Dear Teddy

Letters between Adorno and Marcuse on the subject of ’60s student radicalism.

From “In the Shadow of Hegel” by Colin Harper

The third essay, ‘Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel’, is in many ways the most interesting in the book as it takes up the question of the difficulty of reading Hegel’s works, considers the experience of engaging with Hegel’s philosophy. Many commentators regard Hegel’s prose as at best poor and at worst wilfully obscurantist. “If only he would have written more clearly” is the often repeated lament. Adorno brilliantly argues that such comments betray a failure to understand the nature of Hegel’s break with previous philosophy. “The norm of clarity holds only where it is presupposed that the object itself is such that the subject’s gaze can pin it down like the figures of geometry.” (p.98) If the clarity of our concepts is to grasp the shadowy nature of a shifting reality, if the labour of thought is to actively cast light on that reality, then thought must capture the shadows of reality rather than simply dispel them. In order to identify objects with adequate concepts, our concepts must paradoxically seek to grasp the nonconceptual that is, or is in, objective reality. Rejecting Wittgenstein’s maxim that “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent” as “utterly anti-philosophical”, Adorno claims: “If philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things one cannot speak about, to help express the non-identical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it at the same time.” (p.102) According to Adorno, it is this paradoxical nature of Hegel’s undertaking, of attempting to grasp in thought that which is other than thought, which gives rise to the difficult style of his works; the style attempts to grasp the content and is not simply a result of incidental factors, such as a whim on Hegel’s part or a simple lack of ability to write clearly. The attempt to express the truth in the tension between the clarity of the concept and that which is unclear is ‘clearly’ not an abandonment of clarity as a goal. It is also, however, “not the same thing as the vague and brutal commandment of clarity, which for the most part amounts to the injunction that one speak the way others do and refrain from anything that would be different and could only be said differently.” (p.106) In Adorno’s view, Hegel is thus not to be criticised for writing in the manner he did, but rather for believing that he had more success in his undertaking than he actually had.