Adorno’s Misinterpretation of Absolute Idealism

Abstract

According to Adorno, idealism is based on the assertion that the unity between subject and object is also a subject, namely a transcendental or absolute subject. In idealism, the subject is therefore one part and at the same the whole. From a different perspective: idealism understands the object as constituted by the human subject, but at the same time this product must be opposed to the same subject as something that the subject discovers. This contradiction, Adorno says, is »nonsense« and a »scandal«.¹ Although Hegel criticized Kant’s transcendental subject, for Adorno, Hegel did not really overcome its constitutive formality:² what spirit is for Hegel is for Kant the transcendental subject, insofar as Hegel attempts to expand it beyond the boundaries of the thing-in-itself.³ In absolute idealism thus looms the primacy of the subject.⁴ Hegel’s allegedly »absolute« idealism is for Adorno nothing more than »transcendental subjectivism«.⁵ Fichte begins the Science of Knowledge with the pure identity of the I with itself; thus, Adorno also distinguishes Hegel’s approach from Fichte’s. Indeed, at the beginning of the Science of Logic Hegel rejects – as Adorno openly recognizes – indeterminate identity as the first principle of his system and replaces it with determinate being, which develops all determinations out of itself. Although Adorno does not overlook this decisive difference between Hegel and Fichte, he nonetheless claims that Hegel’s absolute idealism ultimately results from a deeper radicalization of Fichte’s idealism through the further extension of its main principle. Adorno describes, therefore, Hegel’s relation to Fichte as contradictory: despite opposing Fichte, Hegel does not give up Fichte’s general project of deriving determinate contents from the identity of the I with itself; thus, he does not abandon the fundamental claim of the pre-eminence of the subject...