Philosophy and Sociology: 1960. Theodor W. Adorno

concepts must accommodate themselves to the realm of empirical observations in advance. We ought to think just as the reality that we observe before us requires us to think. As for the element that Comte here calls fantasy, the features of spontaneity and independence – in other words, the element that allows us to envisage something that ought to be, something beyond the mere enactment of what already is – we find that this whole sphere of possible conceptualization must be relegated, in the best case, to the realm of auxiliary hypotheses formation.²¹ But Comte’s ideal is precisely this: as long as science functions in an orderly fashion, as long as we have a sufficient number of observations, there is no longer any need whatsoever for fantasy. This is a typical example of the rather patronizing attitude that later came to prevail in the social sciences, the attitude that says: ‘Well, of course, we can’t do without theories altogether, we’ve got to have some idea of what we’re talking about.’ First of all, that’s usually nothing but lip-service, for we clearly don’t take the theoretical issue seriously anyway, and just have the feeling: ‘Well, you know, once we have collected enough facts, the theories can simply disappear; the reality is, the task of the social sciences is to adapt to their material.’ In other words, we should proceed as we do in the natural sciences, even if this means ignoring the difference that human society is indeed a society of human beings, of free and rational subjects who do not relate to their society as to some alien nature that confronts them, for what essentially concerns them involves this nature. It is they who shape this nature and who must therefore try and ensure that it genuinely corresponds to their own practice of knowledge and freedom. In this context we might say that Comtean philosophy reflects back the ‘second nature’²² which our society has become once existing relations have come to prevail over actual individual subjects, reflects it back as if it were ‘first nature’, as if the same principles for knowing and the same modes of behaviour that are appropriate in the face of real and actual nature were just as appropriate in relation to society itself.

      Since we do not have enough time today to go on and examine a further question in connection with Comte, let me just mention here that the arguments in the passages that I have been reading out actually derive from a period of specific political struggles,²³ and that the element of speculation, or, rather, anti-speculation, that you find here clearly sprang from the politics of the time. Napoleon had once issued certain edicts against the school of the Ideologists,²⁴ a philosophical school of the late Enlightenment that attempted to provide a kind of sociology of the ‘facts of consciousness’ and thus trace these facts back to their real functions. Now the kind of authoritarian argumentation which Napoleon mobilizes against unfettered or free-floating reason is precisely what you find in Comte here. We already glimpse here that the same social consciousness which once unfolded under the sign of the liberation of the subject would now once more restrict the freedom of the subject, and in essentially arbitrary ways, through the power of institutions – a tendency which eventually culminated and found its most consistent realization in the heteronomous politics of Fascism, in the total state.

Notes

      1  1 Adorno is alluding to an aphorism of Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) from the little section ‘Hardware’ in his One Way Street: ‘Quotations in my work are like wayside robbers who leap out, armed, and relieve the idle stroller of his conviction’ (Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt am Main, 1991, vol. IV.1, p. 138; Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA, vol. 1, One Way Street, p. 481).

      2  2 Comte formulates his ‘law of the three stages’ as follows:Every branch of our knowledge passes, in this order, through three different theoretical states (stages), namely the theological or fantastical state, the metaphysical or abstract state, and the scientific or positive state. In other words, in all of its investigations the human mind employs, as it advances, quite different and even opposed methods when it philosophizes; firstly the theological method, then the metaphysical method, and finally the positive method. The first method is the point where knowledge begins; the third represents the secure and final state, whereas the second serves simply as a transition from the first to the third. (Auguste Comte, Die Soziologie: Die positive Philosophie im Auszug, ed. Friedrich Blaske, Leipzig, 1933, p. 2. See also NaS IV. 14, p. 15. Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Polity, 2000, p. 5; NaS IV, 15, pp. 219f.; Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, 2000, p. 131.)There is a partial English translation of some of the texts to which Adorno refers in these lectures in Auguste Comte, The Positive Philosophy, trans. H. Martineau, New York, 1974.

      3  3 Adorno may be thinking here of a passage from Hegel’s early Jena essay Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie:The only aspect of speculation visible to common sense is its nullifying activity; and even this nullification is not visible in its entire scope. If common sense could grasp this scope, it would not believe speculation to be its enemy. For in its highest synthesis of the conscious and the non-conscious, speculation also demands the nullification of consciousness itself. Reason thus drowns itself and its knowledge and its reflection of the absolute identity, in its own abyss: and in this night of mere reflection and of the calculating intellect, in this night which is the noonday of life, common sense and speculation can meet one another. (G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, Michel and Moldenhauer, vol. 2, p. 35; The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and Walter Cerf, New York, 1987, p. 103)

      4  4 In fact three years later Oskar Negt (b. 1934), a student of Adorno’s, obtained his doctorate under Adorno and Horkheimer with a dissertation on this very subject. See Oskar Negt, Strukturbeziehungen zwischen den Gesellschaftslehren Comtes und Hegels, Frankfurt am Main, 1964. In their joint introduction to the published version, Adorno and Horkheimer wrote:The merit of Negt’s book is to provide a close comparative analysis of the Hegelian and Comtean theories of society. The results of this analysis diverge significantly from the current view on these issues. Even in the past it was by no means clear that one could simply locate positivism on the side of emphatic progress and speculative philosophy on the side of ideology … The parallels and the contrasts between Hegel and Comte are actually so striking that it is astonishing that the discipline of sociology has paid so little attention to this question to the present day. As an exception one could only really mention Gottfried Salomon-Delatour’s article ‘Comte ou Hegel’, published in the Revue positiviste internationale, Paris 1935/6. (See GS 20.2, p. 660; see also NaS IV.15, p. 218; Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, 2000, p. 178, n. 6)

      5  5 ‘In the metaphysical state, which is only a mutation of the previous one, supernatural powers are replaced by abstract forces or entities which are supposed to inhere in the different beings in the world’ (Auguste Comte, Die Soziologie: Die positive Philosophie im Auszug (see note 2 above), p. 2.

      6  6 Comte, Die Soziologie: Die positive Philosophie im Auszug.

      7  7 Adorno is referring to the German edition of Comte, Die Soziologie, 3 vols, trans. Valentine Dorn, 2nd edn, Jena, 1923.

      8  8 Emile Durkheim (1858–1917) founded the journal L’Année Sociologique in 1898. He acted as the editor for the next twelve years, and it effectively became an organ for disseminating the ideas of his own school of sociology. See Adorno, Einleitung zu Emile Durkheim, Soziologie und Philosophie, GS 8, p. 246.

      9  9 Adorno formulates this idea in a very similar way in his essay ‘The Current State of German Sociology’: ‘The National Socialists were not remotely disturbed by the fact that sociology, their bogeyman, had often claimed, by virtue of scientific objectivity, to occupy a social standpoint beyond the play of social forces and to be able to direct society from that position, something that Plato had already recommended’ (GS 8, p. 501).

      10 10 See NaS IV.15, pp. 27f. Adorno claims that society as a totality, despite its internal social dynamics, still ‘always remains the same – the persistence of “prehistory” – but is realized as constantly different, unforeseen, exceeding all expectation, the faithful shadow of developing productive forces’ (GS 4, pp. 267f.; Minima Moralia, Jephcott, p. 234). This constant development of productive forces is itself the expression of the ‘remorseless domination of nature’ and a blind aspect of the ever-same, which