Negative Dialectics
No being [Sein] without existents [Seiendes]. The Something as the necessary substrate of the concept in thinking, also that of being, is the utmost abstraction – not to be abolished by any further thought-process – of what is substantive, which is not identical with thought; without the Something, formal logic cannot be thought. It is not to be purified of its metalogical rudiment.[1] That substantive which the form of what is at large [Ueberhaupt] in thought would like to shake off, the supposition of its absolute form, is illusionary. Constitutive to what is substantive [Sachhaltiges] for the form is above all the substantial experience of what is substantive. Correlatively, the pure concept, the function of thought, is not to be radically separated at the subjective counter-pole from the existent “I.” The prôtou pseudos [Greek: proto-falsity] of idealism since Fichte was that the movement of the abstraction would permit the discarding of what is abstracted from. It is eliminated from thought, exiled from the latter’s home domain, not annihilated in itself; the belief in this is magical. Thinking without what is thought would countermand its own concept and that which is thought indicates in advance the existents, which were supposed to be posited in the first place by absolute thinking: a simple hosteron proteron [Greek: what is after is what is before]. This would remain offensive to the logic of non-contradictoriness; solely dialectics can comprehend it in the self-critique of the concept. It is objectively caused by epistemology, by the content of what is discussed in the critique of reason, and for that reason survives the downfall of idealism, which culminated in it. The thought leads to the moment of idealism, which is contrary to this; it does not permit itself to be dissolved back into the thought. The Kantian conception still permitted dichotomies such as that between form and content, subject and object, without being put off by the mutual mediatedness [Vermittelheit] of the opposing pairs; it did not notice its dialectical essence, the contradiction implied in its meaning. It was Heidegger’s teacher Husserl who so sharpened the idea of a priori-ty that, against his will as much as Heidegger’s, the dialectic of the eidê [Greek: form, kind] was to be derived from its own claim.[e1] If dialectics has however become inescapable, then it cannot remain glued to its principle like ontology and transcendental philosophy, as a pivotal structure, however modifiable. The critique of ontology does not aim at any other ontology, nor even at one which is non-ontological. Otherwise it would merely posit an Other as what is simply and purely first; this time not the absolute identity, being, the concept, but the non-identical, the existent, facticity. Therein it would hypostasize the concept of the non-conceptual and treat it counter to what it means. Foundational philosophy, prôtê philosophia [Greek: originary philosophy] necessarily carries the primacy of the concept with itself; what withholds itself from it, also departs from the form of a philosophizing allegedly based on a foundation. Philosophy could remain pacified by the thought of the transcendental apperception, or even by being, so long as those concepts were identical with the thought, that it thinks. If such identity is dismissed in principle, then it drags down the tranquillity of the concept as something ultimate in its fall. Because the fundamental character of every general concept dissolves before the determinate existent, philosophy may no longer hope for totality.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, sensation occupied the place of the indissolubly ontic as the something. However sensation has no sort of preeminence of cognitive dignity before any other real existent. Its “my,” accidental to its transcendental analysis and tied to ontic conditions, is mistaken for a legal claim by the experience which is entangled in its reflection-hierarchy, nearest to itself; as if what any particular human consciousness presumed as the ultimate were really an ultimate in itself, as if every other particular human and limited consciousness could not claim the same privilege for its sensations. If the form however, the transcendental subject, is supposed to strictly require sensation in order to function and thus to judge accurately, then it would be quasi ontologically attached not only to the pure apperception but just as much to its counter-pole, to its matter. This ought to shatter the entire doctrine of the subjective constitution, to which, following Kant, matter cannot be traced back. The idea of something immutable, identical to itself, would also thereby collapse. It is derived from the domination of the concept, which wished to be constant towards its content, precisely its “matter,” and for that reason is blind to such. Sensations, the Kantian matter, without which the forms could not even be imagined, which are therefore the conditions of the possibility of cognition in their own right, have the character of that which is transient. The non-conceptual, inalienable from the concept, disavows its being-in-itself and transforms it. The concept of the non-conceptual cannot pause by itself, in epistemology; this necessitates the substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit] of philosophy. Whenever it was master of itself, it dealt with the historically existent as its object, not first in Schelling and Hegel, but contre coeur [French: against its own will] already in Plato, who baptized the existent as the non-existent and yet wrote a doctrine of the state, in which eternal ideas are closely tied to empirical determinations such as the exchange of equivalents and the division of labor. Today it has become customary to make the academic distinction between a regular, proper philosophy, which would deal with the highest concepts, even if they deny their conceptuality, and a merely genetic, extra-philosophical relation to society, whose notorious prototypes would be the sociology of knowledge and the critique of ideology. The distinction is as unfounded as the need for regular philosophy is for its part suspect. It is not merely that by belatedly trumpeting its purity, it turns away from everything in which it once had its substance. Rather the philosophical analysis strikes immanently, in what is innermost to the presumably pure concepts and their truth-content, into that which is ontic, before which the claim of purity shudders and, with arrogant mien, cedes to the particular sciences. The smallest ontic residuum in the concepts, which regular philosophy stirs in vain, compels it to reflectively include what is existent there [Daseiende] in itself, instead of making do with its mere concept and believing itself to be safe there from what it means. Philosophical thinking has for its content neither the remainder after the cancellation of space and time, nor general findings about what is spatio-temporal. It crystallizes in the particular, in what is determined in space and time. The concept of the existent pure and simple is merely the shadow of the false one of being.
Wherever an absolute first is taught, there is always talk of something inferior, something absolutely heterogenous to it, as its logical correlate; prima philosophia [Latin: originary philosophy] and dualism go together. In order to escape this, fundamental ontology must try to keep its first at a distance from determination. What was first for Kant, the synthetic unity of the apperception, suffered the same fate. To him every determination of the object is an investment of subjectivity in non-qualitative multiplicity, irregardless of the fact that the determining acts, which count for him as spontaneous achievements of transcendental logic, also model themselves [sich anbilden] on a moment which they themselves are not; irregardless of the fact that what is to be synthesized does so only by requiring and permitting this last out of itself. The active determination is not something purely subjective, and that is why the triumph of the sovereign subject, which dictates laws to nature, is hollow. Because however in truth subject and object do not firmly oppose one another, as in the Kantian outline, but penetrate each other reciprocally, the degradation of the thing to something chaotically abstract by Kant also affects the power which is supposed to form it. The bane which the subject exerts becomes just as much one over the subject; both pursue the Hegelian fury of disappearance. In the categorical achievement it expended and impoverished itself; in order to be able to determine, to articulate what opposes it, so that it would become the Kantian object, it must dilute itself to the mere generality for the sake of the objective validity of that determination, amputate it from itself no less than from the object of cognition, so that this would be reduced to its concept according to program. The objectivating subject shrinks down into a point of abstract reason, finally into the logical non-contradictoriness, which for its part has no meaning independent of the determinate object. The absolute first necessarily remains as indeterminate as its opposite; no investigation of what is concretely precedent reveals the unity of what is abstractly antithetical. Rather the rigid dichotomical structure crumbles by virtue of the determinations of each pole as the moment of its own opposite. The dualism is already given in the philosophical thought and as inescapable, as the process by which it becomes false in thought. Mediation is merely the most general, itself inadequate expression for this. – If however the claim of the subject that it is the first, which surreptitiously inspired ontology, is cashiered, then what is secondary according to the schema of traditional philosophy is no longer secondary, in a double sense subordinate. Its denigration was the flip side of the triviality that everything existent would be colored by the observer, its group or species. In truth the cognition of the moment of subjective mediation into what is objective implies the critique of the notion of a glance into the pure in-itself, which, forgotten, lurks behind that triviality. Western metaphysics was, except for heretics, peephole metaphysics. The subject – itself only a limited moment – was locked for all eternity in itself, as punishment for its deification. It gazes into the darkened heavens, in which the star of the idea or that of being would arise, as through the embrasures of a tower. It is precisely the wall around the subject however which throws the shadow of what is thingly [Dinghaften] over everything which it conjures, which subjective philosophy powerlessly combats again. Whatever of experience may be carried along in the word being, is expressible only in configurations of existents, not by the allergy against such; otherwise the content of philosophy becomes the impoverished result of a process of subtraction, no different from the erstwhile Cartesian certainty of the subject, the thinking substance. One cannot see out. What would be beyond, appears only in the materials and categories within. That is where the truth and untruth of the Kantian philosophy would step out of each other. It is true, in that it destroys the illusion of the immediate knowledge of the absolute; untrue, in that it describes this absolute with a model, that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, were it merely the intellectus archetypus [Latin: archetypal intellect]. The demonstration of this untruth is the truth of post-Kantian idealism; this latter however is in turn untrue in its equation of subjectively mediated truth to the subject, as if its pure concept were being itself.
These sorts of considerations seem to give rise to a paradox. Subjectivity, thinking itself, would not be explained by itself but rather by the factical, especially by society; but the objectivity of cognition in turn could not be without thinking, subjectivity. Such a paradox originates from the Cartesian norm that the explanation ought to ground what comes later, or at least logically later, in what comes earlier. The norm is no longer binding [verbindlich]. According to its measure the dialectical matter-at-hand [Sachverhalt] would be the simple logical contradiction. But the matter-at-hand is not to be explained according to a hierarchical ordering schemata, called up from outside. Otherwise the explanatory attempt presupposes the explanation, which it first needs to find; presupposing non-contradictoriness, the subjective thought-principle, as inherent to what is thought, to the object. In certain respects dialectical logic is more positivistic than the positivism which condemns it: it respects the object which is to be thought as thought, even there, where it does not follow the rules of thought. Its analysis is tangential to the rules of thought. Thought need not remain content with its own juridicality [Gesetzlichkeit]; it has the capacity to think against itself, without sacrificing itself; were a definition of dialectics possible, this might be one worth suggesting. The armature of thinking need not remain ingrown to it; it reaches far enough to see through the totality of its logical claim as delusion. What is seemingly unbearable about this, that subjectivity would presuppose the factical, but objectivity the subject, is unbearable only to such delusion, to the hypostasis of the relationship of cause and effect, of the subjective principle which the experience of the object does not mesh with. The dialectic, as a philosophical mode of procedure, is the attempt to unravel the knot of that which is paradoxical with the oldest medium of the Enlightenment, the ruse [List: cunning]. It is no accident that the paradox was the bowdlerized form of dialectics since Kierkegaard. Dialectical reason follows the impulse to transcend the natural context and its delusion, which perpetuates itself in the subjective compulsion of logical rules, without imposing its rule on it: without sacrifice and revenge. Even its own essence is something which has come to be and as transient as antagonistic society. To be sure antagonism is no more limited to society than suffering. So little as dialectics is to be extended to nature as a universal explanatory principle, so little nevertheless are two kinds of truth to be maintained next to each other, the dialectical one inside society and one indifferent towards it. The separation of social and extra-social being, oriented to the compartmentalization of the sciences, deceptively veils the fact that blind natural-rootedness perpetuates itself in heteronomous history.[e2] Nothing leads out of the dialectical context of immanence than it itself. Dialectics meditates critically on itself, reflects on its own movement; otherwise Kant’s legal claim against Hegel would never expire. Such a dialectics is negative. Its idea names the difference from Hegel. Identity and positivity coincided in the latter; the inclusion of everything non-identical and objective in the subjectivity, which is expanded and exalted to the absolute Spirit, is supposed to achieve the reconciliation. On the other hand the power of the whole which is effective in every particular determination is not only its negation but also the negative, the untrue. The philosophy of the absolute, total subject is particular.[2] The reversibility of the identity-thesis, which is inherent in this, counteracts its intellectual principle. If the existent is to be totally deduced from the Spirit, then the latter would be doomed to become similar to the mere existent, which it meant to contradict: otherwise the Spirit and the existent would not harmonize. Precisely the insatiable identity-principle perpetuates the antagonism by means of the suppression of what is contradictory. What tolerates nothing that would not be like itself, thwarts the reconciliation for which it mistakes itself. The act of violence of making something the same reproduces the contradiction which it stamps out.
First Karl Korsch and later the functionaries of Diamat have objected that the turn to non-identity would be, due to its immanent-critical and theoretical character, an insignificant nuance of neo-Hegelianism or of the historically obsolete Hegelian Left; as if the Marxist critique of philosophy had dispensed with this, while at the same time the East cannot do without a statutory Marxist philosophy. The demand for the unity of theory and praxis has irresistibly debased the former to a mere underling, eliminating from it what it was supposed to have achieved in that unity. The practical visa-stamp demanded from all theory became the stamp of the censor. In the famed unity of theory-praxis, the former was vanquished and the latter became non-conceptual, a piece of the politics which it was supposed to lead beyond; delivered over to power. The liquidation of theory by dogmatization and the ban on thinking contributed to bad praxis; that theory should win back its independence is the interest of praxis itself. The relationship of both moments to each other is not settled for once and for all, but changes historically. Today, since the hegemonic bustle cripples and denigrates theory, theory testifies in all its powerlessness against the former by its mere existence. That is why it is legitimate and hated; without it, the praxis which constantly wishes to change things could not itself be changed. Whoever scolds theory as anachronistic, obeys the topos of dismissing as outmoded what was thwarted and remains painful. Therein precisely the course of the world is reconfirmed, which it is the very idea of theory not to obey, and the theoretical target is missed, even when it is successfully abolished, whether positivistically or by power-decree. The rage at the recollection of a theory which carries its own weight is by the way not far removed from the short-windedness of intellectual customs on the western side. The fear of epigonality and of the academic odor that clings to every reprise of motives codified in the philosophy of history has long led the various schools to advertise themselves as something which has never yet existed. Precisely that strengthens the fatal continuity of what already exists. So dubious however a procedure is, which insists all the more loudly on Ur-experiences the quicker its categories are delivered from the social mechanism, so little too are thoughts to be equated with what they originate from; this habit is equally a piece of origin-philosophy. Whoever struggles against forgetting, only indeed against the historical one, not, as Heidegger, against that of being and thereby the extra-historical one; against the universally expected sacrifice of a previously achieved freedom of consciousness, advocates no intellectual-historical restoration. That history has stepped past positions, is honored as a judgement over their truth-content only by those to whom history is called the world-court. Often what has been cast aside, but theoretically not absorbed, reveals its truth-content only later. It becomes the sore of the dominating health; this leads back to it over and over again in changed situations. What remained theoretically inadequate in Hegel and Marx became part of historical praxis; that is why it is to be theoretically reflected upon anew, instead of the thought bowing irrationally to the primacy of praxis; this was itself an eminently theoretical concept.
The farewell to Hegel becomes palpable in a contradiction concerning the whole, which is not programmatically settled as a particular one. The critic of the Kantian separation of form and content, Hegel wanted a philosophy without a detachable form, without a method implemented independently from the thing, and yet proceeded methodically. In fact the dialectic is neither solely a method nor something real in the naïve understanding of the term. Not a method: for the unreconciled thing, which lacks precisely that identity which the thought surrogates, is contradictory and blocks every attempt at unanimous interpretation. This thing, not the organizational drive of thought, is the impetus to dialectics. Not something simply real: for contradictoriness is a reflection-category, the thinking confrontation of concept and thing. Dialectics as a procedure means, to think for the sake of what was once experienced in the thing as a contradiction and against it in contradictions. A contradiction in reality, it is a contradiction against these. Such a dialectics is however no longer compatible with Hegel. Its movement does not tend towards identity in the difference of every object from its concept; rather it suspects something identical in it. Its logic is one of disassembly [Zerfalls]: of the prepared and concretized form of concepts, which the cognizing subject immediately faces at first. Their identity with the subject is untruth. Through it the subjective pre-formation of the phenomenon slides in front of what is non-identical, before the individuum ineffabile [Latin: ineffable individual]. The summation of identical determinations would correspond to the fondest wish of traditional philosophy, to the a priori structure and to its archaistic late form, ontology. However this structure is, before every sort of specific content, in the simplest sense negative as something abstractly maintained, Spirit become compulsion. The power of that negativity rules to this day in reality. What would be different, has not yet begun. This affects all specific determinations. Each one which appears non-contradictory proves to be as contradictory as the ontological models of being and existence. Nothing positive is to be obtained from philosophy which would be identical with its construction. In the process of demythologization positivity must be negated all the way into the instrumental reason, which demythologization supplies. The idea of reconciliation rejects its positive positing in the concept. Nevertheless the critique of idealism does not discard what the construction of the concept towards the insight once garnered, and what the guidance of the concepts once won in terms of energy from the method. Only that which is inscribed in the idealistic magic circle goes beyond its figure, by calling it by name in the completion of its own deductive process, demonstrating what is separated from it, what is untrue in it, in the developed summation of the totality. Pure identity is what is set up [Gesetzte: posited] by the subject, and to this extent is brought from outside. To immanently criticize it means therefore, paradoxically enough, to criticize it from outside as well. The subject must render compensation to the non-identical, for what it perpetrated on it. Precisely this sets it free from the appearance [Schein] of its absolute being-for-itself. This latter for its part is the product of the identifying thought, which, the more it devalues a thing to the mere example of its kind or species, the more it imagines that it has it as such, without subjective addition.
By immersing itself in what initially opposes it, the concept, and becoming aware of its immanently antinomical character, thought abandons itself to the idea of something which would be beyond the contradiction. The opposition in thinking to what is heterogenous to it is reproduced in thought itself as its immanent contradiction. Reciprocal critique of the general and the particular, the identifying acts which judge whether the concept does justice to what it is dealing with, and whether the particular also fulfills its own concept, are the medium of the thinking of the non-identity of the particular and concept. And not of thinking alone. If humanity is to rid itself of the compulsion, which really is imposed on it in the form of identification, it must at the same time achieve identity with its concept. All relevant categories play a part in this. The exchange-principle, the reduction of human labor to an abstract general concept of average labor-time, is Ur-related to the identification-principle. It has its social model in exchange, and it would not be without the latter, through which non-identical particular essences and achievements become commensurable, identical. The spread of the principle constrains the entire world to the identical, to totality. If the principle meanwhile was abstractly negated; if it was proclaimed as an ideal that, for the greater honor of the irreducibly qualitative, things should no longer go according to like for like, this would create an excuse for regressing into age-old injustice. For the exchange of equivalents was based since time immemorial exactly on this, that something unequal was exchanged in its name, that the surplus-value of labor was appropriated. If one simply annulled the measurement-category of comparability, then what would step into the place of the rationality, which was indeed ideological yet also inherent as a promise in the exchange-principle, is immediate expropriation, violence, nowadays: the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques. What the critique of the exchange-principle as the identifying one of thought wishes, is that the ideal of free and fair exchange, until today a mere pretext, would be realized. This alone would transcend the exchange. Once critical theory has demystified this latter as something which proceeds by equivalents and yet not by equivalents, then the critique of the inequality in the equality aims towards equality, amidst all skepticism against the rancor in the bourgeois egalitarian ideal, which tolerates nothing qualitatively divergent. If no human being was deprived of their share of their living labor, then rational identity would be achieved, and society would be beyond the identifying thought. This comes close enough to Hegel. The demarcation line from him is scarcely drawn by particular distinctions; rather by the intent: whether consciousness, theoretically and in practical consequence, would like to maintain identity as the ultimate, as the absolute and reinforce it, or else become aware of it as the universal apparatus of compulsion, which it ultimately requires in order to escape from the universal compulsion, just as freedom can only really come to be through the civilizing compulsion, not as a retour à la nature [French: back to nature]. The totality is to be opposed by convicting it of the non-identity with itself, which it denies according to its own concept. Negative dialectics is thereby tied, at its starting-point, to the highest categories of identity-philosophy. To this extent it also remains false, identity-logical, itself that which it is being thought against. It must correct itself in its critical course, which affects those concepts which it handles according to form, as if they were still that which is first for it. It is one thing if thinking, sealed off by the necessity of every inescapable form, adapts in principle in order to immanently repudiate the claim of traditional philosophy to the conclusive structure – it is quite another to spur on that form of conclusiveness by itself, with the intention of making itself into what is first. In idealism the highly formal principle of identity had, by means of its own formalization, the affirmation for its content. This is innocently brought to light by the terminology; the simple predicative sentences are called affirmative. The copula says: it is so, not otherwise; the factual handling of the synthesis, for which it stands, announces that it shall not be otherwise: else it would not be achieved. The will to identity labors in every synthesis; as an a priori task of thinking, immanent to it, it appears positive and desirable: through this, the substrate of the synthesis would be reconciled with the I and for that reason good. This promptly permits the moral desiderata that the subject, by virtue of the insight into how much the thing is its very own, ought to bow to what is heterogenous to it. Identity is the Ur-form of ideology. It is consumed as the adequacy to the thing suppressed thereby; adequacy was always also subjugation under dominating ends, to this extent its own contradiction. After the unspeakable effort which it must have cost the human species, in order to establish the primacy of identity even against itself, it rejoices and basks in its victory, by turning this latter into a determination of the vanquished thing: what this last experienced, it must present as its in-itself. Ideology owes its power of resistance against the Enlightenment to complicity with identifying thought: indeed with thinking at large. It demonstrates therein its ideological side, that it never makes good on the assertion, that the non-I would in the end be the I; the more the I grasps it, the more completely the I finds itself downgraded to an object. Identity becomes the authority of a doctrine of adjustment, wherein the object, according to which the subject would be directed, pays back to the latter what the subject inflicted on it. It is supposed to accept reason against its reason. That is why the critique of ideology is not something peripheral and intra-scientific, something limited to the objective Spirit and the products of the subjective one, but philosophically central: the critique of the constitutive consciousness itself.
The power of consciousness reaches all the way into its own deception. It is rationally cognizable, where a detached rationality which has run away with itself becomes false, turns truly into mythology. The ratio recoils into irrationality as soon as mistakes, in its necessary course, the fact that the disappearance of its substrate, be it ever so diluted, is the handiwork of its abstraction. If thinking follows its laws of motion unconsciously, it turns against its own meaning, that which is thought by thinking, which commands the flight of subjective intentions to halt. The dictate of its autarky damns thinking to nullity; this becomes in the end, subjectively, stupidity and primitivity. The regression of consciousness is the product of its lack of self-reflection. It has the capacity to see through the identity-principle, but cannot be thought without the identification; every determination is an identification. But precisely this approaches what the object is, as non-identical: by stamping it, it wishes to be stamped by it. Non-identity is secretly the telos of the identification, it is what is to be rescued in the latter; the mistake of traditional thought is that identity is held for its goal. The power which explodes the appearance [Schein] of identity is that of thinking itself: the application of its “that is” shakes its nevertheless inalienable form. The cognition of the non-identical is dialectical too, in the sense that it identifies more, and identifies differently, than identity-thinking. It wishes to say what something would be, while identity-thinking says what it falls under, what it is an example or representative of, what it consequently is not itself. Identity-thinking distances itself farther and farther away from the identity of its object, the more relentlessly it tears at the latter’s body. Identity does not disappear through its critique; it transforms itself qualitatively. Elements of the affinity of the object to its thought live on in it. It is hubris, that identity would be, that the thing in itself would correspond to its concept. But its ideal is not to be simply thrown away: in the reproach that the thing would not be identical with the concept lives too the longing that it would like to be so. In this form the consciousness of non-identity contains identity. Indeed the supposition of this, all the way down to formal logic, is the ideological moment in pure thinking. In it however the moment of truth of ideology is also hidden, the injunction that no contradiction, no antagonism ought to be. In the simple identifying judgement, the pragmatic element which controls nature is already conjoined to a utopian one. “A” is supposed to be, what it is not yet. Such hope is contradictorily tied to that which breaks through the predicative identity. For these the philosophical tradition had the word ideas. They are neither chôris [Greek: separately] nor empty sounds but negative signs. The untruth of all achieved identity is the inverted form of truth. The ideas live in the hollows between what the things claim to be, and what they are. Utopia would be beyond identity and beyond the contradiction, a togetherness of what is divergent. For the sake of the former, identification reflects on how language uses the word outside of logic, which does not speak to the identification of an object, but rather to that with human beings and things. The Greek argument as to whether the like or the unlike could recognize the like, is solely to be settled dialectically. If the thesis holds that only the like would be capable of bringing the indelible moment of mimesis in all cognition and all human praxis to consciousness, then such consciousness becomes untruth when the affinity, at the same time infinitely far away in its indelibility, posits itself as positive. In epistemology the invariable result was the false conclusion, that the object would be the subject. Traditional philosophy imagined it could recognize the unlike, by making it like itself, while thereby in actuality it only cognizes itself. The idea of a different one would be to become aware of the like, in that it determines what is unlike it. – The moment of non-identity in the identifying judgement is reasonably comprehensible, to the extent that every individual object subsumed under a class has determinations, which are not contained in the definition of its class. Meanwhile in the more emphatic concept, which is not simply the characteristic of the individual objects from which it is derived, the opposite simultaneously holds good. The judgement that someone is a free man is related, thought emphatically, to the concept of freedom. However this is for its part more than what is predicated of that man, just as that man, through other determinations, is more than the concept of his freedom. Its concept says not only that it could be applied to all other individuals, as freely defined men. It nourishes the idea of a condition in which the individuals would have qualities, which here and now could be ascribed to no-one. What is specific about praising someone as free is the sous-entendu [French: undertone], that something impossible is being ascribed to him, because it manifests itself in him; this simultaneously contingent and secret thing animates every identifying judgement which is worth making. The concept of freedom lags behind itself, as soon as it is empirically applied. It is then itself not what it says. Because however it must always be a concept of what is grasped under it, it is to be confronted with this latter. Such a confrontation impels it to the contradiction with itself. Every attempt, by merely posited, “operational” definitions of the concept of freedom, to exclude what philosophical terminology once called its idea, arbitrarily degrades the concept for the sake of its utility in relation to what it means in itself. The individual is both more and less than its general determination. Because however the particular, the determinate would come to itself only through the sublation of that contradiction, hence through the achieved identity between the particular and its concept, the interest of the individual is not only to preserve what the general concept robbed it of, but as much in that “more” of the concept as in its neediness. It experiences this to this day as its own negativity. The contradiction between the general and particular has as its content, that individuality is not yet and for that reason is bad, where it establishes itself. At the same time, that contradiction between the concept of freedom and its realization also remains the insufficiency of the concept; the potential of freedom wishes the critique of that which its compulsory formalization made it into.
Such a contradiction is no subjective thought-error; objective contradictoriness is what is embittering in dialectics, especially for the reflection-philosophy which is as hegemonic today as in Hegel’s time. It would be simply incompatible with the prevailing logic and thus to be abolished by the formal unanimity of the judgement. So long as critique holds itself abstractly to its rules, the objective contradiction would be only a pretentious way of saying, that the subjective conceptual apparatus unavoidably maintains the truth of its judgement on the particular existents over which it judges, while this existent accords with the judgement only insofar as it is already preformed by the apophantic requirement in the definitions of concepts. This would be easy to incorporate into advanced reflection-philosophical logic. But the objective contradictoriness designates not only whatever of the existent remains outside of the judgement, but something in what is judged itself. For the judgement always means that existent which is judged beyond that particular, which is included in the judgement; otherwise it would be, according to its own intention, superfluous. And exactly this intention is what it does not satisfy. The negative motive of identity-philosophy has retained its power; nothing particular is true, none is, as its particularity claims, it itself. The dialectical contradiction is neither the mere projection of a miscarried conceptual construction of the thing nor metaphyics run amok. Experience refuses to settle whatever would appear in what is contradictory in the unity of consciousness. A contradiction for example like that between the determination, which the individual knows as its own, and that which society imposes on it, if it wishes to keep itself alive, that of the “role,” is not to be reduced to any sort of unity without manipulation, without the fine-tuning of impoverished master concepts, which cause the essential differences to disappear;[3] any more so than the fact that the exchange-principle, which increases the productive-forces in existing society, simultaneously threatens these to an increasing degree with annihilation. The subjective consciousness, to which the contradiction is unbearable, ends up before a desperate choice. Either it must harmonistically stylize itself as contrary to the course of the world and, against its better insight, obey it heteronomously; or it must, in hard-bitten faith in its own determination, conduct itself as if there were no course of the world, and perish in it. It cannot eliminate the objective contradiction and its emanations by itself, through conceptual arrangement. It can however comprehend it; all else is idle assertion. This weighs more heavily than for Hegel, who first envisioned it. Once the vehicle of total identification, it becomes the organ of its impossibility. Dialectical cognition does not, as its opponents charge, construe contradictions from above and step through their resolution, although Hegel’s logic proceeds in this manner at times. Instead, its task is to pursue the inadequacy of the thought and thing; to experience it in the thing. Dialectics need not fear the reproach, that it is obsessed with the fixed idea of the objective antagonism, while the thing would already be pacified; nothing individual finds peace in the unpacified whole. The aporetic concepts of philosophy are marks of what is objectively unresolved, not merely in thinking. To accuse contradictions of incorrigible speculative obstinacy merely shifts the blame; shame bids philosophy not to suppress the insight of Georg Simmel, that it is astonishing, how little one notices the sufferings of humanity in their history. The dialectical contradiction “is” not purely and simply, but has its intention – its subjective moment – in that it cannot be talked out of this; in it dialectics goes towards what is divergent. The dialectical movement remains philosophical as the self-critique of philosophy.
Because the existent is not immediate but only through the concept, one should commence with the concept, not the mere given fact. The concept of the concept became itself problematic. No less than its irrationalistic counterpart, intuition, it has as such archaic traces, which intersect with those of the rational; relics of static thought and of a static cognitive ideal in the midst of dynamized consciousness. The immanent claim of the concept is its order-creating invariance as opposed to the change in what it analyzes. The form of the concept rejects this latter, is therein “wrong.” In dialectics thought raises the objection against the archaisms of its conceptuality. The concept in itself, before all content, hypostasizes its own form against the content. Thereby however also the identity-principle: that what is solely postulated in thought-practice would be a matter-at-hand in itself, something solid, something proper. Identifying thought concretizes by means of the logical identity of the concept. Dialectics amounts, according to its subjective side, to a thinking wherein the form of thought no longer turns its objects into immutable things which stay the same; that they would be so, is refuted by experience. How labile the identity of what is solid to traditional philosophy is, can be learned from its guarantor, the individual-human consciousness. In Kant, it is supposed to ground every identity as a generally designated unity. In fact an older one, looking back to when it once began to consciously exist to some extent, clearly recalls its distant past. It produces a unity, however irreally childhood may slip away from it. In that irreality however the I which one remembers, which one once was and potentially is once again, becomes at the same time an other, an alien, to be detachedly observed. Such ambivalence of identity and non-identity is preserved all the way into the logical problematic of identity. The expert jargon had the ready-made formula of the identity in the non-identity ready for this. It would need to be contrasted first with the non-identity in identity. Such a mere formal inversion meanwhile allows room for the subreption, that dialectics would be in spite of everything prima philosophia, as “prima dialectica” [Latin: originary dialectics].[4] The turn to the non-identical is borne out in its execution; if it remained a declaration, it would revoke itself. In the traditional philosophies, even where they, in Schelling’s words, construed, the construction was in actuality post-construction, which tolerated nothing not already predigested by the former. In that it interpreted even what was heterogenous to it as itself, ultimately as the Spirit, it turned once again into what is the same, into the identical, in which they repeated themselves as in a gigantic analytic judgement, leaving no room for the qualitatively new. It was ingrained into the thought-habit that without such an identity-structure philosophy would not be possible and would crumble into the pure juxtaposition of established positions. The mere attempt to turn philosophical thought towards the non-identical instead of identity would be absurd; it would a priori reduce the non-identical to its concept and thereby identify it. All these sorts of considerations are too radical and for that reason, like most radical questions, not radical enough. The form of the untiring recourse, in which something of the lash of the work-ethic rages, shrinks ever further away from what is to be seen through, and leaves it undisturbed. The category of the root, of the origin itself is dominating, the confirmation of what came first, because it was there first; of the chthonic against the migrant, of the settled against the mobile. What is alluring as the origin, because it does not want to be assuaged by what is derived, by ideology, is for its part an ideological principle. The conservative-sounding sentence of Karl Kraus, “Origin is the goal,” also expresses something scarcely meant in its own time and place: that the static bad state of affairs of the concept of the origin must be removed. The goal would not be to find the way back to the origin, to the phantasm of a good nature, but rather the origin would devolve to the goal, would constitute itself out of the latter. No origin except in the life of the ephemeral.
In its idealistic form dialectics was also a philosophy of origins. Hegel compared it to a circle. The return of the result of the movement to its beginning fatally annuls it: the identity of the subject and object was supposed to smoothly produce itself thereby. Its epistemological instrument is called the synthesis. It is not to be critiqued as an individual thought-act, which combines separate moments into their relation, but as a guiding and highest idea. In its general usage meanwhile the concept of the synthesis, the bulwark against decomposition, has patently taken on that tenor which took on its perhaps most repulsive form in the discovery of an alleged psycho-synthesis against Freudian psychoanalysis; idiosyncrasy balks at the usage of the word synthesis. Hegel used it far more seldom than his triple schemata, already convicted of its rattling, might lead one to suspect. This ought to correspond to the factual structure of his thinking. What predominates are the determinate negations of concepts, turned to and fro, envisioned from the most extreme proximity. What characterizes itself as the synthesis in such meditations, keeping faith with the negation insofar as what is supposed to be rescued therein, is what each preceding movement of the concept succumbed to. The Hegelian synthesis is throughout the insight into the insufficiency of that movement, into the costs of its production, as it were. As early as the introduction to the Phenomenology he gets to the very border of the consciousness of the negative essence of the dialectical logic he is expounding. Its command – to gaze purely at each and every concept until it moves itself, becomes non-identical with itself, by virtue of its own meaning, hence of its identity – is one of analysis, not synthesis. What is static in the concepts is supposed, so as to satisfy these latter, to release what is dynamic out of itself, comparable to the commotion of the drop of water under a microscope. That is why the method was called phenomenological, a passive relationship to what appears. It was, in Hegel, as what Benjamin called a dialectics at a standstill, already far more progressive than anything which appeared a hundred years later as phenomenology. Dialectics means, objectively, the breaking of the identity-compulsion through the stored-up energies which are bound up in its concretizations. This ended up partly prevailing in Hegel, who indeed could not confess to what was untrue in the identity-compulsion. In that the concept experiences itself as non-identical and moves, it leads, no longer merely itself, to what Hegelian terminology terms its Other,[e3] without sucking it dry. It determines itself by that which is outside it, because it does not exhaust itself according to what is its own. As itself it is not at all merely it itself. Where Hegel in the Science of Logic deals with the synthesis of the first triad, that of becoming,[e4] it is only after he equates being and nothingness as what is entirely empty and devoid of determination, that he pays attention to the difference which registers the absolute divergence of the literal linguistic meaning of both concepts. He refined his earlier doctrine that identity could be meaningfully predicated, that is to say more than tautologically, only by the non-identical: only when identified with each other, by means of its synthesis, would the moments become non-identical. From this the assertion of their identity accrued that restlessness, which Hegel called becoming: it trembles in itself. As the consciousness of non-identity through identity dialectics is not only a progressive but a simultaneously retrograde process; to this extent the image of a circle describes it accurately. The development of the concept is also a reaching back, the synthesis the determination of the difference which perished in the concept, “disappeared”; almost as in Hoelderlin’s anamnesis of what is natural, which fell away. Only in the consummated synthesis, the unification of the contradictory moments, is their difference revealed. Without the step that being would be the same as nothingness, both would be indifferent to each other, to use a favorite term of Hegel; only when they are supposed to be the same, do they become contradictory. Dialectics is not ashamed of the reminiscence of the Echternach spring parade. Unquestionably Hegel had, against Kant, delimited the priority of the synthesis: in keeping with the model of the later Platonic dialogue, he cognized the Many and the One [Einheit: the One, the unitary], which Kant regarded as contiguous categories, as moments, neither of which would be without the other. Nevertheless Hegel is, like Kant and the entire tradition, including Plato, a partisan of the One. Not even its abstract negation deserves thinking. The illusion of holding the Many immediately in hand would recoil as mimetic regression back into mythology, into the horror of the diffuse, just as the counter-pole of unitary thinking [Einheitsdenken], the imitation of blind nature through its suppression, ends up in mythical domination. The self-reflection of the Enlightenment is not its revocation: it is corrupted into the latter for the sake of the contemporary status quo. Even the self-critical turn of unitary thinking rests upon concepts, congealed syntheses. The tendency of the synthesizing acts is to be redirected, by becoming aware of what it inflicts upon the Many. Solely the One transcends the One. In it the affinity is granted its right to exist, which was driven back by the advance of the One and nevertheless, secularized to the point of unrecognizability, hibernates in it. The syntheses of the subject imitate, as Plato well knew, what that synthesis, mediately [mittelbar], with the concept, wishes on its own.
The non-identical is not to be won immediately as something positive for its part and also not through the negation of the negative. This latter is not itself, as in Hegel, the affirmation. The positive, which to him is supposed to result from the negation, has more than just its name in common with that positivity which he fought in his youth. The equation of the negation of the negation with positivity is the quintessence of identification, the formal principle reduced to its purest form. With it the anti-dialectical principle wins the upper hand in the innermost core of dialectics, that traditional logic, which more arithmetico [Latin: in mathematical terms] books minus times minus as a plus. It was borrowed from that mathematics, against which Hegel otherwise so idiosyncratically reacted. If the whole is the bane, the negative, then the negation of the particularities which have their epitome in that whole remains negative. Its positive would be solely the determinate negation, critique, not a circumventing result, which the affirmation could happily hold in its hand. In the reproduction of an opaque immediacy which, as something come to be, is also appearance [Schein], the very positivity of the mature Hegel bears marks of what according to predialectical usage is bad. While his analyses destroy the appearance [Schein] of the being-in-itself of subjectivity,[5] for that reason however the institution which is supposed to sublate subjectivity and bring it to itself is by no means the higher one, as he almost mechanically treats it. Rather what is reproduced in it still further is what was negated with good reason in subjectivity, however abstract this latter may be as itself something suppressed. The negation which the subject practiced was legitimate; also that which was practiced on it, and is nevertheless ideology. By forgetting the right of the preceding one at every new dialectical level, against the intermittent insight of his own logic, Hegel prepares the imitation of what he scolded as the abstract negation: abstract – namely confirmed by subjective caprice – positivity. This springs theoretically from the method, not, as it ought to according to Hegel, from the thing, and has spread throughout the world as an ideology as much as it turns into a real mockery and thereby convicts itself of its unwholesome nature [Unwesen]. What is positive in itself is fetishized from the vernacular, in which human beings praise what they positively would be, finally to the bloodthirsty phrase of the positive forces. By contrast what is to be taken seriously about the unwavering negation is that it does not lend itself to the sanctioning of the existent. The negation of the negation does not make this revocable, but proves that it was not negative enough; otherwise dialectics remains indeed what in Hegel it was integrated into, however at the price of its depotentialization, indifferent in the end towards what is posited at the beginning. What is negated is negative, until it has passed away. This is the decisive break from Hegel. To gloss over the dialectical contradiction, the expression of the indissolubly non-identical, once more by identity means so much as to ignore what it says, returning it to pure consistency-thinking. That the negation of the negation would be a positivity, can only be argued by those to whom positivity, as a universal conceptuality, is already presupposed at the outset. It rakes in the spoils of the primacy of logic over the metalogical, of the idealistic deception of philosophy in its abstract form, justification in itself. The negation of the negation would be once more identity, renewed delusion; the projection of consistency-logic, finally that of the principle of subjectivity, on the absolute. Between the most profound insight and its decay, Hegel’s sentence shimmers iridescently: “The truth is also the positive as the knowledge which accords with the object, but it is only this equality [Gleichheit] with itself, insofar as knowledge conducts itself negatively towards the other, has penetrated the object and has sublated the negation, which it is.”[e5] The qualification of truth as the negative conduct of knowledge, which penetrates the object – hence extinguishes the appearance [Schein] of its immediate being-so – sounds like a program of negative dialectics as one of a knowledge which “accords with the object”; however the establishment of this knowledge as a positivity abjures that program. Through the formulation of the “equality with itself,” of pure identity, the knowledge of the object is revealed to be mere rigmarole, because this knowledge is no longer that of the object at all, but the tautology of an absolutely posited noêsis noêseôs [Greek: thinking of thinking]. The idea of reconciliation irreconcilably opposes its affirmation in the concept. If it was objected to this that the critique of the positive negation of the negation would cut the vital nerve of Hegel’s logic and permit no dialectical movement at all, then this latter would be delimited to a naïve faith in the authority of Hegel’s self-understanding. While the construction of his system would undoubtedly fall apart without that principle, dialectics has its experience-content not in the principle but in the resistance of the Other against identity; hence its power. In it the subject too lies hidden, insofar as its real domination creates contradictions, but these have seeped into the object. To attribute dialectics purely to the subject, to clear away the contradiction through itself, as it were, also clears away dialectics, by expanding it into a totality. In Hegel it originated in the system, but does not have its measure therein.
Thinking, which went astray in identity, capitulates easily to what is indissoluble and turns the indissolubility of the object into a taboo for the subject, which is supposed to irrationalistically or scientifically resign itself not to touch what is not the same as it, surrendering to the current cognitive ideal, thereby even paying homage to it. Such an attitude of thought is by no means foreign to that ideal. In every case it binds the appetite for incorporation with the aversion to what is not incorporated, which precisely requires cognition. The resignation of theory before the individuality labors indeed no less for what exists, to which it lends the nimbus and the authority of intellectual impenetrability and hardness, than does a voracious exuberance. As little as what individually exists coincides with its master-concept, that of existence, so little is it uninterpretable, nor for its part any ultimate, against which cognition knocks its head in vain. In keeping with the most enduring result of Hegelian logic it is not simply for itself but an other in itself and tied to others. What is, is more, than it is. This “more” is not imposed on it, but remains, as what is squeezed out of it, immanent to it. To this extent the non-identical would be the thing’s own identity against its identifications. The innermost core of the object proves to be simultaneously external to this, its sealed-off character as appearance [Schein], the reflex of the identifying, solidifying procedure. Where the thinking insistence in relation to the individual leads is towards its essence, instead of towards the general, which it would represent. Communication with others crystallizes itself in the individual, which is mediated in its existence [Dasein] by them. In fact the general, as Husserl recognized, dwells in the center of the individual thing, does not constitute itself in the comparison of something individual with others. For absolute individuality – and Husserl paid no attention to this – is the product of the same process of abstraction, which is set in motion for the sake of the generality. While the individual is not to be deduced out of thought, the core of the individual would be comparable to those works of art which renounce all schematas, which are individuated to the utmost degree, whose analysis rediscovers moments of the generality in the extremity of their individuation, its participation, hidden even from itself, in what is typical.
The unifying moment survives, without the negation of the negation, yet also without delivering itself to the abstraction as the highest principle, not by advancing step by step towards the general master-concept from the concepts, but by these latter entering into a constellation. These illuminate the specifics of the object which the classifying procedure is indifferent towards or uncomfortable with. The model for this is the conduct of language. It offers no mere sign-system for cognitive functions. Where it appears essentially as language, becoming portrayal [Darstellung], it does not define its concepts. It obtains their objectivity through the relationship in which it posits the concepts, centered around a thing. It thereby serves the intention of the concept, to wholly express what is meant. Solely constellations represent, from without, what the concept has cut away from within, the “more,” which the former wishes to be, so very much as it cannot be the latter. By gathering around the thing to be cognized, the concepts potentially determine its innermost core, thinking to attain what thinking necessarily stamped out of itself. The Hegelian usage of the terminus concrete, according to which the thing itself is its context, not its pure selfness, registers this, without however, in spite of all critique of discursive logic, ignoring this. But Hegel’s dialectic was one without language, while the simplest literal meaning of dialectics postulates language; to this extent Hegel remained the adept of current science. He did not need language in the emphatic sense, because to him everything, even what is devoid of language and opaque, is supposed to be Spirit and the Spirit, the context. This supposition is beyond salvation. That which is resolvable, which is not in any previously-thought context, does indeed transcend its self-enclosed nature out of itself, as what is non-identical. It communicates with that from which the concept separated it. It is opaque only for the totality-claim of identity; it resists the latter’s pressure. As such however it seeks expression. Through language it dispels the bane of its selfness. What in the non-identical is not to be defined in its concept, surpasses its individual existence, which shrinks into the polarity to the concept, at which it stares. The interior of the non-identical is its relationship to that which it is not itself and which its instituted, frozen identity with itself withholds from it. It attains itself only in its disclosure [Entaeusserung: removal, relinquishment, realization], not in its hardening; this can still be learned from Hegel, without making concessions to the repressive moments of his doctrine of realization [Entaeusserung]. The object opens itself to a monadological insistence, which is the consciousness of the constellation, in which it stands: the possibility of immersion in what is internal necessitates what is external. Such immanent universality of the individual however is objective as sedimented history. This is in it and outside it, something all-encompassing, in which it has its place. To become aware of the constellation in which the thing stands, means so much as to decode the one which the latter bears within itself, as what has come to be. The chorismos of the outside and the inside is for its part historically conditioned. The only knowledge which can unleash the history in the object, is that which is aware of the historical positional value of the object in its relationship to others; the updating and concentration of something already known, which it transforms. The cognition of the object in its constellation is that of the process, which it has stored up within itself. As a constellation the theoretical thought circles around the concept, which it would like to open, hoping, that it springs ajar like the lock of a heavily guarded safe: only not by means of a single key or a single number, but by a number-combination.
How objects are to be disclosed through constellations is to be gathered less from philosophy, which did not interest itself in this, than from scientific investigations of merit: in many cases the achieved scientific work was ahead of its philosophical self-understanding, that of scientivism. One need by no means start out from its own content, according to metaphysical investigations like Benjamin’s Origin of the German Tragedy-Play, which grasp the concept of truth itself as a constellation.[e6] One could return to a scholar of so positivistic a bent as Max Weber. He indeed understood the “ideal types,” quite in keeping with subjectivistic epistemology, as an aid in approaching the object, excluding every substantiality in itself and to be reliquefied any which way. But just as in all nominalism, however null and void it may consider its concepts, something of the constitution of the thing strikes through this and reaches beyond the thought-practical advantage – not the least motive for the critique of unreflective nominalism – so are the material works of Weber derived far more from the object, than the southwestern German methodology would lead one to expect. In fact the concept is adequate grounds for the thing[6], insofar as the investigation of an at any rate social object becomes false, where it limits itself to a dependency inside its domain, which grounded the object, and which ignores its determinations through the totality. Without the superordinated concept, those dependencies conceal the most effective one of all, that of society, and this cannot be adequately made up for by the individual res, which the concept has under itself. It appears however solely through the individual, and thereby the concept changes once more into the determinate cognition. In contrast to current scientific practice, the difficulty of the definition of historical concepts became clear to Weber when, in the treatise on the Protestant ethic and the Spirit of capitalism, he raised the question of their definition, as only philosophers before him had: Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche. He expressly rejected the delimiting definition-procedure according to the schema “genus proximum, differentia specific”[e7] and demanded instead that sociological concepts ought to “be gradually composed [komponieren: to compose musically] out of individual particular pieces extracted from historical reality. The place of the final conceptual reporting of the results lies therefore not at the beginning of the investigation, but at the end.”[e8] Whether such a definition is required for once and for all, or whether what Weber called “composing,” without formally definitory results, has the capacity to be what Weber’s epistemological intent would like it to be, remains unsettled. So little as definitions are the be-all and end-all of cognition, which vulgar scientivism regards them as, so little are they to be banished. The thinking, which could not master the definition during its course, which is incapable of moments where linguistic precision could stand in for the thing, would very likely be as sterile as one which glutted itself on verbal definitions. More essential, however, is what Weber termed as composing, which would be unacceptable to orthodox scientivism. He is indeed keeping merely the subjective side, the procedure of the cognition, in view. But the compositions in question may well be similarly arranged as their analogue, the musical ones. Subjectively produced, these are successful only where the subjective production perishes in them. The context, which creates it – precisely the “constellation” – becomes legible as the sign of objectivity: of intellectual content. That which is similar to a text [Schriftaehnliche] in such constellations is the recoil of what is subjectively thought and brought together in objectivity by means of language. Even a procedure as obliged to the traditional ideal of science and its theories as that of Max Weber by no means lacks this moment, though it is not thematic in him. While his most mature works, above all Economy and Society, seem to suffer at times from a surplus of verbal definitions borrowed from jurisprudence, these latter are, looked at more closely, more than such; not only conceptual anchorings but rather attempts, by the gathering of concepts around the sought-after central one, to express what it aims at, instead of circumscribing it to operative ends. The in every respect decisive concept of capitalism is thus emphatically demarcated from isolated and subjective categories like acquisitiveness or the profit-motive, similarly by the way to Marx. The oft-cited profit-motive has to be oriented in capitalism to the profit-principle, to market chances, it must avail itself of the calculating capital account; its organizational form has to be that of free labor, household and firm have to be separated, it requires bookkeeping and a rational legal system in accordance with the dominating principle of rationality in capitalism at large.[e9] The completeness of this catalogue remains in doubt; it is especially to be asked, as to whether the Weberian emphasis on rationality, disregarding the class-relationship which reproduces itself through the exchange of equivalents, already equates the method of capitalism overmuch to its “Spirit,” although the exchange of equivalents and its problematic would certainly not be thinkable without rationality. Precisely the increasing tendency of integration of the capitalist system however, whose moments intertwine into a constantly more complete functional context, makes the old question concerning the cause as opposed to the constellation ever more precarious; not the critique of epistemology, but the real course of history necessitates the search for constellations. If these appear in Weber in place of a systematics, whose absence one would gladly reproach him for, then his thinking proves its worth as a third possibility beyond the alternatives of positivism and idealism.
Where a category – through negative dialectics, that of identity and of totality – changes itself, the constellation of all changes and thereby in turn each one. The concepts of essence and appearance are paradigmatic of this. They originate out of the philosophical tradition, are maintained, but their directional tendency is redirected. Essence is no longer to be hypostasized as pure intellectual being-in-itself. Rather, essence passes over into what lies hidden beneath the façade of the immediate, of the presumed facts, which makes them into what they are; the law of doom, which history has obeyed hitherto; all the more irresistible, the deeper it crawls beneath the facts, in order to be comfortably denied by them. Such essence [Wesen] is downright mischief-making [Unwesen], the arrangement of the world which degrades human beings into the means of their sese conservare [Latin: self-preservation], curtailing and threatening their life, by reproducing it and deceiving them that things are so, in order to satisfy their needs. This essence too must appear like the Hegelian one: masked in its own contradiction. Only in the contradiction of the existent to that which it claims to be, can essence be cognized. Indeed it, too, is conceptual in respect to the presumed facts, not immediate. But such conceptuality is not mere physei [Greek: by nature], the product of the subject of cognition, in which it finally finds itself once more confirmed. Instead it expresses the fact that the conceptualized world, however much also through the fault of the subject, is not its own but hostile to it. This is almost imperceptibly attested to by the apperception [Wesenschau] of the Husserlian doctrine. It amounts to the complete alienation of essence from the consciousness which grasps it. It recalls, albeit in the fetishized form of an utterly absolute ideal sphere, that even the concepts to which their essentialities are unthinkingly equated are not only the products of syntheses and abstractions: they represent equally, too, a moment in the many, which calls up the concepts, which according to idealistic doctrine are merely posited. Husserl’s hypertrophied idealism, the ontologization of pure Spirit, for that reason long unknown to itself, helped in its most effective texts to give distorted expression to an anti-idealistic motive, the dissatisfaction with the thesis of the hegemony of the thinking subject. Phenomenology forbade the latter from proscribing laws, where it already had to obey them: to that extent it experiences them as something objective. Because meanwhile for Husserl, as for the idealists, all mediations are put on the noetic side, that of the subject, he cannot otherwise conceive of the moment of objectivity in the concept than as immediacy sui generis [Latin: general in itself] and must copy it, with an epistemological act of violence, from the sense-perception. He frantically denied that the essence in spite of everything is also for its part a moment: originated. Hegel, whom he damned with the arrogance of ignorance, already had the superior insight that the essence-categories of the second book of the Logic are as much historically become, products of the self-reflection of the categories of being, as objectively valid. A thinking which zealously rejected dialectics can no longer attain this, even though Husserl’s basic theme, the logical propositions, ought to have thrust this upon him. For such propositions are, according to his theory, equally objective in character, “laws of essence,” as, something he at first passed over in silence, tied to thinking and dependent in their innermost core on that which they for their part are not. The absolute of logical absolutism justifies itself in the validity of formal propositions and of mathematics; nevertheless it is not absolute, because the claim of absoluteness, as the positively achieved identity of subject and object, is itself conditioned, the condensation of the subjective totality-claim. The dialectic of essence, as one which is simultaneously in its own way quasi existent and yet not-existent, is however by no means, as in Hegel, to be resolved in the unity of the produced and producing Spirit. His doctrine of the objectivity of essence postulates, being would be the Spirit not yet come to itself. The essence recalls the non-identity in the concept of what is not initially posited by the subject, but which the latter follows. Even the separation of logic and mathematics from the ontic realm, on which the appearance [Schein] of its being-in-itself, the ontological interpretation of formal categories rests, has its ontic aspect as something which rebounds from the ontic, as Hegel would have put it. That ontic moment reproduces itself in them. Because it is impossible for them to see through themselves as something separate and conditioned – for the separation is their own essence – they achieve a kind of existence [Dasein]. Even more however the laws of essence of society and its movement. They are realer than the factical, in which they appear and which deceptively veils them. But they cast aside the traditional attributes of their essentiality. They could be called the negativity, reduced to its concept, which made the world thus, as it is. – Nietzsche, the irreconcilable opponent of the theological heritage in metaphysics, ridiculed the distinction between essence and appearance and delivered the background world [Hinterwelt] over to the backwoodsmen [Hinterwaeldlern], therein in accordance with the entirety of positivism. Perhaps nowhere else is it so palpable, how indefatigable Enlightenment comes to benefit the obscurantists. Essence is, what is itself concealed according to the law of the bad state of affairs; to dispute that an essence would exist, means taking the side of appearance [Schein], of total ideology, to which the existent has meanwhile become. Those who would count everything which appears as the same, because they know of no essence which would permit a distinction, make common cause with the untruth out of the fanatical love of truth, with that scientific tedium which Nietzsche so despised, which can’t be bothered with the dignity of the objects to be dealt with, and either parrots public opinion about this dignity or else selects its criterion by whether, as they say, a thing has not yet been worked out. The scientific mindset cedes the decision over what is essential and inessential to the disciplines, which are occupied with the object at any given time; what is essential to one can be inessential to the other. In accordance with this Hegel located the distinction in a third thing, initially outside of the immanent movement of what lies in the thing.[7] Husserl, who would not dream of a dialectic between the essence and appearance [Schein], is ironically in the right against him: in fact there is indeed a fallible, yet immediate intellectual experience of the essential and inessential, which the scientific need for order can talk the subjects out of only with violence. Where such an experience does not occur, cognition remains immobile and fruitless. Its measure is, what the subjects experience objectively as their suffering. Parallel to the theoretical leveling of essence and appearance, those who cognize subjectively lose, along with the capacity to suffer and to be happy, the primary capability to separate what is essential and what is inessential, without anyone really knowing what is the cause and what is effect. The obstinate urge to check on the accuracy of what is irrelevant, rather than to reflect on what is relevant at the risk of error, counts as one of the most widespread symptoms of regressive consciousness. The latest style of backwoodsmen do not bother themselves with any background world, satisfied with what the front-door world [Vorderwelt] talks them into buying, in words and in silence. Positivism turns into ideology, by eliminating the objective category of essence and then, logically, the interest in the essential. By no means is it exhausted however in the hidden general law. Its positive potential survives in what the law covers, what is inessential to the verdict of the course of the world, what is thrown to the margins. The gaze at this, the one at the Freudian “hubbub of the world of appearance” which goes far beyond the psychological one, follows the intention of the particular as the non-identical. What is essential is opposed to the dominating universality, to the bad state of affairs, to the extent that it critically surpasses it.
The mediation of essence and appearance, of concept and thing, does not remain what it was either, the moment of subjectivity in the object. What mediates the facts is not so much the subjective mechanism which pre-forms and renders them, as the objectivity, heteronomous to the subject, behind that which it can experience. It is denied to the primary subjective circle of experience, is preordained to this. Wherever at the present historical stage one judges too subjectively, to use the current parlance, the subject almost automatically parrots the consensus omnium [Latin: general consensus]. For it would give the object what is its own, instead of being satisfied with the false copy, only where it resisted the average value of such objectivity and made itself free as a subject. It is on this emancipation, not on the insatiable repression of the subject, that objectivity depends today. The overwhelming power of what is objectivated in subjects, which then prevents them from becoming subjects, equally prevents the cognition of what is objective; that is what became of what was once called the “subjective factor.” Now subjectivity is what is mediated rather than objectivity, and such mediation is in more urgent need of analysis than the traditional one. In the subjective mechanisms of mediation, those of objectivity are extended, in which every subject, even the transcendental one, is harnessed. That the data are apperceived, according to their claim, as so and not otherwise, is what the pre-subjective social order sees to, which for its part essentially constitutes the subjectivity, which epistemology regards as constitutive. What in the Kantian deduction of categories ultimately remains contingent, by its own confession, “given”: that reason has these and no other basic concepts at its disposal, is attributed to what the categories, according to Kant, have yet to establish. The universality of mediation is not however a license to level everything between heaven and earth down to it, as if the mediation of the immediate and the mediation of the concept were the same. The mediation is essential to the concept, it is itself according to its constitution immediately the mediation; the mediation of immediacy is meaningful however as the reflection-determination, only in relation to what it opposes, the immediate. If there is indeed nothing which would not be mediated, then such mediation always necessarily arises, as Hegel emphasized, in something mediated, without which it for its part would not be. That on the other hand what is mediated would not be without mediation, has a purely privative and epistemological character: the expression of the impossibility of determining the something without mediation, hardly more than the tautology that the thinking of something would be thinking just the same. Conversely no mediation would remain without the something. Its nature as something mediated does not lie in immediacy, in the same manner as something immediate in the mediation, which would be mediated. Hegel neglected the distinction. The mediation of the immediate affects its modus: the knowledge of it and the borders of such knowledge. Immediacy is no modality, no mere determination of the “how” for a consciousness, but objective: its concept points to what is not to be cleared away through its concept. Mediation by no means says that everything would go into it, but postulates what it is mediated by, something not completely worked through; immediacy itself however stands for a moment which does not require the cognition, the mediation, in the same way this latter does of the immediate. So long as philosophy employs the concepts immediate and mediate [mittelbar], which for the time being it can scarcely do without, its language announces the matter-at-hand, which the idealistic version of dialectics denied. That this last passes over the apparently minimal difference, is what lends it its plausibility. The triumph, that the immediacy would in every case be mediated, bulldozes over the mediated and attains the totality of the concept in its blessed journey, no longer held back by anything non-conceptual, the absolute domination of the subject. Because however the difference spirited away is recognizable by dialectics, the total identification in this does not have the last word. It has the capacity to break out of the magic circle, without contrasting it dogmatically from outside to a presumably realistic thesis. The circle of identification, which ultimately always identifies only itself, was drawn by the thinking, which tolerates nothing outside; its imprisonment is its own handiwork. Such totalitarian and for that reason particular rationality was historically dictated by what was threatening in nature. That is it limitation. Identifying thought, the making of everything different into the same, perpetuates the bondage of nature in fear. Unreflective reason is deluded to the point of madness in view of each and every one which eludes its domination. For the time being, reason is pathic; only by curing itself of this, would reason be. Even the theory of alienation, the ferment of dialectics, confuses the need to approach the heteronomous and to this extent irrational world, in Novalis’ words “to be everywhere at home,” with the craving for incorporation and persecution; with the archaic barbarism, that the longing subject is incapable of loving the alien, of loving what is different. If the alien were no longer ostracized, there would hardly be any more alienation.
The equivocation in the concept of mediation, which gives rise to the fact that the opposing poles of cognition are equated to each other at the cost of their qualitative difference, on which simply everything depends, dates back to the abstraction. The word “abstract” is however still too abstract, itself equivocal. The unity of what is subsumed under general concepts is fundamentally different from the conceptually determined particular. In this latter the concept is always simultaneously its negative; it cuts short what it is itself and yet cannot immediately be named, and replaces it with identity. This negative, which is false, but at the same time necessary, is the staging-grounds of dialectics. The core, which in its idealistic version is also for its part abstract, is not simply eliminated. By virtue of its differentiation from nothingness, even the most indeterminate something would be, contrary to Hegel, not something purely and simply indeterminate. This refutes the idealistic doctrine of the subjectivity of all determinations. So little as the particular would be determinable without the general, by which it is identified according to current logic, so little is it identical with it. Idealism does not wish to see that a something, be it ever so devoid of qualities, may not however for that reason already be called nothing. Because Hegel shrank back from the dialectic of the particular which he conceived – it annihilated the primacy of the identical and consequently idealism – he is incessantly driven to shadow-boxing. In the place of the particular he slides the general concept of particularization pure and simple, of “existence,” for example, in which it is no longer anything particular. This restores the manner of procedure of thinking, which Kant justifiably scolded as the amphiboly of the concepts of reflection in the earlier rationalisms. The Hegelian dialectic becomes sophistic, where it fails. What makes the particular into the dialectical impulse, its indissolubility in the master-concept, it deals with as a universal matter-at-hand, as if the particular were itself its own master-concept and thereby indissoluble. Precisely thereby the dialectic of non-identical and identity becomes illusory [scheinhaft]: the victory of identity over the identical. The inadequacy of the cognition, which cannot assure itself of any particular without the concept, which is by no means the particular, redounds to the advantage of the Spirit as in a card-trick, which raises itself over the particular and purifies it of what resisted the concept. The general concept of particularity has no power over the particular, which it abstractively means.
It is easy for the polarity of subject and object to appear for its part as an undialectical structure, in which all dialectics is supposed to take place. But both concepts are originated categories of reflection, formulations for something which is not to be unified; not anything positive, nor any primary matter-at-hand, but negative throughout, the expression solely of non-identity. In spite of this the difference between subject and object is for its part not to be simply negated. They are neither the ultimate duality, nor does the ultimate unity hide behind them. They constitute each other just as much as they diverge from each other by means of such a constitution. If the dualism of subject and object were laid down as a principle, it would be once again total, monistic, just like the identity-principle which it rejects; the absolute duality would be unity. Hegel used this for the purpose of absorbing the subject-object polarity, which he felt rendered him preeminent to Fichte and Schelling by developing it according to both sides, into thinking. As a structure of being the dialectic of subject and object becomes according to him the subject.[8] As abstractions both are thought-products; the supposition of their opposition declares thinking inalienably to what is first. But the dualism does not take the hint of the pure thought. As long as this remains thought, it is consummated according to the dichotomy, which has become the form of thinking and without which thinking would perhaps not be. Every concept, even that of being, reproduces the difference of thinking and what is thought. It was burned into the theoretical consciousness of the antagonistic constitution of reality; insofar as it expresses this, the untruth of the dualism is the truth. Once detached from this however the antagonism would become the philosophical excuse of its eternity. Nothing else is possible except the determinate negation of the individual moments, through which subject and object are opposed absolutely and precisely thereby identified with each other. The subject is in truth never wholly the subject, the object never wholly the object; nevertheless both are not to be pieced together out of a third, which would transcend them. That which is third is no less deceptive. The Kantian agenda [Auskunft], of drawing it away from the positive, finite cognition as the infinite, and spurring this on to untiring effort via the unattainable, is inadequate. The duality of subject and object is to be critically maintained against the totality-claim which inheres to thought. Indeed the separation, which makes the object into what is alien, what is to be dominated and appropriates it, is subjective, the result of ordering preparation. Only the critique of the subjective origin of the separation does not once again bring together what is separated, after it has really split. Consciousness boasts of the unification of what it first arbitrarily divided into elements; hence the ideological overtone of all talk of the synthesis. It is the veil of the analysis, hidden from itself and increasingly tabooed. The antipathy of the vulgar noble consciousness towards this is due to the fact that the dismemberment, which the bourgeois Spirit reproaches its critics for practicing, is its own unconscious handiwork. The rational labor-processes are its model. They require compartmentalization as the condition of commodity production, which resembles the universal-conceptual procedure of the syntheses. If Kant had included the relationship of his method to theory, that of the epistemologically investigating subject to the one under investigation, in the critique of reason, then it would not have escaped him that the forms by which the multiplicity is supposed to be synthesized are for their part the products of operations, which the structure of the work, revealingly enough, entitled transcendental analytics.
The course of the epistemological reflection was, according to its predominant tendency, that which traced back objectivity more and more to the subject. Precisely this tendency should be reversed. What in the tradition of philosophy distinguished the concept of subjectivity from the existent, is modeled after the existent. That philosophy, laboring to this day from the lack of self-reflection, forgot the mediation in what is mediated, in the subject, is so little meritorious of sublimity than any other sort of forgetting. As punishment, as it were, the subject is overtaken by what is forgotten. As soon as it is made into an object of epistemological reflection, it shares with this that character of objectivity, whose absence it happily lays claim to as the preeminence before the realm of the factical. Its essentiality, an existence [Dasein] of second potency, presupposes (as Hegel did not fail to state) the first one, facticity, as the condition of its possibility, although negated. The immediacy of the primary reactions was broken through in the formation of the I and with them the spontaneity into which according to transcendental custom the pure I is supposed to contract; its centristic identity goes at the expense of what idealism then attributes to it. The constitutive subject of philosophy is more thingly [dinghafter] than the specific psychological content which it expelled from itself as thingly-naturalistic. The more autocratically the I raises itself up above the existent, the more it imperceptibly turns into an object and ironically countermands its constitutive role. Not merely the pure I is ontically mediated through the empirical one, which shines through unmistakably as the model of the first treatment of the deduction of the pure concept of reason, but so too is the transcendental principle itself, in which philosophy believes to possess its first in contrast to the existent. Alfred Sohn-Rethel was the first to point out that in the latter, in the general and necessary activity of the Spirit, inalienably social labor lies hidden. The aporetic concept of the transcendental subject – one which is not-existent, which nonetheless acts; one which is universal, which is nonetheless supposed to be experienced as particular – would be a soap bubble, could never be created out of the autarkic context of immanence of necessarily individual consciousness. To this latter however it represents not only what is more abstract, but by means of its formative power also what is more real. Beyond the magic circle of identity philosophy, the transcendental subject can be deciphered as the society which is unconscious of itself. Such unconsciousness can be deduced. Since intellectual labor was separated from the manual kind in the sign of the domination of the Spirit, of the justification of privilege, the divided Spirit was obliged, with the exaggeration due to a bad conscience, to vindicate precisely that domination-claim, which it derived from the thesis that it would be the first and originary, and that is why it takes pains to forget from whence its claim comes, if it is not to crumble. Deep down the Spirit suspects that its stable rule is not at all that of the Spirit, but possesses its ultima ratio [Latin: ultimate ratio] in the physical violence at its disposal. It may not utter its secret, at the price of its downfall. The abstraction which, even by the lights of extreme idealists like Fichte, made the subject to a constituens in the first place, reflects the separation from manual labor, discernable through the confrontation with the latter. When Marx told the Lassalleans in the critique of the Gotha program that labor was not, as the vulgar socialists were wont to hold, the sole source of social wealth,[e10] he thereby philosophically expressed, in a period in which he had already left behind the official philosophical thematic, no less than the fact that labor is not to be hypostasized in any form, in the industriousness of hands so little as in intellectual production. Such hypostasis merely perpetuates the illusion of the primacy of the producing principle. It comes to its truth solely in the relationship to that non-identical, for which Marx, in his contempt for epistemology, first chose the crude, all too narrow name of nature, later natural material and other, less incriminating termini.[e11] What ever since the Critique of Pure Reason comprised the essence of the transcendental subject, functionality, the pure activity, which occurs in the achievements of the individual subjects and simultaneously surpasses these, projects free-floating labor on the pure subject as origin. If Kant thereby restricted the functionality of the subject, in that it would be null and void without something material befitting it, then he unflinchingly indicated that social labor is one on something; the greater consistency of the subsequent idealists eliminated this without hesitation. The universality of the transcendental subject however is that of the functional context of society, that of a whole, which coalesces out of the individual spontaneities and individual qualities, limiting them in turn through the leveling exchange-principle and virtually removing them, as powerlessly dependent on the whole. The universal domination of exchange-value over human beings, which a priori does not permit subjects to be subjects, degrades subjectivity itself to a mere object, relegating that principle of universality, which asserts that it would establish the predominance of the subject, to untruth. The “more” of the transcendental one is the “less” of the empirical subject, itself utterly reduced.
As the extreme borderline case of ideology the transcendental subject comes to within a hair of the truth. The transcendental universality is no mere narcissistic self-exaltation of the I, not the hubris of its autonomy, but has its reality in the domination which ends up prevailing and perpetuating itself through the exchange-principle. The process of abstraction, which is transfigured by philosophy and solely ascribed to the cognizing subject, plays itself out in the factual exchange-society. – The determination of the transcendental as what is necessary, which conjoins itself to functionality and universality, expresses the principle of the self-preservation of the species. This last delivers the legal grounds for the abstraction, without which it cannot work; it is the medium of self-preserving reason. It would not take too much artifice to parody Heidegger, by interpreting the thought of the necessity in what is philosophically universal as the need to avert privation, by remedying the lack of groceries through organized labor; thereby the Heideggerian mythology of language would indeed be unhinged: an apotheosis of the objective Spirit, which from the very beginning ostracized the reflection on the material process, which reaches deep into such, as inferior. – The unity of the consciousness is that of the individual-human and as its principle also visibly bears its trace; thereby that of the existent. For transcendental philosophy, individual self-consciousness indeed becomes due to its ubiquity something universal, which may no longer insist on the advantages of the concretion of self-certainty; in the meantime insofar as the unity of consciousness is modeled on objectivity, that is to say has its measure in the possibility of the constitution of objects, it is the conceptual reflex of the total, seamless amalgamation of the acts of production in society, by which the objectivity [Objektivitaet] of commodities, their “objectivity” [Gegenstaendlichkeit], is formed in the first place. – Moreover that which is solidified, persisting, impenetrable in the I is the mimesis of the impenetrability of the external world, as perceived by primitive consciousness, for the experiencing consciousness. In the intellectual supremacy of the subject, its real powerlessness has its echo. The ego-principle imitates its negation. It is not, as idealism has been drilling in for centuries, that obiectum subiectum [Latin: object is subject]; unquestionably however, subiectum obiectum [Latin: subject is object]. The primacy of subjectivity spiritually perpetuates the Darwinian struggle for existence. The subjugation of nature for human ends is a mere natural relationship; that is why the superiority of the reason which controls nature and of its principle is appearance [Schein]. The subject participates epistemologically-metaphysically in it, proclaiming itself as the Baconian master and finally the idealistic creator of all things. In the exertion of its domination it becomes part of what it intends to control, succumbing like the Hegelian master. What comes to light in it is, how very much it is in thrall to the object, by consuming this latter. What it does, is the bane of that which the subject imagines to be under its bane. Its desperate self-exaltation is the reaction to the experience of its powerlessness, which prevents self-reflection; absolute consciousness, unconscious. Kantian moral philosophy gives splendid testimony to this in the unconcealed contradiction that the same subject, which he calls free and sublime, is as something existent a part of that natural context which its freedom wishes to escape. The Platonic doctrine of ideas, a powerful step towards demythologization, already repeats the mythos: it eternalizes those relationships of domination which passed from nature over to human beings, and which is practiced by the latter, as essences. If domination over nature was a condition and stage of demythologization, then this latter would have to reach beyond that domination, if it is itself not to fall prey to mythos. The philosophical emphasis on the constitutive power of the subjective moment however always blocks the truth. Thus do animal species like the tricerotops dinosaur or the rhinoceros carry around the armor which protects them, as their own ingrown prison, which they – at least so it appears anthropologically – seek in vain to shed. The imprisonment in the apparatus of its “survival” [in English] may explain the especial ferocity of the rhinoceros just as much as the unacknowledged and therefore all the more fearsome one of homo sapiens. The subjective moment is enmeshed as it were in the objective one, is itself, as something delimiting which is set down on the subject, objective.
All this has, according to the traditional norms of philosophy, of the idealistic one and the ontological one, something of the hosteron proteron [Greek: what is after is what is before] attached to it. What the weighty tone of stringency is to propose, is that these sorts of considerations presuppose, without confessing it, as mediating what they wished to deduce as mediated, i.e. the subject, thought; all their determinations would already be, as determinations, solely thought-determinations. But the critical thought does not wish to place the object on the orphaned royal throne of the subject, on which the object would be nothing but an idol, but to remove the hierarchy. Indeed the appearance [Schein] that the transcendental subject would be the Archimedean point of leverage, is scarcely to be broken by the analysis of subjectivity purely in itself. For this appearance [Schein] contains, without it needing to be extracted out of the mediations of thought, that which is true of the precedence of society before the individual consciousness and all its experience. The insight into the mediatedness of thinking by means of objectivity does not negate thinking and the objective laws by which it is thinking. That there is no getting around this, indicates for its part exactly that support on the non-identical which thinking, through its own form, denies just as much as it seeks and expresses. The grounds of the transcendental appearance [Scheins] are however still transparent above and beyond Kant: why thinking in the intentio obliqua [Latin: oblique intention] always culminates inexorably in its own primacy, the hypostasis of the subject. The abstraction namely, whose reification in the history of nominalism since the Aristotelean critique of Plato has been ascribed to the subject as its error, is itself the principle whereby the subject becomes the subject in the first place, its own essence. That is why the recourse to that which it is not itself seems external, violent. What convicts the subject of its own caprice, its prius [Latin: first] of its own posteriority, always sounds like transcendental dogma to it. If idealism is criticized strictly from inside out, then it has the defense at hand that the critique thereby sanctions it. By employing its premises, the former would have the latter virtually already in itself; hence would be superior to it. Idealism dismisses objections from outside however as reflection-philosophical, predialectical. The analysis need not however abdicate in view of this alternative. Immanence is the totality of those identity-positions, whose principle is rendered void in immanent critique. Idealism is to be made, as Marx put it, to dance to its “own tune.” The non-identical, which determines it from inside out, following the criterion of identity, is simultaneously the opposite of its principle, which it vainly claims to control. Indeed no immanent critique can serve its purpose completely without knowledge from outside, without a moment of immediacy, if you will, something accessory [Dreingabe] to the subjective thought, which looks beyond the apparatus of dialectics. Precisely idealism cannot denounce that moment, that of spontaneity, because it itself would not be without it. Idealism, whose innermost core was termed spontaneity, breaks through spontaneity. – The subject as ideology is enchanted in the name of subjectivity like Hauff’s Dwarf Nose by the spice Sneeze-with-pleasure. This herb was kept secret from him; thus he never learned to prepare the pâté Suzeraine [French: sovereign pâté], which bears the name of overlordship in decline. No introspection alone would bring him to the insight into the rule of his deformed shape as that of his labor. It requires the push from outside, the wisdom of Goose Mimi. To philosophy, and most of all to the Hegelian one, such a push is heresy. Immanent critique has its border therein, that the law of the context of immanence is ultimately one with the delusion to be broken through. But this moment, truly indeed that of the qualitative leap, is realized solely in the completion of the immanent dialectic, which has the tendency to transcend itself, not entirely dissimilar to the transition of the Platonic dialectic to ideas which exist in themselves; if dialectics made itself totally conclusive, then it would already be that totality, which leads back to the identity-principle. Schelling perceived this interest against Hegel, and thereby offered himself up to ridicule for the abdication of thought, which fled to mysticism. The materialistic moment in Schelling, which ascribed something like a driving power to the material in itself, may have a share in that aspect of his philosophy. But the leap, too, is not to be hypostasized as in Kierkegaard. Otherwise it would transgress against reason. Dialectics must delimit itself out of the consciousness of itself. The disappointment, however, that philosophy does not awaken from its dream by its own movement entirely without the leap; that it requires what its bane keeps at a distance from it, something other and something new – this disappointment is nothing other than that of the child, which feels sorry during the reading of Hauff’s fairytale, because the dwarf released from its misshapen form never had the opportunity to serve the Duke the pâté Suzeraine.
The thorough-going critique of identity gropes for the preponderance [Praeponderanz] of the object. Identity-thinking is, even where it claims otherwise, subjectivistic. To revise this, to account for identity as untruth, establishes no equilibrium between subject and object, no hegemony of the functional concept in the cognition: even where it is only infringed upon, the subject is already disempowered. It knows why it feels absolutely threatened by the slightest surplus of the non-identical, according to the measure of its own absoluteness. Even as something minimal it violates the whole, because the whole is its pretension. Subjectivity changes its quality in a context, which it is not capable of developing out of itself. By means of the inequality in the concept of mediation, the subject falls to the object totally differently than the latter to the former. The object can only be thought through the subject, but always preserves itself in contrast to this as an other; the subject is, however, according to its own constitution, already an object in advance. The object is not to be thought out of existence from the subject, even as an idea; but the subject, from the object. In 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 existing I is implicit even in the sense of the logical “I think, which all my conceptions should be able to follow along,” because it is the sequence of time for the condition of its possibility and is the sequence of time only as something temporal. The “my” refers to a subject as an object among objects, and without this “my” there would be in turn no “I think.” The expression existence [Dasein], synonymous with the subject, plays at such matters-at-hand. From objectivity it is assumed, that the subject would be; this lends to the latter a touch of objectivity; it is no accident that subiectum [Latin: what is subject], that which underlies, recalls what the artificial language of philosophy named objective. The object by contrast is only related to subjectivity in the reflection on the possibility of its determination. Not that objectivity would be something immediate, that the critique of naïve realism could be forgotten. The preponderance [Vorrang] of the object means the progressive qualitative differentiation of what is mediated in itself, not beyond dialectics but a moment in it, in which it is however articulated. Kant still refused to be talked out of the moment of the preponderance of objectivity. He directed the subjective compartmentalization of the capacity of cognition in the critique of reason[e12] out of objective intent, as well as tenaciously defending the transcendental thing-in-itself.[9] It was evident to him that it did not simply contradict the concept of an object, of being in itself; that its subjective mediation is to be reckoned less to the idea of the object than to the insufficiency of the subject. While it did not succeed in going beyond itself in him either, he did not sacrifice the idea of otherness. Without it, the cognition would degenerate into tautology; what is cognized would be this itself. This clearly irritated the Kantian meditation more than the inconcinnity, that the thing in itself would be the unknown cause of the appearances, even though causality as a category is annexed to the subject in the critique of reason. Insofar as the construction of the transcendental subjectivity was the magnificently paradoxical and fallible effort to master the object in its antipode, then what positive, idealistic dialectics only proclaimed is to be achieved solely through its critique. It requires an ontological moment, to the extent that ontology critically strips the binding constitutive role from the subject, without however substituting for the subject through the object in a sort of second immediacy. The preponderance of the object is attainable solely by subjective reflection, and that upon the subject. One may illuminate this matter-at-hand, difficult to reconcile with the rules of current logic and seemingly absurd in its abstract expression, by noting that an Ur-history of the subject could indeed be written, as outlined in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, but no Ur-history of the object. This would always already deal with objects. If it was argued against this that there would be no cognition concerning the object without the cognizing subject, then no ontological priority of the consciousness follows from this. Every assertion that subjectivity would somehow “be,” already includes an objectivity, which the subject by means of its absolute being would first need to ground. Only because the subject is for its part mediated, hence is not the radical Other of the object, which first legitimates this, does it have the capacity to grasp objectivity at all. Rather than constitutive, the subjective mediation is the block before objectivity; the former does not absorb what is essential to the latter, the existent. The autonomized consciousness, the epitome of what is active in the achievements of cognition, has genetically branched off from the libidinous energy of the species-being of humanity. Its essence is not indifferent towards this; by no means does it define, as in Husserl, the “sphere of absolute origins.” Consciousness is the function of the living subject, its concept is formed in its image. This is not to be exorcised out of its own meaning. The objection that the empirical moment of subjectivity would thereby be intermixed with the transcendental or essential one is feeble. Without any relation to an empirical consciousness, to that of the living I, there would be no transcendental, purely intellectual one. Analogous reflections on the genesis of the object would be nugatory. The mediation of the object says, that it may not be statically, dogmatically hypostasized, but is only to be cognized in its imbrication with subjectivity; the mediation of the subject, that without the moment of objectivity it would literally be nothing. The index of the preponderance of the object is the powerlessness of the Spirit in all its judgements hitherto in the arrangement of reality. The negative, that the Spirit’s reconciliation failed along with the identification, that its preponderance [Vorrang] miscarried, becomes the motor of its own disenchantment. It is true and appearance [Schein]: true, because nothing is exempt from the domination, which it reduced to its pure form; untrue, because in its intertwining with domination it is not at all the Spirit, for which it takes itself and claims to be. Thereby the Enlightenment transcends its traditional self-understanding: it is demythologization not merely as reductio ad hominem [Latin: reduction to the person], but also conversely as reductio hominis [Latin: human reduction], as the insight into the deception of the subject, which stylizes itself as the absolute. The subject is the late form of mythos, and yet the equal of its most ancient form.
The preponderance of the object, as something which is nevertheless itself mediated, does not break off the subject-object dialectic. Immediacy is so little beyond dialectics as mediation. According to the tradition of epistemology the immediate falls under the subject, but as its given fact [Gegebenheit] or affection. Indeed the subject is supposed, insofar as it is autonomous and spontaneous, to have formative power over this; it has none however insofar as what is immediately given would be simply there. It is just as much the bedrock state of affairs [Grundbestand], on which the doctrine of subjectivity rested – that of the “mine,” that of the content of the subject as its possession – as it resists something objective in the form of what is given, the Menetekel, as it were, of objectivity in the subject. That is why Hume, in the name of what is immediate, criticized identity, the principle of the I, which would like to maintain itself as independently-realized against the immediate. Immediacy is not however to be solidified, so as to please an epistemology calibrated to conclusiveness. In it what is immediately given and the forms, which are equally simply given, are tailored complementarily to each other. Though immediacy does command a halt to the idolatry of derivation, it is however for its part also something abstracted from the object, the raw material of the subjective production-process in which epistemology had its model. The given is in its impoverished and blind form not objectivity, but rather merely the borderline value which the subject, after it confiscated the concrete object, has not completely mastered in its own magic circle. To this extent empiricism took note, in spite of all sensualistic reduction of the things, of something of the preponderance of the object: since Locke it insisted that there would be no content of consciousness which did not stem from the senses, would not be “given.” The critique of naïve realism in the whole of empiricism, culminating in the abolition of the thing by Hume, was always, by virtue of the character of facticity of immediacy to which it was tied, and the skepticism against the subject as creator, despite everything still rudimentarily “realistic.” Once thinking has freed itself from the supposition of the preponderance of the subject, then empiristic epistemology no longer has the legal right to transfer, as a residual determination, a kind of minimum of the object into the immediacy of the data, by means of the subjective reduction. Such a construction is nothing but a compromise between the dogma of the preponderance of the subject and its unattainability; the naked, sensible datum, divested of its determinations, is the product of that process of abstraction, to which the Kantian subjective epistemology contrasted it; the purer the datum from its forms, the more threadbare, “abstract” it also becomes. The residuum of the object as the given, which remains after the subtraction of subjective additions, is a deception of prima philosophia. That the determinations through which the object becomes concrete would be merely imposed on it, is valid only for the unshakable faith in the primacy of subjectivity. Its forms are however not, as in Kant’s doctrine, something ultimate to cognition; this latter is capable of breaking through it in the course of its experience. If philosophy, disastrously split off from the natural sciences, may refer to physics at all without short-circuiting itself, then it would be in such a context. The latter’s development since Einstein has, with theoretical stringency, blasted apart the prison of the intuition as well as the subjective a priori of space, time and causality. The subjective – in keeping with the Newtonian principle of observation – experience speaks, with the possibility of such an outbreak, on behalf the preponderance of the object and against its own supremacy. It turns, as involuntarily dialectical Spirit, the subjective observation against the doctrine of what is subjectively constituted. The object is more than pure facticity; that this is not to be removed, forbids it at the same time to remain content with its abstract concept and its dregs, the recorded sense-data. The idea of a concrete object falls to the critique of subjective-external categorization and that of its correlate, the fiction of something factical, devoid of determination. Nothing in the world is comprised – added up, as it were – out of facticity and concept. The power of proof of the Kantian example of the hundred imaginary thalers, whose reality is not ascribed to them as a further characteristic, strikes the form-content dualism of the Critique of Pure Reason itself and has a power far beyond this; actually it denies the distinction between the Many and the One, which the tradition of philosophy has been making since Plato. Neither concept nor facticity are additions to their complement. Hegel’s presumptuously idealistic presupposition, that the subject could thus purely, unreservedly deliver itself over to the object, to the thing itself, because that thing would reveal itself in the process, as what it would already be in itself, the subject, notes something true against idealism beyond the thinking mode of conduct of the subject: it must really “look at” the object, because it does not create the object, and the maxim of cognition is to facilitate this. The postulated passivity of the subject is measured by the objective determinacy of the object. But it requires a more lasting subjective reflection than the identifications which, already according to Kantian doctrine, the consciousness automatically, as it were, unconsciously carries out. That the activity of the Spirit, even that which Kant reckoned as the constitution-problem, is something different than that automatism which he equated it with, specifically comprises the intellectual experience which the idealists discovered, though immediately castrated. What the thing itself may mean is not positive, immediately available; whoever wishes to cognize it, must think more, not less than the point of relation of the synthesis of the Many, which is the same, at bottom, as no thinking at all. Therein the thing is itself by no means a thought-product; rather the non-identical, by and through identity. Such non-identity is no “idea”; but something supplemental to such. The experiencing subject labors to disappear in it. Truth would be its downfall. The latter is merely feigned by the subtraction of everything specific of subjectivity in the scientific method, ad maiorem gloriam [Latin: to the greater glory] of the subject, which has grown independent as a method.
To philosophy of import, the thought of the preponderance of the object is suspect, the aversion against this institutionalized since Fichte. The thousand-fold repeated and varied assurance to the contrary wishes to drown out the festering suspicion that the heteronomous would be mightier than the autonomy, which already in Kant’s doctrine is not supposed to be compelled by that overwhelming power. Such philosophical subjectivism ideologically accompanies the emancipation of the bourgeois I as its foundation. It draws its tenacious power from the misdirected opposition against the existent: against its thingliness. By relativizing or liquefying this, philosophy believes itself to be beyond the primacy of commodities and beyond its subjective form of reflection, the reified consciousness. In Fichte that impulse is unmistakable as the drive towards hegemony. It was anti-ideological insofar as it saw through the being-in-itself of the world, which was confirmed by conventional, unreflective consciousness as something artificially made, something badly self-preserved. In spite of the preponderance of the object the thingliness of the world is also appearance [Schein]. It misleads the subjects into ascribing the social relationship of their production to things in themselves. This is developed in Marx’s chapter on fetishism, truly a piece of the legacy of classic German philosophy. Even its systematic motive survives therein: the fetish-character of commodities is not chalked up to subjective-mistaken consciousness, but objectively deduced out of the social a priori, the process of exchange. Already in Marx the difference is expressed between the preponderance of the object as something to be critically established and its remnants in the existent, its distortion by the commodity-form. Exchange has, as something which occurs [Vorgaengige], real objectivity and is nevertheless objectively untrue, violates its own principle, that of equality; that is why it necessarily creates false consciousness, the idol of the market. The natural-rootedness of exchange-society is only sardonically a law of nature; the primacy of the economic, no invariant. It is easy for thought to imagine as consolation that it possesses the philosopher’s stone in the dissolution of reification, of the commodity character. But reification itself is the reflection-form of false objectivity; to center theory on it, a form of consciousness, makes critical theory idealistically acceptable to the dominating consciousness and the collective unconscious. It is to this that the earlier texts of Marx, in contrast to Capital, owe their contemporary popularity, especially among theologians. There is no lack of irony that the brutal and primitive functionaries, who labeled Lukacs a heretic more than forty years ago due to the chapter on reification in the important book History and Class Consciousness, suspected what was idealistic in his conception. Dialectics is so little to be reduced to reification as to any other isolated category, were it ever so polemical. What human beings suffer from, the lament of reification would in the meantime rather gloss over than denounce. The woe lies in the relationships which damn human beings to powerlessness and apathy and yet would have to be changed by them; not primarily in human beings and the manner in which the relationships appear to them. In contrast to the possibility of total catastrophe, reification is an epiphenomenon; all the more so is the alienation coupled to it, the subjective state of consciousness, which corresponds to it. It is reproduced by fear; consciousness, reified in the already constituted society, is not its constituens [Latin: what constitutes]. Those who regard the thingly as what is radically evil; who would like to dynamize everything, which is, into pure contemporaneity, tend to be hostile towards the other, the alien, whose name does not resound in alienation for nothing; to that non-identity, which would need to be emancipated not solely in consciousness but in a reconciled humanity. Absolute dynamics however would be that absolute handling of the facts, which violently satisfies itself and misuses the non-identical as its mere occasion. Unbroken universally human slogans serve thereby once again to make what is not the same as the subject, into what is the same. The things harden themselves as fragments of what was subjugated; the latter’s rescue means the love for things. What consciousness experiences as thingly and alien is not to be expelled from the dialectic of the existent: negatively, compulsion and heteronomy, yet also the distorted figure of what ought to be loved, and what the bane, the endogamy of consciousness, does not permit to be loved. Far beyond the Romanticism which felt itself as weltschmerz, as the suffering from alienation, hover Eichendorff’s words, “beautiful stranger [Fremde: alien, stranger].” The reconciled condition would not annex the alien [Fremde] by means of a philosophical imperialism, but would find its happiness in the fact that the latter remains what is distant and divergent in the given nearness, as far beyond the heterogenous as what is its own. The untiring charge of reification blocks that dialectic, and this indicts the construction in the philosophy of history, which supports that complaint. The truly meaningful times, whose return the young Lukacs longed for, were just as much the product of reification, of inhuman institutions, as he only attested to those of the bourgeois ones. Contemporary depictions of medieval cities often look as if executions took place precisely as a form of popular entertainment. Should any sort of harmony of subject and object have prevailed anno [Latin: in that year], then it was realized by pressure exactly like the recent ones, and fragile. The transfiguration of past conditions serves the later and superfluous renunciation, which is experienced as inexorable; only when lost do they gain their allure. Their cult, that of the pre-subjective phases, came to itself in the era of declining individuation and the regressive collective in horror. Reification and reified consciousness realized, along with the unbinding of the natural sciences, also the potential of a world without scarcity; previously the condition of humanity was already dehumanized by what was thingly;[e13] at least these went together with thingly forms of consciousness, while the indifference for things, which are appraised as pure means and reduced to the subject, helped to grind down humanity. Both are in each other in the thingly, the un-identical of the object and the subjugation of humanity under the d