By James Lello.

Peter Gordon, Adorno and Existence (Harvard University Press, 2016)

In the winter of 1923, Siegfried Kracauer sent a letter to Leo Löwenthal concerning the young Theodor Adorno: ‘“If Teddie ever decides to make a declaration of love so as to escape from the sinful state of bachelorhood’, Kracauer quipped, he would ‘be sure to phrase it so obscurely that the young lady concerned … will be unable to understand what he is saying unless she has read the complete works of Kierkegaard.”’ This anecdote, cited by Peter E. Gordon near the start of his book, reveals Adorno’s intimate relation to Kierkegaard, even if a sceptic might dutifully retort that ‘any philosopher might have served to illustrate the travails of “Teddie” Wiesengrund Adorno in matters of romance’. For Gordon, this throwaway allusion also reveals how a ‘Kierkegaard renaissance’ extended beyond Adorno to include many other intellectuals from the German-speaking regions of central Europe during the middle of the 1920s. Adorno’s thought has undergone such a renaissance of its own in recent years that one could hardly feel, on the grounds of critical attention alone, the need for yet another study of Adorno. However, just because something is well known does not necessarily mean it is known well. Too much has been written about Adorno’s ‘melancholy spirit’ and, particularly in America, ‘expressions of regret concerning his exacting aesthetic standards and mandarin sensibility have become de rigueur’. Too little has been written on Adorno’s relation to the concept of ‘existence’ and the influence of Kierkegaard, above all, but also of Husserl and Heidegger. Gordon, currently professor of History at Harvard University, is excellently placed to do precisely this, building on his previous work as both an author and editor of such works as Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (2003); The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (2007); The Modernist Imagination: Essays in Critical Theory and Intellectual History (2008); Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (2010); Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy (2013), to name but a few. ‘The Adorno Industry’ should therefore benefit a great deal from Gordon’s account of a comparatively neglected topic in a far from neglected philosophical corpus.

The pairing of ‘Adorno and existence’ announces ‘neither a mere dualism nor a coincidentia oppositorum’. The ‘and’ of the title signifies neither a ‘full reconciliation’ nor an ‘abstract negation’. Its syntax might more accurately be imagined, following Hegel, as speculative; the conjunction signals the simultaneous identity and nonidentity between subject and object. The title does not therefore suggest that Adorno was in any sense an existentialist, or the like (Gordon is careful to distinguish ‘Existentialism’, ‘philosophy of existence’, and ‘existential ontology’). But if the existentialist tradition was one Adorno could not and did not agree with, it was nevertheless one that many of his most important ideas lived off, representing in particular a ‘paradigmatic but unsuccessful attempt to realize what would become [Adorno’s] own philosophical ambition, to break free of the systems of idealism and to turn – in the phrase made famous by Jean Wahl – “toward the concrete.”’ But Gordon goes well beyond just demonstrating how Adorno’s youthful critique of the images of bourgeois subjectivity he found in Kierkegaard made possible his subsequent work on Heidegger and Husserl; he also suggests that the existential tradition helped form some of Adorno’s own most significant arguments. Both these elements, Gordon hopes, will reinforce Adorno’s position as ‘one of the very few truly indispensible minds in the philosophical discourse of modernity.’

This book also has more modest aim: its chronological ordering and references to Adorno’s life make it read, in part, like intellectual biography or self-professed ‘philosophical physiognomy’ (echoing the title of Adorno’s study of Mahler). In 1931, aged just twenty-seven, Adorno submitted a study of Kierkegaard to Paul Tillich for his Habilitationsschrift. Gordon begins with this, which would become Adorno’s first published work of philosophy (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic), before tracing the subsequent returns to Kierkegaard: the first in 1940 with the essay ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’, the second in 1963, just six years before he died, with an essay dedicated to Tillich: ‘Kierkegaard noch einmal’ (an essay which remains to be translated for the English-speaking world). These three key texts chart Adorno’s career from a young philology student in Frankfurt, to his exile in New York, and finally to his time spent as an émigré back in Frankfurt after World War II. Gordon also traces the development of the relationship to Kierkegaard right up to Negative Dialectics in July 1966, as well as the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. Between Adorno’s first work of philosophy and final return to Kierkegaard, the core of Gordon’s book is comprised, focusing in particular on two other key representatives of the existential tradition: Heidegger and Husserl.

It is worth recalling, briefly, some of the central characteristics of Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift in order to see how they prepare the way for his later works. For Adorno, Kierkegaard introduces the category of the aesthetic merely in order to surpass it, in the pursuit of religious existence. Adorno rejects this subordination of aesthetics by reading Kierkegaard ‘“against the grain (gegen den Strich)”’, focusing on the images that belie the putative rejection of the aesthetic, and which in turn reveals the social and historical predicament of their author. Images of bourgeois apartments, for instance, represent spaces of asocial inwardness opposed to the perceived inauthenticity of the crowd or public space. For Adorno, Kierkegaard’s image of the ‘“window mirror [Reflexionspiegel],”’ seemingly little more than ‘“a characteristic furnishing of the spacious nineteenth-century apartment”’, projects ‘“the endless row of apartment buildings into the isolated bourgeois living room”’. Through an optical trick, the living room ‘“dominates the reflected row at the same time that it is delimited by it.”’ Like the bourgeois ‘intérieur’, the mirror is – for Adorno – the symbol of a Kierkegaardian inwardness that discovers a duplication of ‘“isolated privacy”’ at precisely the moment it tries to look beyond itself.

Imagery of reflection recurs throughout Gordon’s book as an implicit leitmotif, connecting the critique of Kierkegaard with those of Heidegger and Husserl. The image returns in Adorno’s depiction of Heidegger’s desire ‘“to break out of the immanence of consciousness”’ in Negative Dialectics. Heidegger’s philosophy is figured there, Gordon writes, as a ‘subjectivism yearning for the solidity of the object’, a ‘fetishized longing for the concrete’, which ‘offers the salvation of reconciliation in its attempt to recollect a mode of being beyond the supremacy of the modern subject; but it remains trapped within the same “immanence of consciousness” as the Husserlian (transcendental) phenomenology against which it rebelled.’ In Adorno’s words, Heidegger’s ‘“breakout [from consciousness] however is one into a mirror, blind towards the moment of the synthesis in the substrate.”’ Heidegger’s fetishized yearning for concreteness only creates an uncontested primacy of the subject that arbitrarily converts a methodological starting point into a privileged metaphysical position. As Adorno expresses it: ‘“[h]e who interprets by searching behind the phenomenal world for a world-in-itself which forms its foundation and support, acts mistakenly like someone who wants to find in the riddle of reflection of a being which lies behind, a being mirrored in the riddle, in which it is contained.”’ The irony of existential ontology’s lapse into idealism is that it had meant to overcome any such metaphysical priority of thought over being. Constitutive subjectivity thus persists in existential ontology’s account of objectivity, even when subjectivism was putatively eschewed. Therefore, the transcendental unity of apperception (Kant’s central claim that because things cannot be known in themselves, but only as they appear to consciousness – the ‘I think’ must accompany all representations), actually ‘found an unlikely repetition even in the modern philosophies that claimed to have overcome idealism.’ Philosophy now resembles a series of repeated journeys Through the Looking Glass; Heidegger looks like Alice in Wonderland ‘who believes she glimpses an entirely new reality on the other side of the looking glass but actually remains a captive to her own fantasies.’

In Gordon’s account, Adorno thought Husserl was similarly trapped in ‘an idealist hall of mirrors’, where the only visible reality was a bourgeois subjectivity unceasingly reflected back at him. Images of reflection now reappear in Adorno’s metaphor of the camera, a metaphor that suggests how the phenomenological appeal to realism only reinforced the priority of consciousness over reality. As Adorno argued: ‘“[j]ust as in photography the camera obscura and the recorded pictorial object belong together, so in phenomenology do the immanence of consciousness and realism.”’ Thoughts, consequently, ‘“seal themselves off more and more from whatever does not emanate from them and their jurisdiction, the immanence of the subject.”’ This affinity between photography and phenomenology illustrates the latter’s failure to understand non-subjective reality, a failure to move beyond an understanding of the real as more than what is merely ‘real-for-thought’. Phenomenology consequently adopts a ‘conservative’ stance by merely affirming the given. Because consciousness loses all contact with the external reality it wanted to master, the phenomenological lapse into solipsism is also a fall into ‘logical absolutism’, transforming phenomenology and positivism into unlikely bedfellows. The phenomenological reduction thus turns the given into pure description, denying the object in question its independent dynamism. Adorno, Gordon notes, compared this to a stiflingly maternal form of devotion: “‘Like the photographer of old, the phenomenologist wraps himself with the black veil of his époché, implores the objects to hold still and unchanging and ultimately realizes passively and without spontaneity of the knowing subject, family portraits of the sort of that mother ‘who glances lovingly at her little flock.’”’

These images of reflection merely give a snapshot of Gordon’s careful account of the development of Adorno’s arguments about Heidegger and Husserl out of the early work on Kierkegaard. But these figures were also an integral part of the articulation of Adorno’s own philosophy, especially his formulation of the problem of ‘constitutive subjectivity’. For Adorno, bourgeois philosophy recapitulates the characteristic struggle of the subject to preserve its ‘primacy’ over the object, but in doing so loses the solidity of worldly objectivity. In Gordon’s terms, a truly critical philosophy for Adorno, by contrast, would ‘sketch an alternative route beyond the power of constitutive subjectivity so as to reach, at last, the object that has eluded bourgeois philosophy in all its forms.’ It is obvious that to think of an object we require a subject. It is much more difficult to imagine the reverse, as Adorno once pointed out: ‘“[i]n the meaning of subjectivity is also the reckoning of being an object; but not so in the meaning of objectivity, to be a subject.”’ The latter is only possible if thought’s object ‘“preserves itself.”’ This point is amongst the most important in the whole of Adorno’s authorship; the object must retain a moment of objective identity even outside the event of its ‘conceptualization’. Kant saw that idealism could only be an account of worldly experience if it allowed for an insufficiency in the subject, an insufficiency evident in the persistence of the primacy of the object in the doctrine of the ‘thing in itself’, which, for Kant, cannot be known to consciousness. The ‘otherness (Andersheit)’ of the ‘thing-in-itself’ meant that it remained beyond subjective conceptualization. However, without this otherness, Adorno writes, ‘“knowledge [Erkenntnis] would degenerate into tautology; what is known would be knowledge itself [das Erkannte wäre sie selbst].”’ Idealism must therefore retain within itself ‘a moment of truth’. As Gordon points out, this Kantian doctrine of the ‘thing-in-itself’ was actually a remainder within idealism of a reality free from the spell of subjectivity, a point made in Adorno’s late essay, ‘Subject and Object’. For Adorno, the otherness of the ‘thing-in-itself’ was not just of social or materialist importance, but was transcendentally necessary: it was logically presupposed in the very concept of experience itself. By thus insisting on the ‘primacy of the object’ (Vorrang des Objekts) preserved as the remnant of transcendental idealism’s ‘thing-in-itself’, Adorno was not just able to overcome the problem of constitutive subjectivity, or replace it with something else that would inevitably adopt the very terms it had sought to overthrow (as was the case in Husserl and Heidegger). Instead, Adorno saw that constitutive subjectivity could only be overcome by insisting on its strength, rather than though its abstract negation. As he famously phrased it in the preface to Negative Dialectics: ‘“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 ever since he came to trust in his own mental impulses; now he did not wish to put it off any longer.”’ Only in this way could the positivistic insistence on the object as the given be avoided.

Inward subjectivity, Gordon argues, was therefore now ‘the necessary precondition for any genuinely dialectical relationship with the object’. As is well known, for Adorno, any hope for the dialectical reconciliation of the subject with society was likely to be impossible in the era of late capitalism. It was therefore crucial to resist the extorted reconciliation of subjectivity with a false totality. What is less well known is how Kierkegaard’s thought, far from representing ‘a mere ideologue for bourgeois society’, eventually became for Adorno a crucial articulation of the nonidentity between subject and object, interiority and exteriority, self and world. Even if for Kierkegaard this was part of a specifically theological objection to the world’s incapacity to comprehend its own avowed Christianity, Gordon shows how the Dane’s refusal of ‘the absolute being-for-another of the world of goods’ crucially influenced Adorno’s own, more familiar, arguments. Negative dialectics is therefore not the alternative to existential ontology, but rather its realization. If the existential tradition continually lapsed into idealism, continually encountering its own reflection, for Gordon the ‘“utopian” promise’ of negative dialectics resided in the ‘breakthrough to the object’: ‘[N]egative dialectics is the overcoming of existentialism but also its fulfillment.’ This is perhaps the central claim of Adorno and Existence. As the book’s final sentence insists, Adorno sought ‘redemption’, ‘not from existence but of existence, in and through its critique.’ Negative dialectics may well turn to materialism, but ‘only by passing through the subject and not by simply annulling its power.’ Above all, this demands a ‘critical sensitivity to the inner life of the subject, whose nonidentical experience stands as a possible preserve for emancipation in the midst of an otherwise wholly reified objectivity.’ Gordon’s own critical sensitivity is evident throughout this necessary return to Adorno, noch einmal.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Lello was born in London. He is currently working on a PhD on Henry James at the University of Cambridge, where he also did his BA and MPhil.