In his lecture ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, Adorno pointed out how ‘Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where bourgeois ideology and the dialectic of civil society are so deeply intertwined, had once invoked the state, allegedly beyond the play of social forces, as an agency that could intervene from without, applying special administrative measures, to ameliorate the antagonisms produced by the immanent dialectic of a society which, according to Hegel, would otherwise disintegrate’ (GS 8, p. 367). On this question, see also Adorno’s lecture of 21 February 1963 on the character of philosophical terminology (Philosophische Terminologie, vol. 2 [see note 10 above], pp. 305–19).
12 12 In his book Ideology and Utopia (first published in Bonn in 1929) Karl Mannheim (1893–1947) described the ‘socially unattached intelligentsia’ as that ‘relatively classless stratum’ whose members were best placed, through reflection on their own position, to effect the ‘synthesis’ between the socially conditioned character of knowledge on the one hand and the search for truth – conceived as independent of spatial and temporal factors – on the other (Ideologie und Utopie, 3rd edn, Frankfurt am Main, 1952, p. 135; Ideology and Utopia, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils, London, 1991, pp. 137–8).
13 13 The human being can neither be inherited, nor sold, nor given away; he cannot be the property of anyone because he is his own property, and must remain so. Deep within his breast he bears a spark of divinity which raises him above the animals and makes him a fellow citizen in a world the highest member of which is God – this is his conscience. It commands him utterly and unconditionally – to will this and not that, to do so freely and on one’s own initiative, without external compulsion of any kind. (Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Zurückforderung der Denkfreiheit von den Fürsten Europas, die sie bisher unterdrückten, in Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s sämtliche Werke, ed I. A. Fichte, Bonn, 1834–, and Berlin, 1845–, vol. 6, p. 11.
14 14 See, for example, J. G. Fichte, Beitrag zur Berichtigung der Urteile des Publikums über die französische Revolution, ibid., pp. 37–79, and especially p. 61.
15 15 In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes ‘ratiocination’ [das räsonnieren] as ‘freedom from all content and an attitude of vanity in regard to it’ (Hegel, Werke, vol. 3, Phänomenologie des Geistes, p. 56; Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford, 1970, p.35 (translation modified).
16 16 ‘The history of mankind can be seen, in the large, as the realization of Nature’s secret plan to bring forth a perfectly constituted state as the only condition in which the capacities of mankind can be fully developed, and also bring forth that external relation among states which is perfectly adequate to this end’ (I. Kant, Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht, in Werke in sechs Bänden, vol. 6, p. 45 [A 403]; Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View, trans. Lewis White Beck, in Kant Selections, ed. L. W. Beck, New York, 1988, p. 422.
17 17 In his book Spirit of the Laws of 1748, Montesquieu (1689–1755) had developed John Locke’s constitutionalism and argued for the division of powers between the legislative, the judiciary and the executive.
18 18 Auguste Comte, Soziologie (see note 7 above), vol. 1, p. 45. Contrary to what Adorno says, this passage is included in the Blaschke edition of excerpts from Comte (pp. 47f.).
19 19 In his book Système de politique positive (Paris, 1851–4) Comte presented his conception of a ‘religion of humanity’. Thus he writes:The positivist priesthood must also renew all those functions which refer to our own perfection, in calling upon science to study humanity, poetry to produce song, morality to cultivate love, in order that, through the irresistible cooperation of all three, politics may unceasingly serve humanity. The cult endorsed by the positivists, in contrast to that of the theologians, is by no means directed towards an absolute, isolated and unintelligible being, whose existence cannot be proved and which brooks no comparison with anything else. No mystery shall impair the spontaneous self-evidence which attaches to the new Supreme Being. The latter can only be celebrated, and loved, and served, in accordance with a proper knowledge of the different natural laws which govern its existence, and which are the most complex laws we are capable of observing. (Auguste Comte, System der positiven Politik, trans. Jürgen Brankl, Vienna, 2004, pp. 341f.)
20 20 In his lectures on Kant’s first Critique, Adorno characterizes the kind of ‘Yes, but’ objection which prevents us from asking the questions that really need to be asked as ‘infantile’: ‘For that is precisely what children do when they reply, Yes, but …, to every explanation you give, and when they find that they cannot stop asking questions because they do not understand the matter in hand, but instead just keep on asking questions mechanically. That is to say, they just keep on asking for the sake of asking without ever responding to the resistance in the matter in hand, the resistance created by what it actually refers to’ (NaS IV.4, p. 31; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Livingstone, p. 16).
21 21 Adorno goes into more detail in this regard in his ‘Introduction’ to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology:Comte, whose sociology reveals an apologetic, static orientation, is the first enemy of both metaphysics and fantasy simultaneously. The defamation of fantasy, or the way it is forced to become a field for specialists subject to the division of labour, is a primal phenomenon of the regression of the bourgeois spirit – not however, as some avoidable error, but more in thrall to that fatal character that couples instrumental reason, which society indeed requires, with the taboo on fantasy. That the latter is only tolerated in reified form, as abstractly opposed to reality, weighs no less heavily on art than it does on science. Legitimate fantasy seeks despairingly to lose this burden. Fantasy is less a question of free invention than of working with a free mind without instant recourse to a realized facticity. (GS 8, p. 336; Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby, London, 1976, p. 51)
22 22 For the ‘very important concept of second nature’, see T. W. Adorno/Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt am Main, 1955, p. 145; Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge, 1999, p. 110. The concept of ‘second nature’ had been employed by Georg Lukács (1885–1971) – who perhaps derived it from §4 of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – in his early Theory of the Novel to describe the nature-like appearance of what has been socially produced (G. Lukács, Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der grossen Epik, 2nd edn, 1963, p. 61; The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, London, 1978, pp. 62f. See also G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, Michel and Moldenhauer, vol. 7: Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, p. 46; Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T. Malcom Knox, rev. and ed. Stephen Houlgate, Oxford, 2008, p. 26). Adorno used the expression very early on to describe ‘the world of things created by human beings and also lost by them’ (GS 1, p. 355). See also Negative Dialektik, GS 6, pp. 350f.; Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London, 1973, pp. 356f.
23 23 Adorno underlined the word ‘political’ here.
24 24 See Lecture 1, note 2.
LECTURE 3 17 May 1960
Ladies and gentlemen,
I would like to continue our discussion of certain passages from Comte’s Cours de philosophie positive that we began in the last session. And I would just remind you that we talked about the way in which the concept of observation and therefore of what is factual gets played off in Comte against the realm of the imagination. I would also remind you that Comte believes that the neglect of the facts is encouraged by the untamed exercise of the imagination, a neglect that he identifies with a failed or inadequate adaptation to the actual given circumstances of society. In Comte, therefore, you already find, in rudimentary form, something like the theory of adaptation that later played such an important role in Spencer, and indeed has continued to dominate the field in American sociology to this day. I would add, in passing, that all this is not without interest in historical terms, for many of you will know that