Philosophy and Sociology: 1960. Theodor W. Adorno

the context of sociology is what has appropriately enough been dubbed ‘social Darwinism’; in other words, Darwin’s theory of adaptation, of the ‘survival of the fittest’, of the specimens that are best adapted to the actual conditions of life, is essentially transferred to sociology. But you find such theories, or at least this general idea, in Comte even before the development of Darwin’s theory of adaptation, which surely shows that the spirit of positivism in sociology unfolded in an immanent way and certainly has no need to be traced back to influences from biology. The fact that the concept of adaptation first makes its appearance in the context of sociology – although it now certainly enjoys a more secure scientific status in biology than it does in sociology – seems only to strengthen the possibility that the Darwinian conception itself was influenced by social ideas that actually derived from the competitive mechanisms of modern society, from the question of survival or otherwise in the specific context of economic struggle. (This possibility has already been suggested in various ways, and, in connection with our own concern with the relationship of philosophy and sociology, it clarifies the relationship between sociology and other concrete particular disciplines.) Thus I suggest that these ideas can ultimately be traced back to sociology and found their way into biology only later on,¹ and that this account is more plausible than the tired old story about Spencer that you get from the standard histories of science.²

Now the downgrading of imagination in comparison with observation – a direct consequence of the theoretical approach we have been considering – gives a distinctive twist to the concept of the subject, and this is actually what defines the relationship of philosophy and sociology. If you just recall for a moment, including those of you who have not specifically studied philosophy, what you know about the great idealist systems of the post-Kantian period, especially those of Fichte, Hegel and Schelling, you will certainly be aware that a remarkably elevated and emphatic concept of subjectivity stands at the heart of all these philosophical doctrines. It is quite true that Hegel’s philosophy of objective idealism restricts the unrestricted validity of the concept of the subject as an utterly creative and spontaneous agency, a view that is particularly characteristic of Fichte; but in Hegel too the entire world can ultimately be regarded as the product of subjectivity, and the exemplary demand which this lays upon knowledge, upon philosophy as science, is precisely this: thought must exert itself to move beyond the mere facts, to penetrate the facts in a really thoughtful way, and, to express this task in traditional philosophical language, to bring out the very essence of the matter. Of course we cannot just talk about this tendency in a purely general and unqualified way. I need to say this because I feel obliged to present these things to you in a properly differentiated fashion. For there is a real danger that such general characterizations threaten to obscure or obliterate significant distinctions. And I believe that it is the duty of a lecture course such as this not to pass on any misleading ideas merely for the sake of offering you a straightforward orientation at the start. Now the concept of the subject, as you find it in philosophy, is itself ambiguous in many ways. Thus in Fichte, and to a certain sense already in Kant, the ‘subject’ is distinguished from the individual.³ The subject can be seen either as a social subject or as a purely intellectual entity, i.e. as an abstraction from the actually existing empirical subjects, or again as the ideal subject of scientific cognition, we might say, as the spirit of science as distinct from the individual human subjects who may embody it. Now this emphatic concept of the subject, which you can trace back to Kantian philosophy, of course also already implied for the German idealists some restriction of the meaning of actual empirical subjects. Thus even the most extreme speculative idealism would not have claimed that any individual, if I may put this rather crudely, could just think away wildly in their own way and simply construe a world of their own making. Rather, each thinking individual serves as a representative of this higher, universal, transcendental or objective subject, must try and live up to the full and undiminished significance of what can be found and observed, and thereby correct the limited and arbitrary aspects of a merely individual subjectivity. Hegel’s philosophy already follows this through to the very end when he calls, with a seemingly paradoxical expression, for freedom towards the object.⁴ This refers to the capacity on the part of the subject to abandon oneself to the object, to immerse oneself as thinking subject in the matter itself, instead of simply spinning this out of oneself, turning it into a mere product of oneself, as it were. Nonetheless, the thought of the thinking subject as a spontaneous and productive subject is crucial for German Idealism, and indeed for the entire philosophical tradition. It is no accident if, in contrast to the passage I have already cited, where Comte speaks of the excess of imagination over observation, we find something very different even in Kant, a thinker who was notoriously cautious and reserved in his attitude to speculative thought. For Kant accords a central place to the concept of the imagination, and specifically to the original and productive power of the imagination which gives unity to the things of experience. In other words, what you find in sociology, to put this rather crudely here, is a kind of anti-subjective tendency: on this view the subject is not supposed to inform or shape reality in any way through its own intellectual processes or through its own activity, but simply keep to what reality provides. And in the course of time this has produced a requirement that anyone who is engaged with empirical sociology today can readily experience for themselves;⁵ and this, if I may exaggerate somewhat just so you understand what I am talking about here, is the requirement for the self-liquidation of the thinking subject. I believe that what distinguishes the positivistic spirit from the spirit of philosophy is this notion that the subject must effectively eliminate itself in order to attain the truth, whereas philosophy holds that the object only reveals itself at all through its exposure to the power and freedom of the subject. This is one of the most crucial distinctions here. Thus when the sociologists among you are learning how to prepare interviews these days, you will be told that it is imperative in all cases to suppress any thoughts of your own, that you ignore your own views when drawing any conclusions about the people before you, that you keep entirely to the relevant data; in short, if this suppression of your imagination, this restriction of your own freedom, appears to you here as the natural requirement of scientific research, this is ultimately connected with the attitude that early sociology already adopted in relation to the spirit of philosophy. I just want to present you with this idea here, and simply help you to see that these demands, which you will of course encounter not only in sociology but in every field of scientific research and investigation, are not nearly as self-evident as they may initially seem to be, for such demands actually already imply a very specific conception of scientific or objective knowledge, and one that is anti-philosophical in character. And it will be our task here to reflect expressly upon the question whether this ascetic approach which science constantly expects of us actually represents a freedom towards the object, whether it gives us more of the object, or whether under certain circumstances it even gives us less of the object, or whether perhaps this question can ultimately be decided simply in these terms.

In any case, this Comtean demand at the expense of the free subject has a certain implication for sociological thought which I would like to draw to your attention even at this preliminary stage, and that is the way this demand essentially directs the process of thinking. By encouraging you to avoid speculation and orient yourselves to the given, you find your thought is already referred to the categorial forms and the givens that you happen to encounter as they are. This tacitly presupposes the existing order, the particular arrangement of things that you find before you, although this presupposition is never actually made explicit, and the existing order is not only turned into the criterion of truth but is thereby elevated to the norm that is supposed to govern thinking as such. And this specific concept of adaptation has had these two sides to it right from the start: in the first place, we must unreservedly register the facts as faithfully as possible, while taking care to deduct all costs incurred by the process of subjectivity, so that the remainder, what you are finally left with, is the truth; in the second place, there is already something normative or prescriptive about this adaptation or accommodation on the part of knowledge to what is currently the case; thus knowledge itself is supposed to take its measure from the existing order of things as they are, though it may perhaps improve things in a gradual way. In other words, the conception of sociology which we have started with already contained the demand for the kind of immanently systematized thought that has been proclaimed as an explicit programme in a recently published book by René König, a work