Dialectics: Disintegrated Logic

We have seen, that the title of Part Two of Negative Dialectics is composed of two parts. One is “negative dialectics”, which is clearly Adorno’s own theoretical identification. The other is “concept and categories”, I believe, which is his notification of the “body”, e.g., negative dialectics neither directly confronts the so‑called primary “objective world” nor any ideal or institutional “absolute essence”. Negative dialectics just confronts the world historically and theoretically through concept and categories. Thereby, Adorno attempts to consciously break away from the delusion of the logic of identity in his philosophical discussion. People cannot find, in Adorno’s writings, the means of argumentation of prime philosophical thesis and of traditional dialectics. Nevertheless, we still can discern his radical philosophical intention with a backbreaking analysis: dialectics as logic of disintegration. It is the price which is supposed to pay for a valuable thought. However, it is interesting that Adorno does not give a clear definition of negative dialectics by so far yet. He begins a series rejections and oppositions. One of his foes, Heidegger keeps dancing to avoid solidification. He occasionally refers to some affirmative “symptoms” while he continually says “no”. Here, it reveals Adorno’s thought of post‑modern and post‑Marx.

1. Against “The First Philosophy”

At the very beginning of Part Two that elaborates directly negative dialectics, Adorno claims with discretion that, “in criticizing ontology we do not aim at another ontology, not even at one of being nonontological”. It is actually a judgment of the failure of Heidegger. For Adorno’s philosophy, an “authentic” first concept is no longer to be hoped for, nor a “total philosophy”. For this aim, he has to cut his path.

Adorno has a grand view. Rejection of ontology and overthrowing totalization of system are not slogans; rather, they are inherent and realized in his construction of his concrete theory. First of all, Adorno refuses idealism in every form or illusory abstraction without a ground. He interprets such a position in saying that “there is no Being without entities”. This is his radical principle. The term of entity (das Seiende is borrowed from Heidegger, which does not refer to the matter in old‑fashioned materialism in a narrow sense, but an objective object, phenomenon or objective process (it is also not the ossification of Heidegger’s metaphysics of ideal essence). Generally speaking, it is something in a certain relation, which absorbs Heidegger’s interpretation of the relation “in the world”. “Being is something, maybe the essential something about thinking”. A Japanese new‑Marxian philosopher, Hiromatsu Wataru thereby proposes “ontology of something”. In the question of the object and content of thinking, Adorno insists something as the premise of abstraction of a concept, contrary to Hegel and Heidegger. This is why he announces that “’something’ – as a cogitatively indispensable substrate of any concept, including the concept of Being”. Hegel ever raised absolute spirit against something sensible while Heidegger twiddled with the relation in the world (degeneration) in his claim to authentic Being, rejecting ossified beings. It is an illusion in pursuit of the absolute form of a concept to break away from the concrete content of thinking. Adorno cannot forget Heidegger. In fact, thinking is nothing without concrete historical objects or things. On the other hand, thinking is dependent on real individual human being – I (Dasein).

Adorno states that “Idealism’s primal illusion ever since Fichte was that the movement of abstraction allows us to get ride of that from which we abstract. It is eliminated from our thought”. Philosophers reach Idea in the air with the stairs of “something”, and then remove the stairs. Being without something; thinking without a subject. It is odd metaphysical thinking. “The contents of philosophical thinking are neither remnants after deducing space and time nor general findings about spatial‑temporal matters. Philosophical thinking crystallizes in the particular, in that which is defined in space and time”. There is a point to be noted. Although still in opposition to idealism, Adorno here does not talk of the question of primacy. It is a simple elaboration of “something”. In this sense, Hegel and Heidegger live in “days over clouds” (the name of a film by Anthonio, an Italian direct, in the 1990s).

What is problematic? From Adorno’s point of view, the mistake of Hegel and Heidegger is not intuitionistic superficialness, but a profoundly speculative self‑deception. With a departure of the concept of Being, Hegel is opposed to “something”, because he has found that “something” in any (individual) concept, is always defined and constructed in the self‑consciousness of a concept. It is why he proposes “the primacy of the subject”, namely the coercion of identity derive from the primacy of concept. Hegelian philosophy establishes an absolute system dominated by the absolute Idea: all secondary concepts and objects under the absolute Idea. It is actually a theologically metaphysical reign of terror. Heidegger discovers Hegel’s problem of traditional metaphysical essentialism so that he tries to break away from the solidified essence of Idea and to liberate thinking to face living beings (matters and events). Heidegger ingeniously puts the thinking of the individual subject in its historical relation to the world it lives in. The precondition of “examining” is “in the world”. However, the attempt to going home still reflects the primacy of ontological being. In this sense, Heidegger still indulges in a fundamental ontology. He does not even realizes that, “wherever a doctrine of some absolute ‘first’ is taught there will be talk of something inferior to it, of something absolutely heterogeneous to it, as its logical correalte”. It will result in a fact: a doctrine of some absolute “first” must have an absolute hierarchical structure; the primal dominating concept reigns the determined concepts. Therefore, Although Heidegger has broken away from metaphysics of entity; he remains in a trap of metaphysics.

With such an analysis, Adorno sticks to his belief, that his proposed dialectics is not at all “a structure that will stay basic no matter how it is modified”. In other words, in the question of philosophical premise, he would not presuppose “another downright ‘first’ – not absolute identity, this time, not the concept, not being, but nonidentity, facticity, entity”, as the opposite of Hegel and Heidgger. Dialectics is not a logical structure. We do not need to posit the primacy of material against Hegel’s idealism; nor we need raise primacy of concrete beings against Heidegger’s stick to Being: it is the other side of a false coin. It is important for us to enter Adorno’s discourse on nonidentity and nontotality.

Adorno does not expect “a total philosophy”. The spirit of dialectics is to refuse any principle of primacy, namely, philosophy of identity which stats with a primal ontology. The philosophical concept of “first” is itself an ideological consciousness; similarly, “the category of the root, the origin is a category of domination”, and it “itself an ideological principle”. Apparently, Heidegger’s examining of the root of Being wishes to going home from a homeless Being. It is still a fantasy to establish a domination if immanence, full of poetic ideology of identity thinking. On the contrary, “once we dismiss such identity in principle, the peace of the concept as an Ultimate will be engulfed in the fall of the identity”. Adorno specifies rejection of primal philosophy and systematic thinking of identity as the premise of his negative dialectics. It is a bran‑new discourse established by Adorno: post‑modern must be post‑Marxian.

There is a point to be noted, Adorno ignores a problem: the relation of a deconstructing subject to a general ground of the historical existence (it is not the “first” in logic) and the dominating social structure which always emerges in the history. It is actually a key problem which post‑modernism intends to evade. It describes an embarrassing situation in which a deconstructed gamed of idea is concurrent with advancing globalization of capitalism.

2. Nothingness and Being in Non‑dualistic Gestalt

A ontological structure must produce a homogenous cognitive structure. From Adorno’s point of view, any hierarchical structure of identity must lead to cognitive structure of dualism. A primal philosophy is “inseparable to dualism”. In other words, dualism of subject‑object separation in old metaphysics is an undialectical structure. Evidently, Adorno’s dualism does not refer to Spinoza’s dualism of entity or Kantian dualism of two worlds, but the separation of subject and object. It derives from Heidegger’s discourse of critique.

Adorno acknowledges that subject and object as abstractions, are the product of thinking. In the standard process of thinking, “without which (this dualism) there might be no thought. Every concept, every that of Being, reproduces the difference of thinking and the thought”. But, in a deep logical level, “the supposition of their antithesis inevitably declares thinking to be primary”. This dichotomy “makes the object the alien thing to be mastered and appropriates it”. It is indeed the result of orderly preparation of identity of subject. It inevitably results in the thought’s inherent claim to be total. In other words, the result of dualism is also identity thinking. Therefore, “absolute duality would be unity”. It hits the point. In Adorno’s belief, Hegel uses this for the purpose of taking the subject‑object polarity into his logic. It was due to unfoldment that he felt himself consummating Kant and ranking about Fichte and Schelling. He holds the dialectics of subject and object (the reflection of Idea) comes to be the subject, and defines the dialectical relation “the structure of being”. (Heidegger does in the same way. From this he derives non‑dualist ontology of relation of reflective existence). The non‑dualist relation looks like a new third beyond dichotomy, a savior. However, Adorno insists that “the third would be no less deceptive”.

Why? The reason is that, for Hegel, passion in itself (individual subject) is an isolated subject; material object is an isolated object; and finally they constitute a relation (reflection of Idea). Relation is defined as a senior third factor. However, it signifies the idea of totality. Contrary to discrete subject and object, it is the apotheosis of absolute essence of group‑subject. As Adorno indicates, Heidegger is on to this point. That is why he attempts to substitute the unitary logic of relation for the structure of dualism, and why he tries his best to avoid mention of primary matters unadvisable. I must acknowledge, Heidegger’s philosophical effort has marked several important heterogeneous points. He rejects any dualistic metaphysics of idea and reality and advocates functional presence in the time, so that he takes the copula “be” as his departure. He also wants to break up the substantiation (beings) of subject and object; and his “Dasein”, as the variant of subject, marks the relation (the relation of “at hand” to materials, the relation of “concurrence” with others) in the world. Thinking, resting on Dasein, is questioning of relation of existence; Being is ontologilization of functionally theological relation. With all of these, he wishes to put an end to traditional dualism of entities. However, Adorno still regards Heidegger’s Being as no more than a covert third which marks a certain relation; it remains the variant of identity of subject. Since the functional “be” still produces a certain primacy (ontology of Being) which is more covert, and it must demand an unconsciousness and coercive identity. Being and beings, ontological and degenerative, a more covert dualism, isn’t it? Apparently, Heidegger’s fear of the substantiation of metaphysical ideas directly leads to an idealistic sequel of “thought without thinkers”. The battle against dualistic structure is untrue and unsuccessful.

Both Hegel and Heidegger wish to resolve Kantian problem of dualistic structure with dialectics, but their dialectics (Heidegger does this in an illegally anonymous appropriation) are enslaved to logic of identity in traditional metaphysics. In other words, both Hegel and Heidegger have discovered the objective contradiction between subject and object, matter and idea, but they establish their dialectics in old‑fashioned primal philosophy. It is why Adorno draws his conclusion that “the totality of identical definitions would correspond to the wish‑fulfillment picture of traditional philosophy: to the a priori structure and to its archaistic late form, ontology”. He wants to advance further to break up truly the logic of identity. What is his weapon? We’ll see soon, constellation, which is beyond all the dimensions of every coercive structure, is Adorno’s recipe to reject “oneness” and duality of identity.

3. Logic of Identity: "Metaphysical Thaumatrope"

What is identity principle which Adorno attempts to denounce? He summarizes the four dimensions of the identity principle that has dominated western philosophy for thousands of years: 1) Identity of individual consciousness: it is untruth of self‑sufficient subject. The departure of identity is absolute identity of individual subject. It is actually the “ego” in Descartes’ celebrated expression “Cogito, ego sum”, which supposes the individual subject keeps unchanged in all of its experiences. In truth, since Freud and Lacan in particular, the identification of the mirror image of “I” – the human subject – is alienated from the beginning; the nature of a social “I” is identified as a kind of schizophrenia. After Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, the thesis is downright abolished in the slogans such as “death of human being”, “death of subject” and “death of author”. 2) Universality of logic derived from identity. The premise of universality of identity is identified individual consciousness, which can produce identified group‑subject, the foundation of the universal nature. “Without identified consciousness or particular identity, there would be no universality”. (I have stated that, Stirner it the first one to fight against identity of the universal group in the history of western philosophy, after whom Kierkegaard’s new humanism emerged.) 3) Identity of thinking and its object, namely, the logical principle “A=A”. In truth, the self‑identity and stability which the principle supposes as its object, is no more than a no historically metaphysical presupposition. (Since Husserl’s rejection of ready‑made concepts, passing through Heidegger and Gadamer, the principle of inaccessibility of concepts is finally confirmed in post‑modern discourse.) 4) Identity of subject and object. However it is mediated, the subject always licks up the object. It is an ideal of accessibility in old‑fashioned dualistic structure of cognition. It is sometimes represented as the intuitionistic truth or conformance of the essence of truth to its form. This is what Adorno attempts to fight against.

"Identity is the primal form of ideology". The reason is that, Since Tracy, especially since Marx and Mannheim, ideology always employs a false relation to shade the recessive coercion of actual concepts. Identity is regarded as adequacy to the thing it suppresses. In this sense, logic of identity becomes a complicity of ideology against enlightenment in the deep rational structure. From Jameson’s point of view, in Adorno, “As for identity itself, however, in so far as it has been characterized functionally in terms of domination and repression”. The judgment is reasonable. Adorno makes an analysis of the historical reasons of the shape of identity logic as follows:

First of all, with regard to its resource, identity is concurrent with anthropocentrism: “when the subject affirms itself the Baconish master of everything and the creator of anthropocentrism of the world, he brings something epistemological and metaphysical into the illusion”. This is the subjective principle of identity. It is also a new extraction of the subject of Negative Dialectics and should be put in the context of contemporary ecology. Adorno elaborates, in the authoritative discourse of anthropocentrism, "The circle of identification – which in the end always identifies itself alone – was drawn by a thinking that tolerates nothing outside it; its imprisonment is its own handiwork. Such totalitarian and therefore particular rationality was historically dictated by the threat of nature. That is its limitation. In fear, bondage to nature is perpetuated by a thinking that identifies, that equalizes everything unequal".

I think it a profound reflection and investigation of identity logic. Apparently, Adorno does not agree with Marx on the idea of productivity – the foundation of historical materialism – which rests on subjection of nature! This is an entrance opened by Adorno to post‑Marxism.

In Part Three of Negative Dialectics, Adorno takes the law of causality in scientific research as an example to reveal the imprisonment of identity. In other words, identity “as a mental principle simply mirrors the real control of nature”. In his eyes, the relation of causality “can teach us what identity has done to nonidentity”. Objectively and subjectively, causality as an idea of human “is the spell of dominated nature”. Why? Since from Bacon’s reason – which puts nature in question – upon, reason “finds causality in nature wherever it controls nature”. That is to say, wherever nature is controlled and dominated, we can find causality. In a provocatively anti‑Kantian sense – the thesis “human being making law for nature” –causality would be a relation between things‑in‑themselves insofar, or they are subjugated by the identity principle?

Secondly, at the beginning of culture, a concept is the “One” in the “Many” of phenomena. It is a kind of Adorno’s identity. For any cultural system, “the concept’s immanent claim is its order‑creating invariance as against the change in what it covers”. Wearing a pair of glasses of dialectics, Adorno takes it over‑serious. According to his logic, “the unchanged in change” of Eleatic School, Heracleitus’ “living fire” (logos) behind phenomena, city of God (theocratic and fatherhood) against the world and human beings (group‑subject) raised by enlightenment movement, are all coercions of identity. Construction of every philosophical system is producing a logical order of identity, such as Plato’s kingdom of Idea, Hegel’s system of absolute spirit, Stalin’s system of textbook. In all of the structures, heterogeneity is swallowed by a spiritual identity. “ The construction was in truth an imitation, a refusal to tolerate anything not pre‑digested by philosophies”. It is why Hegel declares, “there is noting new (nature covered heterogeneity) under the sun (absolute spirit)”. And it also a decoding of Benjamin’s interpretation identified progress of culture a kind of barbarism.

Thirdly, any subjectivity or principle of thinking is called explicable not by itself but by facts, “especially by social facts”. Therefore, Adorno treats exchange principle of homogeneous commodity economy as the current real ground of identity philosophy, which has confirmed in Introduction.

“The barter principle, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal concept of average working hours, is fundamentally akin to the principle of identification. Barter is the social model of the principle, and without the principle there would be no barter; it is through barter that non‑identical individuals and performances become commensurable and identical. The spread of the principle imposes on the whole world an obligation to become identical, to become total.” In Adorno’s analysis, use value is nonidentified heterogeneity or otherness of commodity; while exchange value is identity of identified heterogeneity. In this sense, he says that, “contrary to use value, exchange value is merely a construction in mind, which dominates and takes place of the needs of human beings: illusion governs reality”. In this sense, modern identity in exchange relation of commodity (market) economy is more primal and firmer than extrinsic coercive identity in land in feudality. As a result, exchange relation is always “the basic philosophical argument” in Adorno’s works. On the other hand, Adorno points out the accessory relation of identity to what the social roles – produced by the extension of the instrumental reason in social life – covers. As he sates, when a people enters a social structure, “technology of logical classification” is embedded with the coercion of “manipulation” and tolerates no qualitative difference. It is a distinctive image of today’s “industrial society”: “it ignores the social conditions of production by resorting to the technological productive forces – as if the state of these forces alone were the direct determinant of the social structure. This theoretical switch can of course excused by the undeniable convergences of East and West in the sign of bureaucratic rule”. The judgment is more than profound. The concurrence of emphasis on the development of productivity with conceal of relation of production is an open secret in contemporary bourgeois academic tradition since Webber.

Evidently, Adorno is opposed to the infinite development of productivity that centers the instrumental reason. It is practical impulsion of production for production that is the ground of the persistent violence of identity in today. This is why he fights against the primacy of practice. It is a considerable theoretical question in post‑Marxism.

4. Against Praxis: The Magic Curse of Production for Production

Adorno asserts that, bourgeois reason of enlightenment approaches its triumph in the process of industrialization, but the triumph is “full of sufferings and errors”. The identity of the universal history of capital is actually “the unity of the control of nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over men’s inner nature. No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb. It ends in the total menace which organized mankind poses to organized men, in the epitome of discontinuity”. This is a celebrated dictum of Adorno. In his eyes, the totality of coercive identity is “teleologically the absolute of suffering”. Since “whatever does not enter into identity, whatever eludes rational planning in the realm of means, turns into frightening retribution for the calamity which identity brought on the nonidentical”. There is a point worthy attention. Adorno does not view the sufferings and errors as the problem of capitalist relation of production emphasized by Marx. Adorno goes too further: he attempts to criticize productivity through Marx. Young Lukács’ critique of unconscious reification of production (technology) – he reverses Webber – is reversed as a self‑conscious idea. Moreover, Adorno battles against the primacy of practice overthrows ontology of practice. It is the authentic philosophical foundation of post‑Marxism.

In the discussion on freedom in Part Three, Adorno definitely give voice to his position against practice. “Marx received the thesis of the primacy of practical reason from Kant and German idealists, and he sharpened it into a challenge to change the world instead of merely interpreting it. He thus underwrote something as arch‑bourgeois as the program of an absolute control of nature.” The assertion is somehow problematic. According to Adorno’s leading post‑modern opinion, the idea of primal practice is a specific product of industrial civilization; the primacy of practice implies productionism and anthropocentrism. However, his equation here is oversimplified. To equate the idea of the primal practice with “something as arch‑bourgeois as the program of an absolute control of nature” demonstrates Adorno’s post‑Marxian inclination. Surely it implies some difference. In his analysis, Marx’ idea of practice serves “the telos of due practice”, namely, “the abolition of the primacy of practice in the form that had prevailed in bourgeois society”. According to Marx’ imagination, “it would be possible to have contemplation without inhumanity as soon as the productive forces are freed to the point where men will no longer be engulfed in a practice that want exacts from them, in a practice which then becomes automatic in them”. In later text, Marx insists that in historical materialism, “the dialectics of practice called for the abolition of practice, of production for production's sake, of the universal cover for the wrong practice”. Even so, Adorno does not agree to the opinion yet. According to him, it is unfeasible to rest the freedom of human beings on practice itself, even it is of no help “to reduce labor to the minimal level as possible”. Adorno denies the conquering subjectivity on which is amplified on from Marx’ These on Feuerbach. He believes, everything on the basis of ruling over others is suspicious, and happiness derives from it is untrue. Theoretically, Adorno argues against everything related to practice (This is the jumping‑off point from which Arendt distinguishes action from labor and work and from which Habermas proposes the subjective and non‑utilitarian free communication which is different from practice of object labor.)

Adorno tries to illustrate this with the example of Stalin, whose action of putting practice on a dominating position results in a blind practice which ignores theory. In this case, it is the impulse of making practice primal that brings theory into a sacrifice of authority! Even Marxist theory itself, under the direction of the slogan “theory related to practice”, has been degraded to “a servant’s role”. Since theory is “paralyzed and disparaged by the all‑governing bustle”, theory is no more scientific cognition, nor sober critique and reflection of reality; it degrades into special tools to underwrite the policy. As a result, “The visa stamp of practice which we demand of all theory became a censor’s placet”.

Adorno’s these opinions are quite compelling. However, he does not completely grasp the historical thinking immanent to Marxist philosophy. As we know, Marx’s practice refers to the movement of material production under certain historical conditions (for Heidegger, it means the state of “in the world” related to material objects at hand). In different historical periods, the contents of practice are heterogeneous and their complexities are accordingly different. Under definite historical conditions, different actions of practice in the structures of practice have different statuses in the history of human creating. From the production of human in remote antiquity, through production of emblements in agricultural civilization, to operation of information in post‑modern industrial civilization, the general ground of social historical existence and its development cannot be simply summarized as a romantic nonsense such as “against practice”. It is right to argue against destructive exploitation of nature, but it is absurd to oppose general control of nature. In criticism of oversimplified advocacy of the slogan “against anthropocentrism”, I have commented:

“In Heidegger’s contemplation the rootlessness of industrial civilization, he discovers the fact that desire for material and the instrumental reason make men get the key of the street, the fact that the technological structure derived from the state ‘at hand’ constitutes artificial authoritative center and deprives natural existence and human existence of truth: men are not telos, he/she is no more than a ‘present’ tools called by the instrumental reason. The functional fluctuation of Rhine and the ‘mediocrity’ of human beings have indicated the question of later ecology and the critique of mass culture. However, Heidegger’s poetic residing does not imply an ‘uprooting’ of human existence. In truth, a post‑modern ‘non‑center’ is a new romantic illusion: men as hegemon are supposed to be overthrown, but the dominant status of ‘earth‑centered’ (in Engels’ term) human existence in actual history cannot be bereaved. Try to imagine, is it possible for men to make ‘matters be what it is’ in a non‑centered way? Is it possible for men to maintain their lives without cognition of natural objects or without eating the bodies of other life?! Ecology is not anti‑human, but an attempt to avoiding the blindness and excessive exploitation by dominant human existence: the telos of ecological balance is men.”

It is possible for men to keep their existence without the exchange between their practice and extrinsic nature. To be against bourgeois industrialism in practical philosophy is downright different from negation of the historical fundamentality of practice. Adorno fails to grasp the distinction.

Surely Adorno understands Marx. According to his reading of Marx, what lies behind the primacy of practice is the framework of material production, namely, the constant development of productivity. He analyzes in an exact sense, “periods of harmony with the world spirit, of a happiness more substantial than the individual’s, tend to be associated with the unleashing of productive forces”. Marx tends to substitute the melioration of total material conditions for social existence (happiness of “I” in group) for individual subjective claim of value. However, according to Adorno,

“The unleashing of productive forces, an act of spirit that controls nature, has an affinity to the violent domination of nature. Temporarily that domination may recede, but the concept of productive force is not thinkable without it, and even less is that of an unleashed productive force. The very word ‘unleashed’ has undertones of menace.”

It is a negative theoretical description. The infinite development of production is in reality the nature of industrial civilization, the infinite claim of the enlightened instrumental reason which takes the anthropocentric control of nature as its own premise. In Adorno’s eyes, Marx did not go beyond the industrialism. In the critical refection of philosophy of enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer, they assert that the emancipation will go to its own opposite, from bondage of nature to bondage of men. It is called “dialectics of enlightenment”.

Importantly, Adorno discovers Marx’s criticism of capitalism (Ricardo) which “ruthlessly compels mankind to produce for production’s sake”. In the operation of capitalist economy, material production – which came into being as an instrument for the purpose of promoting existing conditions of human subject – is reversed into telos; on the contrary, mankind becomes an instrument. Marx’s opposition to capitalist production “strikes the fetish which the barter society makes of the production process”. In Adorno’s belief, “the unleashing of forces no sooner parts with the sustaining human relations than it comes to be as fetishized as the orders”. At this stage, world spirit may “pass into that which it buries”. This elusive sentence needs some elaboration.

Although Marx and Engels fight against capitalism and bourgeois view of practice, they are not suspicious of the inevitable totality of universal history. They at most raise the conscious identity of emancipating mankind to take the place of the totality of capital. However, they have failed to foresee that the domination of identity “may outlast the planned economy (which the two of them, of course, had not confused with capitalism)”. In other words, capitalist relation of production – which Marx tries to ever throw – keeps “its tenacious survival after the downfall of what had been the main object of the critique of political economy”. The reason is that, it will “prophesy dominion an infinite future, for as long as any organized society exists”. Yong Lukács does the same way. But the difference is that he substitutes the red revolution for the golden totality of universal history of capital. This is a question in another dimension. Adorno’s contemplation on this point is worth of further discussion.

It is discussible whether Marx has transcended the mode of thinking in the industrial civilization where he lived in, to talk of the bondage in the relation of men to nature and to indicate the totality of industrialism. The key of the problem is, once Adorno is completely opposed to practice and the development of productive force, how he would face the historical reality? Or, it can be summarized another question: how would constellation face the world? The answer is not idea, but real existence. Actually, Adorno is so profound in theory that he reaches the reflective thought that transcends his own time. However, he is not likely to think about the feasibility to translate negative dialectics into social historical reality. It is not impossible to refuse “primacy” or identity or totality in the mind, but Adorno cannot prescribe for removing identity in actual social reality, which is inevitable for socialism. In this sense, his rejection is something like windbaggary. Accordingly, his passive attitude toward practice is reactionary. Negative dialectics is merely a theoretical position. Although he recognizes the practical view of arch‑bourgeois industrialism is the ground of modern identity, he proposed theoretical attitude of non‑industrialism is unfeasible in the operation and realization in reality. Consequently, it is apprehensible of his rejection of Marcuse to this point. Marcuse’ “rejection of failure” is inevitably unsuccessful, but his revolutionary courage is rather appreciated. Habermas’ proposition of bourgeois reform of reality is also a kind of practice. Adorno is in truth a musician of beauty. He would have conceived that the ruthless commotion in music and idea cannot actually change the world. To this point, he is not wiser than Heidegger, who attempts to save the world of ordinary person with the heart in conscience, which expects home. In this regard, Adorno’s orientation of negative dialectics on conceptual dialectics casts shadows upon the brilliance of his theory.

Now, it’s time to turn around to Adorno’s revolution of idea. With the argumentation above, we do need to look up to him.