How not to read Hegel. Foreword to Hegel and the Frankfurt School ed. Paul Giladi.
Foreword
James Gordon Finlayson
When Paul Giladi first asked me to contribute to this very interesting and timely volume, I had just finished writing a long essay entitled ‘Hegel and the Frankfurt School’ for The Oxford Handbook of Hegel, which focused on the diverse ways Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse respectively interpreted Hegel’s philosophy, and also selectively appropriated aspects of Hegel's philosophy in the development of their own views.[1] I felt I had little more to say on the subject. Having read this excellent collection of essays, I realise how wrong I was. There was much more to say, and that I could have said on the topic.
Reading the fine contributions to this volume alerted me to a theme that draws the various essays together, and throws a new complexion on its topic, ‘Hegel and the Frankfurt School’. That theme is the actuality of Hegel’s philosophy. ‘Actuality’ (Wirklichkeit), as readers of this book will know, is a technical term in Hegel’s system. Perhaps the most famous use of it occurs in the Preface to the 1820 lectures on the Elements of the Philosophy of Right: “What is rational, is actual; and what is actual, is rational”.
Hegel’s Doppelsatz, as it is known, is a not unintentionally gnomic formulation, which was written by Hegel when under threat of severe censorship, laid down in the Carlsbad decrees, following the assassination of the poet Kotzebue by the student Carl Ludwig Sand. Draconian censorship was directed toward university students and faculty, and toward publications of political ideas in particular.[2] We can see this by comparing the Doppelsatz of 1820 with a correlative passage from §134, 157 of Hegel’s 1817/1818 lectures on the philosophy of right: “The national spirit is substance. What is rational, must happen, inasmuch as the constitution in general is its (the national spirit’s) development”.
The latter passage, unlike the former, makes clear Hegel’s view about the necessity for progressive politics. Hegel knew that he could not smuggle such ideas past the censors in that form. As Manfred Riedel notes, Hegel did not change his views, in response to the censors, he disguised them.[3]
Though people in Hegel’s circle of acquaintance knew about these amendments, many of his readers did not. Eduard Gans, in his introduction to Volume 8 of the so-called ‘Freundeskreis’ edition of Hegel’s works, published in 1833 shortly after Hegel’s death, complains that “misunderstandings and false interpretations” have not only turned the German public against Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, but wrongly portrayed it as a “servile book”.[4]
To Hegel’s own great consternation, due in part to the gnomic double dictum, contemporary readers misunderstood Hegel’s text, his political theory, and his political views they inferred from it. These misunderstandings persisted for decades. Hegel was widely criticised for being a reactionary defender of the status quo, and an apologist for the Prussian state right up to World War II and beyond, as if his double dictum was another version of the thought in Alexander Pope’s theodicy: ‘One truth is clear: Whatever is, is right’.[5]
Among the last things Hegel wrote, shortly before his death in 1831, were clarifications designed to overturn such misunderstandings. In §6 of the 1830 version of Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel states that, in general, existence (Dasein) is in part ‘appearance’ and only in part ‘actuality’:
In common life, it happens that almost any occurrence, error, evil and such things, along with even the most paltry and transient existence are called ‘reality’ (Wirklichkeit). (EL §6; Werke: 10, 48)
But that is wrong, Hegel explains, because such things only have the value of something that is merely possible, which is not able to be as good as it is. Whereas, by contrast, the realities that deserve the name ‘Wirklichkeit,’ truly are because they have instantiated and embodied the fully developed idea of what they are. The ‘actuality of reason’ is set against to two opposed but equally mistaken kinds of representative thinking: that ideas and ideals are chimeras, and figments of the brain; and that ideas and ideals are “something far too excellent to have actuality” or alternatively that “they are far too important to constitute reality for themselves”.[6]
So, this is what ‘actuality’, in Hegel’s technical sense, means. A good way to understand the writings of the various members of the Frankfurt School on Hegel is to see them as ‘actualizations’ of Hegel’s philosophy, in a similar sense. They renew Hegel’s work by making it relevant to the present, they illuminate it, and give us reasons, often new ones, to engage with it. And the various essays in this volume, some more explicitly than others, attend to the ways in which Frankfurt School thinkers, from Friedrich Pollock and Theodor Adorno through to Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, actualize aspects of Hegel’s philosophy. I do not claim this to be an original insight of mine. Far from it. It is a methodological tenet in Honneth (2000, 2010, 2014), where he explicitly presents his work on Hegel as a ‘reactualization’. And the topic is discussed in detail in James Gledhill’s excellent essay contrasting Honneth’s and Habermas’s ‘reactualizations’ of Hegel in this volume.
We can develop this idea further, by construing ‘actualization’ – and its cognates ‘actualize,’ ‘actualization’ – in the light of Hegel’s technical term ‘actuality,’ with the caveat that Hegel’s conception of Wirklichkeit, like much of his terminology, is inseparable from his teleological conception of absolute spirit. Still, even when Honneth’s notion of ‘actualization’ is given broader and more relaxed construal than Hegel’s (one shorn of Hegel’s speculative metaphysics), the idea of a ‘reactualization’ of Hegel is itself, nevertheless, broadly consistent with Hegel’s approach to philosophy. In fact, it is itself a ‘reactualization’ of Hegel’s idea of actuality. This is true whether or not the ‘actualization’ in question attempts to provide an ‘historical-sociological’ substitute for Hegel’s speculative metaphysical system, in the manner of Honneth, or, the ‘philosophical-juridical’ one, that on Gledhill’s view, Habermas provides.
The second way in which I want to develop this line of thought is by drawing a distinction. The process of re-actualization can take on two distinct forms: interpretations of Hegel on the one hand, and appropriations of Hegel on the other. And anyone interested in the topic of this book, Hegel and the Frankfurt School, has to consider both carefully. And when they do, I suggest they will find that the number of actualizing appropriations of Hegel outdoes the number of actualizing interpretations by some margin.
That is partly because Frankfurt School theorists construct their theories with the aim of reflecting on, and in some cases, of changing, present social reality. They were neither intellectual historians, nor strictly speaking philosophers – but philosophically informed social theorists. It is striking that in spite of their preoccupation with Hegel, Frankfurt School theorists produced between them surprisingly few scholarly studies of Hegel’s philosophy. Herbert Marcuse’s 1932 study Hegel’s Ontology and the Theory of Historicity, and his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (first edition in 1941) are notable exceptions, along with three early essays by Habermas. Note that while Adorno’s Hegel: Three Studies comprises three essays on Hegel, none are scholarly studies on Hegel. Not so much because they are not scholarly, though they are not contrasting – Adorno scarcely consults any of the secondary literature – but because they are, as he himself claims, preliminary studies for his own conception of negative dialectic.[7]
Compare these three essays with the three essays in Habermas’s Theorie und Praxis, which were published in the same year, 1963, and the difference in scholarliness, historical accuracy and in nuance is glaring. In contrast to Habermas, Adorno does not even mention Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, although he does appear in places to allude to and endorse Marcuse’s view, as he does Max Horkheimer’s interpretations of Hegel.[8] Suffice it to say that Adorno’s Hegel Three Studies is not a book one would include on a reading list for a course on Hegel, since, stimulating as it is, it does not give students a reliable understanding of Hegel’s philosophy.
Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution is paradigmatic of what I call an ‘actualizing interpretation of Hegel’. To see this, one has only to pose the questions: ‘Which Hegel is being actualized?’; and ‘To what end?’. Indeed, it is always helpful to ask these questions, whenever one engages with work on Hegel, whether by Frankfurt School theorists or not.[9] In this case, it is the radical, reforming, and progressive Hegel, whose ideas of reason and freedom, he argues, contained an ideal of a better society that was unrealizable in his time. Marcuse wanted to distance Hegel’s philosophy, including the Philosophy of Right, from the misleading interpretations that painted it from its inception, via the Young Hegelians and Rudolf Haym through to Leonard Hobhouse and Karl Popper, as a servile apology for what exists, and an exaltation of the Prussian state. Marcuse also wanted to throw light on Hegel’s relation to Marxism, in the wake of the recent discovery of Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and the consequent rekindling of philosophical interest in the Hegelian origins of Marx’s dialectic.
If one looks at the interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy from a certain distance, beneath the marked differences between them, one can discern at least two unifying tendencies. First, they tend to contrast the young, radical Hegel with progressive politics, a strong anti-clerical stance, and Republican sympathies, with an older, conservative Hegel in the thrall of his own absolute idealism. As György Lukács did in The Young Hegel, the Phenomenology of Spirit is generally seen as the point of transition between the young and the old Hegel. Second, they tend follow Marx, in reading Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and what they see as Hegel’s quietist, or conservative politics as an excrescence of his logic:
Hegel’s true interest is not the philosophy of right but logic. The task of philosophy is not to understand how thought can be embodied in political determinations but to dissolve the existing political determinations into abstract ideas. The concern of philosophy is not the logic of the subject-matter but the subject-matter of logic.[10]
Broadly speaking, the interpretations of Hegel propounded by Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas follow this pattern.
Of course, not all Hegel interpretations are ‘actualizing’; certainly not all those advanced by the Frankfurt School theorists. Interpretations that aim to ground their understanding of Hegel in a historically anchored context, whether intellectual or social and political, and which present the value of understanding and engagement with Hegel as largely a matter of historical interest, are not actualizing ones. We can call such ‘non-actualizing’ interpretations, to continue the Hegelian theme, ‘existing’ interpretations. We need not, and perhaps should not, just because we are writing about Hegel, share Hegel’s parti pris for actuality over mere existence. We can afford to be methodological pluralists about interpretation. The important thing about ‘existing interpretations’ in this sense is that they are grounded in the historical reality of the interpreted work, its author, and its context. ‘Existing’ interpretations needless to say can be good or bad, better or worse, when judged by the relevant criteria.
Now, let us consider what I call the ‘actualizing appropriations’ of Hegel. As I just noted, the Frankfurt School theorists’ engagement with Hegel mainly takes the form of appropriations. (In this volume, we have the examples of Pollock, Honneth, and Habermas.) Appropriators of Hegel set out to update Hegel and to developing aspects of his theory with different conceptual tools, like Habermas and Honneth respectively in different ways develop Hegel’s theory of Sittlichkeit and idea of intersubjective recognition.
For instance, in Habermas’s essay ‘Labour and Interaction: Remarks on Hegel’s Jena Philosophy of Mind’, Habermas identifies and lays out what he sees as Hegel’s early alternative intersubjective theory of the ‘formative process of the spirit’, which was subsequently abandoned in favour of subject-object paradigm required the later system.[11] As Habermas writes: “[a] radicalisation of my thesis would read ‘it is not the spirit in the absolute movement of reflecting on itself which manifest itself in … language, labour and moral relationships’, but rather it is the dialectical interconnections between linguistic symbolisation, labour and interaction which determine the concept of spirit”.[12] In other words, he wants to appropriate and to build on Hegel’s early intersubjective conception of spirit, while distancing himself from Hegel’s later conception, which he judges to belong to the now obsolete subject-object metaphysics.
The rough and ready distinction, between ‘actualizing’ and ‘existing’ interpretations of Hegel, together with the distinction between interpretation and appropriation is a useful optic through which to the Frankfurt School’s relation to Hegel. As in the early essays of Habermas, what we see is that ‘actualizing’ appropriations tend naturally to pair up with ‘existing’ interpretations, as the theorist strips away ideas in Hegel they consider antiquated and embraces and reworks the ideas they still consider valid and conducive to their purposes. This blend of actualizing appropriation and existing interpretation is typical not just of Habermas’s approach Hegel, but also of Horkheimer, and indeed Adorno.[13]
Adorno’s approach to Hegel, is the most conflicted of all the Frankfurt School thinkers, and the most difficult to appraise. He is an appropriator of Hegel, but in a special sense. As he puts it himself, he rejects “loathsome question of what Hegel means for the present” in favour of the question of “what the present means in the face of Hegel”.[14] When we pose our two questions of Adorno – ‘Which Hegel does he appropriate?’; and ‘To what end?’ – we get two contrasting answers. On the one hand, Adorno appropriates the critical, negative and dialectical philosophy, whose radical approach of ‘immanent criticism’ prepares the way for a negative dialectic. On the other hand, Adorno, in contrast to Horkheimer, Honneth and Habermas, also appropriates Hegel, the systematic philosopher of absolute idealism, whose positive metaphysics, Adorno argues, sabotages the dialectic by reducing the object to the subject, and consequently eliminates “every particle of a determination of difference”.[15]
How does Adorno do this? He undertakes, what he calls a ‘rescuing’ critique of Hegel:
Rescuing Hegel, and only rescue not renewal is appropriate - means facing up to his philosophy where it is most painful, and wresting truth from it where its untruth is obvious”. (HTS: 83)
He salvages Hegel’s system by managing to find a moment of truth, even in its untruth. The alleged truth moment in question is that Hegel’s system as the “satanic” prefiguration of the fully “socialised society”[16] which has been completely integrated by production and exchange.
To what end does Adorno do this? He wants to avoid what he sees as the ‘mistake’ made by Lukács and Benedetto Croce (and to an extent, more recently, also Habermas and Honneth) of attempting to surgically separate Hegel’s systematic metaphysics from his dialectical logic. The upshot, however, of such an approach – and this is why I would not include this text as recommended reading on Hegel – is to give Adorno a free pass to peddle all the various myths and legends, and misunderstandings that have beset Hegel’s philosophy, especially his Philosophy of Right, from its inception.[17] For example, Adorno can be found at various points disparaging Hegel’s work for its “apology for the status quo, and its cult of the state” and its “idolisation of the state”.[18]
What makes Adorno especially tricky is a certain mercurial evasiveness, which he sometimes tries to pass off as dialectical subtlety. On the one hand, he talks of Hegel as the “ostensible (angebliche) Prussian state philosopher” as if he would deny that he was one, only on the very next page to claim that the later Hegel “defends the positive – that which simply is – ”.[19] Adorno could have saved himself a lot of dialectical labour had he just read, say, T. M. Knox’s 1940 essay ‘Hegel and Prussianism’, which shows that the existing Prussian state is, in important respects, quite unlike Hegel’s idea of the state.
However, that would, in a way, have crossed his purposes. Adorno’s rescuing critique needs him to be able to smuggle out the radical and progressive dialectical ideas in Hegel, as buried treasure which he has discovered and ‘salvaged’ only by dint of his own dialectical virtuosity. For instance, he declares:
Hegel’s apologetics and his resignation are the bourgeois mask that utopia has put on to avoid being immediately recognised and apprehended. (HTS: 47)
The plain truth is not so recondite and implausible. Hegel was indeed bourgeois, but he was also progressive. As the Doppelsatz shows, and Heinrich Heine attests, Hegel had to disguise a lot of his more reformist ideas to get them past the censor. One of several anecdotes told by his friend and pupil, Heinrich Heine, gently joshes Hegel for his discretion about his political views . “I often used to see him [Hegel] looking around anxiously as if in fear he might be understood. He was very fond of me, for he was sure I would never betray him. As a matter of fact, I then thought that he was very obsequious. Once when I grew impatient with him for saying: ‘All that is, is rational’, he smiled strangely and remarked, ‘It may also be said that all that is rational must be’. Then he looked about him hastily; but he was speedily reassured, for only Heinrich Beer had heard his words.”[20]
Adorno is of course insightful enough to put his finger on significant passages, where Hegel’s thoughts are recalcitrant to his theory. In ‘Aspects of Hegel’ he cites the passage from §249 of the Philosophy of Right, where Hegel writes that “despite its excel of wealth, civil society is not rich enough” to avoid leading to poverty and the creation of a rabble”.[21] Adorno then makes the following objections: first, he objects that Hegel could not imagine an increase in production sufficient to eliminate poverty. And second, he goes on to claim that this is just another example of Hegel’s statism. As he writes, “Hegel’s philosophy of the state is a necessary tour de force” which “suspends the dialectic”.[22] The tour de force was necessary, Adorno claims, “because otherwise the dialectical principle would have extended beyond what exists and thereby negated the thesis of absolute identity”.[23]
It seems to me that the real interest of the passage is twofold:
1) Hegel was insightful enough to see, well before Marx, that capitalism is such that no mere increase in production will lead to the elimination of poverty, while the relations of production remain unchanged.
2) Hegel, as A. O. Hirschman puts it in his brilliant and much neglected article, ‘Hegel, ‘Imperialism and Structural Stagnation’, “had an economic theory of imperialism, when Marx did not”.[24] Hegel foresaw not only that that the state would not be able to rein in the antagonisms of civil society, but that this would lead to imperialism and colonialism. What is remarkable is that Hegel is capable of such insight and that, pace Marx and Adorno, he does not let his system or metaphysics get in the way of the facts, however recalcitrant they are to his philosophy of objective spirit. So much for the view that his philosophy of objective spirit is merely a Satanic prefiguration of a socialised society completely integrated by the capitalist principle of exchange!
I do not want to be overly critical of Adorno’s approach to Hegel. His actualizing appropriations of Hegel’s philosophy are of great subtlety and interest, certainly from the perspective of the development of his own negative dialectic. But they deploy, as a foil, interpretations of Hegel that are not just ‘merely existing’ but, as Hegel might say, ‘lazily existing’. In many ways this is typical of Adorno’s cavalier approach to philosophy. As he once wrote of Against Epistemology:[25] ‘Husserl’s philosophy is the occasion, not the point of this book’. Much the same applies to Hegel: Three Studies. But the irony remains that Adorno, who has the closest affinity to Hegel, who confides to his students that he thinks of himself “as an Hegelian”, and who even – insofar as he embraces what he deems to be Hegel’s dialectical method as his own – thinks like an Hegelian, is nevertheless the least reliable interpreter of Hegel’s philosophy among all the Frankfurt School theorists.
[1] See Finlayson (2017).
[2] Viz. Riedel 1975: 16.
[3] See the passage from Heine below (Heine 1948: 254-255).
[4] Riedel 1975: 20.
[5] See Popper 1966: 41; Russell 1961: 702.
[6] EL: §6; Werke: 10, 48.
In the same vein in the 1831 transcript of his lectures by D. F. Strauss, he claims: “What is actual, is rational. But not everything that exists is actual. What is bad, is internally broken and nugatory”.
[7] “The work … is intended as preparation for a revised conception of the dialectic”. (HTS: xxx; vi).
[8] Adorno’s remarks on the propinquity between ‘freedom’ and ‘reason’ (HTS: 44), are strongly reminiscent of Marcuse. Adorno’s claims about Hegel’s “closed” system and “closed” argument (HTS: 2; 13) echo Horkheimer’s remark that Hegel’s dialectic is “closed” in his essays of the 1930s ‘The Rationalist Debate in Contemporary Philosophy’, and ‘Hegel and the Problem of Metaphysics’.
[9] Take, for example, the essay by Charlotte Baumann, which contrasts two different actualizing interpretations of Hegel’s metaphysics in the light of their social theoretical consequences.
[10] Marx 1975b: 73.
[11] See Eduardo Mendieta’s preface to this volume.
[12] T&P: 143.
[13] An excellent discussion of Horkheimer’s relation to Hegel can be found in Abromeit (2011).
[14] HTS: 1.
[15] HTS: 12-13.
[16] HTS: 27.
[17] See Kaufman (1951) and Stewart (1996). One should also add Knox (1940).
[18] HTS: 28.
[19] Ibid., p. 44.
[20] Heine 1948: 254-255.
[21] See the discussion of this very passage by Borhane Blili-Hamelin & Arvi Särkelä, and Paul Giladi in this volume.
[22] HTS: 29.
[23] Ibid., p. 30.
[24] Hirschman 1981: 167.
[25] Adorno (1983).