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Adorno and Habermason the HumanConditionDeborah Cookaa
University of Windsor, CanadaPublished online: 21 Oct 2014.
To cite this article: Deborah Cook (2002) Adorno andHabermas on
the Human Condition, Journal of theBritish Society for
Phenomenology, 33:3, 236-259,
DOI:10.1080/00071773.2002.11007384
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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 33. No.3.
October 2002
ADORNO AND HABERMAS ON THE HUMAN CONDITION DEBORAH COOK
For millennia philosophers have defined human beings as rational
animals. But they have differed in the stress they place on these
definiens. For Plato, reason is humanity's divine spark, but desire
is by far the largest and most powerful element in human existence.
In a metaphor as vivid as his cave allegory, Plato compared desire
to an unruly horse, "huge, but crooked, a great jumble of a
creature, with a short, thick neck, a flat nose, dark color, grey
bloodshot eyes, the mate of insolence and knavery, shaggy-eared and
deaf, hardly heeding whip or spur."' Hence, reason was assigned the
role of a charioteer who would reign in the dark horse of bodily
desire and lead the soul towards the idea of the good. Centuries
passed before philosophers like Hume would draw the opposite
conclusion: reason is, and ought to remain, subordinate to the
passions. Philosophers were quick to respond to Hume's audacious
attack on the sovereignty of reason. Kant ascribed to reason the
power to structure experience with its transcendental categories,
and Hegel proclaimed the real rational and the rational real. By
the mid-nineteenth century, however, Marx tried to unmask these
claims using ideology critique, while Nietzsche argued that reason
resides in the body and its will to power. With his theory of the
instincts as the basis of behaviour, Freud also wounded our
narcissistic understanding of ourselves as masters of our acts and
thoughts. Yet, with some important qualifications, the aim of
psychoanalysis is largely Platonic: where the irrational id was,
there the rational ego shall be.
This dispute about the relationship between reason and desire
has taken an interesting tum in the work of Theodor W. Adorno and
Jiirgen Haberrnas. Where Adorno adopts Freud's instinct theory, and
sees a conflict between reason and the instinctual dimension of
human existence, Habermas maintains that reason has superseded the
instincts during the course of social evolution. Indeed, these
social theorists have strikingly divergent views about the
evolutionary course of reason in human history. In a third point of
contrast, Adorno maintains that reason today is largely pathic; it
distorts those instincts that might otherwise counter its reifying
effects. Against this, Haberrnas postulates an advanced stage of
communicative reason that serves as a counterweight to the
distortions of communicative action caused by incursions into the
lifeworld of the functionalist rationality of the economic and
political systems. So, although both agree that reason in at least
one of its contemporary guises poses a threat to human welfare,
they differ strongly
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in their views about the nature of this threat, and about how it
may best be foiled. In what follows, these three aspects of
Adorno's and Habermas' work will be assessed. After comparing their
divergent conceptions of human nature by examining the relationship
between reason and desire that each theorist posits, I shall
outline their conflicting views about the evolution of reason.
Finally, Adorno's and Habermas' disparate claims about the more
evolved forms of reason in modern societies will be evaluated. The
significance of their debate extends beyond theory; it ultimately
concerns our capacity effectively to change existing political,
economic, and social conditions such that these conditions become
more beneficial to human life. Our fate is bound inextricably to
the vicissitudes of an evolving reason whose controversial
character will be plumbed in this paper.
The Human Being If philosophers have generally agreed that human
beings are rational
animals, Adorno appears at times to give greater weight to the
animal over the rational dimension of human existence. When he
speaks of the preponderance or precedence (Vorrang) of the object
in Negative Dialectics, for example, Adorno is referring (among
other things) to the preponderance of the somatically-based drives
or instincts over mentation. If philosophers like Kant allowed "no
movens of practice but reason," Adorno rehearses the objections of
many other thinkers (from Hobbes, through Hume, to Merleau-Ponty)
when he writes that "practice also needs something else, something
physical which consciousness does not exhaust, something conveyed
to reason and qualitatively different from it."2 In his critique of
Kant's idea of freedom, Adorno posits a physical addendum (das
Hinzutretende), originally untamed impulse, "the rudiment of a
phase in which the dualism of extramental and intramental was not
thoroughly consolidated yet, neither volitively bridgeable nor an
ontological ultimate" (ND, 228). Conceding that this addendum may,
at most, be sublimated, Adorno also states that its complete
elimination would render action impossible.3 Hence, the freedom of
Kant's transcendental subject is entirely illusory: to the extent
that freedom entails the freedom to act, the only freedom possible
belongs to the embodied subject situated in space and in time.
Adorno infers the precedence of the object from the possibility
of conceiving an object that is not a subject and the concomitant
impossibility of fully conceiving a subject that is not an object
(ND, 183). Disembodied and supposedly "pure," Kant's transcendental
subject is ultimately unthinkable or unintelligible.4 At the same
time, Adorno warns against placing "the object on the orphaned
royal throne once occupied by the subject." To give the object
logical primacy would be to tum it into "an idol." For Adorno, the
"purpose of critical thought" is not to make the object usurp the
place of the subject, but
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rather "to abolish the hierarchy" (ND, 181 ). Like Merleau-
Ponty, Adorno battles on two fronts. Against idealism, he argues
that in order to exist at all, the subject must first exist as an
object; it must be something objective itself in order to grasp
objects. Reason is a thing of this world and, as such, its
development reflects that of the animal life of the human species.
Against empiricism, Adorno argues that a subjective "moment"
necessarily inheres in the idea of an object, qua idea. Struggling
(sometimes unsuccessfully) to advance a dialectical account of the
relationship between subject and object, Adorno criticizes Hume's
conception of an objectivity completely detached from the subject:
if the object "lacked the subject as a moment, then its objectivity
would be nonsense. "5
The subject is ineliminably material, objective. Yet it is also
the case that the capacity for abstraction, for thinking in
universal concepts, defines the subject. Simply put: "Abstraction
is the subject's essence" (ND, 181 ). By virtue of its cognitive
development, consciousness has secured a degree of independence not
only from objects but also, and by extension, from its own material
substance. With anthropogenesis: "the consciousness that has become
independent, and is epitomized in carrying out cognitive
performances, has branched off from the libidinous energy of
humanity's species being." Adorno immediately adds that human
nature is not indifferent to this development because our very
diremption from the instincts nonetheless implies that
consciousness remains "a function of the living subject" (ND, 185;
translation altered). Since "mental activity can be attributed to
no one and to nothing but the living," it follows that a "natural
element infiltrates even the concept which most highly overshoots
all naturalism: the concept of subjectivity as the synthetic unity
of apperception" (ND, 20 I). What the diremption of consciousness
from nature ultimately means is that "everything mental is modified
physical impulse." So, even as he dismisses the question of whether
the mind or the body has priority because this question abstracts
from our lived experience, Adorno also cites Schelling: "Urge
[Drang] ... is the mind's preliminary form" (ND, 202; translation
modified).
The modification of physical impulses - which Adorno links to
the emergence of the capacity for self-reflection - has had both
positive and negative consequences. Viewed positively, it entails a
"qualitative recoil into what not merely 'is'," or a capacity for
thinking beyond the given, for speculation (ND, 202). It is in this
way that humanity has succeeded in raising itself above nature.
Following Hegel, Adorno argued that thinking always involves "an
act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it." It
represents "a revolt against being importuned to bow to every
immediate thing" because thought resists "mere things in being,"
and intends in the object "even that of which the object was
deprived by objectification"
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(ND, 19 passim). Twenty years earlier, in Dialectic of
Enlightenment, Adorno and Max Horkheimer had even sounded a
Habermasian note when they remarked that "[e]scape from the dismal
emptiness of existence calls for resistance, and for this speech is
essential." However, the resistance that speech offers to mere
things in being, or to the dismal emptiness of existence, also has
negative consequences. To the degree that cognition inevitably
involves the subsumption of particular objects under universal
concepts, thought has become coercive and the subject deluded about
both the world and itself. If other animals lead "dreary and harsh
lives" because they lack concepts or words "to seize the identical
in the flux of phenomena, to isolate the same species in the
alternation of specimens, or the same thing in altered
situations,"6 homo sapiens often uses its concepts violently to
subjugate both external nature and its own internal nature. Indeed,
Adorno also maintains that reason as it currently exists "is
pathic; nothing but to cure ourselves of it would be rational" (ND,
172).
Adorno based his philosophical anthropology on these reflections
about the relationship between reason and desire - reflections that
have been central to theories of human nature from the inception of
Western philosophy. Still, it must also be noted that Adorno does
not offer a full-fledged philosophy of human nature. As Simon
Jarvis observes, Adorno maintained in his 1965 debate with the
anthropologist Arnold Gehlen that the "only possible anthropology
is a 'negative anthropology' or a 'dialectical anthropology' ."7
This issue is raised again in Negative Dialectics where Adorno
launches an attack on existentialism. Sartre's and Heidegger's
"eureka" (existence precedes essence) loses its "evidential
character" upon the slightest reflection. It is not yet possible to
say what humanity is because "[m]an today is a function, unfree,
regressing behind whatever is ascribed to him as invariant."
Anthropology mistakenly abstracts from "the dehumanization that has
made the subjects what they are," as well as from "the
de-subjectifying process that has paralleled the historic subject
formation since time immemorial." The fact that "we cannot tell
what man is ... vetoes any anthropology" (ND, 124 ). Still, it
should also be clear that Adorno does follow the philosophical
tradition when he identifies reason and desire as the very "stuff'
of human existence. Owing to their mutilation by social conditions,
however, human beings have not yet been able to develop freely as
both reasoning and desiring beings. Currently, reason subjugates
desire by distorting needs and instincts. To the present day, human
history has been the history of domination of man by man. Only when
domination ends will it be possible to say what it is to be
human.
Aligning himself with an equally venerable philosophical
tradition, Habermas successively distances himself from Adorno as
he begins to emphasize the rational dimension of human existence
over the instincts. In
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Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas was already arguing that
language elevates human beings above mere nature because it
embodies a form of 'reason' which simultaneously means 'the will to
reason' .8 The quasi-transcendental interests in technical control,
mutual understanding, and emancipation are derived from nature, but
they also stem "from the cultural break with nature." Although they
realize or actualize natural desire, these interests have
simultaneously "incorporated the tendency toward release from the
constraint of nature." Still, at this early stage in his
philosophical career, Habermas could sound very much like his
former mentor. Like Adorno, Habermas was prepared to acknowledge
that an "enticing natural force [is] present in the individual as
libido."9 And, both theorists make reference to our diremption from
nature. Nevertheless, by the time the magisterial Theory of
Communicative Action appeared in 1981, Habermas had thoroughly
assimilated the demands of the libido to those of reason.
Habermas attempted to incorporate "enticing natural desire" into
his burgeoning linguistic theory as late as 1974. Yet in this
attempt, his fundamental differences with Adorno actually emerge
all the more clearly. The psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook explains
that in "Moral Development and Ego Identity," 10 Habermas was
trying to overcome the Kantian dichotomy between inclination and
duty when he recommended that a seventh stage be added to Lawrence
Kohlberg's psychological theory of moral development (a
recommendation he would later abandon). In the seventh stage,
content from inner nature was to be (re)introduced into cognition.
But Whitebook objects that Habermas managed to reconcile
inclination with duty only by linguistifying inner nature, arguing
that inner nature is already sprachfiihig, or capable of being
articulated in speech. In fact, as Whitebook also points out,
Habermas had already broached this argument in Knowledge and Human
Interests." There, reconciliation was ultimately achieved at the
cost of subsuming eros under logos - a move that even Plato, with
his view of reason as sublimated, "spiritualized," desire in The
Symposium and Phaedrus would not have sanctioned. What Whitebook
overlooks, however, is an equally controversial move that occurred
later in The Theory of Communicative Action where Habermas denies
altogether that desire is a natural force. Rather than existing
objectively as part of nature, or the natural dimension of our
species being, desire is deemed completely subjective. In contrast
to our "cognitions, beliefs, and intentions," which "belong to the
subjective world" but also "stand in relation to the objective
world," human desire has no relation whatsoever "to elements of the
objective world." 12 Conflating desires and feelings, by claiming
that both are rooted in need, Habermas now maintains that desire
-the volitional side of need - "can only be expressed as something
subjective;" it "cannot be expressed otherwise, cannot enter into
relation with the external world, whether the objective or the
social" (TCA I, 91 ).
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By demoting human desires to the status of subjective
expressions that lack any natural, material, or even social,
referents, Habermas has ensured that the instincts can no longer
upstage reason. The diremption with nature discussed in Knowledge
and Human Interests is apparently now complete. Having subjectified
and linguistified inner nature, Habermas also insists that it
submit to the demands of reason. Just as cognitive claims about
states of affairs and normative claims about what ought to be done
can be judged rational or irrational, so too expressions of needs
are more or less rational, depending on the degree to which they
fulfill the ideal presuppositions of communicative reason. With
this notion of reason, Habermas makes "a prior decision for a wider
concept of rationality connected with ancient conceptions of
logos." Like these early conceptions, in which reason was
associated with speech, Habermas' logos "carries with it
connotations based ultimately on the central experience of the
unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of argumentative
speech, in which different participants overcome their merely
subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally
motivated conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the
objective world and the intersubjectivity of their lifeworld" (TCA
I, I 0).
Communicative reason finds its limits only in the functionalist
rationality of the political and economic subsystems, and the
strategic, instrumental, or purposive rationality of individuals.
But Habermas also deems these other modalities of reason, which he
concedes have had pathological effects on communicative action,
"derivative moments that have been rendered independent from the
communicative structures of the lifeworld." 13 Indeed, before it
could be distorted by functionalist or instrumental forms of
reason, communicative action had to develop more or less
autonomously in a process that Habermas calls the "rationalization
of the lifeworld". In this process, "reaching understanding"
revealed itself to be "the inherent telos of human speech" (TCA I,
287). 14 The rational potential of communicative action is located
in the ideal presuppositions that underlie attempts to reach
understanding or agreement about cognitive, moral, and expressive
validity claims. Among other such presuppositions, "[p]articipants
in argumentation have to presuppose in general that the structure
of their communication, by virtue of features that can be described
in purely formal terms, excludes all force - whether it arises from
within the process of reaching understanding itself or influences
it from the outside - except the force of the better argument (and
thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that
of a cooperative search for the truth)" (TCA I, 25). The rational
potential in communicative action is actualized when this ideal
presupposition, and others like it, are satisfied.
Whereas Adorno thinks that a now pathic reason has inflicted a
great deal of damage on an inner nature that is both "intramental
and somatic" (ND,
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228), Habermas believes that a more holistic and salubrious form
of reason envelops even desire. Of course, many philosophers have
claimed that rationality marks our specific difference from other
animals. On Habermas' view, however, we are the bearers of a reason
that appears to have removed us completely from the animal realm by
emancipating itself from what Plato once called the taskmaster of
desire. Rather than trying to bring our rational powers into
harmony with desire or the instincts, Habermas offers a
controversial conception of desire as the subjective expression of
disembodied needs that are potentially rational because they can be
articulated in speech. Even as desiring beings, then, we are always
already rational. Inverting Nietzsche's claim, "body am I entirely,
and nothing else; and the soul is only a word for something about
the body," 15 Habermas seems to believe that human beings are
entirely mind (or "soul"); and the body is only a word for
something about the mind. Indeed, with his monistic conception of
the human being as rational, Habermas hopes to obviate the
difficulties encountered by Adorno and other modem philosophers
with their allegedly Nietzschean invocation of an Other of reason.
Refusing to pit reason against a supposedly heteronomous Other, to
turn it into the "plaything of unmediated forces working upon it,
as it were, mechanically," Habermas proposes his "diremption model"
of reason which "distinguishes solidary social practice as the
locus of a historically situated reason in which the threads of
outer nature, inner nature, and society converge." 16 The only
limits to communicative rationality are the limits of reason
itself.
The Evolution of Reason Like Habermas, Adorno claims that reason
has evolved historically. But
Habermas has objected strenuously to Adorno's account, arguing
that in Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer "expand
instrumental reason into a category of the world-historical process
of civilization as a whole." With their notion of instrumental
reason, they "project the process of reification back behind the
capitalist beginnings of the modem age into the very beginnings of
hominization" (TCA I, 366). Yet, despite these objections, Habermas
expands his own notion of communicative reason into a category in
an over-arching world-historical civilizing process. Where he and
Adorno actually differ is in their views about the form of reason
that has evolutionary primacy. For Adorno, humanity evolved its
rational structures in response to threats posed by external
nature. In fear, the human species slowly differentiated itself
from objects while attempting simultaneously to assimilate them by
equating them with its concepts. As in Habermas, then, reason
develops with the emergence of speech, but speech was not
originally (or inherently) motivated by the attempt to reach
understanding. Rather language evolved as a means to the end of
controlling nature, putting an end
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to the fear of its untamed powers. In their primitive attempts
to gain mastery over nature - attempts that often involved the
violent subjugation of nature -human beings were also obliged to
control or subdue their own inner nature. And, "with the denial of
nature in man not merely the telos of the outward control of nature
but the telos of man's own life is distorted and befogged." 17
In the beginning was the species. Arguing that the individual is
not temporally primary, Adorno countered that in "the history of
evolution, a more likely presumption would be the temporal prius,
or at least the contemporaneousness of the species." He finds
evidence for this assertion about the priority of the species in
nature itself which "on its lower levels teems with unindividuated
organisms." 18 Agreeing with Hegel in The Philosophy of Mind,
Adorno argues that it is out of the primal mud of species being
that we first began to individuate ourselves and to develop egos.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the ego emerges specifically with
the introversion of sacrifice. This transformation of sacrifice
into subjectivity is itself associated with the development of
language and reason, and is epitomized in Odysseus' cunning during
his confrontation with Polyphemus in which he was prepared to deny
himself as "Nobody" in order to save himself. 19 Once the species
had distanced itself by means of language from the nature of which
it was nonetheless inextricably a part, egos increasingly devoid of
content (empty "I''s) were hollowed out, and the fully human self
was sacrificed. These observations about the progressive
individuation of the species are repeated with different emphases
in Negative Dialectics where Adorno again links the emergence of
the ego to the evolution of rationality. Arguing for materialism,
and against Kant's "thesis of subjective apriority," Adorno
criticizes Kant's denial of nature in the subject, insisting that
"no subject of immediate data, no 'I' to which they might be given,
is possible independently of the transsubjective world." In this
context, he also asserts that "in the evolutionary course of
rationality and ego principle, the two have come into opposition to
each other; yet neither is without the other" (ND, 196).
Exercising the capacity conceptually to abstract from nature
with a view to controlling it, individuated egos emerged that
opposed themselves to nature both in practice and in theory. But,
once again, and in stark contrast to Habermas, Adorno insists that
we have not fully severed - nor could we ever fully sever- our
connection with nature. In Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas
had also advanced the view that reason does not merely serve "as an
organ of adaptation for men just as claws and teeth are for
animals"20 because it has broken with nature in the course of its
evolutionary trajectory. Adorno's view runs diametrically counter
to this. Along with Horkheimer, he maintained that, ever since homo
sapiens began to sever itself from nature by means of language,
reason has served the function of an organ of adaptation.21
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Identifying the human race with reason, Adorno and Horkheimer
advance the claim that the "human race with its machines,
chemicals, and organizations -which belong to it just as teeth
belong to a bear, since they serve the same purpose and merely
function more effectively - is the dernier cri of adaptation in
this epoch."22 So, where Habermas not only thinks that human beings
have broken with nature but views this evolutionary break as
emancipatory and self-affirming, Adorno denies that human beings
can ever break fully with nature, while condemning our unceasing
attempts to do so through language as repressive and
self-negating.
Adorno's speculations are not only sketchy, they are as
controversial as all philosophical accounts of the process of
hominization. Indeed, Habermas has often objected that Adorno
smuggles into his account a philosophy of history. In The Theory of
Communicative Action, for example, he criticizes Adorno for
shifting "the primordial history of subjectivity and the
self-formative process of ego identity into an encompassing
historico-philosophical perspective" (TCA I, 380). Habermas'
interpretation of Adorno as presupposing a philosophy of history is
certainly plausible. Although he maintains that it consists in "the
discontinuous, chaotically splintered moments and phases of history
- the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men,
and finally to that over man's inner nature," Adorno does postulate
a line of universal historical development that has led from "the
slingshot to the megaton bomb" (ND, 320). However, other
commentators have resisted the temptation to interpret Adorno's
work as offering a straightforwardly unilinear and teleological
account of history, a '"retrogressive anthropogenesis' ."23 For
example, Martin Jay maintains that this interpretation, while
"justifiable in part," is "too one-sided" because Adorno also
believed that human history "displayed ... the ability to break
dramatically with the course it had been following and open itself
up to something radically different."24 Simon Jarvis concurs: while
domination has accompanied the evolutionary course of reason like a
shadow, human nature is not "irrevocably founded on domination."
With an implicit shot at Habermas, Jarvis adds that, in Dialectic
of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno reject "the cultural
idealist denial that there can be anything natural in social life,
the insistence that social life is cultural 'all the way down'. "25
A future reconciliation of human beings with both outer nature and
their own inner instinctual nature cannot simply be excluded by
fiat. And, if such a reconciliation remains possible, history may
radically change course for the better.
Despite his criticisms of Adorno, and his protestations to the
contrary, Habermas' s own theory of social evolution may also
conceal a philosophy of history. His theory takes shape in a
bricolage of speculative anthropologies dealing with the process of
hominization, of conjectures by Mead about the
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historical emergence of language, Durkheim' s hypotheses about
the origins of religion, and Piaget's and Kohlberg's cognitive
developmental psychologies, among other theories. According to
Habermas, human history consists in a progressive movement forward
"to a growing decentration of interpretive systems and to an
ever-clearer categorical demarcation of the subjectivity of
internal nature from the objectivity of external nature, as well as
from the normativity of social reality and the intersubjectivity of
linguistic reality."26 Examining this evolutionary pattern under
the rubric of the rationalization of the lifeworld, Habermas
attempts to do nothing less than to demonstrate that the more
developed forms of communicative reason (the terminus ad quem of
social evolution defined as rationalization) satisfy
"universalistic claims," or that the "rational internal structure
of processes of reaching understanding" in the West today are
"universally valid" (TCA I, 137).
Although he contends that he has avoided the pitfalls of a
philosophy of history by undergirding the "thematic of
rationalization" with scientific hypotheses about social evolution
(TCA I, 151) - this claim has a hollow ring. To be sure, Habermas
tried to support it in 1976 when he distinguished a Hegelian-like
logic of social evolution (or "the rationally reconstructible
pattern of a hierarchy of more and more comprehensive structures")
from empirical evolutionary processes (or "the processes through
which the empirical substrates develop"). With respect to the
latter, he wrote, "we need require of history neither unilinearity
nor necessity, neither continuity nor irreversibility."27 The
historical course of communicative reason has never run entirely
smoothly. In Nazi Germany, for example, reason became regressive.
28 At the same time, however, the overall pattern or logic of
history reveals the cunning of reason: the logic of history is one
of increasingly comprehensive rational structures. Indeed, Habermas
is also prepared to concede that he does have a teleological view
of history: historical processes exhibit a direction defined in
part by "the maturity of forms of social intercourse."29 In this
respect, Habermas may be interpreted as advancing a conception of
history that Adorno would emphatically reject, namely, that a
universal history leads "from savagery to humanitarianism" (ND,
320).
Learning processes separate us from the "opaque figures of
mythical thought" and the "bizarre expressions of alien cultures."3
Citing Axel Honneth, Whitebook explains that those '"processes of
rationalization, in which he [Habermas] attempts to conceive the
evolution of society'" actually involve '"a suprasubjective
learning process carried by the social system' ."31 Although
Honneth' s interpretation is somewhat problematic because Habermas
did acknowledge in his early work that there is a "circular process
between societal and individual learning"32 - or between what
Habermas calls phylogenesis and ontogenesis in The Theory of
Communicative Action (TCA II, 5) - there is certainly more than a
kernel of truth to it. For, when
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Habermas claims that historical materialism need not assume "a
species subject that undergoes evolution," and focuses instead on
the evolution of "societies and the acting subjects integrated into
them," 33 the "supra-subjective system" does become one of the
carriers of reason. 34 Without rehearsing the objections of
methodological individualists to the view that society can be
conceived independently of the individuals who comprise
it-objections Adorno himself attempted to refute - it should be
clear that Habermas has radically altered the meaning of the word
"phylogenesis" which usually refers to the evolution of the
species, not societies. Not surprisingly, given the foregoing, it
should also be noted that Habermas' theory of social evolution as a
process of societal rationalization expressly rejects the idea that
there is an ongoing natural evolution of the species to which
rationalization is bound. Whereas earlier stages of hominization
did involve both organic and cultural changes, Habermas maintains
that "at the threshold to homo sapiens ... this mixed
organic-cultural form of evolution gave way to an exclusively
social evolution. The natural mechanism of evolution came to a
standstill."35
Societal evolution involves the rationalization of both the
economic and political subsystems and the lifeworld. But the
rationalization of the former depends upon the evolution of
learning processes (rationalization) in the latter because "the
lifeworld remains the subsystem that defines the pattern of the
social system as a whole" (TCA II, 154). Once we had learned to
distinguish clearly between the objective, the social, and the
expressive domains - domains that were often confused or conflated
in tribal societies based on kinship relations and, later still, in
societies with religious and metaphysical worldviews - formal
procedures for redeeming validity claims in each of these domains
were developed. And, with the discursive redemption, through
argumentation, of these three distinct types of validity claim,
communicative action's rational potential has been more fully
actualized. Anthony Giddens offers a succinct account of the
evolutionary course of communicative reason when he writes: "The
more we are able rationally to ground the conduct of our lives in
the three main spheres of existence - relations with the material
world, with others, and in the expressive realm of aesthetics - the
more advanced our form of society can be said to be."36 It was only
when this process of rationalization had advanced sufficiently that
the political and economic systems began to differentiate
themselves from the lifeworld, forming more or less autonomous
subsystems with their own functionalist rationalization processes
that move in the direction of greater complexity. Thus,
communicative reason indirectly gave rise to functionalist reason.
As greater demands were placed on the lifeworld to redeem validity
claims that had once been accepted without argument in more
traditional cultures, everyday
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language became overloaded or overburdened and its material
reproductive functions were taken over by the political and
economic subsystems with their delinguistified media of money and
power (TCA II, 155).
Before I discuss this other form of reason, I shall briefly
summarize the differences between Adorno's and Habermas'
evolutionary theories. According to Adorno, reason evolved in the
course of humanity's attempts to deal with an environment perceived
as hostile. To this extent, there is some (albeit limited) validity
to Habermas' objection that Adorno focusses exclusively on
epistemological concerns. Our relations with external nature have
determined the evolutionary trajectory of reason; reason has
developed as an adaptive response to the threats that nature poses
to self-preservation. That reason and nature are antagonistic -
despite the embeddedness of reason in nature - emerges especially
clearly in Negative Dialectics where Adorno appears to agree with
Marx: "Human history, the history of the progressive mastery of
nature, continues the unconscious history of nature, of devouring
and being devoured" (ND, 355). In stark contrast to this view,
Habermas focuses on the development of reason through cooperative
linguistic endeavours that are oriented (once again) to reaching
understanding. In order to act effectively, we needed to coordinate
our actions, and it was language that allowed us to do so.
Communicative interaction made it possible for us to work together
more or less harmoniously in groups, tribes, and ultimately
nations. Thus Habermas views communicative action as a "switching
station for the energies of social solidarity" (TCA II, 57).
So, apart from their opposing accounts of the role of desire or
the instincts in human life, these theorists' conceptions of what
one might call (with some qualifications) the state of nature are
also quite distinct. For Habermas, the state of nature is actually
a state of incipient culture comprising a set of linguistically
generated social relations that enabled families to combine into
ever larger groups, creating a "network of lasting reciprocities"
(TCA II, 161). Against this pacific conception, which hearkens back
in some respects to Rousseau, Adorno views the state of nature in a
more Hobbesian fashion. Acting largely instinctually and
aggressively, human beings forged weapons of reason to conquer and
subdue external nature, each other, and, finally, themselves. Of
course, Adorno's conception of the state of nature is just as
speculative as Habermas', and each has long found a place within
the philosophical tradition. It is therefore impossible to say that
one is right and the other wholly wrong. However, I would like to
end this section by suggesting that the two conceptions could
perhaps be reconciled if theoretical emphasis were placed (as
Adorno did not, and Habermas did, but only by subjectifying and
linguistifying it) specifically on the erotic component of human
existence. Whereas Adorno pays much less attention to
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eros - which he nonetheless once described as the instinctual
basis for democratic tendencies prevalent in countries like the
United States - than he does to thanatos because of his concerns
about the recurrence of fascism, Habermas eviscerates eros,
ultimately undermining his democratic theory. The social solidarity
he rightly claims democracy needs cannot, in fact, be reduced to
something that is generated only symbolically.
Reason Today Of course, Habermas also strongly objects to
Adorno's analysis and
critique of existing conditions. On his view, Adorno lacks a
standpoint from which to carry out these activities successfully.
He supposedly places himself on the side of an Other of reason, and
so cannot adequately comprehend the pathic rationality against
which he constantly inveighs. However, Habermas does not take
seriously enough Adorno's claim that philosophy, in the form of a
critical social theory, "must strive, by way of the concept, to
transcend the concept" (ND, 15). In fact, Adorno advocated rational
identity-thinking as the means by which existing conditions could
adequately be assessed (ND, 147). Such thinking is rational to the
extent that it involves speculation on the basis of concepts
inherited from the Enlightenment- concepts like freedom, autonomy,
and individuality. Because these emphatic concepts are not
identical with the experiences to which they refer (though they are
often used in an identitarian fashion), and they point to something
qualitatively different and better than these experiences, the
liberal ideology that developed during the Enlightenment contains
an historically conditioned moment of truth against which existing
states of affairs can be judged. Indeed, throughout his work,
Adorno judged late capitalist societies against the better
potential intimated in their own normative concepts. His critique
is grounded in the truth content, or index veri, of these concepts.
With rational identity-thinking, which respects both the "concept's
longing to become identical with the thing" as well as its
non-identity with existing things, the critical theorist apprehends
both the unfulfilled promise in these conditions and their current,
distorted state (ND, 149). Society as it now exists can be shown to
be false because it does not live up to its own self-understanding
as democratic, free, autonomous, etc.J7 It does not do so owing to
the pervasiveness of what some theorists have called instrumental
reason.
Max Horkheimer often used the terms "subjective reason" and
"instrumental reason" as synonyms for Weber's "purposive
rationality." In the work of both these theorists, instrumental,
subjective, or purposive reason consists in the prevailing tendency
abstractly to classify, infer, and deduce without giving due
consideration to the reasonableness of the goals of these processes
of abstraction.38 For his part, however, Adorno seldom
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used the term "instrumental reason" to refer to the type of
reason that predominates today. Instead, he spoke about the
prevalence of the exchange principle (Tauschprinzip) in late
capitalist societies. Reduced to numerically defined units of value
(income, consumption levels and patterns, etc.), individuals now
act in accordance with the dictates of exchange. Underlying these
dictates is a principle of identification: "through exchange,
non-identical individuals and performances become commensurable and
identical." According to Adorno, exchange serves as the "social
model" for the repressive identitarian form of thinking that
predominates today (ND, 146 passim; translation altered). Although
the exchange principle itself has a truth content to the extent
that it carries with it the idea of "free and just" exchange (in
the "free market economy," for example), Adorno counters the
untruth in this totalizing principle "by convicting it of
nonidentity with itself -of the nonidentity that it denies,
according to its own concept" (ND, 147).
Under the spell of identity-thinking, liberal ideology's more
emphatic concepts are increasingly used in an affirmative way to
endorse existing states of affairs. For example, individuals often
fail to comprehend the normative content of a concept like freedom,
identifying it instead with the existing freedom to consume an
apparently endless array of commodities. Democracy is often equated
with existing political institutions and practices, such as
infrequently held elections, or the choice between two or more
political parties, for example. Indeed, Adorno feared that the more
critical and emphatic dimension of concepts like freedom, autonomy,
and democracy might be surrendered entirely as individuals lost
their capacity to think beyond the given. As the capacity even to
imagine a world other than this one wanes, liberal ideology has
been succeeded by a more pernicious ideology: positivism. When
Adorno claims that reason today is currently pathic, he is
referring largely to the pervasiveness of positivistic modes of
thought. If fear of nature originally prompted human beings
coercively to identify reality with their own concepts - concepts
which might nonetheless retain a moment of nonidentity with respect
to that reality - positivism marks a further degeneration in
rational activity. Because cognitive dissonance is now only
infrequently experienced between the way things are and the way
they ought to be, what things are in themselves -their essence or
form - is often equated or identified with what they are under
existing conditions. Consequently, ideology today has become "the
authority for a doctrine of adjustment"(ND, 148). On a positivistic
reading of it, history has effectively ended.
As we lose the capacity to recognize "the contradiction between
what things are and what they claim to be" (ND, 167), even the
suffering caused by the denial of inner nature may appear
acceptable, a matter of course. Still, while painful experiences
seem inescapable under late capitalism, their "physical moment" may
also effectively reveal to some individuals "that
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suffering ought not to be, that things should be different" (ND,
203). Indeed, Adorno deems pain and negativity to be the "moving
forces" behind his own philosophical resistance to existing states
of affairs in rational identity-thinking (ND, 202). Among the more
important sources of suffering today are the distortion of needs,
the repression of needs, the substitute gratification of needs, and
the continually delayed satisfaction of needs. Yet, while
acknowledging that needs have been distorted under late capitalism,
Adorno also insisted that "material needs should be respected even
in their wrong form." They should be respected because "in the
needs of even the people who are covered [erfaj3t], who are
administered, there reacts something in regard to which they are
not fully covered - a surplus of their subjective share, which the
system has not wholly mastered" (ND, 92; passim). Unsatisfied needs
may also serve to promote resistance to existing conditions. The
suffering caused by the distortion of needs "is as bound to press
us to reverse the denial as the need alone will not reverse it"
(ND, 93).
Thus Habermas is correct in his somewhat exaggerated claim that
Adorno locates resistance to the reifying effects of the exchange
principle in the "rage of nature in revolt." It is, however,
questionable whether this "rage of nature in revolt" is really as
"impotent" as Habermas believes it to be (TCA II, 333). Indeed,
Habermas never directly engages or refutes Adorno's claims about
the potency of instinctual dissatisfaction, and its role in
sparking resistance to reifying tendencies in the 1960s. He merely
contents himself with a summary rejection of these claims - a
rejection he buttresses only indirectly with his equally summary
dismissal of Freud's instinct theory and his concomitant
endorsement of object-relations theory. Furthermore, Habermas is
simply mistaken when he argues that the only possible basis for
resistance in Adorno's work is instinctual, mimetic, or artistic.
An astute commentator like J.M. Bernstein, has correctly described
this interpretation of Adorno as a "massive misunderstanding and
distortion of his thought."39 Adorno does not surrender "all
cognitive competence to art in which the mimetic capacity gains
objective shape" (TCA I, 384). To the extent that he employs
rational identity-thinking, Adorno's negative dialectics itself
offers rational resistance to the bad rationality of existing
conditions.
Habermas also misconstrues Adorno when he accuses him of
inflating "instrumental reason" into the only form of reason extant
today. Furthermore, it is not instrumental reason, but the
identitarian exchange principle, that is the primary target of
Adorno's critique. Still, Habermas is not altogether off the mark
when he charges that the "confusion of system rationality and
action rationality prevented Horkheimer and Adorno, as it did Weber
before them, from adequately separating the rationalization of
action orientations within the framework of a structurally
differentiated lifeworld from the expansion of the steering
capacity of differentiated social systems." Habermas' crucial
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objection to Horkheimer and Adorno is encapsulated in the claim
that they "failed to recognize the communicative rationality of the
lifeworld that had to develop out of the rationalization of
worldviews before there could be any development of formally
organized systems of action at all" (TCA II, 333). If Adorno
believes that needs or instincts serve as a potentially resistive
force, and opposes the reifying effects of the exchange principle
with rational identity-thinking, Habermas posits a qualitatively
different counterweight to reification. In his work, communicative
reason serves as a practical foil for the functionalist reason of
the political and economic subsystems as well as for instrumental
or strategic action in the lifeworld.
Only after communicative reason had developed sufficiently,
could the functionalist rationality peculiar to the economy and the
state take shape, regulating many of the tasks of material
reproduction formerly carried out in the lifeworld. As Maeve Cooke
has shown, however, Habermas has not always distinguished
consistently between the functionalist rationality of the economic
and political systems and the cognitive-instrumental rationality
that also comprises one dimension or aspect of communicative reason
in the lifeworld. At times he claims that it is the one-sided
inflation of instrumental rationality that poses the greatest
threat to action oriented to reaching understanding in the
lifeworld, and he ascribes this form of rationality to the
subsystems. At other times, the capitalist economy and the welfare
state are the carriers of a distinctive functionalist rationality
that poses the same threat. Yet Cooke rightly points out that the
two types of rationality are connected.40 If action regulated by
instrumental rationality involves using others as means to the end
of achieving one's own profit- or power-oriented goals, in
functionalist rationality, the consequences of these strategic
actions become the means by which the subsystems maintain
themselves.41 This view of the functionalist rationality of the
economic and political subsystems recalls Adam Smith's benign
invisible hand. Steered by the media of money and power, and
obeying their own functionalist logics, the welfare state and the
capitalist economy make use of the consequences of the
self-interested actions of individuals in such a way that these
consequences now serve the goal of maintaining and enhancing
processes of material reproduction that are also of signal
importance for the lifeworld. Thus, without intending it, even
self-seeking individuals advance the material interests of society
as a whole.
Functionalist rationality therefore also has a benign and
beneficial aspect. Against Marx, Lukacs, and Adorno, Habermas
argues that the functional subsystems alone perform the
indispensable task of materially reproducing society as a whole. At
the same time, he is prepared to concede that functionalist
rationality currently poses a threat to human welfare. That it does
so is the point of his thesis about the colonization of the
lifeworld. Principles of "societal integration" in Western
countries are on a collision
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course. Social integration, which is engendered by "the
mechanism of linguistic communication that is oriented to validity
claims - a mechanism that emerges in increasing purity from the
rationalization of the Iifeworld" is now being undermined by system
integration which, for its part, is achieved by means of "those
de-Iinguistified steering media through which systems of
success-oriented action are differentiated out" (TCA I, 342).
Functionalist rationality became malignant when its "mechanisms of
system integration" started to "encroach upon spheres of action
that can fulfill their functions only under conditions of social
integration" (TCA II, 305).
Unfortunately, Habermas nowhere spells out in any detail or
depth the pathological effects of the encroachments of
functionalist rationality on communicative rationality in the
lifeworld. Very generally, however, he does argue that these
effects include the supplanting of communicative action by action
geared towards profit maximization and the enhancement of power.
Again conflating functionalist with instrumental rationality,
Habermas offers a preliminary sketch of the communication
pathologies caused by colonization in Volume One of The Theory of
Communicative Action. Such pathologies, he writes, "can be
conceived as the result of a confusion between actions oriented to
reaching understanding and actions oriented to success" (TCA I,
332). With the colonization of the Iifeworld by the subsystems,
then, speech increasingly fails to fulfil the goal or telos
inherent in it as individuals pursue private initiatives and
interests. Habermas deems "the relationship of clients to the
administrations of the welfare state" -which he studies under the
rubric of juridification - to be "the model case for the
colonization of the Iifeworld" (TCA II, 322). With juridification,
"welfare-state guarantees" that are "intended to serve the goal of
social integration" actually promote "the disintegration of
life-relations when these are separated, through legalized social
intervention, from the consensual mechanisms that coordinate action
and are transferred over to media such as money and power" (TCA II,
364).
So, where Adorno stresses the effects of the exchange principle
on our ability to think beyond the given, along with its effects on
the instincts, Habermas is primarily concerned with the effects of
functionalist rationality on the symbolic generation of social
solidarity. For Habermas, once again, the Iifeworld rests on a
fundament of cooperative communicative interaction geared to
understanding or agreement; it is this fundament that is endangered
or threatened when colonization occurs. A second major difference
between the two thinkers can be found in their conceptions of the
emancipatory forces that range themselves against reification. In
Adorno's work, instincts potentially serve as the more effective
resistive force against the debilitating effects of the now
ubiquitous exchange principle. Rational identity-thinking - which
also resists these effects - is itself motivated by the suffering
that
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the repression of instincts has caused. By contrast, in
Habermas' work what is ultimately at issue is the predominance in
society of one form of reason to the detriment of the other,
understanding that even communicative rationality has its place -
the lifeworld - from which it can stray only at the cost of
subverting functionalist rationality and compromising material
reproduction. Moreover, in a further point of contrast to Adorno,
for whom the pathic rationality of the economic system currently
finds a weak counter in human suffering and rational
identity-thinking, Habermas maintains that the functionalist
rationality of the economic and political subsystems always
collides or clashes with an inherently resistive communicative
rationality. Communicative reason, with its distinctive mode of
social integration, can never entirely be breached. Where Adorno
criticizes all-pervasive exchange relations under late capitalism
for repressing and distorting the very instincts and needs that
might otherwise serve as as resistive force against domination,
Habermas celebrates the emancipatory force of a communicative
reason that has not only sublated the instincts in the course of
social evolution, but serves as a more or less effective foil for
the encroachments of its own offspring on its process of symbolic
reproduction.
Concluding Remarks In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas criticized
Adorno for endorsing the
pessimistic views of conservative critics of culture, namely,
that socialization processes today are so overwhelmingly corruptive
that they have actually succeeded in liquidating the individual. In
his sarcastic response to this account of existing conditions under
late capitalism, Habermas objects that: "Until now, no one has
succeeded in extracting the thesis of the end of the individual
from the domain of the malaise and self-experience of intellectuals
and made it accessible to empirical test."42 To this thesis,
Habermas opposes his claim that social integration is
communicatively generated within the lifeworld. Against Adorno's
top-down model of socialization mediated through exchange, he
contrasts his conception of relatively egalitarian and "lateral"
processes of personality formation and social integration in
communicative relations within the family and other groups and
institutions. On this basis, he argues that the welfare state
always confronts the "independent development of normative
structures" - in new social movements, for example - "that are
irreconcilable with the suppression of generalizable
interests."43
Yet Habermas also concedes that it is not possible empirically
to decide which interpretation of new social movements is correct:
the one that sees their normative demands as entirely peripheral to
the autopoietic political system, or the one (his own) which
contends that their demands are rational and ought to be given a
hearing.44 And he also admits that it is not possible to
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determine empirically which view of the political system is
correct - the pessimistic one that portrays it as acting entirely
independently of the will of the people, or his own, which states
that the political system find its limits in the lifeworld.45 Yet,
despite these important concessions, Habermas insists that we
recognize what is at stake in the choice between these two
positions. Opting for his own position, he states, entails a parti
pris for reason. Indeed, Habermas even contends that positions like
Adorno's (which he often conflates with Niklas Luhmann's) do not
permit a similar appeal to reason. Once again, Habermas claims that
Adorno views reason as utterly perverted and distorted by the
economic and political systems and so is left with no referent for
his appeal. Here Habermas restates his long-standing objection that
Adorno lacks a foundation for his critique of reason.
As I have tried to show, however, the differences between the
two theorists cannot be summarized in Habermas' constantly repeated
criticism that Adorno rejects reason outright, while he himself
retains an emphatic view of reason. Both Habermas and Adorno have a
rational basis for their criticisms of reification; both ascribe a
normative content to reason; and both are opposed to reified social
conditions, hoping these conditions will become more rational in
the sense of being more conducive to human life. However, like
Freud, Adorno also insists that the demands of our inner
instinctual nature be given their due. That he is concerned to
reconcile reason and desire suggests that desire cannot simply be
subordinated to reason as Habermas has done. At the same time, it
also suggests that desire does not, as Habermas claims, play the
role of an Other of reason from which reason is radically excluded
- otherwise reconciliation would be impossible. Indeed, Habermas
seems to make the mistake of many who have taken the linguistic
turn: from the proposition that needs and desires can be expressed
only in language, he infers that needs and desires are themselves
inherently linguistic. Although he offers a number of arguments in
support of the claim that humanity has liberated itself from
nature, the most contentious by far is that speech by itself has
fully emancipated us from nature.
Adorno never fully describes what a more emancipated
relationship between the instincts and reason might look like.
However, he does believe very generally that society will only
become more fully rational if it recognizes and responds
satisfactorily to the needs of all individuals. This is in part
what he means by the reconciliation of the universal social order
and the particular individuals in it. So, as he noted in "Sociology
and Psychology," the "resolution of the antinomy of universal and
particular remains mere ideology as long as the instinctual
renunciation society expects of the individual neither can be
objectively justified as true and necessary nor later provides him
with the delayed gratification."46 Projecting his utopian ideal of
reconciliation into the future, Adorno also maintains that
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radical political practice will be necessary before individuals
are able adequately to identify their instinctually-based needs,
and society orients itself primarily to the satisfaction of these
needs. It will take the protracted efforts of the species as a
whole to ensure that reason ultimately prevails over the
irrationality of the economic system. By contrast, while explicitly
rejecting on theoretical grounds the view that there is, or ever
could be, a subject of history (and fearing the reemergence of a
nationalist subject- the German Volk, for example), Habermas also
thinks that improved conditions, in the form of a more rational
world order, are now at hand. Indeed, his partiality for reason has
often appeared recently in the positivistic claim that the real is
already more or less rational. This claim is clearly enunciated at
the beginning of his recent work, Between Facts and Norms, where
Habermas admits that he is presupposing "an internal connection,
however mediated, between society and reason."47 Although both he
and Adorno argue that there is a rational potential immanent in
existing conditions, it is sufficient for Habermas that
communicative practices become what they already are, that is, that
they fully actualize their existing potential in the further course
of their apparently unstoppable and progressive evolution.
Curiously, however, and despite his belief that communicative
reason currently provides a relatively effective counter to the
functionalist rationality of the political and economic systems,
Habermas also severely restricts the compass of reason when he
insists in Between Facts and Norms that the communicative power of
the people limit itself to influence over the political system.
Even in the few exceptional cases when it is generated by new
social movements and other groups, communicative power must take a
back seat to parliaments and courts. It is ultimately up to the
political system to decide whether or not to act on the
discursively generated and rational will of the people by (among
other things) making public opinion pass a "generalizability of
interests" test.48 So, while observing that Western states are now
permanently in crisis because they usually operate independently of
the concerns of their citizens, and while acknowledging at the same
time that citizens are often able rationally to identify what lies
in the general interest of society as a whole, Habermas nonetheless
asserts that liberal democratic political systems alone should
decide what lies in the general interest.
Unlike Adorno, who thinks that the economic system should submit
to the rational directives, Habermas is also content to allow the
capitalist economy to continue to operate as an autonomous,
invisible hand that is guided only indirectly by the influence
citizens already (albeit infrequently) exert over the political
system. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic, given his many objections to
Luhmann's systems theory, that Habermas concedes so much to the
latter's idea of autopoietic systems that he is prepared to accept
their complete functional separation from the lifeworld, as well as
to shield the
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economy's morally neutral imperative of profit-making from all
but the most indirect forms of rational control. Communicative
reason has its place; it ought not to stray too far beyond the
lifeworld contexts that spawn it. To allow the rationally generated
interests of citizens to direct the operations of the capitalist
economy would allegedly run the risk of undermining material
reproduction (among other things). Admitting that the economic
system is completely norm-free, that it is utterly bereft of a
normative orientation towards the material satisfaction of all
members of society, Habermas also argues that the economic system
operates, and should be allowed to continue to operate, outside of
any moral considerations or constraints.
To say the least, the "self-limitations" that Habermas proposes
for communicative reason are puzzling. It might well be argued
that, if there is any truth to his strong claim that communicative
practices today remain relatively healthy despite colonization -
claims that are specifically intended to counter Adorno's
"pessimism"- then there are no good grounds for curtailing the role
ofreason in society today. Notwithstanding Habermas' self-declared
partiality for reason in the face of what he sees as Adorno's
abandonment of it, I would argue that it is Adorno who actually
shows the greater partiality for reason when he insists that all
aspects of society be brought under rational control and directed
towards emphatically rational ends. To the extent that the demands
and interests of citizens are rational in Habermas' sense of that
term, they should take precedence over the one-dimensional and
derivative functionalist rationality of the capitalist economy and
the welfare state. Even if we accept the entirely problematic claim
that needs have no objective referents, it could certainly be
argued that, as long as the subjective expression of needs is
rational, material reproduction should be oriented towards their
satisfaction. It is not sufficient for Habermas to describe
(vaguely) the lifeworld as defining the pattern of the political
and economic systems. If- and this is admittedly a big "if," which
Adorno himself would contest - members of the lifeworld have really
become as rational as Habermas contends, then lifeworld members
ought to assume the role of defining the pattern of society as a
whole. Both the political and the economic systems ought to
subordinate themselves to the rationally generated interests and
needs of citizens. A true partiality for reason would support no
lesser demand.
University of Windsor, Canada
References l. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. W.C. Helmbold and W.G.
Rabinowitz, (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1956), p.38. 2. Theodor W. Adorno. Negative
Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, (New York: Continuum
Books, 1973) p.229 passim. Cited henceforth in the text as ND.
3. In his path-breaking work on Adorno's materialist ethics, which
appeared shortly after
this paper was written, J. M. Bernstein describes the addendum
in this way: "the
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addendum is figured as an ancient impulse, suppressed,
sublimated, withered, but necessarily weakly present if real
willing is to be intelligible; and as such, it figures as a promise
of a reconciliation between mind and nature that is not now
actually conceptualizable." See Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p.256.
4. Cf. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York:
Routledge, 1998) pp.l55-6. 5. Theodor W. Adorno, "Subject and
Object," trans. E.B. Ashton, The Essential Frankfurt
School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, (New York:
Urizen Books, 1978) p.509. (Translation altered).
6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, (New York: The Seabury Press,
1972) pp.246-7 passim.
7. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, op. cit.,
p.70. On Rolf Wiggershaus' remarkably evocative account of it, the
debate between Gehlen and Adorno sounded as though ''The Grand
Inquisitor from Ivan Karamazov's story in Dostoevsky's The Brothers
Karamazov was talking to a Jesus who was no longer silent." See The
Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories, and Political
Significance, trans. Michael Robertson, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1994) p.588.
8. Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans.
Jeremy J. Shapiro, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971) p.314.
9. Ibid., p.312. 10. Idem, "Moral Development and Ego Identity,"
in Communication and the Evolution of
Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979)
pp.69-94. II. Joel Whitebook: Perversion and Utopia: A Study in
Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory,
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995) pp.86-9. Habermas' view of
the Sprachfdhigkeit of inner nature is expressed, among other
places, on page 285 of Knowledge and Human Interests: "At the human
level, we never encounter any needs that are not already
interpreted linguistically and symbolically affixed to potential
actions." In Ideals and Illusions (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1991) p.147, Thomas McCarthy argues that there is a contradiction
in Knowledge and Human Interests between the claim that our
knowledge of nature is bound exclusively to the interest in
technical control over nature and the claim that "nature is the
ground of spirit." McCarthy argues that Habermas' reduction of our
relationship to nature to an objectivating and purposive
relationship is incompatible with his "notion of a 'nature
preceding human history' in the sense of a 'natural process that,
from within itself, gives rise likewise to the natural being man
and the nature that surrounds him'." Habermas responds to McCarthy
by stating that there may be other, non-objectivating, relations
with nature. Nowhere does he answer the more important criticism
concerning the incompatibility of his conception of nature as
natura naturans, or as the ground or source of human nature, and
his diremption thesis. See Jiirgen Habermas, "A Reply to My
Critics," trans. Thomas McCarthy, Habermas: Critical Debates, eds.
John B. Thompson and David Held, (London and Basingstoke: The
Macmillan Press, 1982) pp.242-50.
12. Jiirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol.
I: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1984) p.92 passim. Cited henceforth in the text as TCA
I.
13. Idem, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve
Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1987) p.315.
14. Though Habermas and his many commentators tend to stress the
Kantian dimension of his work, the Hegelian resonances should also
be sounded. So, in the preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit,
trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) p.43,
Hegel writes: "For it is the nature of humanity to press onward to
agreement with others; human nature only really exists in an
achieved community of minds. The anti-human, the merely animal,
consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able to
communicate only at that level."
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15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable
Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: Viking Penguin Inc.,
1982) p.l46.
16. Jtirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,
op. cit., p.306 passim. 17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno,
Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p.54. 18. Theodor W. Adorno,
"Subject and Object," op. cit., p.510. 19. Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p.60. 20.
Jtirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, op. cit., p.312.
21. In Habermas: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1994) pp.58-9,
William Outhwaite remarks that there is "a fairly clear
distinction between [evolutionary] theories which emphasize the
Darwinian theme of the adaptation of systems to their environments
and those based on a notion of development - what Giddens has
called an 'unfolding model'." He adds that "Habermas' version is
closer to the latter." However, Outhwaite does not comment on the
fact that Habermas' unfolding model of social evolution presupposes
that human beings have broken with nature, making the Darwinian
model inapplicable to human development.
22. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of
Enlightenment, op. cit., p.222. 23. Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of
Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.ll4, cited in Martin
Jay, Adorno, (London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984) p.l07.
24. Martin Jay, Adorno, (London: Fontana Paperbacks. 1984) pp.l
07-8 passim. 25. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: An Introduction, op. cit.,
p.39. 26. Jtirgen Habermas, "Historical Materialism and the
Development of Normative Structures,"
in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas
McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979) p.106.
27. Idem, "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,"
in Communication and the Evolution of Society, op. cit., p.l40.
28. Ibid., p.l41. 29. Ibid., p.l42. In this passage, Habermas is
also prepared to "defend the thesis that the
criteria of social progress singled out by historical
materialism as the development of productive forces ... can be
systematically justified." However, as Tom Rockmore points out in
Habermas and Historical Materialism (Bloomington and Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press, 1989) p.96, by the time he wrote The
Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas would no longer consider
Marx's historical materialism to be "even a potentially viable
[theoretical] option." Marx's "old philosophy of history is
irreparably defective, its inadequacies cannot be remedied through
its reconstruction or in other ways."
30. Idem, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld
and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas
McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987) p.400. Cited henceforth in
the text as TCA II.
31. Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a
Critical Social Theory, trans. Kenneth Barnes, (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1991) p.284. Cited in Joel Whitebook, Perversion and
Utopia, op. cit., p.83.
32. Jtirgen Habermas, "Historical Materialism and the
Development of Normative Structures," in Communication and the
Evolution of Society, op. cit., p.l21.
33. Idem, "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,"
in Communication and the Evolution of Society, op. cit., p.l40.
34. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, op. cit., p.83. 35.
Jtirgen Habermas, "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical
Materialism," in
Communication and the Evolution of Society, op. cit., p.l33. 36.
Anthony Giddens, "Reason without Revolution? Habermas's Theorie des
kommunikativen
Handelns," in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein,
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985) p.l 00.
37. I have argued this point in "Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology
Critique," Philosophy and Social Criticism 27, no. I (2001)
pp.l-20. and (with different emphases) in "Critical
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Stratagems in Adorno and Habennas: Theories of Ideology and the
Ideology of Theory," Historical Materialism 6 (Summer 2000)
pp.67-87.
38. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: The Seabury
Press, 1974) pp.3-4. 39. J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Ethics and
Disenchantment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 200 I) p.4. 40. See Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A
Study of Habermas's Pragmatics (London
and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994) pp.l45-6. 41. See TCA
II, p. 150: The goal-directed actions of members of the lifeworld
"are coordinated
not only through processes of reaching understanding, but also
through functional interconnections that are not intended by them
and are usually not even perceived within the horizon of everyday
practice. In capitalist societies the market is the most imponant
example of a nonn-free regulation of cooperative contexts. The
market is one of those systemic mechanisms that stabilize
nonintended interconnections of action by way of functionally
intermeshing action consequences, whereas the mechanism of mutual
understanding harmonizes the action orientations of
panicipants."
42. Jtirgen Habennas, Legitimation Crisis. trans. Thomas
McCanhy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973) p.l28.
43. Ibid., p.l35. 44. Ibid., p.l30. 45. Ibid., p.l35. 46. Idem,
"Sociology and Psychology,'' trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left
Review 47 (1%8)
p.85. 47. Jtirgen Habennas, Between Facts and Norms:
Contributions to a Discourse Theory of
Democracy, trans. William Rehg, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
1996) p.8. 48. Ibid., p. 371.
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