation to Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, forms the starting point for grasping Hegel’s own development of skepticism through his relationship to Kant and Fichte.

4 Hegel and Self-Completing Skepticism

In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel states that Philosophy includes the skeptical principle as a subordinate function of its own, in the shape of Dialectic. In contradistinction to mere skepticism, however, philosophy does not remain content with the purely negative result of Dialectic. The skeptic mistakes the true value of his result, when he supposes it to be no more than a negation pure and simple. For the negative which emerges as a result of dialectics is, because a result, at the same time the positive: it contains what it results from, absorbed into itself, and made part of its own nature. Thus conceived, however, the dialectical stage has the features characterizing the third grade of logical truth, the speculative form, or form of positive reason.1 Since skepticism has at least three separate meanings throughout Hegel’s oeuvre, it is important to be clear about the meaning of this remark, a product of his later thinking. Hegel is certainly here thinking of Ancient skepticism, which he, of course, regards as an important movement, and as a prototype for elements of his own epistemological approach. But Hegel dismisses the circular, non-constructive ‘negativity’ that appears within the interplay between arch[ and telos. Instead, the skeptical impulse must be redirected towards the positive, which is carried out as the ‘negation of the negation’. Such an outcome can only be understood in terms of Hegel’s relationship to Kant, and as a transformation of the negative component of ancient skepticism into a speculative dialectics. Hegel remarks in the introduction to the Phenomenology that the method of the work is to be understood as a self-completing skepticism [sich vollbringende Skeptizimus]. The meaning of this device has been 76

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noted and analyzed in contrasting contexts by Gillian Rose and Werner Marx. Rose translates sich vollbringende Skeptizimus as ‘self-perficient skepticism’, Marx as ‘self-realizing skepticism’.2 I shall here render it ‘self completing skepticism’, as this captures both the reflexive element, and the sense of closure that Hegel is intent to press his readership towards. The following analysis proceeds by a division of the above formulation into its component parts. First, I take up the issue of completion, which raises the question of Hegel’s system, and to what extent this issues from criticisms of Kant and Fichte, and his attempt to complete the program of German idealism. I argue that the process by which Hegel attempts to turn transcendental – or as he expresses it, ‘merely subjective’ – idealism into speculative idealism replicates the same reflexive skeptical movement which Kant originally turned against Hume, in the form of the question of right. The completing moment will also be shown to be an element in Fichte’s notion of an absolute standpoint, and I discuss this in the context of Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s system in the Science of Logic. The second element of the above formulation will be shown to lead back to the key issues at stake in the structure of the Phenomenology, and I here lay out in full the meaning of skepticism that is operative in that work. I then address the reflexive element of self-completing skepticism. Finally, taking ‘self-completing skepticism’ as a whole, I show how Hegel’s idea of a phenomenology relates to ancient skepticism and anticipates later significant developments in critical theory.

4.1. Skepticism and the idea of a system In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines a system as follows: By a system I understand the unity of the manifold modes of knowledge under one idea. This idea is the concept provided by reason – of the form as a whole – in so far as the concept determines a priori not only the scope of its manifold content, but also the positions which the parts occupy relative to one another.3 On the one hand, for Kant, a system replicates the actual structure of experience. Its function is parallel to the transcendental unity of apperception, which determines the scope of the manifold content of experience through the figurative synthesis of intuition. On the other hand, a system follows the form of reflection. For the role (or one of the roles) of the concepts of reflection is to determine the placement, or transcendental location, of concepts in relation to each other through

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comparison and distinction.4 But, as a system, it has to accomplish both sides of this equation together, that is, as dialectic, not through the subordination of one to the other. If we are not to reduce this idea to being simply a product of Kant’s predilection for symmetry (as Schopenhauer argues), we should take note of the ambition. A philosophical system, according to that ambition, must unify both its objects and itself – in Fichte’s terms, both the series of representations presented in experience and the series presented by the philosopher who reflects on experience – within the movement of objectification per se. The objectification and examination of experience must take place in a non-reducible conjunction with its objectification and examination of itself, and the two elements cannot be abstracted from the conjunction without losing the elements of systematicity and completion. This conjunction is the result of the reflexive skepticism inherent in posing the question of right. We have seen how this conjunction, which replicates the function of the transcendental unity of apperception at the level of both reflection and experience, was developed by both Kant and Fichte. However, Kant never properly dealt with the role of apperception in reflection, let alone its role in the system. Fichte, by overprivileging it, subjugated experience to reflection, thus reducing the conjunction to an abstract identity. In the terms set by the discussion in Chapter 3, we can express this problem as a dilemma: Either Science (Wissenschaft), proceeds to an unexamined standpoint, thereby assuming an authority over its object that has not been legitimated, or it attempts to ground that authority before proceeding, in which case the original object, for which it sought authority for proceeding against, that is, experience, is no longer its object, but its product. Hence, the two parts of the conjunction that are supposed to be brought into a unity through the idea of the system are perpetually in danger of falling apart from each other. It was this problem, coiled at the heart of both Kant’s and Fichte’s systems, that Hegel sought to remedy – or at least address – through the idea of a phenomenology. The way I have expressed it above, however, in terms of a dilemma within the idea of a system, is merely its most general manifestation. The problem recurs in various forms in the parts as much as in the whole, and I explored this with respect to the hidden agenda of legality and authority operating ‘behind the back’ of critical reflection in Chapter 3. While this difficulty is endemic to both Kant and Fichte, there is an important difference between the two thinkers that reflects a similar difference in the meaning of a completion of a system. We can see this as follows.

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There are two senses in which a system might be understood as necessary. The first, on which Kant and Fichte agree, is that Science – or rather the form which Science takes in their thought, that of reflection – is necessary in itself. I shall call this the arch[-necessity of the system, in that it arises from the very motivation to philosophize itself. The second sense, on which Kant and Fichte diverge, is the idea that once a certain mode of philosophizing ‘gets going’, through a successful justification of its ground, its progression and results are necessary. This is the internal necessity of the system. In Fichte, this latter idea emerges through the appeal to intellectual intuition or, more generally, through the idea that the content of knowledge can be extracted from its form. Once the basic principle of identity has been established through the absolute positing of the ego, the content of the world unfolds inexorably from the self-identical subject. So, Fichte’s argument goes, the positing of the ego as a synthetic a priori act contains within itself the positing of the non-ego, and these opposites together, again by virtue of their synthetic a priori nature, yield the principle of the identity of self and world. Thus he says: In the third principle [identity of ego and non-ego] we have established a synthesis between the two opposites, self and not-self. … [T]here can be no further question as to the possibility of this, nor can any ground for it be given; it is absolutely possible, and we are entitled to it without further grounds of any kind. All other syntheses, if they are to be valid, must be rooted in this one, and must have been established in and along with it. And once this has been demonstrated, we have the most convincing proof that they are valid as well.5 Kant remained suspicious, in principle, of this idea of the inner necessity of the system, seeing in it not only the vestiges of the ontological proof, to which he was so fundamentally opposed, but also the denial of his distinction between constitutive and regulative principles. The doctrine of the regulative principles derives ultimately from a combination of Kant’s formalism with his refusal to fully extend the principle of apperception into the idea of the system. The outcome is that the progressive uncovering of the series of conditions underlying knowledge remains an essentially contingent matter. More concretely, or negatively, formulated, the doctrine demands that critique must remain suspicious of the interests of reason in its investigations and not succumb to the illusion that the series of conditions which it uncovers is complete.

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Hence Kant remarks: The only conclusion we are justified in drawing from these considerations is that the systematic unity of the manifold knowledge of understanding, as prescribed by reason, is a logical principle. … But to say that the constitution of objects or the nature of the understanding that knows them as such, is in itself determined by systematic unity, and that we can in a certain measure postulate this unity a priori, without reference to any special interest of reason … – that would be to assert a transcendental principle of reason, and would make the systematic unity necessary, not only subjectively and logically as method, but objectively also.6 Although Kant here presents the issue in terms of a rather disingenuous opposition between logic and metaphysics, the basic idea is that the formal nature of reason forbids any completion in regard to content through the inner necessity of the system. Similarly, in the Paralogisms, Kant argues that the ego has form but no content, and that therefore reason as subject has no power of synthesis. Kant is extremely consistent in his denial of inner necessity, and the same line of thinking also underlies his ethics.7 In Fichte’s hands, the interest of reason no longer acts against systematic unity because not only is it capable of, but in fact consists in, the act of intellectual intuition. This might be expressed in another way by noting the similarity between Descartes and Fichte on the notion of certainty. In both cases, certainty – which is originally only an internal subjective relation to what one knows to be true – becomes identical with truth. In Fichte’s case, because the distinction between form and content is supposedly overcome through attaining the absolute standpoint, the content of the system can then unfold with an inner necessity. The second sense of necessity attaching to a system involves the point of entry, the founding/grounding or arch[-necessity. This is a theme that we have pursued, in various forms, in relation to ancient skepticism, in Descartes, Kant and Fichte. In Kant, it was expounded in terms of the necessity of the demand for a deduction. The idea also emerges in Kant’s rejection of Hume’s antinomy between natural and ‘rational’ consciousness – that reason is indeed continuous with ordinary experience, and that the self-contradictions of reason are already embedded in ordinary experience. This leads to Kant’s insight that self-contradiction and illusions are necessary. Hence Kant’s remark at the beginning of the Critique, that the disparity between questions and answers that appears throughout human experience “is not due to any fault of its own.” The

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innocence of ordinary experience is itself necessary to Kant’s belief in its issuing in the necessity of the demand for a deduction. This, in combination with the rejection of Hume’s antinomy between experience and the abstraction of experience in reflection, means that it is a matter of the highest importance for the transcendental deduction itself that the demand for a deduction is self-generating, not imposed by the philosopher.8 In Fichte, the relation between reflection and ordinary experience is both rigidified and inverted. In the second introduction to the Science of Knowledge, Fichte makes the following remark: The part played by the philosopher in this … is to engage this living subject in purposeful activity, to observe this activity, to apprehend it, and to comprehend it as a single unified activity … It is up to him to place what is to be investigated in a position which will allow him to make precisely the observations he wishes to make. It is also up to him to attend to these appearances, to survey them accurately and to connect them with one another. But it is not up to him to decide how the object should manifest itself. This is something determined by the object itself; and he would be working directly counter to his own goal were he not to subordinate himself to this object, and were he instead to take an active role in the development of what appears.9 But how can thought fix the object, that is, experience, for its own investigation while at the same time not assuming that object as already fixed, and thus subject to the constraints on its manifestation implied in such an act? How can the philosopher work for his own goal by subordinating himself to the object? These prolixities have been explored in terms of the ‘circle of reflection’ that Henrich credits Fichte with recognizing. However, Fichte’s appeal to the philosopher’s subordination of himself to the object cannot ultimately be accepted as authentic. This is further evidenced in the dogmatic conviction of his famous remark from the first Introduction to the Science of Knowledge, that “what kind of philosophy one chooses, therefore depends, in the end, on what sort of man one is.”10 In other words, in taking up the perspective of philosophy we are not really subordinating ourselves to the object at all, but following our own already solid convictions, and it is in this conviction – a position not dissimilar from Descartes – that the ground of Fichte’s system ultimately consists. This also constitutes a rejection of the Rousseauian educationalist bent to Kant’s thought. For, presumably, an interest in the educational potential of philosophizing intimates the

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possibility of the reverse relation, that what kind of person one is can depend on what kind of philosophy one ascribes to.11 Fichte’s attempt to prove the necessity of the demand for a deduction as an arch[ truth thus constitutes a quasi-completion of Kant’s system, but a completion by dogmatic decree. These considerations on the two aspects of the necessity of a system instantiate three skeptical themes which I have pursued throughout this study, and which are important for understanding the relationship between critical theory and German idealism. First, the notion of selfconscious reflexivity that is operative within skepticism, although in varying degrees and with different results. Second, the structural problem of a subjective bias that invades a system of thought at its point of entry, and which therefore manifests itself as a problem of a philosophical system. Third, the centrality of the relationship between natural consciousness, or ordinary experience, and reflection. We now turn to Hegel in order to show how he frames his criticisms of Kant and Fichte in these terms.

4.2. Completion and the absolute standpoint In the 1802 essay, Faith and Knowledge, Hegel states that: the Kantian philosophy expresses the authentic Idea of Reason in the formula “how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Kant reproaches Hume for thinking of this task of philosophy with far too little definiteness and universality. This is exactly what happened to Kant himself; and like Hume he stopped at the subjective and external meaning of this question and believed he had established that rational cognition is impossible.12 The question then arises of what more objective form this question could take. Hegel’s criticism that Kant understands this question purely in subjective terms opens up a field of quite technical problems. It involves, to name just two contentious issues, the claim that the burden of explanation of the deduction in the first Critique rests on the assumed form of the table of judgments – and therefore, Kant’s idealism is merely ‘psychological’13 – and that Kant continually oversteps his own principles of rigorously distinguishing the paired functions of concepts and intuitions, reason and understanding, nature and freedom, and so forth. However we understand these criticisms, they are themselves dependent on Hegel’s critique of Kant’s ‘subjective idealism’. I am concerned to show here that this critique is fundamentally consistent with the

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reflexive skepticism that Kant himself brought against Hume. This will allow a perspective, keeping in mind Hegel’s remarks in the above passage, on the sense in which the ‘completion’ of Kant’s system is to be understood in skeptical terms. Kant’s criticisms of Hume can be summarized as follows: The process which transforms (dogmatic) skeptical empiricism into critical idealism involves an alteration in the status of both the object and the subject in question. In the Prolegomena, Kant universalizes Hume’s problem by taking the ascription of objective causality to an event or series of events as merely one instance of the activity of the understanding in its apprehending of objects. The key step in Kant’s reasoning here is the insight that mathematical judgments are themselves synthetic, and thus subject to the potential problem of their validity being ascribed to custom or habit. This step provides the impetus for the more universal form of the objective side of Hume’s problem, namely ‘how are synthetic a priori judgments possible?’ As Kant conceives the question, the key problem in providing an answer to it is the potential for the understanding – a potential concomitant with the power Kant accords to it through its universal role in judgment – to overwhelm the apparently objective limitations imposed on judgment by intuition. However, I showed in Chapter 3 that this problem is, in fact, representative of a larger issue, that is, the legitimacy of the realm of human experience in general, and, consequently, its objective reality. I also argued that in framing the question of right, Kant is extending the subjective side of Hume’s skepticism, asking after the standpoint of the subject involved in shedding doubt on the objectivity of experience. It is only at this point in Kant’s thinking that the problem and its solution begins to assume a form necessitating a deduction, and the complications associated with the role of intuition, both in its relation to the understanding and in relation to the affective role of the thing-in-itself, implies the necessity of a deduction from the subject. This process is coextensive with Kant’s transformation of philosophical method, and culminates in the view that Hume’s skepticism is inadequate in the face of a more fundamental skepticism that has its origin in the question of the identity of the skeptical subject involved in formulating the problem in the first place; hence Kant’s ‘reply’ to Hume is that the latter’s denial of the objectivity of human experience is itself subjectively and dogmatically grounded in experience. This extrapolation of the problem of method ultimately issues in the necessity of a demand for a deduction. While Kant recognizes this necessity, he is unable to provide a satisfactory solution to it, and it is left to Fichte to provide a transcendental

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deduction of method in his attempted derivation of the concepts of reflection from the pure ego. The manner in which Hegel presents the charge of dogmatism against Kant follows the same contours as the above argument. Hegel’s argument replicates Kant’s by highlighting the problem on both the objective and subjective sides. The former can be seen in Hegel’s focusing, like Fichte, on the concepts of reflection, and specifically on Kant’s use of the concepts of identity and difference.14 These concepts – the most fundamental categories of thinking – do not apprehend their object, which in the special case of reflection is experience in general, as it is in itself, but bring their own determinations to bear on it in the act of apprehension. Thus, the critical or reflective deployment of the concepts of identity and difference fix their object, that is, experience in general, in terms of a dualistic opposition. This dualism of identity and difference, being therefore constitutive of the process of reflective critique as such, then pervades the form in which all the insights of critique appear to it. Hence the opposition between identity and difference is responsible for all the Kantian fixed dualisms between something and other, concept and intuition, infinite and finite and between subject and object. Hegel’s insight that Kant’s theory of experience takes the form that it does because of the duplication of the opposition between identity and difference throughout his system, including the systemic incorporation of subject and object, is what allows him, in his discussion in Faith and Knowledge, to replace the language of concept and intuition with that of identity and difference. Thus, he states that intuition “is the unity that is blind, i.e., immersed in the difference and not detaching itself from it,” and that the understanding is “the unity that posits the difference as identical but distinguishes itself from the different.”15 In calling attention to the determinative nature of the concepts of identity and difference in the process of experience, the constitution of ‘the world’ per se then, Hegel is extending the objective side of Kant’s idealism. For, given that the deployment of these categories in conjunction with the transcendental unity of apperception, is at the same time the condition of the possibility of the experience of objects and that of the objects of experience, all representation of objects, and the ‘objects’ themselves carry within themselves both identity and difference. Thus, Hegel is claiming that all experience per se consists in contradiction. Hegel’s criticism with respect to the subjective side of the critical philosophy is similar to Fichte’s; that the appropriate standpoint from which the critique of reason is to take place is never properly established, and it therefore proceeds dogmatically without reflection on the

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categories that it is bringing to its object. Hegel pursues this criticism in different forms throughout the corpus of his writings.16 For our purposes, it is enough to note that Kant’s theoretical distinction between concepts and intuitions founders on the self-referential problem of method which Fichte initially identified. According to Fichte, since the Kantian synthesis by which an intuition is unified with a concept is just what it is for that unity to be a possible object for us; a ‘mere’ impression or pure unsynthesized intuition is inaccessible to us, and ‘us’ must include the philosophizing subject. Kant’s division of concept and intuition therefore demands intellectual intuition at the level of the philosophizing subject, since only through the use of such a faculty would he be able to isolate concepts from intuitions in the first place. As such, the same problem of the standpoint from which Hume is able to shed doubt on the objectivity of experience which is raised by Kant against him, is to be turned against Kant himself. How can we know that and what we cannot know? Or, as Fichte conceived it, what special form must this knowledge take? This problem is not confined to the issue of pure intuition, of course, but extends throughout the various places in the first Critique where Kant imposes limits on knowledge. While Hegel agrees with Fichte with respect to the necessity of turning the skeptical problem of reflexivity back against Kant, he is also, as we have seen, highly critical of Fichte’s solution. The key element of this divergence involves Hegel’s idea of a ‘self-completion’ of Kant’s system. According to Hegel, Fichte reduces the ultimate task of philosophy to the attempt to ground philosophical form absolutely – to achieve an absolute standpoint. But the identity of subject and object, conceived as a standpoint, cannot break out of its own circle except by an immediate appeal to intellectual intuition – through a demand or a summons. Thus, the identical subject–object as a standpoint is not an Absolute, but something both abstract and finite, a mere intellectual vantage point. To complete Kant’s subjective idealism, the identical subject–object must therefore arise from within the system, not externally, as from an absolute standpoint. This is the burden of the argument in Hegel’s extremely abstract discussion of Fichte’s solution in the “Doctrine of Essence” in the Science of Logic. The point is more clearly brought out in Faith and Knowledge, where Hegel states that [Fichte’s system] is able to establish the identity of the antithetic opposites (i.e., to achieve intellectual intuition) only in the infinite; or in other words it turns the abstractive thinking, the pure activity that is opposed to being, into the Absolute. So it does not truly nullify

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the antitheses. Like the idealism of his system Fichte’s intellectual intuition is a merely formal affair. Thought is confronted by reality, the identity of the intellectual intuition is confronted by the antitheses. The only identity here is the relative identity of the causal nexus in the mutual determination of one opposite by the other.17 This interpretation is given a more concrete form in the essay, at the beginning of the Science of Logic, “With What Must Science Begin?” Here, Hegel remarks on Fichte’s attempt to achieve the two forms of the necessity of his system which I recounted above: [We must mention] an original beginning of philosophy which has recently become famous, the beginning with the ego. It came partly from the reflection that from the first truth the entire sequel must be derived, and partly from the requirement that the first truth must be something with which we are acquainted, and still more something of which we are immediately certain.18 For Fichte, this ‘being acquainted’ or, as Hegel then expresses it, this ‘familiarity’, of the ego with itself is assumed to be unproblematic, and a mere ‘summons’ is all that is necessary to induce the self-reverting act by which the absolute standpoint is achieved. I noted in Chapter 3 that this summons is not innocent, and that it reintroduces the problem of authority into transcendental idealism. Hegel makes the same point when he states that “as thus immediately demanded, this elevation [to the standpoint of absolute knowing] is a subjective postulate; to prove itself a genuine demand, the progression of the concrete ego from immediate consciousness to pure knowing must have been indicated and exhibited through the necessity of the ego itself.”19 In other words, the legitimate demand for an absolute standpoint, which would then be in a position to legitimately demand a deduction of the objectivity of the categories, must arise from natural consciousness itself, not from its abstraction in reflective thought. Indeed, as Hegel goes on to note, in making natural consciousness the object of a summons, reflection is no longer dealing with natural consciousness at all, but with its own abstraction, its own product. Thus he says, Before the ego, this concrete Being, can be made the beginning and ground of philosophy, it must be disrupted – this is the absolute act through which the ego purges itself of its content and becomes aware of itself as an abstract ego. Only this pure ego now is not immediate,

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is not the familiar, ordinary ego of our consciousness to which the science of logic could be directly linked for everyone. … When pure knowing is characterized as ego, it acts as a perpetual reminder of the subjective ego whose limitations should be forgotten, and it fosters the idea that the propositions and relations resulting from the further development of the ego are present and can already be found in the ordinary consciousness – for in fact it is this of which they are asserted.20 The ‘immediacy’ employed in the summons to a self-reverting act therefore distorts natural consciousness, but is not self-conscious of its so doing. Therefore, the completion is not self-generated, and reflection’s subjective agenda enters into the process of thought at the very moment of ‘disruption’ which was supposed to expel it. Hegel’s solution to the problem of completion which is bequeathed to him by Kant and Fichte, must involve, then, a dissolution of any ‘external’ subject involved in the system. In other words, it requires an internal or self-completion of a system. In order to make clear the notion of self-completing skepticism, we have to bring these insights to bear on the structure of the Phenomenology. Given the abstract nature of the above discussion I here summarize the key points made thus far. First, Hegel’s critique of Kant is continuous with the reflexive skeptical argument that Kant himself brought against Hume. As Kant’s objection to Hume is that he did not universalize his skepticism towards causality, and hence did not apprehend the synthetic nature of all judgments, so Hegel’s objection to Kant is that he did not universalize his skepticism towards the role of identity and non-identity in merely assigning representations to their transcendental location, and recognize their fundamental role in the configuration of experience itself. Second, Hegel’s critique of the ‘subjectivity’ inherent in Kant’s and Fichte’s systems recognizes the presence of an arch[ in their thought. Correspondingly, the idea of a self-completion of a system is intended to extirpate this arch[. If the system ‘completes itself’ it is immune to the interests of the system-builder who presents it, and evades the potential for an arch[ to enter into the content of the system. Third, Hegel’s objections to Fichte’s notion of intellectual intuition are based on an awareness of the problematic relationship between reflection and natural consciousness. If natural consciousness is merely objectified as a given, it becomes subject to the categories of reflection, and when these categories are unexamined or merely decreed, natural consciousness is dogmatically distorted. Moreover, the idea, endemic to grasping the

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arch[-necessity of the site of entry into a system, that natural consciousness is continuous with reflective philosophy, is revealed to be merely an imposition on the part of the subject involved in expounding natural consciousness.

4.3. Phenomenology against Science The structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a significant point of dispute in the development of critical theory. Even between Adorno and Horkheimer there are quite significant divisions, and between the first and second generations of critical theory the disagreements are more fundamental. The aim in this section is not to deliberate on the various alternative ‘readings’ of the work, but to identify and trace the skeptical impulse that is operative within it, to connect this with the notion of self-completion and develop a perspective on the meaning of selfcompleting skepticism. This will allow greater insight into Hegel’s relation to both ancient and modern skepticism. Nevertheless, some anticipation of the relevant disagreements will set the stage for broaching the critical theory reception of the work in Part III. Habermas characterizes the totalizing character of Hegel’s system as the “infinite processing of the relation-to-self that swallows up everything finite within itself.”21 On the other hand, he is sympathetic to Hegel’s critique of the autonomy of the Kantian rational subject, as long as this is understood as critique, or rather as metacritique. Kortian, from a Habermasian perspective, expresses this understanding as follows: “Examination of Hegel’s argumentation shows it to contain a metacritical moment which holds against all critical interrogation of knowledge, even though this metacritique is placed unilaterally in the service of absolute knowledge.”22 Hence, Kortian is concerned to separate the negative moment of Hegel’s philosophy, the critique of critique – or of the conception of knowledge as an instrument – from its apparently dogmatic one, the presumptive demands of absolute knowledge. This notion of metacritique is to be distinguished from that with which Adorno is operating, and which he views as germinating within Hegel’s phenomenological method. If Hegel’s attack on instrumental reason is construed merely as subjective metacritique, as Kortian suggests, then he reproduces the same basic subject–object structure which he is supposed to be criticizing. Metacritique, as intimated in Chapter 1, with respect to Hegel’s critique of Schulze, does not complete critique, it merely duplicates it at a more abstract level.

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Any attempt to engage properly with the implications of the negative side of Hegel’s thought must take this into account, and in so doing it has to at least encounter the question of completion, and the ‘social’ side of Hegel’s approach. In this section, I shall argue that Hegel’s ‘critique’ of critique is not metacritical, but an attempt to assert an alternative conception of skepticism; that is, I shall argue that the program or ‘path’ that is presented in the Preface and Introduction to the Phenomenology has to be understood as going beyond metacritique without relapsing into a precritical attitude. I shall proceed first by looking at the general structure of the Phenomenology, before dealing in more detail with the concept of self-completing skepticism. The notion of completion is constitutive of the idea of a system, and Hegel’s arguments against Kant and Fichte are intended to show that their ‘systems’ are incomplete. But this claim, for Hegel, means that their systems are dogmatic; they operate in accordance with a certain arch[, or are not properly self-conscious of the assumptions and presuppositions concealed within their method. There is therefore a shortfall between the ambition of systematic critique – its supposedly skeptical method – to examine its object in irreducible conjunction with an examination of itself, and its execution. The question of whether this economy can be made good therefore involves, initially, the issue of the general program of the Phenomenology: What is its purpose, or what problems outstanding from the critical philosophy is it designed to surmount? Clearly, the first aspect of this issue is the meaning of a system as this is presented in the Phenomenology. The Preface and Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology are of course full of claims and exhortations for philosophy to become ‘scientific’ and ‘systematic’. Nevertheless, the case for a systematic Phenomenology is highly problematic. To begin with, to treat the matter purely from a factual standpoint, it is well known that Hegel wrote his Preface and changed the title of the work at the last minute, while the proofs of the text were already being printed. It was only, therefore, in retrospect that he was able to gain a perspective on what was happening in his own work; how its initial conception differed from its execution and how its development took it away from the conventional notion of Science propagated by the earlier German idealists. This highlights the element of discontinuity operating in the general structure of the work, suggesting that the book Hegel set out to write was not the one that he managed to produce. The intended work was a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness”;23 the result was a phenomenology. The issue of discontinuity, however, is not confined to the relationship between the

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Preface and the main text. It appears throughout the work in the shape of idiosyncratic transitions, massively inconsistent terminology and an extremely assymmetrical structure. This latter point has been brought out by Kaufmann, in his discussion of the relation of the contents page to the published work. The table of contents obviously represents an attempt to impose upon the book an order that Hegel had not had in mind when writing it. Not only does it contain all sorts of subdivisions that are not marked in the text, but more significantly, the text is divided into eight parts, each headed by a Roman number and title, beginning with ‘I. Sense Certainty; or This and Opinion’, and ending with ‘VIII. Absolute Knowledge’. But the table of contents lumps together I, II and III under ‘(A) Consciousness’, then inserts ‘(B) Self-consciousness’ before IV, and finally lumps together V, VI, VII and VIII under ‘(C)’ without any title. This last part, which has no title to parallel ‘consciousness’ and ‘self-consciousness’, comprises pages 162–765!24 The contrast with the symmetry of Kant’s first Critique exacerbates the sense that the work cannot – as Hegel insists (in the Science of Logic and elsewhere) – be read systematically. The idea that it presents a series of shapes of consciousness inexorably moving towards a preconceived notion of absolute knowing is therefore absurd. The easy alternative to such a view which Kaufmann then defends, is that the Phenomenology is merely a series of generalizations.25 The fact of this dichotomy within the interpretation of the Phenomenology, which is still pervasive within Hegelian scholarship, constitutes one target towards which Adorno aims his own studies of Hegel: “[Hegel’s] system is not an overarching scientific system any more than it is an agglomeration of witty observations.”26 But the dichotomous character of the various interpretations of the work is not confined to the contrast between ‘science’ and ‘generalization’. Polarized positions also exist as to whether the work is to be understood ‘anthropologically’, as a cumulative account of the development of spirit, or ‘culturally’, as an episodic narrative of development; whether it is a dialectical narrative of experience or a proto-phenomenology, in the sense given that term by twentieth century ontology; and whether it is to be understood ‘ontogenetically’, as the education of the reader’s consciousness, or ‘phylogenetically’ as the educative ascent of the species. The Phenomenology itself fits none of these descriptions accurately enough to allow resolution of these disputes.27 However, consideration of what is at stake

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allows some confrontation with the how they are affected by the issue of skepticism. I consider first the issue of the subject involved in the experience of the work itself. In Descartes’ Meditations, the object and subject of the investigation are encountered purely in terms of a singular individual, the ‘I’ as a special subject. Although the ‘I’ appears to be immune from all other determinations through the form in which the Meditations are presented, this in fact prefigures collusion between author and reader, leading to a ‘performative’ meaning to the work. In contrast, Hume’s critique of the Cartesian problematic simply evades the problem of the subject. Thus, in his response to Descartes, the subject is referred to as ‘I’ and the object as ‘myself’ without apparently, any grasp of the contradictions to which this usage leads. “[For] my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some particular perception or other. … I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”28 In Kant, this determinate subject and object is qualified as ‘the I’ or ‘the self’, manifesting the objectification deemed necessary to both grasp the problem in its proper universality and to establish the standpoint from which the transcendental deduction is to be carried out. However, Kant also makes use of ‘we’, though inconsistently, and this has consequences which will be discussed in Chapter 6, as to how to understand the subject of the text. With Fichte, as with Descartes, there is an intimate – though, somewhat paradoxically, solipsistic – relationship between author and reader. The act of abstraction that Fichte appeals to, by which the self is supposed to become an object to itself, is only grasped as possible if the reader conforms to the author’s exhortation to act on it rather than merely perceive its operating in the text. Hence the ‘act of reading’ is performative; for intellectual intuition is supposed to be itself an activity, not an ‘experience’ as such. In the Phenomenology, and most consistently in the first three chapters, the subject of the text is referred to ambiguously as ‘we’. The identity of this ‘we’ is given conflicting expression in the Introduction and in the main text. In both cases it appears as a mode of consciousness, and is presented in association with natural consciousness. The conventional interpretation of its meaning in the text is that natural consciousness is the object and ‘we’ are the subject investigating it.29 This interpretation derives from the remark Hegel makes in the very first sentence of the main text: The knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a

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knowledge of the immediate or what simply is. Our approach to the object must also be immediate or receptive; we must alter nothing in the object as it presents itself. In apprehending it, we must refrain from trying to comprehend it.30 This abstract appeal to the act of abstraction is of course as problematic as it is for Kant and Fichte. How can ‘immediate knowing’ be known to be immediate, or what kind of abstraction must be performed for ‘us’ to enter into immediate knowing? Similarly, what is the status of the relationship between apprehension and comprehension? Is comprehension something that can be dismissed from our categorial mental apparatus at will – perhaps by a pure act of primary will? This appeal results in the same dilemma that was previously located at the core of both Kant’s and Fichte’s idealism. It places the ‘we’ either in an unexamined standpoint, thereby assuming an authority that has not been legitimated, or in some special privileged position similar to Fichte’s philosophical subject, construing all representations from a standpoint established by decree. But Hegel is fully aware of the contradictions inherent in both these positions. As was shown earlier, Hegel was in agreement with Fichte that Kant had ignored the standpoint of the concepts of reflection, but similarly critical of Fichte’s solution because of the way it subjugated experience to reflection. Hegel’s appeal to ‘mere apprehension’, then, has to be understood as ultimately ambiguous. Although the appeal appears as a starting point for the main text, it is of course prefaced by the qualifications regarding the method of the work that appear in the introduction and preface, which challenge the conventional status of the relationships between author, reader and text. In Werner Marx’s interpretation of the Introduction and Preface to the Phenomenology, he addresses the meaning of a science of the experience of consciousness as follows: The first question to arise is whether, in the title “Science of the Experience of Consciousness”, we are dealing with a subjective genitive – whether it points to a science which is itself carried out as an experience. To all appearance the answer is ‘no’. Paragraph 15 of the Introduction makes a clear separation of science from consciousness, which is in the grip of experience itself.31 For a ‘Science of the Experience of Consciousness’, this separation of Science from consciousness is necessary in order to gain access reflectively to its object. But this very separation, as was shown above, is

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central to Hegel’s skeptical critique of Kant and Fichte. If it is to be taken as the site of entry into his own system, then all the familiar difficulties associated with the domination of the object by the subject recur. Marx’s interpretation may be said to ignore the historical dimension of Hegel’s Phenomenology, the fact that consciousness is in the ‘grip of experience’ itself inasmuch as it is conscious of the historically generated form of modern experience, both natural and philosophical. In other words, experience refers to the history of experience, and skepticism to the consciousness of that history. This is the meaning of Heidegger’s reading in the essay, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” in which he identifies the key connection between skepticism and the historicity of experience: Skepticism, in the appearance of phenomena, brings the shapes of consciousness forth and transforms one into another. Consciousness is consciousness in the mode of self-producing skepticism (sichvollbringende Skeptizimus). Skepticism is the history of consciousness in itself which is neither mere natural consciousness in itself nor mere real knowledge for itself, but first and foremost, in and for itself, the original unity of these two.32 If the ‘we’ is understood as modern philosophical consciousness, it is both subject and object of that which it observes. It therefore does not stand above natural consciousness, or the shapes of reflective consciousness that have preceded it, but itself is a product of those shapes. Heidegger’s reading takes note of the importance of skepticism in Hegel’s introduction to the work, but invokes an ‘original unity’ of philosophical and natural consciousness, which lays the groundwork for the appropriation of Hegel for the project of fundamental ontology. Indeed, Heidegger’s interpretation suggests a picture of ‘Skepticism as Subject’, in which consciousness is driven by its own negativity towards the progressive uncovering of its illusions. Such an account is shot through with both an epistemological and historical teleology.33 In one of several encounters with Heidegger’s reading of Hegel, Adorno provides an alternative account of the role of experience as this is laid out in the introduction to the Phenomenology in the second of his three studies of Hegel. Here, Adorno points not to the unity but to the fundamentally conflicted nature of the relationship between philosophical and natural consciousness: In Kant, philosophy was engaged in the critique of reason; a somewhat naïve scientific consciousness … was applied to consciousness

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as a condition of knowledge. In Hegel the relationship between the two, between the philosophical, critical consciousness and the consciousness engaged in direct knowledge of its object, the consciousness that is the object of criticism, a relationship that Kant did not consider, becomes thematic, the object of reflection. … Kant’s delimitation of consciousness as scientific consciousness that makes straightforward judgments returns in Hegel as the negativity of consciousness, as something that needs to be criticized. … [T]he reflection of reflection, the doubling of philosophical consciousness, is no mere play of thought unleashed and, as it were, divested of its material; it is sound. In that consciousness recalls, through self-reflection, how it has failed to capture reality.34 In other words, Adorno takes the relationship between the ‘we’ and natural consciousness to be put into question through the form in which the Phenomenology is presented. It challenges the authority of reason as a tribunal that interrogates the claims to the possession of the experience of natural consciousness; therefore, the question of right is itself put into question. This provides a definitive clue to grasping the meaning of a selfcompleting skepticism from the standpoint of, and for, critical theory. From the narrative of Hegel’s 1801 essay on skepticism, we know that the form that modern skepticism typically takes, that is, doubt, is to be distinguished from a ‘true’ or genuine form of skepticism. The distinction between doubt and some other form of skepticism appears in paragraph 78, where Hegel discusses what he calls the ‘road’ of the Phenomenology. The idea of a road is central to the method of the work, and involves the idea that there are three layers to each ‘stage’ in the work. There is, first of all, ‘natural consciousness’, which refers to the form of subjective experience of the world as this occurs within different cultures across historical time, and within different groups within those cultures. Hence the form and not simply the content of experience is different for the master and for the slave (as the famous chapter on selfconsciousness argues), and for the ancient relative to the modern. Second, there is philosophical consciousness or ‘reflection’, which is able to observe the contradictions and insufficiencies of ‘natural consciousness’, and to express these as philosophical systems. But philosophical systems must be understood as both in harmony and in conflict with natural consciousness. They are in harmony inasmuch as systems represent codifications or ‘shapes of spirit’ of natural consciousness and

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its contradictions, and hence express in philosophical form the character of those contradictions. On the other hand, systems are in conflict with natural consciousness because that consciousness must be initially dispelled in order for philosophizing to begin, and this is the earliest form of skepticism, one that has its own history, as recounted in the 1801 essay. In its earliest manifestations, in ancient skepticism, that dispelling is taken as unproblematic. As the history of thought unfolds, this skepticism turns against itself, yielding the false sensationalist form of modern empiricism represented by Schulze and Hume. A second form of false skepticism develops within modern idealism, when it also dispels natural consciousness, but in a form intended to reconstitute it as the subject, and this takes the form of Cartesian doubt. These false forms, then, are both instruments and expressions; their internally contradictory motivations and operations express contradictory forms of natural consciousness. The forms of these false skepticisms are traced in the first part of paragraph 78, where they are used to initially define self-completing skepticism negatively by means of contrast: Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the Notion of knowledge, or in other words, not to be real knowledge. But since it directly takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has a negative significance for it, and what is in fact the realization of the Notion, counts for it rather as the loss of its own self; for it does lose its truth on this path. The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair. For what happens on it is not what is ordinarily understood when the word ‘doubt’ is used: shilly-shallying about this or that presumed truth, followed by a return to that truth again, after the doubt has been appropriately dispelled – so that at the end of the process the matter is taken to be what it was in the first place. On the contrary, this path is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge. … Therefore this thoroughgoing skepticism [sich vollbringende Skeptizimus] is also not a skepticism with which an earnest zeal for truth and science fancies it has prepared and equipped itself in their service: the resolve, in Science, not to give oneself over to the thoughts of others, upon mere authority, but to examine everything for oneself and follow one’s own conviction, or better still, to produce everything oneself, and accept only one’s own deed as true.35

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Hegel then proceeds to his positive understanding of self-completing skepticism: The skepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness, on the other hand, renders the Spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is. For it brings about a state of despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions regardless of whether they are called one’s own or someone else’s, ideas with which the consciousness [of truth] straight away is still filled and hampered, so that it is, in fact, incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake 36 Here Hegel, in contesting the possibility of a clear ‘beginning’ to philosophizing (of beginning as a ‘shot from a pistol’) anticipates the argument in the Science of Logic, that the success of the self-completing skepticism of the Phenomenology is the necessary prelude to the standpoint of the Logic. This points to a different interpretation of the multiple levels of the Phenomenology – it is, in fact, an historico-transcendental deduction of the standpoint of the Logic. This issue can be clarified partly with respect to Hegel’s understanding of ancient skepticism. As was noted in Chapter 1, Hegel criticizes the use of terms like ‘subjective’, ‘objective’, ‘absolute’ and so forth as abstractions, whose relationship to experience, which is supposed to be what is to be explained by such terms, remains incomprehensible.37 Hegel’s critique of Schulze is framed in these terms, and can be understood as a generalized critique of method per se, of a method that comes before what it is to be applied to. The implications of understanding the Phenomenology in this way include a decisive rejection of metacritique as a skeptical impulse. Metacritique, and indeed critique, as Kant conceived it, are based on the conception of Science as a canon38 or a method. ‘Method’ is derived from the Greek ‘meta’, meaning ‘with’ or ‘after’, and ‘hodos’, meaning ‘way’. The references Hegel makes to method in the Introduction, through the use of terms like examination (Untersuchungen), investigation (Forschung) and inquiry (Erkundigung), are used in the context of the apprehensions of reflection and the understanding. Hegel therefore attempts to avoid the connotations of these terms because they abstract from experience, and turn it into a product rather than an object. Equally, he attempts to avoid the idea of the Phenomenology as prescribing a ‘pathway’, with the ineradicable association of such a term with Fichte’s notion of absolute method as an ‘ought’. Indeed, the difficulties that Hegel encounters in proscribing

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a predetermined abstract principle of method, and then introducing his own ‘method’ are attempts to encounter the dilemmas of arch[ and telos that arose within Ancient skepticism. Rose brings out the problem of method and the relation to natural consciousness as follows: The Phenomenology is not a teleological development towards the reconciliation of all oppositions between consciousness and its objects, to the abolition of ‘natural’ consciousness as such. The Phenomenology is the education of our abstract philosophical consciousness. … The Preface and Introduction are not simply abstract statements denouncing abstract statement. The abstract rejection of abstraction is the only way to induce abstract consciousness to begin to think nonabstractly. This consistency is the Hegelian system.39 The problem of the separation of method and content is bound up with the problem of the constitution of the subject in the Phenomenology. But if the education of ‘our’ abstract consciousness is not to be abstract, but concrete, then it must at the same time be radically open, historically contingent and ‘we’ construed as a social subject.40 Moreover, if Hegel’s system is the attempt to produce dialectically the conjunction of the objectification and examination of experience with its objectification and examination of itself, without reducing one to the other, then this would seem to contradict the ambition to produce a system per se. Therefore, the reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology that takes it to be a progressive uncovering of the illusions of natural consciousness misses the point of the work. A reading in terms of the work’s self-completing skepticism takes it to be also undermining its own manner of presentation as it is presented, thus intimating that any project oriented towards dissolving illusion will relapse into illusion itself.

4.4. Evading the Absolute Given this perspective, the question arises as to whether Hegel believes that his evasion of the traps of presupposing an ‘absolute standpoint’ is sufficient to escape the skeptical reflexivity that he turns against Kant and Fichte: In other words, can a system that denies systemics be maintained? Returning to the bipartite definition of what is involved in a system, it can be seen that it is a central insight of Hegelian skepticism that the necessity attaching to the site of entry into a system – the arch[ necessity – is dogmatic, and that this is the case on the basis not of external importation of criteria for the success of a deduction, but immanently

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contradictory. Hegel’s attitude to the second notion of a system – its internal structure and necessary development – is highly ambiguous. On the one hand, there are the numerous exhortations as to the necessity of ‘completion’. On the other hand, the idea of the Phenomenology attempts to dismantle that necessity from within. Rose’s notion that this ambiguity – the unresolved internal conflict of the Phenomenology – can be construed as the system, re-writes the meaning of Hegelian skepticism, its relation to any notion of completion and, ultimately to the question of Hegel’s Absolute. The analysis of Hegel’s extrapolation of the objective side of Kant’s theory of experience can be said to bring together two skeptical themes that have been encountered previously. In Chapter 1, I outlined Hegel’s appreciation for the universality of ancient skepticism, the fact that it did not impose limits upon the contradictions and incomprehensibility of experience. In Chapter 3, I drew attention to the function of Kant’s antinomies and their relation to ordinary experience. Hegel’s objection to the form in which the Kantian antinomies are expressed is a consequence of the extrapolation of the objective side of Kant’s subjective idealism. In the Science of Logic, Hegel expresses this as follows: Kant wanted to give his four cosmological antinomies a show of completeness by the principle of classification which he took from his schema of the categories. But profounder insight into the antinomial, or more truly into the dialectical nature of reason demonstrates any Notion whatever to be a unity of opposed moments to which, therefore, the form of antinomial assertions could be given41 Following this remark, Hegel states that “Ancient skepticism did not spare itself the pains of demonstrating this contradiction or antinomy in every notion which confronted it in the sciences.”42 The difference between ancient and Hegelian skepticism in this respect is of course that the Ancients did not express the opposed moments in any thing or concept of a thing as a unity at all, but precisely a lack of any such unity. In other words, the Ancients’ universal skepticism coincided with a selfconscious refusal of a unifying moment. Hegel’s intimation of the unity of the opposed moments in any notion whatever leads ultimately to the issue of the meaning of the Absolute. The ultimate incompatibility of a consistent skepticism with Absolute idealism will be addressed in Chapter 6. Here, however, we can mark out Hegel’s divergence from Ancient skepticism in terms of what he calls “the most abstract expression of the Absolute … the identity of identity and non-identity.”43

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In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel attempts to formulate the Absolute as a self-completing moment within the system itself, and hence as ‘objective’, rather than imposed by the subjectivity of the system-builder. The ‘definition’ of the Absolute that appears here and in the other early writings, when Hegel was still strongly under the influence of Schelling, is the idea of a ‘higher’ identity within which identity and difference are themselves suspended. In Faith and Knowledge, this higher identity is presented as an extrapolation of the productive power of imagination which “should not be taken as the middle term that gets inserted between an existing absolute subject and an absolute existing world. The productive imagination must be recognized as primary and original, as that out of which subjective ego and objective world first sunder themselves into the bipartite appearance and product.”44 In Hegel’s later writings, including the Phenomenology, in which the expression of the Absolute in terms of the faculty of imagination is effectively dropped, we still find the appeal to a final synthesis, or sublation, through which the Absolute is ultimately attained. The moment of sublation, expressed in the speculative identity of identity and non-identity constitutes something of a fault-line that runs through the interpretation of Hegel. For some, the moment of sublation is simply a movement of dogmatic closure that must be resisted. Thus Jacques Derrida distinguishes his theory of différance as the method of unbalancing oppositions “without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of a speculative dialectics.”45 For the critical theorists, and in particular Adorno, a speculative dialectics cannot be simply rejected, but confronted with its own implications. Any predetermined refusal to entertain the speculative moment goes against dialectics, which must encounter and then subject the notion of the identity of identity and non-identity to immanent critique. The nature of this fault-line, I shall argue in Part III of this work, relates to the manner in which a speculative dialectics is to be avoided. However, the issue of whether Hegelian dialectics is to be simply refused, as a “stopping short” at an “external and subjective” version of the question, will be shown to involve, for Adorno, what he perceives as the dangers of returning to Kant on the one hand or towards Nietzsche on the other. It is in these terms that I shall address the relationship between critical theory, Hegelian dialectics and Nietzsche’s preemption of the German idealist path, and show how these relationships again raise the problem of skepticism.

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Part III Skepticism and the Critique of Modernity

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5 Skepticism, Nihilism and the Crisis of Rationality

If the question of skepticism is crucial to understanding the key epistemological problems affecting the development of German idealism, it must also affect our understanding of the project of critical theory. For critical theory is, in key respects, an adaptation of the concerns of German idealism to the crises of rationality that came to light in the twentieth century, but which could then no longer be contained within strictly philosophical discourse. In Part III of this book, I am concerned with the implications of the interpretation of the problem of skepticism within German idealism for the critique of modernity carried out by the Frankfurt School of critical theory. However this requires an initial significant clarification of the concerns of critical theory in general, including its conception of reason and its crises, and the role of the critique of philosophy within the critical theory of modernity. That is the purpose of this chapter. As I have argued previously, the history of skepticism cannot be traced in terms of a single narrative. However, Hegel’s notion of self-completing skepticism is defined in opposition to two other stances, which may be taken as representative of the general skeptical perspectives available to modern philosophy. From the standpoint of critical theory, however, perspectives are never simply philosophical, but are expressions of the experiential and reflective categories available within the culture in general, and therefore are also social forces with particular historical consequences.1 As such, skeptical empiricism is associated with the development of the ‘instrumental rationality’ that Adorno and Horkheimer analyze in the most far-reaching and influential statement of the concerns of the first generation of critical theorists, Dialectic of Enlightenment. The conception of reason addressed in that work conforms closely to the ‘pure heteronomy’ of facts2 that Hegel encounters in Schulze’s 103

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development of Hume’s skepticism. However, understood in its social context, the important qualities and associations of that conception are those of disenchantment, domination and nihilism, which Adorno and Horkheimer take to be intrinsic to modern reason and modern society. Dialectic of Enlightenment does not advance a specific definition of either instrumental rationality or skepticism, but the former concept is taken up from the work of Weber, whose distinctive characterization of modern rationality as ‘instrumental’ (Zweckrationalität)3 first presented the problem of modern rationality in a form that clarified the crisis at its core. That crisis involves not simply the ascendance of instrumentalism but also of nihilism, which Weber generalizes into a problem of modernity.4 But Weber himself takes up these issues in the context in which they were originally framed by Nietzsche’s objections to Kant’s critical philosophy. To understand this problem in its appropriate scope and context requires, then, a hermeneutic detour through both Nietzsche’s and Weber’s accounts of the origins of modern instrumentalism. For both thinkers, that origin can be traced to skeptical empiricism. But, while for Weber, instrumentalism leads to the ascendance of formal rationality and modern disenchantment, for Nietzsche it leads – via the impetus gained through Kantian critique – to modern nihilism. Both accounts are important for understanding the diagnosis of the crisis of reason developed by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, while the perspective of that work has to be understood in relation to the alternative notion of skepticism offered by Hegel’s Phenomenology. The argument in this chapter will be developed in three stages. First, I present an account of the most general features of the stance of critical theory in relation to the conception of reason associated with the Enlightenment and modernity, and how this underwrites the justification for a Hegelian-inspired critique of modern philosophy. This section also establishes a framework for the argument to be developed in Chapter 6, which concerns the relationship between Hegel’s notion of a ‘genuine’ skepticism and Adorno’s conception of a negative dialectics. Second, the meanings of instrumentalism and nihilism are clarified and discussed with reference to the specific cast given to them by Weber and Nietzsche. Third, I will show how these diagnoses of nihilism and the crisis of reason affect the specific stance of Dialectic of Enlightenment.

5.1. The critique of philosophy A central thesis of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is that the Enlightenment conception of skepticism has entered into a

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symbiotic and mutually catalytic relationship with the economic forces and social and political institutions of global capitalism.5 Together, these produce a ‘system’ that is progressively totalizing and increasingly refractory to critical knowledge, evaluation and control by the subject by and for whom that system is produced. Correlatively, the Enlightenment notion of the subject undergoes transformation from the abstract aggregate ‘we’ of Kantian rational beings to the collective ‘we’ of Hegelian historically educated national communities, to the idea of a universal class,6 and is eventually eclipsed as a possible object of knowledge and entity per se. The outcome is a social system and a way of thinking that resembles, more than anything, a philosophical system infected, as it were, with an idealist arch[, in which subject and object are unknowable in themselves and the system has attained an independent developmental dynamic that inoculates it against any attempt to intervene in that development. The first generation of critical theorists took over many of the concepts honed by the founders of sociology to describe these processes. Adorno, Marcuse and Horkheimer all agree that rationalization and differentiation – the evolutionary dynamics emphasized respectively by Weber and Durkheim – are objective processes that are operative in the development of modern society, but which are subordinate to the demands of capitalist accumulation, as expressed in Marx’s law of value.7 For Adorno, rationalization involves the institutionalization of identity-thinking within routinized social practices subordinate to uncritical acceptance of the law of value.8 Differentiation refers to the complementary tendency for social forms to become progressively more diffuse, and for society as a whole to qualitatively expand in accordance with the ever-increasing division of labor.9 They agree with Weber that rationalization is accompanied by disenchantment of the world, and disagree with Durkheim that differentiation could provide the basis for new forms of solidarity; on the contrary, under the rule of the law of value, differentiation tends towards increasing alienation and social atomization. Both rationalization and differentiation, understood as social processes, are accompanied by alterations in the basic categories of experience and knowledge. Those alterations lead towards reductive, mathematized, qualitatively impoverished forms of consciousness and an uncritical acceptance of the legitimacy of positivistic science. Since modern philosophy underwrites the claims of both experience and knowledge, the critique of philosophy is a crucial component of the critical theory program (although the weight given to its centrality to the overall project of a critical theory of society varies.10)

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For Adorno, twentieth-century philosophy remains entrenched within the modern skeptical antinomy that Hegel expresses in the introduction to the Phenomenology. The conception of knowing as an instrument, in which the object is subjectively overdetermined, together with the refusal of reflection on the nature of the instrument in favor of a dogmatic conformity to the ‘facts of consciousness’, has become the dominant model within epistemology. The presuppositions of skeptical empiricism, in other words, guide contemporary paradigms, issuing in a philosophical positivism on the one hand, and human sciences based on such abstract characterizations as ‘individual’ and ‘society’ on the other.11 The contemporary philosophical resistance to that dominance, in the form of phenomenology and ontology, simply pursues the other arm of Hegel’s antinomy, conceiving knowledge as a medium in which the object gains an ascendency over its representation, generally becoming mystified as a transcendent entity or as objective idealism.12 Under either description, the philosophy that arises is a form of idealism, although one that does not recognize itself as such. This is why Adorno conceives of the central purpose of Negative Dialectics as a ‘liquidation of idealism’.13 To this diagnostic picture of the crises affecting modern epistemology, critical theory erects an array of alternatives. The starting point for all of them, however, as Horkheimer argues in his seminal 1937 essay, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” is the refusal to separate from each other areas of inquiry that the dominant theoretical paradigms within the sciences, as a matter of course – and in line with the contemporary understanding of the meaning of epistemology per se – treat as discrete and distinct areas: (1) The inquiry into facts, in accordance with a method invoked prior to the inquiry; (2) the theory of knowledge underlying that method; and (3) the historical processes that condition all three of these elements (the facts, the method and the theory).14 In addition, the historicism that infuses all the claims of critical against traditional theory disallows (4) the separation of theoretical and practical reason, or, as the dominant paradigms currently express that separation, questions of fact from those of value. The refusal to partition these questions from each other invokes Hegel’s demand, in the Phenomenology, that the blocks and limits that Kant’s system erects against the interpenetration of parts – transcendental with empirical logic, experience with reflection and method with inquiry – be subjected to a dialectical dissolution. However, in the form in which this refusal is intimated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, it is inspired by Nietzsche’s quite different approach to the problem of

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rationality. In particular, while the notion of instrumentalism is undoubtedly central to Hegel’s relationship to both skeptical empiricism and to Kant’s notion of critique, its crucial position within the critical theory conceptual armory is inextricable from the problem of nihilism, as Nietzsche expresses it. An account of this co-origin and subsequent development of the concept of instrumental reason is therefore crucial to understanding the argument developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

5.2. Nietzsche, Weber and the antinomies of reason Nietzsche’s importance is often presented simply in terms of his critique of the rationality of the post-Enlightenment culture of nineteenthcentury Europe, and his proposed alternatives to that culture. In this context, Nietzsche is often painted as an irrationalist. But those elements of Nietzsche’s thought that became influential to critical theory are connected less with his antagonisms to what he saw as a culture of bad faith and self-delusion masquerading as enlightened rationality, or with his mythic appeal to some notion of overcoming western metaphysics, than with his diagnosis of liberal modernity’s ills in terms of nihilism. The consequences of this diagnosis have been taken up by a range of thinkers, including, but not limited to the critical theorists.15 The meaning of Nietzsche’s nihilism itself, however, is subject to widely divergent interpretations.16 In Negative Dialectics, Adorno divides nihilism into four general forms, each of which involves a misrecognition of its object. The first, termed ‘abstract nihilism’, is associated with ‘emptiness’ and ‘senselessness’, and involves the exhaustion of meaning from life when it is framed purely in terms of profit and loss. This notion is associated with the ascendancy of formal rationality. Formal rationality can have no response to the problem of meaning other than “to calculate the net profit of life,” which is “precisely the death which the so-called question of meaning wished to escape.”17 This form of nihilism is closely associated with the degradation of the notion of truth, since the universal reduction of meaning to cost–benefit analysis involves a convergence of the principle of exchange with the correspondence theory of truth.18 A second species of nihilism is associated with value – not as a transvaluation of values, as Nietzsche foresaw – but as the emptying out of any content from the value-orientations of European culture. A third form of nihilism, also bound up with meaning, consists in a Schopenhauerian confrontation with the will to live, which Adorno convicts of individualistic hubris.19 A final form, associated with existentialism, involves the

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belief in or desire for nothingness. This last form, Adorno points out, is inauthentic, by virtue of the “meaning, the ‘something’ which, legitimately or not, we mean by the word believing,”20 but both these latter forms of nihilism are self-deluded, inasmuch as they involve a belief that negation is possible without a determinate remainder. As such they regress behind Hegel’s dialectical logic, and even behind Kant’s notion of critique, which recognizes, in the “Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection,” the determinate outcome of the attempts to think nothing.21 In contrast, the entwined meanings of nihilism, understood as the exhaustion of the concepts of truth and value as benchmarks of meaning within modern societies, represent, for critical theory, real manifestations of the crisis of reason. Nietzsche’s insights into the coming of nihilism are premised on his conviction that this exhaustion is a result of the internal, self-undermining dynamic intrinsic to the negative side of Enlightenment thinking, which Hegel conceptualized in terms of a species of false skepticism. The internality and inevitability of that dynamic mutually entail each other – hence Nietzsche’s intention to “relate the history of the next two centuries … [to] describe what is coming, what can no longer come differently: the advent of nihilism.”22 In Book One of The Will to Power, Nietzsche identifies the root causes of European nihilism in the withdrawal of commitment from three interrelated ideals: those of ends, unity and truth.23 The ends that Nietzsche discusses are associated with an ultimate-value orientation towards universal happiness, the growth of love or a primary ethical canon. The withdrawal of commitment from unity involves withdrawal from the ideal of order or systematization.24 Third, and most important, nihilism follows from the liquidation of the concept of truth, understood as oriented to a ‘world’ as it is independent of some beings’ conception of it. Nietzsche draws two immediate conclusions regarding the consequences of these withdrawals for the future of European culture. First, “the faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a purely fictitious world.”25 Second, All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and therefore devaluated the world – all these values are, psychologically considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to maintain and increase human constructs of domination – and they have been falsely projected into the essence of things.26

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This claim – that behind the withdrawal from these separate ideal complexes there lies a single tendentious, ascendant perspective associated with utility and domination – is the primary point of common concern between critical theory and Nietzsche’s perspectives on German idealism. For, of course, the three ideals that Nietzsche cites constitute the anchoring ideals of Kant’s critical philosophy: the commitment to an absolute ethical canon, to the legitimation of true experience and to the systematic unity of reason that undergird the first two aims.27 Nietzsche’s argument, that the preoccupation with utility undermines faith in such ideals, is pursued in various forms throughout his writings, but it is clear that his proclamation of nihilism does not rest on separate claims about the exhaustion of meaning in the domains of value, truth and their systematic justification, but implies a pre-existing common condition that affects each of those domains equally. This precondition is the radical separation of the meanings of truth and value in the first place, which was followed by Kant’s (and Fichte’s) attempts to re-conjoin them, and in so doing to establish their systematic foundation. Nietzsche’s distinctive insight is therefore that the precondition for nihilism is the acceptance of the Enlightenment world-view that detaches the meanings of truth and value from each other. In other words, the disuniting of reason is the precondition for the exhaustion of meaning from the concepts of truth and value.28 That world-view derives primarily from the eighteenth century, and finds its most important expression in the skepticism of Hume.29 As I have noted previously, Hume’s skepticism has two edges to it. First, he challenges the concepts of causality, of self and thinghood per se,30 and thus, as Isaiah Berlin describes it, does away with the “metaphysical cement that had hitherto held the objective world together as a system of logically linked relations within and between facts and events.”31 This is the outcome of his separation of relations of ideas and matters of fact, a distinction sometimes known as Hume’s Fork. Second, Hume was the first to make explicit the disconnection between claims about truth, which he redescribes in terms of the capacity to reason, and claims about morals, which he redescribes in terms of sentiments. Hume’s oftenquoted manner of expressing his moral skepticism, “that in every system of morality that I have met with …, instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is and is not, I met with no proposition that is not connected with an ought or ought not”32 is often known as the is/ought distinction or the fact/value distinction, or simply as ‘Hume’s Law’. What is less often acknowledged is that Hume’s Fork is in fact the basis of Hume’s Law, and it is the separation of the realms of truth and value from

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each other that inspired both Kant’s redescription of the moral basis for action in terms of practical reason, and his search for the common root of theoretical and practical reason. As Marcuse expresses it, the idealistic counterattack was provoked not by the empiricist approaches of Locke and Hume, but by their refutation of general ideas … [R]eason’s right to shape reality depended upon man’s ability to hold generally valid truths … . For Hume, general ideas are abstracted from the particular, and ‘represent’ the particular and the particular only. They can never provide universal rules or principles.33 This undermines the rationalist belief that “reason could lead beyond the brute fact of what is, to the realization of what ought to be.”34 Hume’s Fork, although it appears initially as a purely ‘negative’ doctrine (simply, as Kant himself was wont to interpret it, as a check on the ambitions of reason) emerges, in Kant’s formalization of Hume’s Law, in the separation of pure and practical reason (and in a manner that neither Kant not Hume could have anticipated) as the precondition for rationalization,35 that is, its formalization as a doctrine of pure facts and pure means.36 The consequences of the disuniting of reason for critical theory – and in this they depart from Nietzsche’s stance – have to be understood as entwined with social processes such as atomization and desacralization that accompany it. No single framework can do justice to all the social processes engendered by that disuniting, but certain ones provide key indices of the relevant changes. Horkheimer, for example, traces the political expression of rationalization in the principle of universal tolerance.37 [T]he bourgeois idea of tolerance … is ambivalent. On the one hand, tolerance means freedom from the rule of dogmatic authority; on the other, it furthers an attitude of neutrality towards all spiritual content, which is thus surrendered to relativism. Each cultural domain preserves its ‘sovereignty’ with regard to universal truth. The pattern of the social division of labor is automatically transferred to the life of the spirit, and this division of the realm of culture is a corollary to the replacement of universal objective truth by formalized inherently relativist reason.38 Horkheimer indicts this insulation of each domain from the other (the moral, the political, the cultural, the economic and the scientific) for its unsustainability, and therefore for its irrationality,39 which is due to the “intellectual imperialism of the abstract principle of self-interest – the core of the official ideology of liberalism [indicating] the growing

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schism between this ideology and social conditions within the industrialized nations.”40 Such a schism leaves liberalism vulnerable to the extremisms of fanaticism on the one hand,41 and to total economic rationalization on the other.42 For Horkheimer and Adorno at least, it is economic rationalization – understood as the universal inflation of the principle of utility – that truly expresses the spirit of nihilism, and Dialectic of Enlightenment is devoted to grasping the world-historical implications of the ascendance of that principle. But the precondition of such an ascendance is the Enlightenment distinction between the realms of pure reason on the one hand and of pure sentiments on the other. This distinction sets in motion the interplay of disintegrative social processes and rational reflection on a new ‘ethical a priori’, an interplay that accelerates the process of rationalization.43 The is/ought distinction is not equivalent to, but the foundation for, the separation of facts and values, the formalization of which modern social theory (and social science) owes to Weber. An initial sense of how Weber develops the distinction and its implications is enabled by a review of the renewed scrutiny of the historical separation of reason and sentiment that has followed Alasdair MacIntyre’s highly influential account, in After Virtue, of the moral consequences of what he calls ‘the Enlightenment project of attempting to justify morality’. The diagnostic narrative that MacIntyre wants to tell concerning the disintegration of morality in liberal modernity closely resembles Nietzsche’s (and indeed Hegel’s), and derives from similar considerations.44 MacIntyre credits Nietzsche with being the first to realize that the breakdown of modern moral vocabulary stemmed from the Enlightenment separation of the spheres of truth and value, and gives rise to the ascendance of instrumental rationality. MacIntyre’s account also connects that narrative explicitly with Weber’s perspective, and provides a gateway to understanding Weber’s distinctive contribution to grasping the problem of instrumentalism as it was later taken up by the critical theorists.45 MacIntyre points out that the discourse of morality as we know it and experience it today consists of fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions but we have – very largely – if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.46 This loss is visible not simply in the incommensurability of the languages within which many rival moral claims today are made, for

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example the language of rights versus the language of utility, but also in the vocabulary of our institutional practices, including those concerned with the production of and reflection on knowledge. Hence, MacIntyre includes in his diagnostic investigation, an account of the substance of contemporary philosophical and sociological inquiry into morality. Contemporary analytic moral philosophy is underwritten by the emotivist theory of morals, the idea – sometimes traceable to C.L. Stevenson – that moral statements are merely subjective expressions of preference. They cannot be cast into the language of truth and rationality and are, therefore, ultimately without meaning. The origins of emotivism, both as a philosophical and an everyday view of morals, stem, however, not from some ‘fall’ or degradation, but from the objectification of the language of morality as a distinct and discrete sphere: The history of the word ‘moral’ cannot be told adequately apart from an account of the attempts to provide a rational justification for morality in that historical period – say from 1630 to 1850 – when it acquired a sense at once general and specific. In that period, ‘morality’ became the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct which are neither theological not legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own. It is only in the later seventeenth century and eighteenth century, when this distinguishing of the moral from the theological, the legal and the aesthetic has become a received doctrine, that the project of an independent rational justification of morality becomes not merely the concern of individual thinkers, but central to Northern European culture.47 Once the term had been abstracted from, and acquired an existence independently of, the institutionalized practices of shared social life, and thus rationalized as an independent object of inquiry, it became possible to conceive of ‘justifying’ morality, a project that is inseparable from the attempt to centralize and control its meaning.48 But, as MacIntyre argues, that very process of abstraction constitutes a rending of the relations within which ‘moral’ language can authentically consist. Thus, the Enlightenment project of justifying morality “had to fail” on its own terms and as a consequence of its own actions.49 The objectification of morality is thus a self-undermining endeavor. The objectification of morality is also the premise of the value-free approach to sociology, which owes its origins and most sophisticated expression to Weber.50 Weber, however, also recognized the momentousness of that objectification once it is raised to the level of a civilizational

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principle in the ascendance of instrumental reason and its correlate, homo oeconomicus. MacIntyre and the critical theorists both develop Weber’s primarily economic account of the growth of instrumental reason by applying it to culture, and both recognize – as Weber arguably did not – that it is in the realm of culture that the ascendancy of instrumental reason is truly totalizing, since culture increasingly saturates social life to a degree not available to the merely political. Thus, according to MacIntyre, the culture is infused with a drastic weakening of the moral vocabulary available to the denizens of the modern liberal state. The moral outlook of the dominant social characters, “the rich aesthete, the therapist and the manager,”51 and their contemporary vision of the world, do not simply consist in the internalization of the Weberian distinction between instrumental and substantive rationality – between the belief that values are important for their role as the means to achieve rational goals as effectively and efficiently as possible and the belief that values are binding on action for their own sake – but have passed beyond the recognition that such an opposition exists in the first place. In other words, modern liberal culture has absorbed the lesson but not the dilemma that Weber presents, in his famous essay, “Science as a Vocation,” that “we need new reasons to think that what is produced by scientific work is important in the sense of ‘worth being known’. And it is obvious that all our problems lie here, for this presupposition cannot be proved by scientific means.”52 As a result, in moral terms, the distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations is obliterated.53 Politically, liberalism becomes publicly defined in terms of the ends-indifference, that is, the separation of value from truth, of its political practices. As politics, as in culture, rationalization codifies the taken-for-granted commitment in modern industrialized societies to viewing the questions of the ends of human life as in principle unsettlable, and therefore meaningless, as loci of orientations for shared life. MacIntyre’s understanding has the advantage of placing Weber’s theory of rationality center-stage. Yet his rendering, in common with other accounts, fails to recognize certain key distinctions within Weber’s theory. The conventional account of Weber’s position is roughly as follows: Unlike positivism, Weber recognizes the value-laden nature of scientific rationality per se. But Weber’s view of science rests on a distinction, made explicit by later philosophy of science, between two types of value judgment, one hypothetical, the other categorical, these corresponding to the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic values.54 Instrumental values are sought for their role as the means to achieve intrinsically valuable ends. The choice of instrumental values

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takes place according to objectively rational criteria, namely, how effectively they are in bringing about intrinsic values. As regards intrinsic values, however, science is silent – there is no scientific way to resolve disputes over them. Since the values held by individuals, cultures or subcultures must be accepted as ‘givens’, yet are all equally subjective, moral and political conflict takes the form of a power struggle among the various values and interests, with the right solution being determined by whoever has the most power or persuasive force, often itself determined by purely instrumental considerations. Thus, Weber’s politics may be viewed as an unmasking of democracy as simply the extension of power politics into all realms of life. A closer look at Weber’s nuanced account of the general nature of rationality in Economy and Society, however, reveals not a single opposition between instrumental and intrinsic values, but a double antinomy, between, on the one hand, instrumentally rational (Zweckrational) versus value-rational (Wertrational) action, and, on the other, between formal and substantive rationality. Instrumentally rational action “is determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the environment and of other human beings; these expectations are used as ‘conditions’ or ‘means’ for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends,”55 while value-rational action “is determined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical, aesthetic, religious or other form of behavior, independently of its prospects for success.”56 The antinomy between formal and substantive rationality, on the other hand, is presented as a category within modes of economic behavior. Formally rational economic activity exists “to the degree to which the provision for needs … is capable of being expressed in numerical, calculable terms and is so expressed.”57 Substantive rationality, by contrast, conveys only one element common to all substantive analyses: namely, that they do not restrict themselves to note the purely formal and (relatively) unambiguous fact that action is based on goaloriented rational calculation … but apply certain criteria of ultimate ends … and measure the results of the economic action, however formally rational in the sense of correct calculation they may be, against the scales of ‘value rationality’.58 The two antinomies are generally conflated into a single one,59 registering the fact that the formal/substantive antinomy is to be viewed as simply the application of the instrumental/value-rational antinomy to

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the realm of economic life. But this conflation then misses Weber’s point that the language of economics is precisely and uniquely suited to express the antinomy between the instrumentally rational and valuerational as an antinomy – in the form of formal versus substantive rationality. But formal rationality in fact does not simply stand in for instrumental rationality within the realm of economics, but contains specific value-rational commitments of its own – that of taking “given subjective wants and arranging them in a scale of consciously assessed relative urgency,”60 that is, of following the principle of marginal utility. This means that formal rationality, inasmuch as it acknowledges the principle of utility, is shot through with specific value commitments, namely those of establishing scales of value. As Immanuel Wallerstein expresses it, in commenting on the two Weberian antinomies, “to decide what is marginally useful, one must design a scale. He who designs the scale determines the outcome.”61 In other words, the fact of the second antinomy within the decision-making procedures of everyday life increasingly obscures the existence of the first, and formal rationality comes to occupy the position of the value-rational orientation itself. In this respect, the distinction between the instrumentally rational and value-rational is obliterated, or becomes merely a distinction of points on a single scale. The insight that the ideal of value-free social science privileges a particular perspective, which is shot through with value-rational commitments, but which appears as formal rationality, is merely a subordinate part of Weber’s more general thesis; that we must understand the development of capitalist modernity not as the negation of aristocratic ideals and feudal structures by an objective rationality that incorporates a ‘view from nowhere’, but as expressing the outcome of positively formulated value-orientations that are driving modern civilization towards an economic form.62 In this respect, Weber correctly diagnoses the ideology of liberal modernity as resting on a conflict between substantive and formal rationality, which issues in the domination of the latter over the former. The institutionalization of both the distinction and the domination, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, leads to the ascendancy of the logic of endless capital accumulation and universal commodification, which then becomes progressively dissolvent, and – in contradistinction to liberalism’s own ideological justification, that it can maintain the quarantining of its distinct domains – tends towards the purely economic colonization of other forms of social life, that is, culture and politics, but also experience and inner life.63 What Weber’s analysis does not provide, however, is an adequate account of the philosophical background that brought the conflict

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between instrumentalism/formalism and other kinds of reason to the foreground in the first place. For Weber – who at least publicly kept faith with value-free rationality, ostensibly in the name of intellectual honesty64 – ‘rationality’ in general refers to one historically situated form of cognitive orientation that only exists within actualized social relations, and there is little meaning to an Idea of reason, beyond what gets practiced and institutionalized through the play of power relations. The critical theorists reject Weber’s value-free stance not simply because of its abrogation of substantive rationality, but also because – as Weber’s own arguments, as presented above, indicate – it is self-contradictory. If ‘value-free’ rationality is truly shot through with the value commitments of formal rationality, then one cannot simply present this as a social fact from a value-free perspective. Weber’s insight is therefore selfundermining from the standpoint from which he presents it. This criticism, crucially, hinges on the notion of the self-conception of enlightened rationality, which, as will be seen, constitutes a central argument within Dialectic of Enlightenment. However, that argument is also dependent on the conception of nihilism that Nietzsche develops most clearly in The Genealogy of Morals.

5.3. Enlightenment as self-completing nihilism Another way of grasping Weber’s account of science is presented by Raymond Aron: Science reveals to us what we desire and what we can attain, but not that which we ought to strive for; it leads us to self-knowledge and to knowledge of the world. Beyond that is the sphere of desire and will.65 Weber’s conclusions in “Science as a Vocation” may therefore be understood as an attempt to cut off reflection on the ‘beyond’ that underlies the objectivity of modern science, and therefore an attempt to contain Nietzsche’s confrontation with that realm. In the Preface to The Will to Power, in which he cites the necessary succession of nihilism, understood as the withdrawal of faith in the three value-complexes constitutive of the culture of Enlightenment rationality, Nietzsche intimates a further stage in the evolution of that culture, which he presents as self-completing nihilism (sich-vollendenden Nihilismus).66 Nietzsche’s self-completing nihilism, may be understood as parallel to Hegel’s self-completing skepticism. Both respond to a skepticism they view as corrosive, not through resistance but, as it were, by

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turning the negativity of skepticism against itself. For Nietzsche, the detachment of the meanings of truth and value from each other is the necessary precondition of nihilism, but it is not sufficient. The utilitarian perspective – which issues in the dominance of formal rationality – with which Nietzsche is concerned, is not, in the skeptical form given it by Hume, sufficient to generate the withdrawal from those three ideals that together constitute the pillars of the modern value system, and this is so because, in its empiricist form, that skepticism is not sufficiently reflexive (as I argued in Chapter 3). From Nietzsche’s perspective, selfcompleting nihilism arises as a consequence of the reflexive dynamic that Kant sets in motion through the idea of critique. The contours of Nietzsche’s argument on this point can be reconstructed as follows. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche points to the inadequacy of the fundamental question of the first Critique, on which resistance to Hume’s skepticism is thought to hinge, ‘how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?’: “Synthetic judgments a priori should not ‘be possible’ at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective optics of life.”67 Nietzsche’s position is not, of course, that we should therefore retreat to a pre-Kantian skepticism, but that the particular questions that have been asked by modern philosophy, and which culminate in Kantian critique should be interrogated critically as to their origin. In other words, when Nietzsche interrogates the impetus behind the will to truth, he is not merely reducing the question of the will to truth to the quaestio quid facti of the drives and instincts that underlie it; this would be to reduce genealogy to psychology.68 Rather, he is asking why philosophy attempts to engage with precisely the questions it does, and therefore he brings reason before a new tribunal, one that espouses the new law tables of Zarathustra. The outcome of such an interrogation is insight into the meaning of the will to truth, which, in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals, is revealed as a form of the ascetic ideal – itself a sublimated form of the will to power. The ascetic ideal consists in an abhorrence, as Nietzsche expresses it, of “life … [that is] nature, world, the whole sphere of becoming and transitoriness,”69 and a corresponding need to transcend sensuous becoming, and to withdraw into an idealized abstract realm. In other words, it is a determination to locate the value and the meaning of life in an ahistorical ‘beyond’.70 In addition, asceticism has two overarching formal characteristics. First, it is reflexive, that is, intrinsically self-directed; hence Nietzsche’s reflections that “[r]ead from a distant

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star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook of disgruntled arrogant and offensive creatures filled with a profound disgust at themselves, at the earth, at all life.”71 Second, the ascetic ideal is totalizing, it “permits no other goal, submits to no power” but consists within a single “closed system of will, goal and interpretation.” 72 The ascetic ideal is, as it were, a single ‘package’ of values, whether expressed as Platonism, Christianity or Kantianism. In Kant’s critical philosophy, the knowing subject – a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless, knowing subject”73 – is characterized by an aspiration to apprehend the world as pure immediacy, at the same time as it affirms the impossibility of that task. Therefore, the will to truth expressed in the Kantian knowing subject is the same ascetic determination to locate the value and the meaning of life in a transcendent ‘beyond’. It is, in short, an attempt to make room for a metaphysical faith in truth to underpin the other two ideal value-complexes of European culture – “faith in a metaphysical value, the absolute value of truth [is] sanctioned and guaranteed by the [ascetic] ideal alone.” 74 The self-completing moment appears in Nietzsche’s observation that the will to truth embodied in Kant’s critical philosophy occupies a special position within the spectrum of ideologies generated by the ascetic ideal. For once the critical philosophy, understood as “Christian truthfulness, has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however, when it poses the question ‘what is the meaning of all will to truth.’ ” 75 Nietzsche’s answer to that question has been variously interpreted. One view, that it issues in relatively benign or emancipatory ‘perspectivism’, which devalues truth as an end by making it relative to other ends, and does not claim itself to represent Truth, has been defended by, among others, Rorty and Foucault. Perspectivism consists in the claim that the self-conception that emerges reflexively from the will to truth is one that establishes a multiplicity of perspectives, from each of which truth-from-a-point-of-view may be asserted. For Foucault, Nietzsche does away with the notion of a unified rationality, and this leaves only strategies of insight and strategies of subversion.76 For Rorty, and other pragmatists, Nietzsche’s charge against Kant is underpinned by a relativist epistemology: All knowing consists in mediation within systems of purposes. To attempt to suspend that mediation is to attempt “to eliminate the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were capable of this – what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?”77 Therefore, if one values the notion of truth, one should respect “the lie involved in the belief in Truth.” 78

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For Horkheimer and Adorno, neither of these options are likely outcomes of self-completing nihilism. Rather, they are closer to Weber’s suspicion that the will to truth, while it undermines the ascetic faith in a ‘beyond’, does not touch the other formal components of the ascetic ideal – its reflexive orientation and its totalizing tendency towards the colonization of other forms of life (as a “closed system of will, purpose and interpretation”). As a result, the will to truth assumes the form of a dissolvent rationality that is both skeptical, in its refusal to countenance the claims of experience or knowledge that exceed the limits laid down by formal rationality, and nihilistic, in the sense that it liquidates the context in which the ideal value-complexes, in particular the faith in truth, make sense. It is this convergence of dogmatic skepticism with nihilism, and both as modern consequences of Enlightenment thinking that is traced by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

5.4. Dialectic of Enlightenment as critical prelude to Negative Dialectics If Dialectic of Enlightenment is primarily concerned with grasping and, presumably in some sense, resisting the self-completing nihilism of Enlightenment negativity, its own ‘standpoint’ becomes problematic. The work cannot be simply a critique of Enlightenment thinking as selfnegating, without becoming part of that which it is intending to resist. Dialectic of Enlightenment may be said to have suffered from misunderstandings on this score inasmuch as it has been conceived as wholly negative, and in this respect Adorno’s insistence that “dialectics is not a stand-point” has often been taken too literally (and undialectically).79 Here, I am concerned with the work as highlighting the social forms taken by the self-conception of Enlightenment, understood (1) as the outcome of the skeptical empiricism which Hegel opposes in both the 1801 essay and the Phenomenology, and (2) as a response to Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the self-completing nihilism to which that skepticism leads. In these terms, it can be taken as a critical prelude to Negative Dialectics. Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument appears to center on the claim that the Enlightenment ideal of rationality has become collusive in the erosion and appropriation of the emancipatory forces which it originally engendered. The substance of that claim is captured in the aphorism that forms its core thesis regarding the inherent reversibility of myth and enlightenment: “[j]ust as the myths already realize enlightenment, so enlightenment, with every step becomes more deeply engulfed in mythology”,80 or as it is rendered elsewhere, “myth is already

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enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” 81 However, the meaning of that cryptic opposition as a point of entry into the critical theory conception of the vicissitudes of rationality and modernity has been a matter of considerable dispute. I want to here distinguish both a general level of understanding of the work, which is relatively uncontroversial within contemporary conceptions of the critical theory project, and a secondary level, characterized by significant fractures within the work which point in a different direction as regards the main tenets and future of critical theory. Clearly, it is part of the intention of Dialectic of Enlightenment to provide an antidote to any linear historical conception of the succession of rational to pre-rational modes of thinking and of organizing society. Therefore, at this level, the work is directed not only against the historical conceptions of reason that proliferated in the Enlightenment, but also Hegelianism, in the form in which it came to be influential in traditions (such as organicism and pragmatism, but also Marxism) that give priority to Hegel’s philosophy of history, and the neo-Kantian historicism implicit in the foundations of modern sociology.82 All these traditions make use, implicitly or explicitly, of the concept of historical necessity or, less prejudicially, of the ‘evolution of society’, in charting the transition from premodern to modern, ‘enlightenment’ thinking. Adorno’s main critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history, in Negative Dialectics, convicts it, in the abstractive concept of the ‘world spirit’, of anticipating the concept of ‘society’, and of harboring a prescriptive ambition towards “the unity of the totally socialized society, the closest kin of the philosophical idea of absolute identity, in that it tolerates nothing outside of itself.”83 The first half of the equation (‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’) then, must be understood as directed against this broad range of historicist renderings. From this position, it then seeks to undercut the false dichotomy of a materialist versus idealist historicism, that is usually thought to differentiate those traditions. Adorno and Horkheimer’s view that the domination of enlightenment over myth does not presage emancipation, but the perpetuation of domination and unreason within new forms, which recall and replay previous ones, has to be understood both from the standpoint of consciousness and of actual social and economic relationships. As they claim, in a significant passage from the essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” [m]ankind, whose versatility and knowledge become differentiated with the division of labor, is at the same time forced back to anthropologically more primitive stages, for with the technical easing of life

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the persistence of domination brings about a fixation of the instincts by means of a heavier repression … [A]daptation to the power of progress involves the progress of power, and each time anew brings about those degenerations which show not unsuccessful but successful progress to be its contrary. The curse of irresistible progress is irresistible regression.84 At this level, Adorno and Horkheimer are arguing that mass repression and the fixing of the work ethic of industrialism result in a new set of socially produced ‘instincts’, which are indistinguishable from the drives that dominate the life of oppressive premodern societies, in which social differentiation, individuality and the possibility of a critical relationship to existing forms of authority and coercion had not emerged. As a result, they continue, “men are once again made to be that against which the evolutionary law of society, the principle of self, had turned: mere species beings, exactly like one another through isolation in the forcibly united collectivity.”85 The corollary of this is that the concept of rationality as ideology is a paramount category in the critique of modernity. Dialectic of Enlightenment is devoted to the articulation of this critique through examination of the process of transition from the pre-modern world view, based on mythology, to the modern world view, based on formal rationality. But this articulation, together with that which it articulates, has social and economic moorings, which cannot be treated outside a Marxist framework. Thus, Enlightenment dissolves the old inequality – unmediated lordship and mastery – but at the same time perpetuates it in universal mediation, in relation of any one existent to another. It … excises the incommensurable. Not only are qualities dissolved in thought, but men are brought to actual conformity. The blessing that the market does not inquire after one’s birth is paid for by the barterer, in that he models the potentialities that are his by birth on the production of commodities that can be bought in the market.86 So Adorno and Horkheimer claim that historical materialist categories are an abstraction from the reality of consciousness to the same degree that historical idealism abstracts from material conditions. Indeed, for Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘enlightenment’ is not an abstract equivalent of ‘reason’, but refers to rationally evolved rules that are institutionalized in real social and economic practices, within which the internal contradictions of formal rationality become visible.

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While this reading captures the core components of the second part of Adorno and Horkheimer’s equation, it implies little about the first part – the claim that ‘myth is already enlightenment’. A second level of analysis emerges once we consider some of the interpretations that may be said to flow from taking a one-sided interpretation of the main dialectical thesis. To understand this, it is worth looking at three influential accounts of Dialectic of Enlightenment. A straightforward example of a one-sided reading is to take the work as an attempt to show simply that modern civilization has betrayed the ideals that lie at its basis. This is the interpretation of, for example, Rorty, who claims that the purpose of Dialectic of Enlightenment is to show that the forces unleashed by the Enlightenment have undermined the Enlightenment’s own convictions. What [Adorno and Horkheimer] called the ‘dissolvent rationality’ of Enlightenment has, in the course of the triumph of Enlightenment ideas during the last two centuries undercut the idea of ‘rationality’ and ‘human nature’ which the 18th century took for granted. They drew the conclusion that liberalism was intellectually bankrupt, bereft of philosophical foundations, and that liberal society was morally bankrupt, bereft of social glue.87 This reading attributes to Adorno and Horkheimer the view that, at one time, Enlightenment served as a progressive emancipatory force but has become destructive of its own emancipatory momentum. Rorty goes on to argue against the conclusion that Adorno and Horkheimer apparently draw, as based on the mistake of assuming that the aims of a normatively oriented social or intellectual movement will remain consistant as that movement evolves. From here, he argues that the dissolvent rationality of the Enlightenment has been successful in not simply undermining the philosophical and normative foundations of traditional social life, but of showing us how to live without foundations. ‘De-divinization’ of the world, as he terms it, gives rise to re-enchantment in the recognition of contingency. Rorty’s reading, while it correctly emphasizes the anti-foundationalist orientation of critical theory, ignores the second half of the equation, and focuses on the supposed claim to regression. A more complex interpretation is that the purpose of the work, given not only its maze of metaphor, narrative and dialectic, but also its ‘totalizing’ character is not seriously intended as a critique of modernity in any productive sense. Habermas claims that “If [Horkheimer and

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Adorno] want to … continue with critique, they will have to leave at least one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of all rational criteria. In the face of this paradox, self-referential critique loses its orientation.”88 Thus, Dialectic of Enlightenment commits Hegel’s original sin of attempting to achieve a total description of modernity, which issues in total negativity. Habermas’s interpretation, by highlighting the problematic level of generality at which Dialectic of Enlightenment is pitched, points towards an understanding of the work that takes it as a ‘social myth’, a narrative in the tradition of the eighteenth century notion of a ‘State of Nature’,89 which is not intended as a serious argument or set of factual claims that could lay the basis for a research program. On this view, it is in fact a counter-narrative to oppose to progressive philosophies of history, oriented to offset underlying assumptions about western civilization, and so perhaps inculcate a critical attitude that could then be harnessed to a research program. This reading therefore implies that Adorno and Horkheimer are engaged in a kind of regressive philosophy of history. A third interpretation, which we might call ‘Foucauldian’, is that Dialectic of Enlightenment is an elaborate exercise in ‘unmasking’ enlightenment rationality as merely a form of power. On this understanding, enlightenment is part of an ideology of Western cultural hegemony. By interchanging the terms of myth and enlightenment, the purpose is to intimate the cultural relativity of ‘reason’, showing it to be simply another social practice, thereby limiting its claims to sovereignty and making space for the authorization of other forms of thinking organized around alternative types of social life. This line of thinking, influenced by Nietzsche, adumbrates a discursive analytical shift from a vocabulary of reason to that of power. It then takes Adorno and Horkheimer to be concerned with the way mythic and rationalized forms of thinking are both equally infused with power and both equally unable to become conscious of that fact. Enlightenment substitutes materialism and universality for particularity and spiritualism, but does not succeed in destroying myth. This is because both represent two sides of the same will to domination: “It is not merely that domination is paid for by the alienation of men from the objects dominated” (this is Marx’s basic thesis on commodity fetishism). Rather, “the objectification of consciousness, the very relations of men – even those of the individual to himself – were bewitched. The individual is reduced to the nodal point of the conventional responses and modes of operation expected of him. Animism spiritualized the object, whereas industrialism objectifies the spirits of men.”90 Therefore, Marx’s account of commodity

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fettishism must be supplemented with a sustained treatment of the will to domination. This reading is an attempt to explain rationality in terms of power, and takes Dialectic of Enlightenment to be a complement to Nietzsche’s arguments in The Genealogy of Morals and The Will to Power. While each of these three readings have their virtues, they each rest on a one-sided view of the equation that Adorno and Horkheimer present in the work. If we follow the logic of each of these three readings of the thesis that ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’, then how are we to understand the converse claim? By implication, these readings take Adorno and Horkheimer’s use of the Homeric myth of Odysseus as a source of examples of how aspects of ancient societies prefigure the present. To cite one example, Adorno and Horkheimer note the fact that Homer’s Odysseus is both solitary and a wanderer, and thus exemplifies the individualistic and rootless qualities that mark Robinson Crusoe, the modern homo oeconomicus.91 “Both Odysseus and Crusoe … make their weakness (that of the individual who parts from the collectivity) their social strength … their isolation forces them to pursue an atomistic interest.”92 Odysseus therefore apparently anticipates the social conditions that allowed the emergence of homo oeconomicus in the crisis of propertylessness and alienation that emerged in the original centers of capitalism in Europe. But if we interpret it in this way, as a response to Weber and Marx, it implies that the supposedly unique qualities that brought about the ‘spirit of capitalism’ in fact were not unique, but can be understood as lying latent within western society at the very roots of its consciousness. But such an interpretation would simply reinforce the view of modernity as historical necessity. The misconstrual of the terms ‘enlightenment’ and ‘myth’ is at the heart of the difficulty here. For Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘enlightenment’ does not refer to a specific intellectual movement of the eighteenth century but – as Simon Jarvis and J.M. Bernstein have both argued – as the thought-movement that derives from the ‘principle of immanence’, an “ever-increasing skepticism about any claims for access to a transcendent content or meaning, that is, to a content or meaning lying outside thought itself.”93 The principle of immanence, in other words, involves the combination of two elements that Nietzsche identifies: on the one hand, the movement towards pure heteronomy intrinsic to skeptical empiricism; on the other, the reflexivity of Kantian critique. Myth, on the other hand, may be said to consist in the attribution of subjectivity to an object. Originally, in animism, that object was Nature, which came

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to be called the Fates, then God, then various philosophical versions of an Absolute subject. In this context, the proposition “myth is already enlightenment,” has to be understood not in addition to but as part of the converse claim that “enlightenment reverts to mythology.” If we understand the two propositions as operating together, it can be seen that the main purpose of the argument is not to claim either that mythology inexorably produces instrumental reason, or that reason inevitably brings about social regression, but that the very opposition between myth and enlightenment on which the self-conception of the enlightened world stands is mistaken.94 In this respect, it is the opposition between myth and enlightenment that must be brought into question, not one or the other proposition. This leads, then, to the underlying claim of Dialectic of Enlightenment, that the opposition between myth and enlightenment, which appears at the foundation of the meaning of both concepts (and the various interpretations cited above), becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as Enlightenment undergoes self-critique. The same point is played out in the conceptions of morality, culture and identity developed in later chapters of the work. Dialectic of Enlightenment therefore operates as a critique, not of modernity per se, but of modernity’s self-conception, as based on the conceptual dualism of myth and enlightenment. As such, it reworks the project of establishing a perspective from which to grasp the vicissitudes of rationality and modernity that is carried out in the Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology. Therefore, it is best understood as a further development of the skeptical impulse that was traced through German idealism in Part II, and which culminates in Hegel’s self-completing skepticism. However, given the critical theory rejection of the idea of self-completion – not least because of its convergence with the totalizing claims of the world spirit – it is best understood as a self-undermining skepticism. This is also why Dialectic of Enlightenment can be understood as an argument against the presuppositions of the dominant contemporary theoretical paradigms within the social sciences, and why it has to be understood in the context of Hegel’s Phenomenology. For, to take the route offered by either of the three readings discussed above, would be to return to an implicit first, either through re-establishment of a transcendental standpoint or through some mythic claim to an ‘overcoming’ of the tradition of the enlightenment which has been sedimented in both the critical tradition and in the material conditions of that tradition. Therefore, a generalized response to these readings of

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Dialectic of Enlightenment (at least in its operative position as an intervention in an historical dialogue) is to view them as misunderstanding the immanent dialectical mode in which the work is operating. To gain a picture of the notion of dialectics as it was developed by Adorno specifically will be the main purpose of the final chapter, in which the connection with Hegel’s skepticism will return to the foreground.

6 Negative Dialectics and the Fate of Critical Theory

The conceptions of skepticism that emerge from the nineteenth-century play into the debates surrounding the significance of critical theory in two primary ways: First, in the epistemological concerns with the possibilities of philosophy, which arise from German idealism; second in connection between skepticism and nihilism developed by Nietzsche. While Dialectic of Enlightenment pursues the Nietzschean track out of Kant’s critical philosophy, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics returns to the epistemological nexus of Hegel’s critique of Kant. In this chapter, I am concerned primarily with the relationship between Adorno and the German idealists. The terms of this focus on Adorno’s Hegelianism will be situated relative to two other themes: first, the relationship of the whole first generation of critical theorists to Hegel’s philosophy; second, the mediation of their interpretation of Hegel by Lukács, whose revamping of Marxism through the application of key Hegelian categories was pivotal to the development of critical theory.

6.1. Hegel and critical theory An initial avenue into the complex relationship between critical theory and Hegel’s philosophy can be established by considering Horkheimer’s contrast, in the postscript to “Traditional and Critical Theory,” between the German idealists, for whom reason was “the activity of a metaempirical consciousness-in-itself, an absolute ego, the spirit,” and critical theory, for which “the intervention of reason in the processes whereby knowledge and its object are constituted, or the subordination of these processes to conscious control, does not take place in a purely intellectual world, but coincides with the struggle for certain real ways of life.”1 Horkheimer brackets Hegel’s with Kant’s and Fichte’s systems, while also 127

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acknowledging the important elements of his critique of Kant and Fichte that lead towards the critical theory perspective. Hegel’s ‘solution’ when “confronted with the persisting contradictions in human existence and with the impotence of individuals in the face of situations they have themselves brought about … seems a purely private assertion, a personal peace treaty between the philosopher and an inhuman world.”2 If the argument of Part II of this book is correct, Hegel’s ‘method’ of selfcompleting skepticism, does more than simply reproduce the idea of an absolute subject from the tangle of Kant’s and Fichte’s reflections on the unity of apperception. Understood as a response to the problem of the deduction of the modern philosophical consciousness, Hegel’s skepticism is an attempt not to resolve, but to re-centre the problem of the ‘private assertions’ of the philosopher, and to pose the difficulty that besets a self-consciously historically situated account of the nature of reason and of society within the project of modernity. This, at least, is the view of Adorno. Horkheimer thought it possible to acknowledge the importance of Hegel’s dialectical method, while consigning his system, together with the systemic ambitions of Kant and Fichte, to a lumber room of philosophies that needed to be bypassed. Adorno and Marcuse, by contrast, both develop a stronger sense of the importance of German idealism in their respective and, to a certain degree, convergent conceptions of the critical theory project.3 For Adorno, indeed, Hegel’s perspective alone is capable of confronting (though not resolving) the crisis of reason typifying much of twentiethcentury thought, which for Adorno breaks down into a dilemma between the false objectivity of the positive sciences on the one hand and an inherently subjectivized notion of ontology on the other. Indeed, only a perspective that has undergone the historically ‘educative’ stages of the skepticism in the Phenomenology can be adequate to the problem of rationality as the struggle for real ‘ways of life’ which Horkheimer demands. That adequacy is expressed in Adorno’s idea of a negative dialectics.

6.2. Reading Lukács Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of culture in Dialectic of Enlightenment obviously draws on their Marxist roots. However, it does not simply generalize Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, but depends crucially on the notion of ‘reification’ (Verdinglichung), as this is developed by Lukács in the central essay from History and Class Consciousness, entitled “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”. Lukács here

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synthesizes the theories of rationalization propounded by Simmel and Weber into a re-Hegelianized Marxism that gives priority to the concept of consciousness. Nevertheless, Lukács regards the essay’s core premises as materialist, inasmuch as consciousness is regarded primarily as a cultural product, its forms being traceable to the structure of specific social (productive) relations.4 Lukács develops Marx’s argument in the first chapter of Capital to argue that modern monopoly capitalism is maintained through a system of self-expanding value, the vehicle for which is the commodity form.5 The commodity form tends to invade and pervade not only relations of production, but also the categories of experience and categories of human action, thus transforming both the knowledge and societal forms available to modern societies. In its vision of the colonizing tendencies of the commodity form, Lukács’s essay redefines what for Marx was essentially an economic issue – and had therefore to be understood from an economic (materialist) perspective – as a generalized social and existential problematic. What is at issue here is the question: how far is commodity exchange together with its structural consequences able to influence the total outer and inner life of society? … The distinction between a society where this form is dominant … and one in which it only makes an episodic appearance is essentially one of quality. For, depending on which is the case, all the subjective and objective phenomena in the societies concerned are objectified in qualitatively different ways.6 Objectification within the commodity form allows phenomena to become increasingly permeable to processes that turn human beings and their qualities into things (de re), and to subject them to the domination of those things. Lukács’s account of reification has been subject to a wide and confusing array of interpretations,7 partly due to the fact that the concept lacks the robustness and clarity required for the work it is supposed to fulfill in the essay. The concept of reification implies a whole set of other processes associated with the development of capitalist society. To name the most important ones: The transformation of all qualities into equally comparable quantities, the domination of exchange-value over use-value, rationalization and disenchantment, the deformation of individuality, the de-differentiation of the cultural, political and aesthetic spheres into the economic and the construction of society as a ‘second nature’ through transforming natural or historically given social relations, things and

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institutions into commodified, formally rational forms. Lukács’s account of these processes lays the groundwork for the general perspective of critical theory, although each of the principal critical theorists reject Lukács’s original framework. For Adorno, it is the epistemological underpinning of Lukács’s project that is perhaps most influential for the idea of a negative dialectics. The continuities between Lukács’s essay on reification and Negative Dialectics can be laid out under three headings or main themes: (1) The critique of the systems that define the course of German idealism, which Lukács and Adorno take as both a symptom of, and a potential means to overcome, reification. Lukács’s analysis of that problematic lays the framework for both Adorno’s approach to the problem of Hegel’s system, and for his more general understanding of the relationship between philosophy and social theory. (2) Lukács’s suggestive account of the nature of the subject as it is developed through the course of German idealism, which anticipates elements of the problem of the crisis of reason that Adorno addresses in terms of ‘identity thinking’. (3) Lukács’s attention to the problem and meaning of Kant’s thing-in-itself as a limit, a barrier, and therefore, potentially, as a ‘block’ to the self-totalizing tendency of idealism, which anticipates some essential elements of Adorno’s critique of idealism in Negative Dialectics. I here reconstruct Lukács’s sketches of these three problems as a prelude to Adorno’s development of them in terms that return the discussion to the problematic of skepticism. Both Lukács and the critical theorists work with the Hegelian notion that philosophy consists in an aspect of ‘spirit’, that it ‘expresses’ or ‘reflects’ the dominant components of a social structure, both as they objectively appear as institutions and productive forces, and as they are experienced by individual subjects.8 However, there are important differences between the critical theorists in the way they understand the relationship between philosophy and social theory in general. For Lukács, idealism is a subjective form of the objective social processes captured under the rubric of reification, and therefore has a surplus truth-content beyond its own self-conception. He presents the significance of that truth-content within the framework of the traditional Marxist conception of ideology, as arising from, or expressing, social relations. In places, that framework is simply reductive, as in the conclusion to the second section of the reification essay. Here Lukács develops Marx’s argument against Hegel’s conception of the world-spirit as a “demiurge [that] only seems to make history,” but in fact represents only an intellectual reflection of antagonistic class relations, into the full-fledged claim that German idealism is ideological through and

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through, inasmuch as it “provides a complete intellectual copy and a priori deduction of bourgeois society.”9 In other places, Lukács’s theory tends towards mystification, as in his account of the correspondence between, on the one hand, the progressively self-totalizing character of capitalist society and, on the other, the tendency demonstrated during the course of rationalist philosophy (and especially German idealism) towards self-completion. In fact, Lukács takes the problem of the subject, as this grew out of the development of German idealism, and simply transposes it into the realm of the social. For “the problem of knowledge as the problem of what ‘we’ have created”10 is simply the irresolvable contradictions that beset Kant’s and Fichte’s systems, and which Hegel attempts to resolve through the device of a self-completing skepticism. The contradiction that appears here between subjectivity and objectivity in modern rationalist formal systems, the entanglements and equivocations hidden in their concepts of subject and object, the conflict between their nature as systems created by ‘us’ and their fatalistic necessity distant from and alien to man is nothing but the logical and systematic formulation of the modern state of society.11 For Lukács, the development of modern philosophy represents, as it does for Hegel, the graduated universalization of the principle of a subjectcentred reason. As substance becomes subject, however, what counts as ‘the world’ comes to be construed – against Hegel’s own strictures – entirely in terms of the categories of the understanding, issuing in a subjective mathematized idealism. The last remaining barrier to that idealism, the Kantian thing-in-itself, is dissolved in the Hegelian system. Hegel, in opposing an ideal of reason (Vernunft) to understanding (Verstand) does not deviate from the self-totalizing tendency of modern idealism; he merely attempts to make it consistent in a way that Kant’s antinomianism could not. Lukács sees this tendency as both inevitable and contradictory, for the attempt to universalize rationalism necessarily issues in the demand for a system but, at the same time, as soon as one reflects upon the conditions in which a universal system is possible, i.e., as soon as the question of the system is consciously posed, it is seen that such a demand is incapable of fulfillment.12 It is incapable of fulfillment, however, not because of the inherently aporetic notion of necessity invoked here (in the demand for a system),

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but because, for Lukács, the medium within which such a demand occurs is thought, the abstraction of knowing from the living social medium of which it is an expression. Once the problem comes to be seen in its proper medium, as a problem of social reality, not its abstraction in thought, the contradiction disappears. Lukács invokes here a mysterious connection between philosophical systems and the actually existing sum total of social relations, which, like the notion of a system itself, reaches a point where reflexivity, that is, self-conscious knowledge, drives it to total transparency. He then proceeds to transpose the problem of from what stand-point the question of the system is to be posed, into the question of the stand-point from which a totally reified society can be challenged, a stand-point (notoriously) occupied by the political situation of the proletariat. Lukács’s thought has been called Fichtean in inspiration and tendency, and the notion of the proletariat as both question and answer, problem and solution to the riddle of history, points in the same direction as Fichte’s dogmatism. Fichte’s absolute ego, as a unity of acting and knowing, transposed into the realm of the social, becomes the ‘unique’ position of the proletariat: When the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is practical. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective structural change in the object of knowledge. In this consciousness and through it the special objective character of labour as a commodity, its ‘use-value’ (i.e., its ability to yield surplus produce) … now awakens and becomes social reality.13 Leaving aside the problems of Lukács’s interpretation of Marx’s theory of value, the idea of the unity of act and fact as the objective selfunderstanding of the proletariat depends (and still depends) on the notion of class, and since Lukács and other Marxists were never able to understand the concept in anything more than economic terms, or at best – as Horkheimer points out – as social psychology,14 it could never function in anything more than an economic, or narrowly political, sense. Similarly, the historical determinism of the appeal to the proletariat as the internally generated subject of history replays the mythology of the Fichtean arch[-necessity in an historical (and messianic) form. But this does not obscure Lukács’s insight into the importance of understanding the course of German idealism in terms of its structural features. Above all, Lukács’s understanding of the problem of the relationship between subject and object in Kant’s transcendentalism

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anticipates Adorno’s understanding of the importance of the critique of idealism. Lukács points out that, [t]he attempt has often been made to prove that the thing-in-itself has a number of quite disparate functions within Kant’s system. What they all have in common is the fact that they represent a limit, a barrier, to the abstract, formal, rationalistic ‘human’ faculty of cognition.15 In terms of the subsequent development of German idealism, two barriers in particular prove to be the most contentious and important. The first is that between form and content, between the forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding on the one hand, and the thingin-itself (what Adorno will call the ontological moment) on the other. The second barrier that Kant erects is between the objects of the understanding as these are taken up by the special sciences, and the ‘ultimate’ objects pursued in the Ideas of reason, the comprehension of which, according to Lukács, “are needed to round off the partial systems into a totality, a system of the perfectly understood world.”16 This second barrier is what Adorno calls the Kantian ‘block’. Modernity, understood as the outcome of the Enlightenment ‘project’, represents, in a sense, the failure of both limits. Reification and modern positivistic science represent respectively the objective and subjective sides of the failure to acknowledge the first limit. The institutions of modern science and the universalization of the market both involve the transformation of phenomena into objects which embody exchange-value and quantifiability. They increasingly tend towards an unreflective idealism, inasmuch as it becomes progressively more difficult to conceive of phenomena either nonquantitatively or not in terms of exchange-value. At the same time, the second limit is breached not in the sense that Kant feared – in the unlicensed intervention of philosophy into the realms of the special sciences – but in the collapse of the meaning of the Idea of totality in the fragmentation and specialization of the sciences. Lukács expresses the consequences of this breach as follows: The more intricate a modern science becomes and the better it understands itself methodologically, the more … it will become a formally closed system of partial laws. It will then find the world lying beyond its confines, and in particular the material base which is its task to understand, its own concrete underlying reality, lies, methodologically and in principle, beyond its grasp.17

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Lukács’s rather undeveloped insight that positivism threatens to become ‘idealist’ as it breaches both of Kant’s limits becomes the foundation of both Adorno’s notion of the ontological moment and of the idea of block, which he deploys against the ‘identitarian’ tendencies of modernity. While Adorno develops these concerns from Lukácsian bases, their epistemological significance for critical theory has to be understood in relation to the problem of skepticism as Adorno takes it up from German idealism.

6.3. Critical theory as negative dialectics: Methodological reflections Like Lukács, Adorno takes the problem of the fixed opposition between subject and object as originating in the polarization of Kant’s system into, on the one hand, an absolute unknowable, the thing-in-itself, and, on the other, the subject, unified as formal or potential self-production (apperception). Adorno is concerned to understand the German idealist development of this problem primarily in philosophical terms, through the ‘method’ of a negative dialectics. However, his account cannot ignore raising issues of the social, and I take up here, though in general terms, Adorno’s account of the relationship between social forms and epistemology. I then proceed to sketch the relationship between skepticism and negative dialectics around three points of intersection, each of which may be understood as extensions of themes initially advanced by Lukács: (1) Adorno’s critique of systems in general, the framework of which he lays out in three sequential sections in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics; (2) the concept and critique of identity-thinking, a concern that is infused throughout Negative Dialectics, but which is addressed in terms of the issues that relate most directly to Hegel’s skepticism in part two of the work, entitled “Concepts and Categories”; (3) the set of devices and techniques that Adorno erects to prevent his own reflexive elaboration of the critical elements of Hegel’s method from collapsing back into idealism. The use of the notion of ‘block’, which is adumbrated in Negative Dialectics, but given a much clearer and fuller exposition in Adorno’s lectures on Kant’s first Critique, will be shown to define the particular manner in which the concept of skepticism can be deployed for the future of critical theory. Lukács’s transposition of the epistemological categories of German idealism into the social categories of a praxial Marxism has been criticized from a variety of different perspectives. The attitude of the leading members of the first generation of critical theorists goes beyond the

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standard accusations of it being either a mystification,18 on the one hand, or an overweening cultural Marxism on the other. Adorno’s own understanding of the social and political significance of the critique of German idealism may be distinguished from that of both Marcuse and Horkheimer. In Reason and Revolution, Marcuse interprets Hegel’s system as a social ontology.19 The historically evolving opposition between subject and object (the object of epistemology) is to be understood in terms of social categories such as language, labor and property (the object of social theory). For Marcuse, the ‘crystallization’20 of abstract epistemological categories into social ones, reveals the fact that Hegel’s system is to be understood anthropologically, as the social evolution of the species. Epistemological and logical forms are expressions of an underlying progression of society towards more self-consistent forms, as the principles of freedom and rationality unfold. Hence, in the Introduction to Reason and Revolution, Marcuse frames his own project as a “process of referring [Hegel’s] philosophical conclusions to the context of social and political reality,”21 emphasizing the systematic unity of his philosophical with his political writings. Horkheimer also regards philosophy and other cultural forms as expressions, but of an “underlying supraindividual order” that attempts to preserve itself through the social solidarity that these forms produce.22 Therefore, Horkheimer comes closest, among the principal critical theorists, to espousing a sociology of knowledge.23 Adorno’s understanding of the relationship between epistemology and social forms is more extensively worked out than that of either Marcuse or Horkheimer. This is partly due to the ‘groundwork’ carried out by Walter Benjamin, to whose perspective on the nature of immanent critique Adorno is heavily indebted.24 It also registers the privileged position that the critique of philosophy holds within Adorno’s thought as a whole.25 Significantly, Adorno is much more wary of the dangers of positing a model of the relationship between epistemology and social forms that makes use of the metaphors of ‘underlying’ and ‘expression’, since these tend to collapse back easily into a uncritical distinction of essence and appearance – a distinction he takes Hegel’s dialectic, properly understood, to have undermined. The relationship is to be conceived more along the lines of the notion of ‘reflection’, which can be elaborated by considering Adorno’s conception of the dialectical relationship between sociology and philosophy, as this has become historically sedimented within the modern intellectual division of labor. On the one hand, Adorno argues against reflective philosophies that refuse to encounter the social element within their own content. Thus

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he remarks: People who wish to criticize our dialectical attempts to operate with the concept of society as a constitutive concept of epistemology really never have more than the one argument. This is that our efforts are illegitimate because philosophy has absolute priority over all social considerations and that, on the contrary, such social questions have first to be grounded in the theory of knowledge.26 But to ‘operate with the concept of society’ does not imply the reduction of philosophy to a sociology of knowledge. As Rose has argued, a neo-Kantian paradigm at the root of twentieth-century sociology, has persistently driven social theory in this direction,27 towards the ambition to reconstruct sociology in the image of first philosophy. Thus Adorno also warns against ‘sociologism’ as vulnerable to positing society as both an essential and a subject: The aspects of that tradition that philosophy needs to rethink radically – is located in this search for the ideal of an absolute first principle. And we should take note that to give society absolute primacy and hypostasize that is just as much an act of naturalistic hypostasization as to give absolute priority of the spirit.28 The key to Adorno’s distinctive approach to the interpretation of German idealism is his concern not to detach method from content – a concern that he takes over from Hegel, even though Hegel had himself violated his own strictures on this. The farewell to Hegel becomes tangible in a contradiction that concerns the whole, in one that cannot be resolved according to plan, as a particular contradiction. Hegel, the critic of the Kantian separation of form and substance, wanted a philosophy without detachable form, without a method to be employed independently of the matter, and yet he proceeded methodically.29 It is through this prism that we have to understand Adorno’s development of the themes laid out in Lukács’s essay, at the perimeter of a negotiation around epistemology and sociologism as ‘first philosophies’.

6.4. Metacritique of systems The relationship between Negative Dialectics and the self-completing skepticism of Hegel’s Phenomenology may be reconstructed by returning initially to the concept of metacritique.

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Simon Jarvis argues that the perspective of Negative Dialectics simply is metacritique, inasmuch as it “performs a further critique on critical inquiry itself. It asks not only ‘what are the conditions of the possibility of experience?’, but ‘what are such a transcendental inquiry’s own conditions of possibility?’.”30 But to understand Negative Dialectics simply as metacritique is misleading. The term, as I showed in Chapter 1, derives from the post-Kantian reaction and leads potentially to Schulzean skepticism. As I argued in Chapter 4, Hegel’s skepticism is directed against metacritique as such, since it leads to the intractable dilemma between experience and reflection that is laid out in the Introduction to the Phenomenology: To contest reflection from the immediacy of experience is to lapse into dogmatic empiricism, while to subordinate experience to reflection leads to subjective idealism. Adorno’s method within Negative Dialectics accepts Hegel’s argument against metacritique, but denies Hegel’s own claim to have ‘solved’ the problem of metacritique through the self-completing skepticism of the Phenomenology. This is because there is an internal contradiction between its negative element, the skeptical method, and its positive outcome as self-completion. It is a contradiction, however, that itself emerges only as a result of its reaching an outcome, and its failure is itself an outcome of the system. Therefore, Adorno’s perspective is only ‘metacritical’ insofar as inquiry into inquiry is an indissoluble element of dialectics; but this takes place from the stand-point of having moved through the permutations of Hegel’s system (“the contradiction that concerns the whole”), and accepted his skeptical dissolution of metacritique. A key component of Adorno’s perspective, then, is the rejection of systems, which is present as a form of metacritique, although this does not exhaust the ‘method’ of Negative Dialectics. There is no single argument in Negative Dialectics ‘against’ systems – no pistol bullet that can be delivered decisively against the systemic impulse, and indeed, such a bullet would risk recreating what it destroyed.31 Adorno instead mobilizes an array of deflections against systemic thinking in general, some of which inform his more specific arguments against Hegel’s system, and which may be understood as metacritical forays (rather than ‘metacritique’ per se). This evasive strategy is consistent with the importance that Adorno places on the stylistic and formal32 elements of his philosophy, beyond simply the content: the metacritical content of Negative Dialectics must be adequate to that which it critiques, but constantly aware of the dangers of duplicating the false forms it seeks to criticize. The difficulty of the work is partly due to tension between those contradictory aspirations. Adorno could never countenance the refusal to

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engage with the truth-content of philosophy inherent within such devices as a ‘mistrust of meta-narratives’ (Lyotard) or ‘ironic post-metaphysical thinking’ (Rorty and, arguably, Habermas). Such externally imposed interventions deny both the responsibilities of critique and the principle of determinate negation, and end up reaffirming what they negate through lack of reflection on their own perspective. Yet remaining immanent, acknowledging that metacritique cannot simply step out of the tradition from which it emerges, risks reproducing the false forms of that tradition. This is the substance of Adorno’s comment on presentation (Darstellung). Presentation is not a matter of indifference or external to philosophy, but immanent to its idea. Its integral moment of expression, nonconceptually-mimetic, becomes objectified only through presentation in language. The freedom of philosophy is nothing other than the capacity of giving voice to this unfreedom. If the moment of expression tries to be anything more, it degenerates into a point of view; were it to relinquish the moment of expression and the obligation of presentation, it would converge with science. Expression and stringency are not dichotomous possibilities for it. They need each other, neither is without the other.33 Therefore, Adorno’s metacritique of systems cannot be conducted or presented as a set of critical assertions, but must be understood as operating within the form of that which it criticizes. In this sense it reworks the performative element of the Phenomenology, enacting its own inner impulse.34 Adorno regards philosophical systems as distinguished by two ambitions: towards presuppositionlessness on the one hand and towards self-generation on the other, ambitions that come together in the idea of a total, self-completing system. To counteract the self-completing tendency, Adorno mobilizes metacritical elements of Lukács’s and Nietzsche’s work to present a thumbnail historical account of the rise of rationalist systems in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics. The former’s insight into the fact that systematic philosophy ‘reflects’ a society initially based on, and tending towards an ever greater degree of, systematization – an aspect of what Adorno elsewhere calls the ‘societalization of society’35 – is deployed in the observation that: In the history of philosophy the systems of the seventeenth century had an especially compensatory purpose. The same ratio which, in unison with the interests of the bourgeois class, smashed the feudal

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order of society and its intellectual reflection, scholastic ontology, into rubble, promptly felt the fear of chaos while facing the ruins, their own handiwork. … In the shadows of the incompletion of its emancipation, the bourgeois consciousness had to fear being cashiered by a more progressive class; it suspected that because it was not the entire freedom, it only produced the travesty of such; that is why it expanded its autonomy theoretically into the system, which at the same time took on the likeness of its compulsory mechanisms.36 To claim that the fear of anarchy, internalized and redirected in response to the emerging world economic system, produces a concern with selfcompleting systems, looks, on the surface, to be a straightforwardly materialist – and, potentially, reductionist to the same degree – ideological claim that points towards the liquidation of philosophy. Yet such a Lukácsian maneuver is immediately contradicted by the second part of Adorno’s narrative, in which the systems of German idealism are presented in terms of Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power. In the primal ego, according to Adorno’s sketch here, what is other (l’autrui) must be associated with what is evil, in order to empower the will against it, and to dominate over it. Fichte’s philosophical system, in which the identification of what is not-I provides the driving force for the construction of the founding/ grounding act, as well as the incorporation of the world within the I, represents the sublimation of this anthropological schema … The system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and every idealism.37 We can understand the two quite different perspectives in these two sections as complementary only if we comprehend them both as part of the metacritical array of forays against systems and as internal critiques of Lukács and Nietzsche. In this respect, the argument is parallel to the strategy undertaken within Dialectic of Enlightenment. Both the Lukácsian account of systems as expressions of the underlying socio-politicaleconomic order, and Nietzsche’s account of the bad faith inherent in the redirection of the instinctual drive towards system-building, are, by themselves, inadequate. The common element of that inadequacy is the reduction of the system to its underlying productive mechanism, without reflection on the meaning and significance of that which was produced. Thus, Lukács attempts to press the history of thought into social forms, while Nietzsche simply refuses to engage with the concrete forms of domination and ressentiment within which his critique operates.

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However, if they are re-construed as varieties of metacritique operating within the framework of a negative dialectics, they can act to weaken the system-building propensity both philosophically and sociologically, while remaining methodologically subordinate to the dialectical selfunderstanding of immanent critique. A further metacritical device, deployed against the second element, the idea of presuppositionlessness, emerges from Adorno’s reflections on the contradictions of the systems form. Adorno’s approach here recalls Hegel’s reworking of ancient skepticism into a system of antinomies. According to Adorno, Hegel’s demand for experience to yield to the object requires acknowledging the inner dynamic of the system, which is inherently antinomical. This is so because the antinomical form embodies two mutually opposed forces: towards infinity, in the form of a dynamics – the urge to exceed – and towards totality, in the form of a statics – the urge to contain. The antinomical form of the system is therefore the source of the limited contradictions that emerge in the course of the unfolding of its content. Thus, Adorno says, “the pedantries of all systems, down to the architectonic complexities of Kant – and even of Hegel, despite the latter’s program – are the marks of an a priori inescapable failure, noted with incomparable honesty in the fractures of the Kantian system.”38 The failure is a priori because it lies in the inner tension between the outcome of the attempt to produce a completed system, and the motivations that brought it forth. This brings our discussion back to the importance of understanding Adorno’s metacritique of systems in the context of his relationship to Hegel’s self-completing skepticism. For metacritique, understood as internal to a negative dialectics, derives from an Hegelian impulse. Adorno identifies its origin, anticipating the argument in Negative Dialectics, in his earliest major work Metakritik der Epistemologie: Though Hegel’s logic, like Kant’s, may be fastened to the transcendental subject, and be completed (vollkommener) Idealism, yet it refers beyond itself … . The power of the uncontradictable, which Hegel wields like no other … is the power of contradiction. This power turns against itself and against the idea of absolute knowledge … . It thus also undermines the primacy of the system and its own content.39 In Negative Dialectics, Adorno presents the attempt to unfasten Hegel’s thinking from its self-completing moment as part of his critique of systems, an attempt to overthrow the aims and inner tendencies of

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systemic thinking. Hegel’s system is prejudiced at its outset; his substantive philosophizing had as its fundament and result the primacy of the subject or, in the famous formulation from the introduction to the Logic, the identity of identity and non-identity. To him, the determinate particular was determinable by the Spirit, because its immanent determination was supposed to be nothing other than the Spirit.40 Against this inner tendency is to be opposed a notion of dialectics itself derived from Hegel, a dialectics whose “motion does not tend to the identity in the difference between each object and its concept; instead it is suspicious of all identity.”41 Therefore, the idea of a negative dialectics attempts to counter what ancient skepticism understood as the dogma that inheres within the arch[ of a program oriented towards results. It is a self-consciously one-sided project, not undertaken for the sake of gaining a hitherto unacknowledged and privileged access to knowledge or truth (even where such knowledge or truth is that there is none, an equally dogmatic stance). Neither is it lacking in self-consciousness about its own stance – it is “driven by its own inevitable insufficiency” as “the consistent sense of non-identity.”42 At the same time, to unfasten Hegel’s thinking from its self-completing moment requires not a return to the pre-Hegelian categories of critique, but a reorientation of aims and tendencies, equally rejecting the demand to ground reflection and experience in a moment of reconciliation and completion, and the empiricist conceit of simply proceeding without proper examination of the skeptical problems which produce such a demand.

6.5. Against identity Adorno’s attack on systems is linked with his rejection of idealism in general. The distinctive element of German idealism from Kant to Hegel is its reflexivity, which, as I argued in Chapter 4, can be regarded as the skeptically inspired attempt to rid idealism of its subjective element. Adorno’s metacritique of this reflexive element echoes Nietzsche’s conviction of the will-less, purely formal Kantian subject, bereft of purposes and desires, castrated as an intellect. But for Adorno, it is not the subject that is reduced by the attempt to expel purpose and interest from the act of knowing, but the object. Idealism’s protou pseudos [proto-falsity] ever since Fichte was that the movement of abstraction allows us to get rid of that from which we

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abstract. It is eliminated from our thought, banished from the realm where the thought is at home, but not annihilated in itself; the faith in it is magical. Thinking without what is thought would countermand its own concept and that which is thought indicates in advance the existents.43 The tendency of idealism to reduce the object to its concept is the philosophical expression of experience under the rule of the commodity form – a tendency that Adorno captures under the rubric of identity-thinking. Adorno’s notion of identity-thinking is multifaceted, in terms of its meaning and implications. To identify per se is not to engage in identitythinking. However, two ‘systematic falsifications’ arise from identitythinking, which together may be said to constitute its ‘identitarian’ quality.44 The first is the tendency, in a society dominated by the principle of formal rationality, to think and know objects not in the form in which they present themselves, that is, according to the “conceptuality prevailing in the object itself,”45 but as they fall within a preformed matrix of categories and associations that act to economize, functionalize and reduce to the commodity form whatever is brought into the field of experience. It is in this sense that Adorno claims that “the principle of exchange, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average working time … is the social model of the identity principle.”46 The institutionalization of the principle both in its external (social) and internal (experiential) form has pathological, though ostensibly contradictory, effects. On the one hand, it reproduces and legitimates the logic of domination within social relations, over nature, and within subjective representation. On the other hand, it progressively increases the distance between the subject, both as social and individual, and the actual qualities of the object, which then become reified in the ‘second nature’ of society. Thus, according to Adorno, “subjectivism and reification are not incompatible opposites, but corollaries.”47 A second aspect of identity-thinking, which Adorno addresses in Negative Dialectics explicitly in terms of Marx’s theory of exploitation, concerns the conflation of identity with ‘rational identity’. Adorno’s concrete example of this phenomenon concerns the application of the Idea of freedom, which, when apprehended ‘rationally’, is an Ideal existent and carries with it an internally utopian element.48 But in a vocabulary increasingly drained of the concept of non-factual meaning, any claim to the current state of society (or of any particular individual) to be ‘free’, that makes use of this ideal rational element, is subject to the

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suspicion of meaninglessness. Thus the claim that rational identity becomes absorbed into identity is the general version of MacIntyre’s theory of the disintegration of contemporary moral vocabularies.

6.6. Block and the mourning of metaphysics In recognizing the significance of the antinomy between reflection and experience, and rejecting Hegel’s attempts to resolve it, Adorno affirms a commitment to a non-identical moment outside idealism – what Kant understood, within the context of experience, as the unsynthesized contents of an intuition. This moment is expressed by Adorno in two terms, each of which can be elaborated with respect to Hegel’s skeptical method – the ‘preponderance’ (Vorrang) of the object, and the notion of ‘block’. The notion of preponderance intimates the need not for ontology, but for an ‘ontological moment’. Adorno appeals to that moment as a critical counterweight to the assumption in favor of the primacy of the subject that escalates from the idealist critique of Kant. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno frames that moment in relation to Heidegger’s claim to the turn towards fundamental ontology that arises from a proper reconsideration of Kant’s first Critique. Heidegger’s major work on Kant, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, emphasizes the importance of the “Schematism” chapter in the first Critique, as implicitly pointing towards the ‘lack of fit’ between intuition and understanding, and therefore the need for a ‘common root’ to both, which is the contribution to the apprehension of Being carried out by the transcendental imagination.49 Heidegger therefore follows a path initially pursued by Hegel in Faith in Knowledge, in which that common root (the Absolute, for Hegel) is defined in terms of the identity of identity and non-identity, where those terms map onto the functions of intuition and understanding in Kant. Heidegger’s account of the imagination links it with language, allowing him to trace the origins of the common root to primordial time.50 Heidegger’s intent is to head off Hegel’s attempt to ‘evert’ the meaning of the common root, to give it a social and historical form (substance that becomes subject). But by turning the meaning of the transcendental imagination inside out, so to speak, understanding it in terms of a primal objectivity, the reflexive critique of idealism is also skirted. For Adorno, the ‘ontological moment’ maps onto the first of the two barriers that Kant erects against subjectivism. Heidegger’s attempt to simply posit that barrier in terms of primal objectivity amounts to an

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avoidance of critical reflexivity, and is therefore, at root, anti-critical, anti-Enlightenment and reactionary. Any attempt, indeed, even if selfconsciously enacted, to avoid reflexivity will either revert to a pre-critical dogmatism or drift back towards myth.51 Hence, Adorno’s insistence that a negative dialectics “requires an ontological moment, to the extent that ontology critically strips the binding constitutive role from the subject, but without substituting for the subject through the object in a sort of second immediacy.”52 That moment is expressed by Adorno, not as ‘being’ but as ‘something’, a term in which resistance to abstraction is concenrated, and thus is able to do the work of maintaining non-identity. ‘Something’ – as a cogitatively indispensable substrate of any concept, including the concept of Being – is the utmost abstraction of the subject-matter that is not identical with thinking, an abstraction not to be abolished by any further thought process.53 Thus Adorno affirms an entity that bears close resemblance to what ancient skepticism defines as azetetos, that which cannot be questioned or brought within the ambit of subjectivity. In this respect, the critique of abstraction affirms the need to recover something lost or diminished by Cartesianism. Adorno’s notion of the metaphysics of the block is an extension of the second Kantian barrier that Lukács identifies, that between the Ideas of reason and the activity of the understanding. But the notion of block is also self-consciously framed at the nexus of Hegel’s reflexive critique of Kant. Hegel’s skepticism emphasizes the incoherence of reason merely positing a block to the remit of consciousness. The point is brought out by Adorno as follows: In Kant, the idea that a world divided into subject and object, the world in which, as prisoners of our own constitution, we are involved only with phenomena, is not the ultimate world, already forms the secret source of energy. Hegel adds an un-Kantian element to that: the idea that in grasping, conceptually, the block, the limit that is set to subjectivity, in understanding subjectivity as ‘mere’ subjectivity, we have already passed beyond that limit.54 It is at the contact point between Kant’s stubborn refusal to give up the reference to a ‘beyond’, within which the notions of subjectivity and objectivity still have meanings separate from each other, and Hegel’s recognition that the realization of the existence of such a reference

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overthrows it, that Adorno’s commitment to a residual metaphysics inheres. The doctrine of block is a device intended to express a commitment to Kant’s Ideas of reason, and therefore as a reaffirmation of Kant’s second barrier. Inasmuch as Hegel’s self-completing skepticism breaches that barrier, in its attempt to actualize philosophy, to close the gap between the love of knowing and actual knowing, it must be rejected.55 On the other hand, in the absence of the aspiration – without the love of knowing – philosophy is reduced to the subjective reflection of an increasingly reified society. In his lectures on Kant’s first Critique, Adorno expresses the predicament as metaphysical mourning. [W]e have a situation in which knowledge is illusory because the closer it comes to its object, the more it shapes it in its own image and thus drives it further and further away … . This is what is reflected in the doctrine of the block; it is a kind of metaphysical mourning, a kind of memory of what is best, of something that we must not forget, but that we are nevertheless compelled to forget.56 Given Adorno’s view of the double-ascendance of subjectivism and reification on the one hand and the eclipse of moral–rational vocabulary on the other, we might expect his reflections to be pitched directly against these tendencies. But to hope that philosophy could be effective in this way is to misunderstand its energies and significance. Rather, the notion of block merely opposes non-identity to identity and anti-systemic to systemic thinking. Such antinomian thinking intimates the need for a philosophy that resists completion by virtue of its own internal consistency.

Notes Introduction 1. The importance of Marxism to critical theory is the central tenet of what remains perhaps the most influential account in English of the critical theory research program, David Held’s Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1980). See especially p. 13. Cf. Douglas Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 1–2. For bibliographies of both the principal writings of and commentary on the Frankfurt School, see David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, pp. 484–99, and Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, trans. by Michael Robertson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 715–71. 2. This change should not be viewed as a one-sided process; important shifts in the meaning of philosophy itself have been driven partly by critical theory. 3. On the history of the relationship between Adorno’s philosophical interests and the other members of the School, see Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, pp. 200–2. For a fine summary of Adorno’s conception of the role of philosophy within critical theory in general, see Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 8–12. For a perspective on the key differences between Adorno and Habermas, see J.M. Bernstein, Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 29. 4. Garbis Kortian, Metacritique: The Philosophical Arguments of Jurgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), p. 32. 5. Rorty’s argument is presented in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), and refined in subsequent works. Taylor’s essay, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Review of Metaphysics, 25:1 (1971), pp. 3–51, provides the basis for his anti-naturalistic and subsequently antifoundationalist hermeneutics. Lyotard, in arguing for the ‘end of metanarratives’ in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), takes explicit aim at epistemology’s self-conception. 6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by N. Kemp Smith (London: MacMillan, 1929), A424, B451. 7 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 47. 8. Ibid. 9. See Kortian, Metacritique: The Philosophical Arguments of Jurgen Habermas, p. 30. Cf. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. by Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 39–40. 10. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 47. 11. Miller’s translation renders this inaccurately as ‘thoroughgoing skepticism’ (see Ibid., p. 49). For a full discussion of the difference, see Chapter 4. 146

Notes 147 12. See, for example, Richard H. Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, 3rd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979). 13. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. by H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 23.

1. Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 1. The key work on the influence of ancient skepticism is Popkin’s History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Recent specialist scholarship on ancient skepticism has been pioneered by Miles Burnyeat who has explored it in a number of influential and historically sensitive articles (see, e.g., “Can the Skeptic Live his Skepticism,” in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. by M.F. Burnyeat (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1983) pp. 117–48), “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” Philosophical Review, January 1982, pp. 3–40 and “The Skeptic in his Place and Time,” in Philosophy in History, ed. by Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 225–54. 2. The resurgence follows especially the work of Alisdair MacIntyre, and the continuing attention accorded to Hannah Arendt’s focus on Greek ethics. Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), as I show here, has been influential in drawing attention to neglected aspects of Hellenistic philosophy in general. 3. There is significant disagreement regarding the most basic tenets of ancient skepticism. Probably the most widespread understanding is that it represents a form of phenomenalism, as Frede and Stough both argue (see Michael Frede, Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995) pp. 179–225 and Charlotte Stough, Greek Skepticism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969) pp. 67–97). For a criticism of this interpretation, in which it is attributed directly to historical insensitivity, see Burnyeat, “Can the Skeptic Live his Skepticism,” p. 127. Cf. Gisela Striker, “Skeptical Strategies,” in Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. by M. Schofield, M.F. Burnyeat and J. Barnes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 54–83. 4. The Lectures are general acknowledged to be one of Hegel’s more conservative works, in which – from the standpoint of critical theory – the dialectic appears in its most dogmatic form. 5. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 123–38. 6. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axi note (a). For a review and critique of Schulze’s arguments in Aenesidemus, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 266–84. 7. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, p. 270. 8. See Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current (New York: Viking, 1980) p. 9. Hamann is also the subject of a separate late essay by Berlin, The Magus of the North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1994). On the influence of Hamann on later idealism, Cf. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, pp. 39–43. 9. See the discussion in Chapter 5. On Jacobi’s diagnosis of nihilism, see Beiser, The Fate of Reason, p. 81.

148 Notes 10. Schulze’s argument is really presented in two steps. First, he lodges the metacritical claim against Kant, and only then appeals to the return to Hume. His argument can only be successful, then, if Hume’s skepticism is accepted at face value. 11. Hegel excoriates this approach memorably in the Encyclopedia Logic as the doctrine of the “wise Scholasticus, who refuses to enter the water until he has learned how to swim.” See G.W.F. Hegel, Logic, trans. by William Wallace, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 14. 12. It may therefore also be understood as anticipating a key element of the Phenomenology, in which philosophical positions are encountered and attacked not simply on the basis of their internal coherence, but also of their historical specificity, and therefore as both logically and actually surpassed. The most obvious example of this is Hegel’s account of sense-certainty, which includes an ‘anthropological’ account of the development of human consciousness, and a scornful aside against Schulze, who is accused of raising a level of consciousness of the world that has been surpassed even by animals to the status of a philosophical truth. See Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 109. 13. See J.G. Fichte, “Review of Aenesidemus,” in Fichte: Early Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. by Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 59–77. 14. Cf. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, p. 268. 15 G.W.F. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy, Exposition of its Different Modifications and Comparison of the Latest Form with the Ancient One,” in Between Kant and Hegel, trans. and ed. by H.S. Harris and G. DiGiovanni (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985), pp. 313–14. 16. Ibid. The same issue is at stake when Hegel warns ‘us’ in the first chapter of the Phenomenology that our approach to the first shape of spirit must be one of ‘receptive’ apprehension rather than ‘active’ comprehension (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 58). See also the discussion in Chapter 4. 17. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy,” p. 339. 18. Ibid., p. 330. 19. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Hume’s Enquiries, ed. by L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 159. 20. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 57. 21. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 73. 22. Schulze, Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie, cited by Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy”, p. 318. 23. See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. and ed. by R.G. Bury (London: Heinemann, 1942), pp. 23–6. 24. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy,” p. 321. 25. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 49. 26. Hegel, Logic, pp. 118–19. 27. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 20. 28. See David Sedley, “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism,” in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. by Miles Burnyeat (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), p. 17.

Notes 149 29. See Harris and DiGiovanni, Between Kant and Hegel, p. 360 n. 77. 30. Michael Forster, Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 35. 31. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy”, p. 330. 32. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 4. 33. Ibid., p. 13. Cf. Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1982), p. 148. 34. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 15. 35. For a detailed analysis of the historical context of Hellenistic philosophy, see Burnyeat, “The Skeptic in his Place and Time,” pp. 225–54. 36. The account of Epicureanism that follows is influenced by Nussbaum’s interpretation of the dominant themes of Epicureanism in The Therapy of Desire. 37. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 169. 38. Ibid. 39. Macintyre draws attention to the centrality of the notion of law in Stoic philosophy, and how this chimed with the social rigidity of Imperial Rome. He argues that Stoicism, in its rejection of the Aristotelian account of the plurality of virtues in favor of the hegemony of law, anticipates the demise of the idea of a community’s common good, which he takes as the definitive ethical shift in the transition to modernity. See also the discussion of MacIntyre’s affinity with the critical theorists’ conception of ethics and modernity in Chapter 5. 40. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 121. 41. This account of the epistemic commitments of Stoicism is influenced by Nussbaum, Burnyeat, David Sedley, “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism,” in Burnyeat (ed.) The Skeptical Tradition, pp. 9–30, and Pierre Couissine, “The Stoicism of the New Academy”, in Burnyeat (ed.) The Skeptical Tradition, pp. 31–64. 42. See Sedley, “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism”, p. 14. 43. Cicero, Academica, trans. by H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1933), p. 561. 44. The meaning and extent of Socrates’ irony cannot be discussed further here. The question of the role of irony in ancient skepticism is under-explored. However, there does seem to be a consensus among scholars that, at least with respect to Pyrrho, no irony was present. 45. Agog[ and haeresis were understood as in opposition to each other, although this is not retained in translation. 46. Schulze, Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie, cited by Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy,” p. 320. 47. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy,” p. 337. 48. Ibid., p. 320. 49. Hegel remarks that Pyrrho should be understood as a “creative individual [origineller Mensch]” (Ibid., p. 333), whose philosophy grew out of his lifepractice, and thereby became the foundation of a school. Pyrrho, therefore, in common with other such spontaneous thinkers, represents a kind of orginal unity of natural consciousness and reflection. The development of ancient skepticism, and the transformation of the Pyrrhonian agoge into a formal haeresis, culminating in Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism, parallels the increasing polarization of experience and reflection and the turning of each against the other.

150 Notes 50. Cicero, Academica, p. 565. 51. Hegel, in the skepticism essay, presents the Parmenides as the primary forerunner of Ancient skepticism. For an account of the probable influences on Arcesilaus, see Sedley “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism,” p. 11. 52. See Ibid., p. 17. 53. Cf. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, p. 23. 54. See Sedley, “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism,” p. 17. 55. Tropos means a ‘turning’, as distinguished from a rule or a principle. 56. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy,” p. 337. 57. Ibid., p. 338. 58. The term arch[ designates both a beginning and a regulating principle. Heidegger captures this element when he notes that: “arch[ has a double meaning: that from which something emerges, and that which governs over what emerges in this way” (Martin Heidegger, “Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics, in Basic Writings,” trans. and ed. by David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 284). 59. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, pp. 28–9. 60. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 300. 61. Ibid., pp. 290–1. 62. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 160. 63. See Burnyeat, “Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism,” pp. 118–19. 64. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 3. 65. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy,” p. 338.

2. On the Origins of Modern Skepticism: Descartes, Doubt and Certainty 1. Miles Burnyeat, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” p. 19. 2. Especially the consequences of Galileo’s discoveries. As Anthony Giddens argues, in The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 19, the distinctively modern experience of ‘empty’ or ‘abstract’ space is dependent logically and chronologically on both the scientific abstracting capability, and the practice of universal map cartography that was first practised by Western travelers and explorers of the sixteenth century. 3. For a discussion of the meaning of reification, see Chapter 6. In this context, it is enough to note that reification involves the large-scale institutionalization of alienating social processes. 4. For an account of the neo-Kantian origins of both Lukàcs’s and Heidegger’s perspectives, see Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981), pp. 24–31. For a more detailed account of the convergences between Lukács and Heidegger, see Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, trans. by W.Q. Boelhower (London: Routledge, 1977). For Adorno’s own account of the influence and importance of Lukács, see Adorno, “Reconciliation under Duress,” in Aesthetics and Politics, trans. by R. Taylor (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 151–76. 5. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (London: Merlin Press, 1968), p. 112.

Notes 151 6. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 47. 7. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume I, ed. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 89. 8. Descartes, Discourse on Method, p. 90. 9. Cf. Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 34. Williams draws attention to the subjective and rather hesitant aspect of Descartes’ initial resolve, suggesting its unusual and nonuniversalizable character. One of most trenchant of Descartes’ contemporary critics, Pierre Bourdin, raises similar concerns regarding the privileging of the individual’s doubts (excerpted in the “Seventh Objection and Replies” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, pp. 361–76), but Descartes’ dismissal of such objections is quite perfunctory. 10. Harry Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’ Meditations (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 15. 11. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, p. 8. 12 J.M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism and the Dialectics of Form (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 161. Bernstein takes the Discourse on Method as both logically prior and more central to Descartes’ project than the Meditations, and he associates that project with the establishment of the atomistic self, as a form compatible with the redefinition of nature as subject to the infinity of human desire. The self is co-originary with this redefinition. Bernstein’s argument bears comparison with Arendt’s conception of the modern self as occupying an Archimedean point (see later), in the sense that both associate the origins of the Western notion of the self with the emergence of an instrumental relationship to nature. 13. I borrow the term from Habermas, who designates by it the continuity between French rationalism and German idealism, as granting special status to the ‘I’. 14. This would be the standard account of the relationship between belief and truth within modern analytic philosophy. According to this, knowledge is simply justified true belief. Therefore the criteria for a subject S knowing p are: (1) p (2) S believes p (3) S is justified in believing p. 15. This way of understanding the relationship is parallel to the investigation in Chapter 3, where we will examine the notion of legitimacy in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. It is enough to note here that Kant makes a distinction between a de facto mode of deduction and one arrived at de jure. The former he distinguishes as “the manner in which a concept is acquired through experience and through reflection on experience, and which therefore concerns, not its legitimacy, but only its de facto mode of origination” (Critique of Pure Reason, A85). 16. Cf. the analysis in Leszek Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), where he uses Husserl as a vehicle to come to terms with the interest in certainty in Western thought. While Kolakowski’s conclusions have some bearing on the contradictions inherent in the idea of a search for certainty, he takes the concept of certainty itself to be quite transparent.

152 Notes 17. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (An English Translation of Les Mots et Les Choses) (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 18–23. 18. Ibid., p. 55. 19. Ibid., p. 52. 20. Thus, in “Regulae VII,” Descartes notes that “enumeration alone, whatever the question to which we are applying ourselves, will permit us always to deliver a true and certain judgment upon it” (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, p. 354). 21. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 55. 22. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), p. 330. 23. Descartes’ suspicion is, in some respects, the epistemological counterpart to his contemporary Hobbes’ political pessimism. The factical basis of Hobbes’ views in the violence of seventeenth century European Society is generally recognized; the influence of that society on Descartes’ epistemology is less often noted. 24. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 253. 25. The challenge is not to the senses only, but to the rational context within which sensory evidence was admittted. As Heidegger argues, Galileo and his opponents both observed the same fact; what allowed Galileo to present conclusions regarding the differing rates of fall of bodies in terms of law was his initial, a priori formulation of motion as an invariant property of bodies in general, and not as belonging to any specific body (see “Modern Science, Metaphysics and Mathematics,” p. 289). 26. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 3rd edn, trans. and ed. by Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Press, 2003), pp. 53–101. Arendt uses Weber’s analysis as a kind of shorthand to describe the social changes that developed alongside the process of world alienation: the rise of industrial capitalism, accompanied by the displacement of the dominant social forms of family and property by nationality and labor-power, and the emergence of the modern atomized individual, capable of assuming an independent legal and economic identity. Arendt therefore follows Marx and Hegel in recognizing the importance of ‘legal status’ as a condition for the rise the modern individual – capable, for Hegel, of assuming the identity of citizenship and, for Marx, of selling his or her labor on the ‘free’ market. 27. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 253. 28. See, for example, Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 45–8. Arendt draws primarily on Russell and Whitehead in drawing her conclusions regarding the philosophical significance of the scientific revolution. 29. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 258. 30. Ibid., p. 265. 31. Ibid., p. 264. Giddens, in The Consequences of Modernity, points out that the instrumentalization of the experience of time and space is not simply the condition for conceptualizing the earth as a single unity, but also makes possible the construction of the modern experience of locale and life-stage. According to Arendt, earth alienation also involves the displacement of the earth from the center of Creation, which sets in motion a progressive reduction

Notes 153

32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

of its cosmological significance. In the twentieth century, this has proceeded in conjunction with the progressive devaluation of the earth, expressed in contemporary representations of the earth not as a dwelling place or habitat but as a prison (see The Human Condition, p. 2). See Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 256–7. Arendt insists on the historically factual level of her analysis. Alienation refers simply to the introduction of imagined distance into relationships, both between human beings and to the objects of their knowledge and action. See Ibid., p. 285. This formulation of the Cartesian problem is presented by John McDowell, “Subjective Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,” in Subject, Thought and Context, ed. by Philip Pettit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 147–52. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 275. This is Arendt’s formulation, but it could be noted that the notion of a common sense stands in for the idea of the Cartesian transcendental subject. For an interpretation of Arendt’s notion of a post-Cartesian sensus communis, see Michael Gottsegen, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 130, 207. John McDowell, “Subjective Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,” p. 148. McDowell takes up this point in pursuing a theory of ‘object dependence’, which has been influential among contemporary realists. Descartes actually notes that his senses have “deceived” him, using the French verb tromper. I alter the paraphrasing in order to bring out the significance of the idea of deception only at the third stage of doubt. Cf. Bernard Williams, “Descartes’ Use of Skepticism,” in Burnyeat (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition, p. 343. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, p. 89. Cf. the interpretation of Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 67. Descartes, Objections and Replies, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Heidegger, “Modern Science, Mathematics and Metaphysics,” in Basic Writings, p. 302. Heidegger goes on to argue that, in the form in which Descartes expresses it, the bare Cogito, the ‘I-think’, unites the I-principle with the core of modern mathematics, the numerary, expressed in the principle of contradiction. He goes on to argue for a conception of the mathematical (mathesis) that exceeds the merely numerary. Heidegger, once again, is taking up themes addressed by Lukács and the critical theorists in the modern convergence of the rational with the mathematical. Descartes, Objections and Replies, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume I, p. 244. Ibid. Heidegger, “Modern Science, Mathematics and Metaphysics,” p. 302. Jaatko Hintikka, (1962) “Cogito ergo Sum: Inference or Performance,” Philosophical Review, 71, p. 170. Ibid., p. 168 (italics added). Frankfurt has pointed to some of the problems of this interpretation, including its inconsistency with key patterns of argument presented in the second

154 Notes

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

meditation. Frankfurt, however, then goes on to argue again for an inferentially based reading. See Frankfurt (1996) “Descartes’ Discussion of his Existence on the Second Meditation,” in Philosophical Review, 75, pp. 185–207. Descartes, Meditations, p. 27. John Morris, “Descartes’ Natural Light,” in Rene Descartes: Critical Assessments, Vol 1, ed. by George J.D. Moyal (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 413–29. Ibid., p. 432. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. by Allan Bloom (London: Penguin, 1979), p. 267. Ibid., p. 268.

3. The Question of Legitimacy: Skepticism, Law and Transcendental Idealism 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axi. Ibid., Bxvi. Ibid., Bi. The relationship between Kant and Rousseau is obviously more complex than we allow for here. For a general analysis see, for example, W. Kersting, “Politics, Freedom and Order,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. by Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 342–6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. by G.D.H. Cole (New York: Everyman, 1996), pp. 211–12. Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Rodney Livingston (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 150. Dieter Henrich, “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. by E. Forster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 31. Ibid., p. 35. Kant was a librarian at the royal library in Konigsberg for six years. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A91, B124. Ibid., A91, B124. Kant’s formulation is a rather extreme interpretation of Hume’s conclusions. As will be seen later, Hume himself did not consider the causal relation to be an illusion as such. The interpretation is justified in this context, however, and perhaps should be understood as a veiled criticism of Hume’s failure to sufficiently distinguish the status of causality from concepts for which he would have had as much contempt as did Kant. Ibid., A84, B117. Ibid., A87, B119. Ibid., A88, B120. Ibid., A88, B121. The general significance of the distinction between objective validity and objective reality for understanding the course of the transcendental deduction is a much disputed and extremely complex topic. The problem derives from the fundamental distinction between logic and ontology which Kant opposed to Wolff’s rationalism, and which remained an irresolvable ambiguity throughout key sections of the first Critique. Here we are concerned only with the implications of this distinction for skepticism. Paul Guyer, in “The

Notes 155

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

Transcendental Deduction of the Categories,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, takes the distinction to be complementary to that between the transcendental and the empirical. Thus he says that “a concept has objective reality if it has at least some instantiation in experience but objective validity only if it applies to all possible objects of experience” (p. 125). This claim is filled out in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 11–24. Robert Pippin argues, on the contrary, that the status of the categories in determining objective reality is the stronger claim, and I take him to be correct in this (see Robert Pippin, Kant’s Theory of Form (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 154). This also commits him to pursuing the apperception issue more deeply than Guyer, thus leading him towards Fichte and Hegel. See Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 18–22. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A88, B120. The function of unity in the constitution of reality is discussed in Dieter Henrich, “The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction,” in Reading Kant: New Perspectives on Transcendental Arguments and Critical Philosophy, ed. by Eva Schaper (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 251–79. Henrich argues against unity as the basis for the course of the transcendental deduction in favour of the identity of the subject. However, this does not affect the importance of the function of unity in the ‘constitution of reality’ issue. Manfred Kuehn, “Kant’s Conception of Hume’s Problem”, in Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics in Focus, trans. and ed. by B. Logan (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 156–7. Ibid., p. 157. See, for example, N. Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, (London: MacMillan, 1923), pp. xxv–xxx. Kuehn, “Kant’s Conception of ‘Hume’s Problem’,” p. 168. Ibid. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. by B. Logan (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 33. See, for example, E. Forster, “How are Transcendental Arguments Possible?” in Reading Kant: New Perspectives on Transcendental Arguments and Critical Philosophy, ed. by Eva Schaper (London: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 11–34. A more sophisticated defense of this approach is made by Ernst Cassirer in Kant’s Life and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), in which the deduction from knowledge of objects is tied to the more general character of the Copernican Revolution. Kant himself distinguishes between the analytic mode of argument offered in the Prolegomena from the synthetic mode of the first Critique. On the difference between the two, see Dieter Henrich, “The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” Review of Metaphysics, 88, pp. 640–59. See Henrich, “The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction,” for an analysis of why this form fails. Cf. Pippin, Kant’s Theory of Form, pp. 183–5. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B20. Henrich, “The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” p. 652. Heidegger interprets Kant’s task as “a pure phenomenology of the subjectivity of the subject.” However, he sees the quaestio quid juris as merely “a formula

156 Notes

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

for the task of an analytic of transcendence” (Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. by J.S. Churchill (Indianopolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1962), p. 59). In the light of our previous discussion concerning Kant’s conception the demand for a deduction, it should be clear that the juridical aspect of the deduction cannot be dispensed with in the manner in which Heidegger does so. Concomitantly, the importance of understanding Kant’s task juridically if the continuity with Hume’s skepticism is to be authentic will be shown in what follows. For instances of this traditionalist understanding of the relationship see A. Lovejoy “On Kant’s Reply to Hume,” in Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. by Moltke S. Gram (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1967). Guyer’s extensive scholarship on the relationship also seems to tend towards this reading. See, for example, P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Chapter 4. For his critique of Kant’s understanding of the category of causality, see Arthur Schoperhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. by E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), pp. 440–54. See Henrich, “The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” p. 654. For further analysis of the issue see Paul Guyer, “Kant on Apperception and A Priori Synthesis,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 17, pp. 205–12. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B135. Antinomy is another term that has a legal origin. According to Howard Caygill, “[a]ntinomy is a rhetorical form of presentation … in which opposed arguments are presented side by side with each other. The form was widely used in seventeenth-century jurisprudence (as in Eckolt’s De Antinomiis of 1660) to point to differences between laws arising from clashes between legal jurisdictions.” (Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 75.) Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 6. Ibid., pp. 15–16. Rose has argued elsewhere that the key element seized upon by the later generations of Kant critics is the particularity of the justice claimed, and the consequent encroachment of sociohistorical contingency into that adjudication. See Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 43–5. The same result emerges when the problem is seen with respect to Kant’s relationship to Rousseau on the question of legitimacy. The idea embodied in Rousseau’s concept of the general will rests on the identity of the subject and object of legislation. The quaestio quid juris in that instance would be by what authority is that identity itself constructed? The role accorded by Rousseau to the original social contract might be said to be an attempt to address this problem. However, it still bears the stamp of an attempt to answer only the question of fact. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 42. See Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, p. 448. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A832, B860. Fichte made a number of revisions in the text for different editions of the work, which appeared three times in the period from 1794 to 1802. The translation used here, J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. and ed. by P. Heath and J. Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), incorporates these changes into the text without notation.

Notes 157 43. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A260, B316. 44. Henrich, in “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction,” states that Kant understands reflection to be always implicit in any investigation. Hence “we reflect always, but investigation is a deliberate activity” (p. 43). He also notes that “reflection is not introspection. It accompanies operations internally. It is not the achievement of a philosopher who, by means of a deliberate effort and within an intentio obliqua, turns inward to examine the operations of reason. Thus it is a source, not an achievement” (p. 42). This interpretation is presumably intended to deflect the move to the Fichtean position. However, it seems to me that the distinction between a ‘source’ and an ‘achievement’ cannot be accounted for from within the Kantian framework. Fichte has a similar criticism in mind when he states that “The self is at once the agent and the product of action; the active and what the activity brings about; action and deed are one and the same.” (Fichte, Science of Knowledge, p. 97). 45. Immanuel Kant Logic, trans. by R. Hartmann & W. Schwartz (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. 99. 46. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A261, B317. 47. Ibid., A262, B318. 48. Ibid., A261, B317. 49. Ibid., A263, B319. 50. Ibid., A268, B324. 51. Kant makes reference to the ‘common root’ of our faculties in the Introduction to the first Critique, and declares it to be unknowable. Heidegger takes up this theme in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 50–9, stating the common root to be the faculty of imagination. 52. Moltke Gram, in an influential article, “The Impossibility of Transcendental Deductions,” in Kant Disputed Questions, ed. by Moltke Gram (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1967), identifies the weak point in Kant’s argument as the possibility of schematically identifying a field of reference for the objects whose conditional existence is to be proved with reference to the subject. However, he ignores the role Kant accorded to the concepts of reflection in accomplishing this. 53. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, p. 30. 54. Ibid., p. 38. 55. Ibid., p. 41. 56. Ibid., p. 33. Henrich credits Fichte with grasping the ‘circularity’ of the act of reflection, thus overthrowing a dogmatic paradigm that had subsisted from Descartes through Locke and Liebniz to Kant. The circle consists in the idea that when I think of myself – make myself an object – I can think of myself doing this. But the actual doing of it is something separate from me conceptualizing myself doing it; therefore, the I-object always remains beyond the I-subject because the former only exists inasmuch as it is an object. The circle is therefore irresolvable. 57. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, p. 37. 58. Henrich, “The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction,” p. 253. 59. Fichte’s philosophy may therefore be thought of as enunciating two principles of modernity: mass democracy and the demands of radical individualism. The combination, as Marcuse and others argue, leads to social atomization. 60. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 154.

158 Notes 61. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A424, B452. In fact, as Caygill has pointed out, appearances, under Kant’s theory of experience, themselves are never ‘deceptive’ as such. (See A Kant Dictionary, pp. 79–80.) It is the way appearances are taken up by the subject that generates deception.

4. Hegel and Self-Completing Skepticism 1. G.W.F. Hegel, Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 119. 2. See Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981) pp. 149–54 and Werner Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology: Its Point and Purpose – A Commentary on the Preface and Introduction (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 51. 3. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A832, B860. 4. Ibid., A268–9, B324–5. 5. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, p. 114. Italics added. 6. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A648, B676. 7. The categorical imperative never states what one should do in any specific set of circumstances. It merely provides a doctrinal rule through abstracting from all the content of those circumstances. The meaning of the categorical imperative is also closely related to the problems of arch[ and telos, since it is supposed to “declare an action to be of itself necessary without reference to any purpose, without any other end.” (Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by J.W. Ellington, in Kant’s Ethical Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 25.) Hegel’s critique of Kant’s ethics is similar to his critique of his epistemology; that content always seeps into form, and that neither reason nor the will, as Kant understands them, is purely formal, but continually subject to uncognized qualifications. 8. This illustrates again the significance of Henrich’s ‘Rousseauian criterion’. 9. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, p. 30. 10. Ibid., p. 16. 11. There are, though, occasional tendencies in Kant toward Fichte’s position. For example, in his footnoted remark that “deficiency in judgment is just what is ordinarily called stupidity, and for such a failing there is no remedy. An obtuse or narrow-minded person to whom nothing is wanting save a proper degree of understanding and the concepts appropriate thereto, may indeed be trained through study, even to the extent of becoming learned. But as such people are commonly still lacking in judgment (secunda Petri), it is not unusual to meet learned men who in the application of their scientific knowledge betray the original want, which can never be made good” (Critique of Pure Reason, B173). 12 G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. by W. Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), p. 69. 13. See Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, pp. 24–35. 14. In the early writings, Hegel speaks of identity and difference, rather than identity and non-identity. The distinction between the words ‘difference’

Notes 159

15.

16.

17. 18 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

and ‘non-identity’ is itself informative. Non-identity is merely that which stands outside identity; hence it is defined only with respect to identity itself, which is therefore the privileged term. For this reason, Adorno consistently refers to the ‘non-identical’ in attempting to dissociate Hegel’s philosophy from what he perceives as its subjectively idealist bias (see Negative Dialectics, p. 149). Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, p. 70. The concept/intuition language, according to Hegel, is also inadequate because it takes experience to consist in the function of faculties. This leaves it open to a psychologistic interpretation. The centrality and complexity of the issue for Hegel can be realized if we consider the general structure of the Science of Logic in terms of this criticism. The logic of being treats of the contradictions and concomitant determinations that arise from the categories of experience, when they are propounded as immediate objects. The recurring contradictions and incomprehensibility of the categories, and therefore the failure of the logic of being, make necessary a logic of essence in which the categories are examined in terms of the ‘determinations of reflection’. However, this too is to be understood as a demonstration of failure. For a discussion of Hegel’s logic as a process of failure, see Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 185–96. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, p. 154. G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. by A.V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1993) p. 77. Ibid., p. 76. Ibid. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 36. Garbis Kortian, Metacritique: The Philosophical Arguments of Jurgen Habermas, p. 34. On the combination of circumstances that forced Hegel to change the title of the work see Robert Pippin, “You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in F. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 52–3. Walter Kaufmann, “Hegel’s Conception of Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding, ed. by Eva Pivcevic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 67. Cf. Pippin, “You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” pp. 53–6. See Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Re-Interpretation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965). Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 4. Cf. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 150. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 300. This interpretation appears in Quentin Lauer, An Interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 1982) pp. 38–9. A similar version appears in Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 67–9, although here Houlgate presents the issue in terms of the reader’s relationship to the Science of Logic. See also J. Loewenburg, Hegel’s Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of the Mind (New York: Open Court, 1965), p. 15. The common element of all these readings is that the initial standpoint of the ‘we’ is taken as unproblematic. From what I have already said with reference to Hegel’s critique of Fichte, it

160 Notes

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

should be clear that Hegel could hardly have understood this standpoint as unproblematic in itself. These interpretations also ignore the problem of taking natural consciousness as given, as simply something ‘we’ take up or merely observe in our capacity as ‘phenomenologists’. Even where some gloss is given to this problem, for example, in Loewenhoek, where he states that the impartiality of the phenomenological standpoint depends on us first “yielding to the stand-point of the shape of consciousness in question” (p. 15), the problem is not encountered dialectically, that is, by engaging with the claims that a ‘shape of natural consciousness’ might raise against ‘us’. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 90. Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology: Its Point and Purpose – A Commentary on the Preface and Introduction, p. 144. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. by K.R. Dove (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 66–7. Adorno challenges Heidegger’s reading of the Phenomenology in his own essay on Hegel’s concept of experience as follows: “For Hegel, what experience is concerned with at any particular moment is the animating contradiction of such absolute truth. Nothing can be known ‘that is not in experience’ – including, accordingly, the Being into which existential ontology displaces the ground of what exists and is experienced” (Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 53). Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, pp. 71–2. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 49–50. Ibid., p. 50. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 48. Kant distinguishes critique as a canon as opposed to an organon of knowledge. See Critique of Pure Reason, A795, B823. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 150–1 See Theodor, W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 145. Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 191. Ibid. Ibid., p. 34. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, p. 73. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. by A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 43.

5. Skepticism, Nihilism and the Crisis of Rationality 1. For Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, while it is important that philosophy be understood as an expression of social forces, it is equally important that it be salvaged as something other than a mere expression and be generative of new and alternative conceptions of rationality. Without this generative and emancipatory dimension, philosophy is reduced to the same impotent role assigned to it by positivism. 2. See Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 121. Adorno here describes skeptical empiricism as a “naked, supposedly ideology-free hegemony of mere facts which human beings are expected to accept supinely.” In this section,

Notes 161

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

Adorno opposes skeptical empiricism to two further, rather loosely constructed conceptions of skepticism, which are related to the alternatives posed by Hegel in the Phenomenology. One, associated with Montaigne, is humanist, liberal and progressive; the other, associated with Vilfredo Pareto, is relativist, nihilist and – as Adorno suggests in his “Contribution to the Theory of Ideology” – proto-fascist. For reasons discussed in Chapter 1, however, Pareto’s thought could hardly be described as skeptical. Rather, it is relativist, and belongs to a tradition of conservatism opposed, above all, to the universalist claims of the Enlightenment (Cf. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 90). Similarly, Montaigne’s humanism, I would argue, is less skeptical than it is an historically particular counter-reactionary response to Scholasticism. Weber’s notion of Zweckrationalität comprises three interrelated complexes: the growth and extension of scientific rationality, the disenchantment of the world and the eclipse of absolute ethical precepts by a utility-bound ethics. Some of the specific ways in which these complexes influenced the critical theorists are treated later. For a more general overview of that influence see Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, pp. 65–70. This is not to suggest that Weber was the first to generalize crises of rationality into crises of society, but he was the first to cast the problem of reason in explicitly sociological terms and thus, arguably, lay the groundwork for the more general problem of ‘modernity’. For an explicitly philosophical contextualization of Weber’s role in the emergence of that problem, see Robert Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 7. In this respect, Dialectic of Enlightenment remains perhaps even more timely today, in the ‘age of globalization’, than at the time of its publication, inasmuch as the institutions and principles with which it takes issue have only now come to be seen in their full-fledged global form. For a discussion of the relationship between early critical theory and globalization, see Douglas Kellner, “Theorizing Globalization,” in Sociological Theory, November 2002, p. 290. The conception of class as a universal social subject is not confined to the Marxist-Lukácsian appeal to the proletariat, but also appears in Mannheim’s conception of the intellectual stratum. Veblen’s appeal to the ‘engineers’ may also be understood in terms of the casting of a ‘universal interest’ onto a particular class. There is disagreement both between the first generation of critical theorists themselves on the interpretation of Marx’s theories of value, and between commentators on how to understand those differences. One of the most lucid accounts appears in Rose, The Melancholy Science, pp. 30–1, where she insists that the notion is central to the theories propagated by Adorno, Lukács and Benjamin, in the sense that each depends on the contrast between use-value and exchange-value as a core component of their analyses. Similarly, Held has insisted on the importance of the universalization of exchange-value as the core component of Adorno’s critique of identity. Neither Held nor Rose, however, draw out the importance of the ‘self-expanding’ quality that underpins capitalist production, that is, that capitalism as an economic system requires ever-increasing quantities of surplus value. This component of Marx’s theory has been thought to be fatally dependent on the ‘labor theory of value’, and to have been effectively dropped by the critical theorists. Nevertheless,

162 Notes

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

the fact that Adorno (and others) reject Marx’s idea that ‘labor is the source of all value’ in no way commits them to the claim that the depression of wages below the level of their value in production is not one key systematic component of capitalist accumulation. In recent years, theories of globalization have given something of a new lease of life to the labor theory of value which is quite compatible with critical theory. The most sophisticated version is to be found in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of ‘deruralization’. See Wallerstein The End of the World as we Know It: Social Science for the End of the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 79–80. Where this is understood uncontroversially as the principle that the maximization of profit in production is the first and, in many situations, only priority of capitalism as an economic and political system. Under Durkheim’s sociological paradigm, differentiation is straightforwardly associated with increasing complexity. This is not a necessary consequence, since it is perfectly possible for society to become progressively more segmented and stratified, but also for the underlying principles under which that differentiation occurs to become progressively simpler and more centralized. The best account of this variation is presented by Wiggerhaus in his biographical panorama of the key members of the Frankfurt School. See Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, pp. 41–105. Adorno takes Durkheim as the exemplar of positivism in the social sciences. His most adept and swiftest destruction of Durkheim’s presuppositions appears in Negative Dialectics, p. 326 note. Heidegger’s ‘ontologization of history’ is the arch-culprit here. See Negative Dialectics, pp. 130–1. See Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, pp. 534–5. See Horkheimer “Traditional and Critical Theory,” pp. 198–200. Heidegger, post-structuralists, pragmatists and others all draw – either implicitly or explicitly – on the implications of the claim to nihilism. For an account of Nietzsche’s nihilism that frames it in terms of a different set of categories (primarily ‘active’ and ‘passive’), see Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 44–5. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 377. Adorno’s point is placed in dramatic contemporary relief if we consider the sociologist Alan Wolfe’s observations on the Chicago School of Economics view of economics as a total science, insisting that “the tools of economic analysis can be used not just to decide whether production should be increased or decreased, but in every kind of decision making situation. Thus we have been told … that a man commits suicide ‘when the total discounted lifetime utility remaining to him reaches zero’.” (Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper: Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley and Los Angeles CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 36–8.) Truth as the identity of thought with its object is, for Adorno, modeled on the principle of exchange. “The exchange-principle, the reduction of human labor to an abstract general concept of average labor-time, is fundamentally related to the identification-principle. It has its social model in exchange, and it would not be without the latter.” Negative Dialectics, p. 146. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 377. Ibid.

Notes 163 21. Adorno places great emphasis on the importance of the Amphiboly chapter of the first Critique. See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 154. 22. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §1. 23. Ibid., §12A. 24. Nietzsche associates this ideal strongly with metaphysical system-building. 25. Ibid., §14. 26. Ibid. 27. The three ideals align to some extent with the three Critiques. 28. In this respect, Nietzsche’s diagnostic outlook on the significance of Enlightenment skepticism is not substantively different from that of Hegel or the other German idealists. But, where the German idealists sought to critique the Enlightenment separation of truth and value in the name of establishing the ‘common root’ or Sollen of theoretical and practical reason (Kant and Fichte) or of Sittlichkeit (Hegel), Nietzsche seeks to push the separation toward what he sees as its logical outcome, the overcoming of enlightenment rationality itself, and of its completion or ‘perfecting’ in the recognition of the will to power. 29. MacIntyre has pointed out, with some justification, that this worldview is first clearly enunciated by Pascal. See After Virtue, p. 54. 30. Cf. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 179. 31. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, p. 72. Berlin is quoting Carl Becker’s account of the significance of Hume’s skepticism. 32. Hume Treatise of Human Nature, III.1.i. 33. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 19. 34. Ibid. 35. Cf. J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 77. 36. The is/ought distinction that arises from Hume’s Fork has been restated and redescribed in various ways. In modern positivism, it is expressed in the view that value judgments are incapable of being expressed in the language of science. Therefore, they cannot be candidates for truth or falsehood. A more reflexive view, clearly expressed in one of Carl Hempel’s seminal articles, is that truth, as science, involves a commitment to value that may be, and clearly often is, in conflict with other values. To choose truth over alternative possible ends is to value a particular end, or particular vocabulary type, over others. See Carl Hempel, “Science and Human Values,” in Social Control in a Free Society, ed. by R.E. Spiller (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), pp. 39–64. The degree to which Hempel’s insight is acknowledged and actualized within the scientific community is an open question. 37. The theme is repeated in Marcuse’s 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” in Robert Paul Wolff (ed.), A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965), pp. 81–123. 38. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 19. 39. Horkheimer’s conception of the irrationality of modern society is that it presents a mismatch between self-conception and reality. This view captures only one dimension of what Adorno dubs identity-thinking. For a perceptive discusison of how Adorno takes up Horkheimer’s critique of identity, see Susan Buck Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), p. 189.

164 Notes 40. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 20. 41. Horkheimer was thinking primarily of fanatical nationalism, but the observation is no less valid today where forms of toxic gemeinschaft express themselves as religious fundamentalism. 42. Indeed, as Adorno and Horkheimer argue in “The Elements of Anti-Semitism” section of Dialectic of Enlightenment, fanaticism and instrumental reason have to be understood as mutually supportive. A similar argument has been made recently by, among others, Benjamin Barber, whose Jihad Vs. McWorld (New York: Ballantine, 1996) replays the analyses of the culture industry and antisemitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment from a global perspective. 43. Cf. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 77. 44. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 113, 256. 45. MacIntyre’s solution to that problem – recovering the language of Aristotelian virtues as an adequate vehicle for understanding moral action – has exerted influence over Habermas’s evolving interest in teleological ethics in general (e.g., Jurgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, trans. by William Rehg, Max Bensky and Hella Beister (Oxford: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 44–7). For a variety of reasons, I believe that that turn should be regarded as reactionary. First, MacIntyre’s account depends on an impoverished conception of agency, and while it is certainly true that morality and ethical life depend on shared traditions and practices that are historically ‘given’, it is also the case that they can be oriented to ‘real’ ideals that are not institutionalized in any group practice or tradition per se, but are still meaningful as moral practices. Second, MacIntyre offers no compelling reason why the only alternative to Nietzsche is Aristotle, and his conception depends, as others have pointed out, on an insufficiently critical account of the ethical shortcomings of the ancient Greek polis. 46. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 2. 47. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 39. 48. See Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 77. Bernstein argues that, historically, “three pressures converged to make the search for rational foundations for morality necessary and intelligible”: the redescriptions of qualities of things in terms of the mathematized language of natural science, the destruction of canonical knowledge brought about by experimentation and the rise of individualism (pp. 78–9). I would add a fourth element, intimated by MacIntyre’s stance but explicitly drawn out in Foucault’s investigations, which would be of equal importance and at a similar level of operative impact to those processes that Bernstein describes: the rise of the state, particularly in Northern Europe, which brought with it the need for redescription and control of the vocabulary and spheres of social life, including sexuality, sanity and ‘morality’. 49. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 51 50. According to MacIntyre, the paradigm of value-free sociology is best expressed in the work of Erving Goffman, who imposes its premises on the actual conduct of social life. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 115. 51. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 109. 52. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans. and ed., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 141.

Notes 165 53. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 26. 54. I owe this general interpretation of Weber’s position to Robert Hollinger’s essay, “From Weber to Habermas,” in E.D. Klemke, R. Hollinger and D.W. Rudge, eds., Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp. 539–49. 55. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Volume I, trans. by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1978), p. 24. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., p. 85. 58. Ibid. 59. See, for example, Hollinger, “From Weber to Habermas,” p. 542. 60. Weber, Economy and Society, p. 26. 61. Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World As We Know It, p. 144. 62. Liah Greenfeld, in The Spirit of Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), argues that in this respect the content of Weber’s argument has been widely misunderstood. However, she then also argues that the form of Weber’s argument (which could be construed as a kind of transcendental argument) has also been completely misconstrued, revealingly enough, by economists. “Economists and economic historians argue endlessly the reasons for the relative prosperity of nations, for their success or failure in the industrial race, but they do not ask why such a race exists at all and why nations should want to enter it. This they regard as self-evident. But there is nothing self-evident about it. In most historical societies, economic activities held the place occupied by classes which participated in them – the bottom of the social ladder and value hierarchy” (p. 5). It is the valuation of formal rationality that is itself in need of explanation, and to which Weber had addressed his essays on the Protestant ethic. 63. Adorno and Horkheimer tend towards the use of the (Lukácsian) language of the objectification of consciousness to describe this process. Habermas pairs the idea of colonization with Alfred Schutz’s notion of the lifeworld to express a similar observation (see, e.g. The Theory of Communicative Action: Volume II: Liefworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1981), p. 395). 64. But also, many suspect, to be on the ‘winning’ side of the historical process. 65. Raymond Aron, German Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 83. 66. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Volume I, §3,4. Hegel’s term for his skepticism is sich-vollbringende. The translation of both terms is ambiguous, but both may be rendered as self-completing. I owe the parallel to Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism, p. 68 n. 1. 67. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1966), §11. 68. Cf. Ansell Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, p. 120. 69. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), III, §11. 70. Cf. Aaron Ridley, “Science in the Service of Life: Nietzsche’s Perspectivism,” in The Proper Ambition of Science, ed. by M.W.F. Stone and J. Wolff (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 95. 71. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, III, §11.

166 Notes 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92. 93. 94.

Ibid., III, §23. Ibid., III, §12. Ibid., III, §24. Ibid., III, §27. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Press, 1972), pp. 36–7. The Genealogy of Morals, III, §27. Aaron Ridley, “Science in the Service of Life: Nietzsche’s Perspectivism,” p. 96. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 4. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1972), pp. 11–12. Ibid., p. xvi. For an account of the neo-Kantian framework of modern sociology, see Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 13–36. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 314. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 35–6. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 11. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 56. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 126–7. For a thorough refutation of this reading, see Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 41–2. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 28. As Simmel remarks, “In the whole history of economic activity, the stranger makes his appearance everywhere as a trader, and the trader makes his as a stranger” (Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. by Donald Levine, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 144). Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 61. Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, p. 25. Cf. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, pp. 83–6. Cf. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, pp. 94–5.

6. Negative Dialectics and the Fate of Critical Theory 1. Max Horkheimer, “Postscript,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, p. 245. 2. Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, p. 204. 3. Cf. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, pp. 224–25. 4. For an account of the idealism/materialism problem in “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” see Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 121–3. 5. For one of the best accounts of the relationship between Marx’s theory of value and his theory of the commodity, see Robert L. Heilbroner, Marxism: For and Against (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 93–140. 6. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 86.

Notes 167 7. The literature on Lukács’s use of the concept of reification is complex and voluminous. For a critical account that situates the issue with reference to Adorno, see Rose, The Melancholy Science, pp. 27–51. For more sympathetic expositions of the specifically Lukácsian use of the concept, see Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel, pp. 5–10 and Arato and Breines, The Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism, pp. 113–41. For an interesting recent account, defending the contemporary relevance of the concept, see Timothy Bewes, Reification, or The Anxieties of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002). 8. The weight given to the relationship, as either ‘reflection’ or ‘expression’ varies, as discussed later. 9. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 148. 10. Ibid., p. 128. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., p. 117 (italics added). 13. Ibid., p. 169. 14. See Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 214. 15. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 114. 16. Ibid., p. 115. 17. Ibid., p. 104. 18. Heidegger draws attention to the supposed ‘mystification’ inherent in the concept of reification in explicating what “we are to understand positively when we think of the unreified being of the subject, the soul, the consciousness, the spirit, the person” (Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 72. See also Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, pp. 19–21. 19. In fact, Marcuse discusses Hegel’s early systems, (from the so-called Jena system of 1802 to the Science of Logic) as a series of attempts to grasp the idea of a social ontology. 20. See Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 95. 21. Ibid., p. 29. 22. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 176. 23. Which is not to deny that philosophy cannot fill a critical role in understanding the evolution of society and its own position as a cultural form within that evolution. Mannheim gave the sociology of knowledge a conservative dimension by burdening its historicist element with an unreflective and functionalist relativism. I would argue that the most valuable element of Horkheimer’s somewhat contested legacy to contemporary critical theory is to point the way to a sociology of knowledge that could remain both critical and sociological, but the point cannot be pursued further here. For some recent reflections on Horkheimer’s legacy see Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang Bonss, John McCole (eds.), On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 24. See Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics, pp. 66–8. Cf. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 34–52. 25. See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, pp. 530–7. 26. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 145–6. 27. See Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 21–37. Rose’s characterization of all sociology as infected with a pervasive neo-Kantian reductionism seems itself

168 Notes

28. 29. 30. 31.

32.

33.

reductive, but her account of the neo-Kantian roots of modern sociology is convincing. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 148. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 144. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 155. Buck-Morss argues, however, that the very consistency of Adorno’s ‘antisystem’ leads it back to systematic thinking. See The Origins of Negative Dialectics, p. 189. It seems an exaggeration to claim, as Rose does, that Adorno has “transformed Marxism into a search for style” (see Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 139). Nevertheless, it is difficult to overestimate the importance that Adorno places on presentation. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 18. Given the nature of what is at stake in their research program, the members of the Frankfurt School could not evade the issue of the presentation of their ideas. The contradictions within which Horkheimer finds himself entangled in his attempt to present his ideas in a conventional form are apparent in the conclusion to Eclipse of Reason: Language is assumed to suggest and intend nothing beyond propaganda. Some readers of this book may think that it represents propaganda against propaganda, and conceive each word as a suggestion, slogan or prescription. Philosophy is not interested in issuing commands. The intellectual situation is so confused that this statement itself may in turn be interpreted as offering foolish advice against obeying any command … it may even be construed as a command directed against commands. (p. 184)

34. This is not to associate the performative element with any notion of an ‘inner necessity’. As Horkheimer points out, “Critical theory is indeed incompatible with the belief that any theory is independent of men and even has a growth of its own” (“Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 229). 35. See Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 78. 36. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 21. 37. Ibid., p. 23. 38. Ibid., pp. 21–2. 39. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology, trans. by Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), pp. 3–4. 40. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 7. 41. Ibid., p. 145. 42. Ibid., p. 5. 43. Ibid., p. 135. 44. Adorno’s discussion of these falsifications is concentrated in the two sections “On the Dialectics of Identity” and “Cogitative Self-Reflection” (Negative Dialectics, pp. 146–51). It is dangerous to pare Adorno’s project down to a particular and limited set of concerns, but an argument can be made for viewing these two sections as the real heart of the work. For a summary expression of this reading see Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics, p. 189.

Notes 169 45. Theodor W. Adorno et al. (ed.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 69. 46. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 146. 47. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 175. 48. Cf. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 44. 49. See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 144. 50. Ibid., p. 202. 51. Thus Heidegger’s Dasein is perpetually at risk of transcending its actual historical substrate and being reified as a Subject. 52. Cf. Jarvis’ extremely clear discussion of the differences between Adorno and Heidegger, in Adorno: A Critical Introduction, pp. 201–07. 53. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 135. 54. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 6. 55. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 3. 56. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 176. I am indebted to Dennis Redmond (see http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ ndtrans.html) for help in many of the amended translations from Negative Dialectics in this chapter.

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172 Select Bibliography Habermas, J. (2004) The Future of Human Nature, trans. William Rehg, Max Bensky and Hella Beister (Oxford: Polity Press). Harris, H.S. and DiGiovanni, G. (1985) Between Kant and Hegel (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). Hegel, G.W.F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Nisbet H.B., trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). —— (1977) Faith and Knowledge, Cerf, W. and Harris, H.S., trans. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press). —— (1968) Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1. Haldane, E.S. and Simpson, F.H., trans. (London: Routledge). —— (1975) Logic, Wallace, W., trans. (Oxford: Clarendon Press). —— (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, Miller, A.V., trans. (Oxford: Oxford University Press). —— (1969) Science of Logic, Miller, A.V., trans. (New York: Humanities Press International). Heidegger, M. (1993) Basic Writings, Krell, D.F., trans. (London: Routledge). —— (1962) Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, trans. (Oxford: Blackwell). —— (1970) Hegel’s Concept of Experience, Dove, K.R., trans. (New York: Harper and Row). —— (1962) Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Churchill, J.S., trans. (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press). Heilbroner, R.L. (1980) Marxism: For and Against (New York: Norton). Held, D. (1980) Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas (Oxford: Polity Press). Henrich, D. (1969) “The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” Review of Metaphysics, 22, pp. 640–59. Hintikka, J. (1962) “Cogito ergo Sum: Inference or Performance,” Philosophical Review, vol. 71, pp. 162–4. Houlgate, S. (1991) Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy (London: Routledge). —— (1986) Hegel, Nietzsche and the Criticism of Metaphysics (Cambridge: University of Cambridge). Horkheimer, M., Critical Theory: Selected Essays, O’Connell, M. et al., trans. (New York: Seabury Press, 1972). —— (1947) Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1974). Hume, D. (1984) A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Penguin Books). —— (1975) Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 3rd edn, Selby-Bigge, L.A. and Nidditch, P.H., eds (New York: Oxford University Press). Jameson, F., ed. (1977) Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso Press). Jarvis, S. (1998) Adorno: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge). Kant, I. (1929) Critique of Pure Reason, Kemp-Smith, N., trans. (London: MacMillan). —— (1983) Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, Ellington, J.W., trans. in Kant’s Ethical Philosophy (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett). —— (1974) Logic, Hartman, R. and Schwartz, W., trans. (New York: BobbsMerrill).

Select Bibliography 173 —— (1950) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphyics, Beck, L.W., ed. (New York: Liberal Arts Press). Kaufmann, W. (1965) Hegel: A Re-Interpretation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). Kellner, D. (1989) Critical Theory, Marxism and Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press) —— (2002) “Theorizing Globalization,” Sociological Theory, vol. 20, pp. 285–305. Kemp Smith, N. (1923) A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: MacMillan). Klemke, E.D., Hollinger, R. and Rudge, D.W. eds (1998) Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books). Kolakowski, L. (1975) Husserl and the Search for Certitude (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Kortian, G. (1980) Metacritique: The Philosophical Arguments of Jurgen Habermas, Raffan, J., trans. (Cambridge: University of Cambridge). Lauer, Q. (1982) An Interpretation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press). Logan, B. (1996) Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics in Focus (London: Routledge). Loewenburg, J. (1965) Hegel’s Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of the Mind (New York: Open Court). Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, Livingstone, R., trans. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Lyotard, J.F. (1999) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Bennington G. and Massumi B., trans. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Marcuse, H. (1954) Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd edn (New York: Humanities Press). Marx, K. (1990) Capital, vol. 1, Fowkes, B., trans. (London: Penguin Books). Marx, W. (1975) Hegel’s Phenomenology: Its Point and Purpose – A Commentary on the Preface and Introduction (New York: Harper & Row). McIntyre, A. (1982) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1985). —— (1990) Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press). Moyal, George J.D., ed. (1990) Rene Descartes: Critical Assessments, vol. 1. (London: Routledge). Nietzsche, F. (1966) Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Walter Kaufmann ed. and trans. (New York: Modern Library). —— (1967) On The Genealogy Of Morals And Ecce Homo, Kaufmann, W., trans. (Vintage Books, 1989). —— (1967) The Will to Power, Kaufmann, W. and Hollingdale, R.J., trans. (New York: Random House). Nussbaum, M. (1994) The Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Pettit, P., ed. (1986) Subject, Thought and Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pippin, R. (1989) Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

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Index

absolute, Hegel’s, 6, 85, 98–9, 143; knowing, 86, 88, 90, 140; method, 96; standpoint, 77, 80, 82, 85, 86, 97 academic skepticism, see ancient skepticism accident (tuchikos), 31, 51 Adorno, Theodor W., 1, 6–8, 18, 33, 37, 52, 57, 88, 90, 93, 94, 99, 103–8, 111, 115, 119–24, 126–8, 130, 133–45 Aenesidemus, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, 26, 29, 30, 31 Aenesidemus (Schulze), 15, 16, 17, 19 agog[, 26, 32 Alexander, 24 alienation, 36, 37, 43, 44, 105, 123, 124 ancient skepticism, 7, 13–17, 19, 20, 35, 36, 47, 76, 77, 80, 95, 97, 98, 140, 141; academics, 16, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 30, 31; Adorno and, 144; Cartesian doubt and, 27, 35, 37, 38, 40, 45, 51; evolution of, 23, 26, 28–30; freedom of, 20; Hegel’s understanding of, 13, 14, 17–19, 20, 22–3, 27, 28, 32–4, 96; information on, 20, 22; interpretation of, 13, 22; modern empiricism and, 13, 19, 27, 35; motivation of, 31–2; Schulze and, 15–17, 20, 22, 23; Stoicism and, 25–6, 30; tropes, 22–3, 28, 30; see also pyrrhonism; reflexivity; skepticism animism, 123, 124 antinomy, 47, 66, 73, 98, 106, 114, 115, 143; of law, 66; see also Critique of Pure Reason appearances, 16, 26, 27, 29, 44, 45, 81 apperception, 65, 70, 71, 78, 79, 134; unity of, 6, 64, 65, 77, 78, 84, 128

apprehension, 27, 33, 84, 96, 143; versus comprehension, 92 Arcesilaus, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30 arch[, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 50, 67, 74, 76, 82, 87, 89, 97, 105, 141; arch[-necessity, 79, 80, 88, 97, 132 Archimedean point, 44 architectonic, 67, 140 Arendt, Hannah, 25, 41, 43–4 Aristotle, 23, 24, 62 Aron, Raymond, 116 asceticism, 43, 44, 117, 118, 119 ataraxia, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32 atomization, 105, 110 azetetos, 27, 44, 144 Beck, Lewis White, 60 Beiser, Frederick,16 belief, 14, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 28, 32, 40, 46, 47; certainty and, 27; living without, 26; see also doubt Benjamin, Walter, 135 Berlin, Isaiah, 109 Bernstein, J.M., 40, 124 Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 117 block, 27, 52, 106, 130, 133, 134, 143–5 Burnyeat, Miles, 32, 36 Capital (Marx), 129 capitalism, 105, 115, 124, 129, 131; global, 105; spirit of, 124 Carneades, 22, 23, 29, 31 categories, 66, 70, 84, 85, 86, 98, 103, 105, 108, 121, 127, 129, 134, 135, 141, 142; of reflection, 87, 103; of representation, 41; of resemblance, 41; table of, 62, 67; of the understanding, 8, 62–3, 65, 68, 74, 131, 133

176

Index causality, 65, 73, 86, 109; objectivity of, 58, 61, 64, 74, 83, 87 certainty, 16, 19, 20, 26, 27, 33, 38, 39, 42, 43, 45, 50, 51, 55, 59, 62, 80; desire for, 40, 42; meaning of, 40–1; self-evidence and, 39–41; see also doubt Christianity, 14, 118 Cicero, 22, 26, 28, 29 civil society, 55, 66 Clitomachus, 29 Cogito ergo Sum, 37, 38, 47–51; as inference, 48; as performative, 49; self-evidence and, 45, 47 commodities, 37, 121, 129, 132; commodification, 115, 130; commodity fetishism, 123, 128; commodity form, 129, 142 common root (of understanding and intuition), 69, 110, 143 Copernican Revolution, 55 critical theory, divisions within, 1, 88; as research program, 8; Hegel and, 2, 6, 8, 88, 99, 103, 125, 127–8; modernity and, 6, 36, 41, 103, 104, 120; philosophy and, 1, 2, 103–6, 127 Critique of Pure Reason (first Critique) (Kant), 4, 17, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 72, 74, 77, 82, 90, 111, 134; “Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection”, 68, 69, 108; “Antinomy of Pure Reason”, 4, 74; “Paralogisms of Pure Reason”, 80; “Schematism”, 143 de-divinization, 7, 122 deduction, 48, 59, 66, 67, 71, 75, 84, 86, 97, 128, 133; meaning of, 57–8, 66; see also transcendental deduction democracy, 114 Derrida, Jacques, 99 Descartes, René, 3, 4, 7, 33, 35–51, 55, 57, 72, 80, 81, 91 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 7, 8, 103, 104, 106, 107, 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128; as

177

critique of modernity, 125; interpretations of, 122–4; Negative Dialectics and, 127, 139; standpoint of, 119 dialectics, 76, 99, 119, 126, 137, 141; negative, 6, 8, 104, 128, 130, 134, 140, 141, 144; speculative, 76, 99 differance, 99 difference, see identity differentiation, 105, 121, 129 Diogenes Laertius, 2, 29 Discourse on Method (Descartes), 38 disenchantment, 104, 105, 129 dogma, 7, 18, 20, 29, 30, 37, 47 domination, 104, 108, 109, 115, 120, 121, 123, 129, 139, 142; will to, 123, 124 doubt, 7, 17, 19, 30, 33, 34, 37, 44, 45, 63, 73, 83, 94; belief and, 20; Cartesian, 4, 35–8, 41, 43–5, 49, 51, 95; certainty and, 26, 38–9, 41; in Hume, 60–1, 85; hyperbolic, 49, 50; meaning of, 20–1, 27; method of, 38, 43, 45, 47; pathway of, 95; skepticism and, 20; stages of, 44, 45–8; universal, 44–5; see also ancient skepticism; belief; skepticism Durkheim, Emile, 105 economics, 114, 115 Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Weber), 114 ego, 71, 79, 80, 86, 87, 99; see also self emotivism, 112 empiricism, 15, 19, 35, 56, 58, 66, 137, 141; idealism and, 17; rationalism and, 35; skeptical, 4, 13, 18, 19, 27, 35, 83, 95, 103, 104, 106, 107, 110, 117, 119, 124; see also ancient skepticism; skepticism Encyclopaedia Logic (Hegel), 14, 21, 76 enlightenment, 4, 7, 16, 42, 104, 105, 108, 111, 112, 116, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 133, 144; meaning of, 121, 124; myth and, 119–20, 122, 123, 124, 125; self-conception of, 119, 125; world-view of, 109

178

Index

Epicureanism, 13, 21, 22–5, 26, 48 Epicurus, 24, 25, 26 epistemology, 8, 15, 17, 25, 43, 67, 106, 118, 134, 135, 136; demise of, 2, 3, 5 epoch[, 26–9, 30, 31, 32 essence, 37, 108, 135; logic of, 85 eudaimonia, 23–4, 31 experience, 33, 36, 37, 45, 47, 51, 58, 59, 74, 78, 105, 115, 119, 129, 137, 142; doubt and, 44, 51; in Hegel’s Phenomenology, 91–3, 94, 97; Hegel’s theory of, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 140; Kant’s theory of, 55, 56, 59, 60–2, 64, 77, 80–1, 84–5, 98; legitimation of, 8, 60, 67, 70, 71, 83, 109; limits of, 15, 61, 74; ordinary, 18, 19, 66, 72, 80, 98; reflection and, 18, 19, 21, 30, 33, 68–73, 78, 81–2, 84, 106, 137, 141, 143; speculative, 3; see also reflection external world, loss of, 28, 44–6, 78; problem of, 35, 36, 45 fact-value distinction, 106, 109, 111 faith, 7, 30, 43, 51 Faith and Knowledge (Hegel), 82, 85, 99 Fichte, J.G., 3, 8, 17, 51, 56, 67, 69–72, 75, 77–87, 89, 91–3, 96, 97, 109, 127, 128, 131, 132, 139, 141 Forster, Michael, 22 Foucault, Michel, 41, 42, 118, 123 foundationalism, 3, 37, 122 founding/grounding act, 50, 80 Frankfurt, Harry, 39 Frankfurt School, see critical theory Galilei, Galileo, 43 Gassendi, Pierre, 48 genealogy, 35, 117 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 116, 117, 124 general will, 56–7 geometry, 37, 59 German idealism, 13, 72, 77, 103, 127, 130, 131, 132, 135, 139, 141; critical theory and, 82, 103, 128;

development of, 7, 51, 103, 125, 131, 133; see also idealism Habermas, Jurgen, 1–3, 88, 122, 123, 138 Hamman, J.G., 3 Harris, H.S., 22 Hegel, G.W.F., 1–8, 13–20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32–7, 51, 56, 57, 72, 74–9, 81–99, 103, 104, 106–8, 111, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125–8, 130, 131, 134–7, 140, 141, 143 “Hegel’s Concept of Experience” (Heidegger), 93 Heidegger, Martin, 36–7, 48–9, 93, 143 Hellenistic philosophy, 13, 14, 23, 24 Henrich, Dieter, 57, 58, 63, 72, 81 Herder, J.G., 16 Hintikka, Jaatko, 49, 51 historicism, 2, 13, 16, 17, 20, 106, 120 History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Lukács), 37, 128 homo oeconomicus, 113, 124 Horkheimer, Max, 1, 7, 8, 88, 103–6, 110, 111, 115, 119–24, 127, 128, 132, 135 The Human Condition (Arendt), 43 Hume, David, 3, 4, 7, 8, 15–19, 27, 32, 33, 56, 58, 60–6, 68, 72–4, 77, 80–3, 85, 87, 91, 95, 104, 109, 110, 117 Hume’s antinomy, 80, 81 Hume’s Fork, 109–10 Hume’s Law, 109–10 Hume’s principle, 61 Hume’s problem, 61, 62, 64, 83 hyper-skepticism, 64 idealism, 2, 5, 84, 95, 98, 106, 130, 131, 133, 134, 139, 140–3; Fichtean, 86, 92, 141; liquidation of, 106; materialism and, 121; objective, 5, 51, 65, 106; speculative, 77; subjective, 5, 82, 85, 131, 137; transcendental, 62, 70, 86; see also empiricism; German idealism

Index identity, 6, 41, 42, 68, 79, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 99; absolute, 120; abstract, 78; difference and, 41, 42, 68, 84, 99, 141; identity-thinking, 8, 105, 130, 134, 141–3; non-identity and, 6, 87, 98, 99, 141, 143, 144, 145; relative, 86; of the subject, 60, 75, 83; see also absolute, Hegel’s; Negative Dialectics ideology, 5, 47, 111, 115, 121, 123, 130 immanence, principle of, 124 immediacy, 16, 18–19, 36, 48, 59, 86–7, 91–2, 118, 137, 144, incommensurability, 35, 111, 121 industrialism, 121, 123 instrumentalism, 40, 104, 107, 111, 116 intuition, 50, 51, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 69, 70, 77, 82, 83, 84, 85, 133, 143; intellectual, 26, 70, 79, 80, 85, 86, 87, 91 irrationalism, 7, 107 isosthenia, 28, 29, 30, 73 Jacobi, F.H., 16 Jarvis, Simon, 124, 137 judgments, 51, 62, 68; synthetic a priori, 63, 67, 82, 83, 87, 117 Kant, Immanuel, 2–6, 8, 14–17, 31, 33, 55–72, 74–85, 87, 89–94, 96–9, 104, 106–10, 117, 118, 127, 128, 130–4, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145 katalepsis, 26 Kortian, Garbis, 2, 3, 88 Kuehn, Manfred, 60, 61 labor, 44, 105, 110, 120, 135, 142 law, 25, 55, 57, 64, 66, 117; antinomy of, 66 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Hegel), 14 legitimacy, 8, 33, 55, 58–60, 63, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 83; meaning of, 57; reflexivity and, 56, 57 liberalism, 4, 107, 111, 113, 115, 122

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Locke, John, 110 Logic (Kant), 68 logic of representation, 41 logic of resemblance, 41 lucretius, 24 Lukács,Georg, 37, 42, 127–34, 136, 138, 139, 144 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 3, 138 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 25 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 25, 111–13, 143 Marcuse, Herbert, 1, 105, 110, 128, 135 Marx, Karl, 1, 2, 36, 37, 77, 92, 93, 105, 123, 124, 128–30, 132, 142 Marx, Werner, 77, 92, 93 Marxism, 1, 2, 120, 121, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 134, 135 materialism, 4, 8, 42, 43, 121, 123, 129, 139; versus idealism, 120 mathematics, 37, 39, 42, 62, 63, 74 McDowell, John, 45 medicine, 24 Meditations (Descartes), 38, 39, 40, 45, 49, 50, 51, 55, 72, 91 metacritique, 3, 6, 23, 66, 88, 89, 96, 136, 137–8, 140; meaning of, 15, 88, 137, 140, 141; of systems, 138–40 Metakritik der Epistemologie (Adorno), 140 meta-narratives, 2, 138 metaphysics, 4, 37, 42, 48, 56, 62, 80, 143, 144, 145; mourning and, 143, 145; overcoming of, 107; post-metaphysical thinking, 2, 138 Metrodorus, 26 Middle Academy, 28, 29 morality, 109, 111, 112, 125; justification of, 111, 112 Morris, John, 50, 51 myth, 7, 107, 119, 121, 123, 124, 132, 144; see also enlightenment natural consciousness, 17, 18, 19, 66, 72–3, 74, 82, 86, 87–8, 91, 93–5, 97 natural light, 50–1

180

Index

negative dialectics, see dialectics Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 6, 8, 104, 106, 107, 119, 120, 121–31, 133–45; “Concepts and Categories”, 134; identitythinking in, 141–2; metacritique in, 137, 139–40; presentation of, 138; self-completing skepticism and, 136, 137, 140; see also Dialectic of Enlightenment neo-Kantianism, 37, 120, 136 New Left, 1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 8, 16, 67, 99, 104, 106–11, 116–19, 123, 124, 127, 138, 139, 141 nihilism, 8, 16, 67, 104, 107, 108, 109, 111, 116, 117, 119, 127; forms of, 107–8; self-completing, 116, 119 Nussbaum, Martha, 23, 24, 31, 32 objective reality, 59, 60, 62, 63, 83; and objective validity, 59–60, 62 Odysseus, 124 “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy” (1801 essay) (Hegel), 14–20, 22, 94, 95, 119 ontological moment, 133, 134, 143, 144 ontology, 36, 37, 48, 90, 93, 106, 128, 135, 138, 143–4 The Order of Things (Foucault), 41 Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Sextus), 20, 22 Parmenides (Plato), 28 perspectivism, 118 phenomenology, 35, 43, 77–8, 89–90, 106 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 3, 4, 6, 7, 14, 16, 17, 72, 89, 91–4, 96, 97, 98, 99, 104, 106, 119, 128, 136, 138; as education, 97; as historico-transcendental deduction, 96; interpretations of, 90, 92, 93–7; Introduction, 5, 6, 19, 21, 31, 37, 76, 89, 106, 125, 137; method of, 6, 8, 14, 17, 32, 35; path of, 89, 94, 96; Preface, 89, 90, 92, 97; science of the experience of consciousness and,

92; “Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy Consiousness”, 14; structure of, 18, 33, 77, 87, 88, 89; table of contents of, 90 Plato, 23, 24, 26, 28, 51, 118 positivism, 5, 106, 113, 134 presuppositionlessness, 51, 138, 140 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (Kant), 61, 62, 63, 83 protestantism, see reformation Pyrrho of Elis, 15, 22, 23, 26, 28, 29, 30 Pyrrhonism, 22, 30, 31, 32 question of right (quid juris), 58, 63, 64, 66, 77, 78, 83, 94; and question of fact (quid facti), 58, 64, 66 rationalism, 4, 7, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42, 48, 58, 110, 131, 133, 138; see also empiricism rationality, 4, 7, 35, 55, 103, 106, 107, 112, 113, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125, 128, 135; dissolvent, 119, 122; formal, 104, 107, 117, 119, 121, 142; as ideology, 121; instrumental, 88, 103, 104, 107, 111, 113, 116, 125; substantive, 114–16; see also reason; value rationalization, 105, 110, 111, 113, 129 realism, 5, 17, 43, 65, 93 reality, 27, 30, 43, 44, 47, 86, 94, 110, 121, 133; objective, 59–60, 62–3, 83; social, 8, 132, 135 reason, 2, 4, 6, 15, 17, 20, 23, 35, 37, 39, 43, 45, 50, 51, 55, 58, 61, 66, 73, 76, 77, 80, 82, 98, 103, 104, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 120, 121, 123, 127, 128, 131, 144; crisis of, 14, 66, 103, 104, 108, 128, 130; critique of, 5, 8, 14, 15, 16, 84, 93; disuniting of, 109, 110; experience and, 58, 59, 73; ideas of, 67, 82, 116, 133, 144, 145; interests of, 79, 80; mathematical, 37, 51; subject-centered, 131; tribunal of, 55, 66, 72, 94, 117; unity of, 4, 109; see also rationality; understanding

Index Reason and Revolution (Marcuse), 135 reflection, 18, 38, 78, 79, 106, 135, 138, 139, 145; circle of, 81; concepts of, 19, 21, 67–8, 69–70, 72, 77–8, 84, 86–7, 92, 108; in Hegel’s Phenomenology (as philosophical consciousness), 18, 87, 94, 96, transcendental, 69–71; see also experience reflexivity, 2, 8, 16, 52, 57, 64, 65, 117, 118, 119, 124, 132, 134, 141, 143, 144; ancient skepticism and, 20–1, 28, 32, 34; reflexive skepticism, 56, 77, 78, 82, 83, 85, 87, 97, 117, 141; see also legitimacy Reformation, 43, 55 Regulae (Descartes), 50 reification, 37, 128, 129, 130, 133, 142, 145 Reinhold, Karl, 15 relativism, 110, 118 ressentiment, 139 Rorty, Richard, 3, 118, 122, 138 Rose, Gillian, 66, 77, 97, 98, 136 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 24, 51, 56, 57, 71, 72, 81 Schelling, F.W.J., 99 scholasticism, 7, 40, 41, 42, 45, 138 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 64, 65, 67, 78, 107 Schulze, G.E., 3, 14–20, 22, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 64, 65, 88, 95, 96, 103 Science of Knowledge (Fichte), 67–9, 71, 72, 75, 81 Science of Logic (Hegel), 14, 77, 85, 86, 90, 96, 98, 141 Sedley, David, 29 self, 38, 39, 40, 48, 50, 69, 70, 71, 79; as identical, 65; see also apperception self-completing skepticism, see skepticism Sextus Empiricus, 20, 22, 23, 28, 29, 31, 47 Simmel, Georg, 129 skepsis, 20 skepticism: Hegel’s classification of, 22; meaning of, 3, 4, 6, 7, 13, 20, 21, 38, 40, 77; modern, 21, 27, 33, 34, 35, 61, 94; moral, 109; motivation

181

for, 14, 31, 32, 37, 38, 42, 43, 71, 74, 79, 95, 140; nihilism and, 8, 116, 119, 127; self-completing, 6, 7, 8, 33, 76, 77, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95, 96, 97, 116, 117, 128, 131, 137, 139, 140, 145; thoroughgoing, 95; see also ancient skepticism Sloterdijk, Peter, 41, 42, 43 the Social Contract (Rousseau), 56 social theory, 2, 5, 111, 130, 135, 136; philosophy and, 130, 135 society, 5, 104, 105, 106, 120, 128, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 142; capitalist, 105, 129, 131; evolution of, 120, 121; as second nature, 129, 142 sociology, 2, 105, 112, 120, 136; of knowledge, 135, 136; philosophy and, 135 solidarity, 105, 135 solipsism, 91 space, 44, 59, 60; and place, 36 speculation, 4, 18, 33, 76, 77, 99 Stevenson, C.L., 112 Stoicism, 13, 14, 21, 22–6, 29, 30 Strauss, Leo, 21, 27 subjectivity, 31, 38–9, 124, 144; problem of, 36, 99, 131, 144; subjectivization/ de-subjectivization, 36, 39, 42, 48, 57 symmetry, 67, 78, 90 synthetic method (Kant), 65 systems, 6, 8, 32, 33, 37, 42, 50, 51, 67, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98–9, 105, 108, 109, 118, 119, 127, 128, 130, 131, 132, 145; arch[ necessity and, 79, 88, 97; Fichte’s, 77, 78, 81, 85, 87, 127, 131; Hegel’s, 51, 77, 88, 130, 135, 137, 141; inner necessity of, 79, 80, 98; Kant’s, 15, 82, 83, 85, 106, 133, 134; metacritique of, 136–41, 145 table of judgments, 62, 67, 74, 82 Taylor, Charles, 3 telos, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 76, 97 thing-in-itself, 64, 69, 83, 131, 134; as limit, 130, 133 time, 44, 60, 143

182 Index transcendental deduction, 8, 55–67, 70, 72, 81, 83, 91; demand for, 58–60, 67, 71, 75, 86; in first and second editions of Kant’s first Critique, 65–6; historicotranscendental, 96; necessity of, 60, 66, 80, 83; necessity of demand for, 80, 81, 82, 83; see also Critique of Pure Reason transcendental place, 69 transcendental standpoint, 125 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 72 understanding, 5, 21, 50, 56, 61, 62, 64, 67, 68, 69, 74, 80, 83, 84, 96, 143, 144; concepts of, 8, 55, 57, 58, 59, 60, 62, 68, 74, 131, 133; reason and, 80, 82, 131 universalism, 21, 123 universalization, 41, 42, 44, 45 utility, 108, 109, 111, 112, 115

value, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119; exchange-value and use-value, 129, 132, 133; hypothetical versus categorical judgments of, 113, instrumental versus intrinsic, 113, 114; law of, 105; self-expanding, 129; value-free rationality, 112, 115, 116; value-rational action, 114–16 Vico, Giambattista, 42 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 115 Weber, Max, 43, 104, 105, 107, 111–16, 119, 124, 129 will to power, 117, 139 The Will to Power (Nietzsche), 108, 116, 139 will to truth, 117–19 world spirit, 25, 120, 125 Zarathustra, 117