Notes on Adorno - "History and Freedom" - Lecture 3

Lecture 3 Constitution Problems

In this lecture, Adorno makes the point that individual discontinuous [random] events are not destiny but occur logically within the context in which they manifest and he identifies the "problem of the philosophy of history" as one of determining how to blend the "unity" [context] and "discontinuity" [random events] into a working theory of history. (28)

The Truth of Facts

Adorno begins by defining a fact as the individual experience of a random event which is "immediate knowledge" only for the person undergoing the experience (20) The truth of the event, the way in which it is experienced, depends largely on the person's knowledge of the times in which it occurs.

A fact..has a greater immediacy for the knowing subject than...the so-called larger historic context to which only...theory can give us access....This immediate knowledge...is no more than immediate knowledge for us....[I]ndividual facts can only be spoken of as a part of a context which then manifests itself in these individual facts. (20)

As an example, he describes the horror he experienced when his home was searched by Nazi's. The event was random in the sense that house searches were a routine practice in Nazi Germany, people never knew if or when they might be subjected to one. Adorno says he experienced horror when he answered the ring of his doorbell and found police on his doorstep. The horror was felt because he knew his life and his families lives were in danger. The fact of the doorbell ringing did not trigger his horror, it was the larger context in which it occurred. If the same event had happened in earlier times, before the Nazi's took over Germany, he admits he would not have felt horror as he would not of thought his life was at risk (20).

[W]hat appears to be a brute fact is in reality something that has become what it is, something conditioned and not absolute. (20)

Immediacy and Mediation

Context, for Adorno, is "the larger conditioning factors" at play (21). Every experience of an immediate event is conditioned by the context in which it occurs. And every fact can be said to be mediated when we refer it back to its conditioning events. In essence, the immediacy of every event, every fact, is mediated. i.e. the fact of Adorno's horror was immediate for him but can only be imagined by us when we consider both the event and the circumstances [context] surrounding it. Adorno argues that in ignoring the facts, the immediacy of human experience, we end up with a "universal that is not a true universal" (21) and so delude ourselves:

The construction of theoretical frameworks alone without confronting the facts really can lead to large-scale delusion. (21)

He refers to the theories of  "writers such as Gobineau" (21). According to the footnotes, Gobineau (1816-82) was a Frenchman who was "an important intellectual forerunner of the Nazi's" having developed a theory of the superiority of the Aryan race, claiming only they "were capable of developing culture"  (274).
However, Adorno also warns that individual experience is "only an element and one that should be no more overemphasized abstractly than the universal" (21).

Constitution Problems

Adorno notes that any large view of the "encompassing context" that is not based on individual, "factual accounts" is thought to be theory and "consigned to philosophy" where it is "relegated by the general scientific consensus to the status of a ...final chapter in an historical narrative, one that does not need to be taken too seriously" (21) and takes exception to Georg Simmel's book The Problems of the Philosophy of History: An Epistemological Essay which treats "every speculation about history...as a subjective stylization" (21-2) calling the "vulgar thesis that history is purely subjective in constitution quite untenable" (23). Adorno claims "Simmel's analysis is lacking in reflection; he is concerned with the way in which an existing mind relates to already existing facts" (22).

It is in fact the objective nature of history in which individual subjects have their being that has primacy over all the human subjects that according to him [Simmel] are supposed to give shape to history....The fact is that we can only properly experience the objective nature of history, as opposed to its supposed subjective 'shaping', once we realize that we are its potential victims. (23)

For Adorno, history is neither a separate thing in itself nor is it purely subjective; it is neither an abstract universal nor a series of individual, subjective experiences; it is something we exist in that works on us.

Confusion of the logical and the real

The less free people are in history and the more they feel themselves to be in the grip of the universal necessity that, thanks to the coherence of the social system of a given epoch, stamps its imprint on the dynamic of history, the historical age, the more desperately eager they are to assert that their own immediate experience is ultimate and absolute in nature. (24)

Adorno argues that he objects to this false immediacy which occurs when the immediate is turned into an absolute; when

...confusion of the logical explanation, or , rather, the immediate cause of an experience with the real cause, that is to say, with the total historical context and its direction, on which we are all dependent. (25)

He felt horror when his house was searched not because the doorbell rang and "these two particular policemen...appeared at [his] front door because they had received orders to do so" but at the fact that "the nature of the system as a whole" had led them there (24).

Hegel's 'world spirit'

Adorno claims Hegel "registered" these same ideas "in the shape of his objective idealism" which, in identifying spirit with existence "concedes" the power existence has over us (25). He tells us:

It is essential that where such things as spirit or reason are under discussion you should not imagine that we are faced with a secularization of the divine plan...minus the person of God....Hegel was a genuine philosopher of mediation and also an Aristotelian in the sense that he attempted to define the spirit that prevails over mankind as something that also prevails in them. (25-6)

Spirit, for Hegel, was not an "independent embodiment" separate from human beings; it was "the spirit of the age" and this is what he meant by "world spirit." It "is the spirit that asserts itself despite people's wishes" (25).
For Adorno, "the objective course of history asserts itself over human beings...And...at the same time it asserts itself through human beings" when they "appropriate and identify" with the general trend of things (26).

[T]he very constraints that are imposed on people by the course of the world, and that compel them to attend to their own interests and nothing beyond them, is the very same force that turns against people and asserts itself over their heads as a blind and almost unavoidable fate. (27)

In other words, what the individual experiences as fact is experienced as it is because of the process that leads to the event--the ideas people hold about the context the event occurs in conditions the experience. And what appears as a random event to the individual is not random in itself but inevitable in terms of the context-- the who is random, not the what. At least, that is what I think Adorno is getting at in this lecture. And we make the mistake of thinking the event is the primary element in what`s happening when really it is the encompassing context that is primary.

[F]acts are transmitted by virtue of the primacy of this process in which things happen over people's head and through them...more precisely, what characterizes this primacy is that events assert themselves over people's heads because they assert themselves in people's minds themselves. And this primacy takes precedence over the fact. (27)

The immediate experience of an event is primary for the individual but it is actually mediated by culture or spirit of the age which is the true primary. If he lived in different times or a different culture his experience of the same event would be different. The event is not an absolute. And the experience is not relative to the individual as others in the same context, with the same knowledge of it would likely react the same way. Adorno was not the only person in Nazi Germany to have his house searched by the police nor the only one to experience the horror the search entailed.