Notes on Adorno's "History and Freedom" - Lecture 2

[Notes on History and Freedom by Theodor W. Adorno]

The Dominant Theme in Historiography and the Humanities
What was presented earlier as "the crisis in the idea of historical meaning" [i.e. our habit of assigning meaning where none exists] is the result of the foundations [postulates] of the study of historical writings [historiography] and the humanities.  The dominant theme, first formulated by [Leopold von] Ranke, is 'tell how it really happened' but this precludes any attempt at understanding "historical tendencies" or "large concepts such as...universal history itself". It also undermines history as the recording of events, which tends to regard particular events as more important than other events. (10-11)

Adorno's main concern is "with one specific problem of history...the relation between the universal...tendency...and the particular, the individual"(11) He is not concerned with how "history is constructed."(11)

History and the particulars of progress and domination
We need to keep a certain "distance" from history. Too close an examination of details obscures "the wood for the trees", too much distance and "the categories" we apply become "magnified...and fail to do justice to the material."(11) 

We also need to be wary of "individual examples of progress" as:

[I]n the society in which we live, every single progressive act is always brought about at the expense of individuals or groups who are thereby condemned to fall under the wheels....The rationality to which we commonly ascribe universality was a rationality of the domination of nature, the control of both external nature and man`s inner nature.(13)

[So what we call "progress" for one group obscures the suffering that so-called progress creates for a multitude of others; and, what we call rationality is really the exercise of control over nature and man.]

The Universal Principle = Rationality, Antagonism and Domination
What Adorno calls the universal principle is an unreflexive rationality that controls/dominates/subjugates by classification [since the Enlightenment?]. And what we see as particulars or individual facts are really universals in concentrated form.

[T]he idea that the principle I have called the universal principle, the principle of progressive rationality, contains an internal conflict ....this kind of rationality exists only in so far as it can subjugate something different from and alien to itself....antagonism, conflict, is in fact postulated in this principle of dominant universality, of unreflecting rationality....[T]he stage at which self-awareness might lead this rationality to bring about change—that stage has not been reached.(13)

He sees the particular as the principle of antagonism that "persists and perpetuates itself"(14).  And while he admits there are outbursts of "irrational or primitive forces in our own age" he claims they are nearly always the product of "manipulation" in "the service of domination."(15)

Spirit as Reason, Technical Rationality
Hegel's spirit has "made itself independent...through its potent instruments, logic and mathematics"(15-16) but it is still a product; it is not autonomous:

The evolution of spirit as rationality, as the reason that dominates nature, or as what I have called technical rationality...is the product of the material needs of human beings...and the categories of the spirit contain these needs as the necessary elements of their form. Spirit is the product of human beings...and of the human labor process"(16) 

Spirit [reason], for Adorno,  is "no absolute first thing...it is something produced by the reality of a life bent on self-preservation...spirit [reason] misconceives itself as primary, instead of perceiving its interconnectedness with actual life."(16)

The Great Paradox and our Web of Delusion
What we term rational progress is little more than "the exploitation of nature transferred  to men and continuing to work in them"(16-17)

[P]rogressive instrumental reason is the embodiment of the antagonism that consists in the relation between the supposedly free human subject...and the things on which his freedom is built. The antagonistic character of progressive rationality is the aspect of it that turns the universal...into the particular which causes such anguish to us who are likewise particular.(17) 

According to Adorno, this is "the blindspot...of Hegelian philosophy"(17) Because we don't recognize that we are, in essence, acting as a universal in condensed form we are fated to act as we do while we loudly deny that we are under any power's control:

[H]uman beings who always believe that they are in full possession of themselves and, because of their certainty on this point, are highly reluctant to admit the degree to which they are merely the function of some universal. For the moment they were to concede that they would in a sense cease to be in their own eyes what their whole tradition tells them they are [free?]. This is a great paradox. (17) 

For science tells us there is no "universal", that "in reality there is nothing but spontaneous individual phenomena" (17)

Nowadays, there really is something like a perversion of consciousness, a reversing of what is primary and what is secondary....we let ourselves be talked out of everything we experience at any given moment as the determining forces of our lives....[and] things that are really questionable, such as the primary character [universal?] of individual human reactions, are treated by this so called scientific mind as if they were truly primary...this [is] a web of delusion. (18)

 In other words, we think we act independently, freely, and science supports us in this—we are rational beings—when in reality, because we are "unreflective" our actions are really particular, specific, expressions of our culture and not the actions of fully autonomous beings. [We delude ourselves into thinking we act as autonomous entities?]