History and Freedom

Lectures 1964-1965

Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745630137, 9780745630120
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factors that prevented him from identifying a definitive plan for the future course of history was his feelings of solidarity with the victims and losers. As for the future, the course of events was to remain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to a Hölderlin-like openness. This trace of the messianic has what he called the colour of the concrete as opposed to mere abstract possibility.

Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on the road leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. The second of these was concerned with the topics of history and freedom. In terms of content, these lectures represented an early version of the chapters in Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant and Hegel. In formal terms, these were improvised lectures that permit us to glimpse a philosophical work in progress.

The text published here gives us an overview of all the themes and motifs of Adorno's philosophy of history: the key notion of the domination of nature, his criticism of the existentialist concept of a historicity without history and, finally, his opposition to the traditional idea of truth as something permanent, unchanging and ahistorical.

PART I
HISTORY

LECTURE 1
PROGRESS OR REGRESSION?¹

10 November 1964

Adorno's notes for this lecture:

Refer to the special situation of this lecture course.²

From a book on dialectics, i.e., to be treated as completed sections of a dialectical philosophy; that is to say, not as individual phenomena independent of the overall conception.

Legitimate in the sense that the two complexes to be treated have always been at the core of a dialectical philosophy.

Thus in Kant the relation of the realm of freedom to history is mediated by conflict [Antagonismus].

While in Hegel history is regarded immediately as progress in the consciousness of freedom, such that consciousness for Hegel amounts to a realized freedom.³

This doctrine is extremely precarious. Shall concentrate on its problematic nature, i.e., the actual historical relation of universal and particular.

Even with the greatest generosity and with the aid of a spiral theory,⁴ it is no longer possible to make the case for such progress directly:

objectively, because of the increasingly dense texture of society both in the East and in the West, the intensification of the process of concentration and of bureaucratization which has the effect of reducing people more and more to the status of functions. Freedom is limited to self-preservation. Even the most highly placed are merely functions of their function.

subjectively, because of ego-weakness, addiction to consumption, conformism. Nothing seems less plausible than the claim that there is progress in the consciousness of freedom, even allowing for the progressive democratization of formal political institutions, since these find themselves opposed by both the substance of social power and human apathy. Indifference to freedom. Neutralization of mind. Depoliticization of science.

After Auschwitz, a regression that has already taken place and is not merely expected à la Spengler, not only every positive doctrine of progress but also even every assertion that history has a meaning has become problematic and affirmative. There is here a transformation of quantity into quality. Even if the murder of millions could be described as an exception and not the expression of a trend (the atom bomb), any appeal to the idea of progress would seem absurd given the scale of the catastrophe.*

[Interpolation] *Problem: what is the relation of progress to the individual – a question brushed aside by the philosophy of history.

Simply by asking what history is over and above the facts, the history of philosophy seems inexorably to end up in a theory of the meaning of history.

This applies even to so-called negative or pessimistic histories of philosophy such as Spengler's.⁵

Cultural morphology – overarching patterns = organic teleologies; cultures would then have at least as much purpose – ‘meaning’ – as the plants to which Spengler compares them; they would be living beings in their own right, a solace for individual subjects.⁶

Incidentally, where Spengler attributes the unity of a cultural sphere to its soul, it would be more logical to ascribe it to the unity of its modes of production.

Even in Spengler, the anti-idealist, there is a latent idealism in his explanation of history as arising from within human beings.

Question: is the philosophy of history possible without such latent idealism, without the guarantee of meaning?

10 November 1964⁷

[From Hilmar Tillack's notes]⁸ When one grows older and is forced to choose between one's duty as professor to give lectures and the desire to follow one's own philosophical bent, one develops a certain peasant cunning. In the case of this course of lectures, I shall focus on two complexes taken from a philosophical work in progress⁹ that I have been engaged on for years, two core themes, samples of dialectical philosophy, concerned, on the one hand, with the relation of world spirit to the history of nature, and on the other, with the doctrine of freedom.

In Kant's philosophy of history, the essence of which is distilled in the ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, the realm of freedom into which individuals might hope to enter is brought together with history. For his part admittedly, in his practical philosophy, Kant is inclined to think of this freedom as existing in the here and now. It is supposed to arise as a result of conflict [Antagonismus]. This resembles Hobbes's earlier view of a war of all against all, the savage conflicts in which mankind has nothing to gain and that result in the famous contracts founding the states.¹⁰ Objectively, Hegel takes over the idea of working one's way forward through conflict but, by adding the idea of the cunning of reason, he intensifies it into a metaphysics, a theory of progress in the consciousness of freedom. History becomes a radical movement in the direction of freedom. ‘Consciousness of freedom’ does not refer to individual, subjective consciousness, but to the spirit that objectively realizes itself through history, thus making freedom a reality. This theory of progress, as an advance in freedom, is highly vulnerable.

I do not propose to give you a general introduction to the philosophy of history of the kind you will find in writers such as Mehlis,¹¹ Bernheim¹² or Georg Simmel.¹³ Instead, my specific approach focuses on the relationship between freedom and the individual. This is in large part identical with the relation of the universal, the great objective trend, to the particular. This dialectical and logical approach is almost more important than the direct discussion of the structural problems of history. I may note, incidentally, that I agree with Liebrucks¹⁴ here that Hegel's authentic statement of this dialectical philosophy of history is to be found in his Logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit rather than elsewhere. Without wasting time on the overworked notion of a spiral development in history, it can be said that a direct progress towards freedom cannot be discerned. Objectively, such progress is impossible because of the increasingly dense texture of society in both East and West; the growing concentration of the economy, the executive and the bureaucracy has advanced to such an extent that people are reduced more and more to the status of functions. What freedom remains is superficial, part of the cherished private life, and lacks substance as far as people's ability to determine their own lives is concerned. In reality they are only given free rein in limited activities because they could not stand it otherwise, and all such licence is subject to cancellation. Even in the sphere of consumption – significantly, this term has displaced what used to be called enjoyment – they have become appendages of the machinery. Goods are not produced for their sake and their consumption satisfies people's own desires only very indirectly and to a very limited extent. Instead, they have to make do with what the production line spews out. Freedom becomes impoverished, jejune, and is reduced to the possibility of sustaining one's own life. Mankind has reached a point today where even those on the commanding heights cannot enjoy their positions because even these have been whittled away to the point where they are merely functions of their own function. Even captains of industry spend their time working through mountains of documents and shifting them from one side of their desk to the other, instead of ignoring office hours and reflecting in freedom. Were they to pursue the latter course, their businesses would collapse in chaos. Where an optimum of freedom seems to have survived people cannot avail themselves of it. If you were to sit down, reflect, and make decisions, you would soon fall behind and become an eccentric, like the Savage in Huxley's Brave New World.¹⁵

Freedom is also a realm of subjective experience; that is to say, it is not just to be assessed by some objective standard. Where a subjective interest, a consciousness, is absent, there can be no freedom. Where objective conditions cease to favour a person or a category, or even obstruct and undermine them, there will be a corresponding loss of interest in them, and hence of the strength and the ability required to help them to prosper. Spengler says that Rousseau is starting to be a bore, and Marx even more so.¹⁶ We need not discuss the truth of this claim here, but we can concede that the pathos of freedom in 1789 had its purely decorative side, one that continued to reverberate down to the middle of the nineteenth century. Nowadays, people are unable to get excited about it. They may fear losing the opportunities for consumption, but their interest in expanding freedom is absent. It is an illusion to imagine that freedom is a substantial value merely because words are long-lived. Freedom survives only in remote mountainous regions where there is still resistance to totalitarian tyranny. Elsewhere, it has long since acquired the odium of obsolescence. What is of significance for the internal structure of individuals today is a phenomenon identified by psychoanalysis. This is the phenomenon of ego weakness. David Riesman speaks of inner-directed and other-directed characters.¹⁷ By the latter, the predominant type today, he means the social character whose actions are guided by outside influences. In his case the discrepancy between the development of his ego and the power of the forces that bear down on him has the effect that his ego does not reach the point of a dialectic between his internal and external powers. In consequence he simply conforms. The chaining of people to consumption is an index of this. Political apathy has also become the universal rule in all countries now, as long as direct personal interests are not affected. It should be thought of in the same context. The progressive democratization of political institutions will do nothing to mitigate the loss of a sense of freedom, the growing indifference or the enfeeblement of the desire for freedom because the socio-economic reality of even the freest political institutions stands in the way of such a sense of freedom.

People are not as bound to authority as was supposed as recently as some thirty years ago because of their identification with their father imago. What we are witnessing is rather a neutralizing effect resulting from the pressure to conform. This leads to a closing off of the entire horizon of freedom and dependency. Where no freedom is experienced, there can no longer be any authority. The vanishing of this conceptual pair, freedom and authority, is more significant today than the growing apathy. This process of neutralization is what we must be concerned with. Resistance to the routinization of science is another task that still remains to philosophy.

This process of neutralization should not be thought of as harmless. The loss of a sense of freedom tends to flip over into immediate terror, as is all too evident in Auschwitz. The catastrophe there was not just a disaster predicted by Spengler, but an actual reality, one that makes all talk of progress towards freedom seem ludicrous. The concept of the autonomous human subject is refuted by reality. By the same token, if freedom and autonomy still had any substance, Auschwitz could not have happened. And by Auschwitz I mean of course the entire system. Confronted with the fact that Auschwitz was possible, that politics could merge directly with mass murder, the affirmative mentality becomes the mere assertion of a mind that is incapable of looking horror in the face and that thereby perpetuates it.

What we see here is the transformation of quantity into quality – monstrous though it is to try to operate with the concept of quality in order to grasp the murder of millions. In fact, even to attempt to withstand such events mentally, to shed light on them with the aid of concepts, is to fix them with concepts. To speak of genocide as if it were an institution is to institutionalize it. We thereby assume a second burden of guilt. The change from quantity to quality here has this meaning: in bygone days exceptional situations were exceptions to the main trend. Alternatively, we might treat men such as Tamburlane and Genghis Khan as great natural calamities. Nowadays that has all changed. The horror of our day has arisen from the intrinsic dynamics of our own history; it cannot be described as exceptional. And even if we do think of it as an exception and not the expression of a trend – although this latter is not implausible, given that the atom bomb and the gas chamber have certain catastrophic similarities – to do so is somehow absurd in the light of the scale of the disaster. What can it me...

Table of contents

• COVER
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• EDITOR'S FOREWORD
• PART I: HISTORY
• PART II: PROGRESS
• PART III: FREEDOM
• REFERENCES
• INDEX OF NAMES
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS