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Negative Dialectics

Cover of the first edition
Author	Theodor W. Adorno
Original title	Negative Dialektik
Translator	E. B. Ashton
Language	German
Subject	Philosophy
Publisher	Suhrkamp Verlag
Publication date	1966
Media type	Print
Pages	416 (Routledge edition)
ISBN	0-415-05221-1 (Routledge edition)

Part of a series on the
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Negative Dialectics (German: Negative Dialektik) is a 1966 book by the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, in which he presents a critique of traditional Western philosophy and dialectical thinking. Adorno argues that the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and progress has led to the domination of nature and the suppression of human individuality, and he develops the notion of negative dialectics as a critique of the positive, idealistic dialectics of Hegel and the Marxist dialectical materialism that grew out of it.

Negative dialectics rejects the idea of a final synthesis or reconciliation, instead emphasizing the importance of maintaining the tension between contradictory elements and resisting the temptation to subsume particulars under abstract, totalizing concepts.

Central to Adorno's argument is his reflection on the Holocaust and the systematic extermination of the Jews at Auschwitz, which he sees as a catastrophic failure of Enlightenment rationality and a profound challenge to the very foundations of philosophical thought. He argues that the experience of Auschwitz demands a fundamental rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition and a new form of critical theory that can grapple with the ethical and metaphysical challenges posed by the Holocaust, writing that a "new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen."

Summary

Adorno sought to update the philosophical process known as the dialectic, freeing it from traits previously attributed to it that he believed to be fictive. For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the dialectic was a process of realization that things contain their own negation and through this realization the parts are sublated into something greater. Adorno's dialectics rejected this positive element wherein the result was something greater than the parts that preceded and argued for a dialectics which produced something essentially negative. Adorno wrote that "Negative Dialectics is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of the 'negation of the negation' later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy."

Adorno's purpose was to overcome the formal logical limits of the previous definitions of dialectics by putting into light that new knowledge arises less from a Hegelian unification of opposite categories as defined following Aristotelian logic than by the revelation of the limits of knowledge. However, this philosophical project is inseparable from Adorno's reflection on the historical experience of Auschwitz, which he sees as a decisive break that challenges the very foundations of Western philosophical thinking. Adorno argues that the systematic extermination of the Jews cannot be adequately comprehended or represented within the frameworks of traditional philosophy, and his "negative dialectics" is an attempt to develop a mode of thinking that can respond to the ethical and metaphysical challenges posed by the Holocaust.

His emphasis on the non-identity and particularity of objects, his critique of the totalizing tendencies of Enlightenment thought, and his call for a new form of philosophical reflection are all deeply shaped by his conviction that Auschwitz demands a fundamental rethinking of the Western philosophical tradition. Such a revelation reaches out to its experienced object, whose entirety always escapes the simplifying categories of purely theoretical thinking. Adorno raises the possibility that philosophy and its essential link to reality may be essentially epistemological in nature. His reflection moves a step higher by applying the concept of dialectics not only to exterior objects of knowledge, but to the process of thought itself.

To summarize, "...this Negative Dialectics in which all esthetic topics are shunned might be called an “anti-system.” It attempts by means of logical consistency to substitute for the unity principle, and for the paramountcy of the superordinate concept, the idea of what would be outside the sway of such unity. To use the strength of the subject to break through the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity—this is what the author felt to be his task . Stringently to transcend the official separation of pure philosophy and the substantive or formally scientific realm was one of his determining motives."

Influence

Adorno's work has had a large impact on cultural criticism, particularly through Adorno's analysis of popular culture and the culture industry. Adorno's account of dialectics has influenced Joel Kovel, the sociologist and philosopher John Holloway, the anarcho-primitivist philosopher John Zerzan, the sociologist Boike Rehbein, and the Austrian musicologist Sebastian Wedler.

The book has also had an influence on Holocaust historiographers, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Yehuda Bauer, and Saul Friedländer. In addition, the memoirs of camp survivors such as Jean Amery and Tadeusz Borowski can be seen as anticipating or otherwise influencing Adorno's thought in Negative Dialectics. Adorno's critique of systemic thinking can explain the taboo of formulating precise explanations for why the Holocaust happened and what specific outcomes the Final Solution intended to achieve. It suggests that in trying to do so, we approach the limits of knowledge; particularly pertaining to the abyss of what was experienced subjectively in the camps, summarized in the phrase "Here is no why," uttered by a camp guard to an inmate at Auschwitz.

References

1. Adorno, Theodor W.; Tiedemann, Rolf (2003). Can one live after Auschwitz? a philosophical reader. Cultural memory in the present. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8047-3143-0.
2. Zuidervaart, Lambert, ed. (2007), "Metaphysics after Auschwitz", Social Philosophy after Adorno, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 48–76, ISBN 978-0-521-69038-6, retrieved 2024-03-22
3. ^ Adorno, Theodor W. (1990). Negative Dialectics. London: Routledge. p. xix. ISBN 0-415-05221-1.
4. Herberg-Rothe, Andreas (2020). "Dialectical Philosophy after Auschwitz: Remaining Silent, Speaking Out, Engaging with the Victims". The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence. IV (1).
5. See quote

   We are blaming the method for the fault of the matter when we object to dialectics on the ground (repeated from Hegel’s Aristotelian critics on) that whatever happens to come into the dialectical mill will be reduced to the merely logical form of contradiction, and that (an argument still advanced by Croce) the full diversity of the noncontradictory, of that which is simply differentiated, will be ignored.

   — Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Preface

6. See quote

   indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.

   — Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Preface

7. See quote

   Having broken its pledge to be as one with reality or at the point of realization, philosophy is obliged ruthlessly to criticize itself.

   — Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Preface

8. See quote

   The plain contradictoriness of this challenge is that of philosophy itself, which is thereby qualified as dialectics before getting entangled in its individual contradictions. The work of philosophical self-reflection consists in unraveling that paradox.

   — Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Preface

9. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. (1983) . Negative dialectics. New York: Continuum. ISBN 978-1-4411-3523-0. OCLC 741691296.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
10. James Bohman (1999). Robert Audi (ed.). The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 10. ISBN 0-521-63722-8.
11. Kovel, Joel (1991). History and Spirit: An Inquiry into the Philosophy of Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press. p. 261. ISBN 0-8070-2916-5.
12. "John Zerzan: Anti-civilization theorist, writer and speaker".
13. Rehbein, Boike (2015-03-24). Critical Theory After the Rise of the Global South: Kaleidoscopic Dialectic (1 ed.). Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315718934. ISBN 978-1-315-71893-4.
14. John Holloway. Negativity and Revolution: Adorno and Political Activism (2008) ISBN 978-0-7453-2836-2, ed. with Fernando Matamoros & Sergio Tischler
15. Friedlander, Saul; et al. (1992). Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the Final Solution.
16. Levi, Primo. Survival at Auschwitz. p. 29.

Further reading

• Dennis Redmond's updated translation of Negative Dialectics, with commentary.
• Buck-Morss, Susan. Origin of Negative Dialectics. Free Press, 1979.
• Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno or the Persistence of the Dialectic. Verso, 2007.
• Boucher, Geoff. Adorno Reframed. I.B. Tauris, 2013.

• 1966 non-fiction books
• Frankfurt School
• German non-fiction books
• Works by Theodor W. Adorno