The ideology of modernity and the Myth of the Given

Introduction

How does one begin philosophy? In one sense, by thinking about a philosophical problem. But what makes a problem ‘philosophical’? Here the canon provides an inexhaustible supply of ‘philosophical problems’, to the (we hope) delight of undergraduate philosophy majors and to the (quite likely) irritation of their peers who need only to satisfy curricular requirements. One’s life as a professional philosopher involves sifting through those problems in light of one’s own calling. Yet our professional training also involves a ‘disciplinization’ whereby certain problems come into view as distinctively philosophical problems, and distinguished from other problems, however pressing and perhaps far more serious, of a ‘non-philosophical’ nature. In other words, how a philosopher is trained influences how she or he regards a set of problems as deserving of the designation ‘“philosophical” problems’, and which problems fall outside of the purview of philosophy as a discipline.

The contours of the discipline of philosophy exert a powerful, though usually overlooked, point of divergence between ‘Continental’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy. This point of divergence bears on what philosophers in both traditions do, and do not do, with Hegel, who constitutes something of a point of departure between the two traditions: analytic philosophy constituted itself through its rejection of Hegel, whereas Hegel has remained, in all the various streams of Continental philosophy, a figure deserving of profound (if sometimes begrudging) respect. Hence the rediscovery of Hegel among analytic philosophers could challenge the very discipline of professional philosophy, since professional Anglophone philosophy is ‘analytic’ by virtue of its dismissal of Hegel. As a result, the resurgence of serious interest in Hegel in contemporary analytic philosophy is also blocked. To clarify this ‘blockage’, I will examine the similarities and differences between how John McDowell and Theodor Adorno orient themselves towards Hegel. McDowell has not only written about Hegel but also said of Mind and World that ‘one way that I would like to conceive of this work is as a prolegomenon to a reading of the Phenomenology, much as Brandom’s forthcoming Making It Explicit…is, among, other things, a prolegomenon to his reading of that difficult text’ (1996: ix).

McDowell and Adorno are linked by their shared interest in how to accept Hegel’s insights about the articulation of our experience of objects without committing the Myth of the Given, but without following Hegel all the way into ‘idealism’. McDowell and Adorno converge where they seek to bring naturalism and idealism into productive synthesis; they diverge over what they take the synthesis to be and to entail. Whereas McDowell presents us with a ‘naturalized idealism’ that fully reconciles nature and reason, but only at the theoretical (hence ‘abstract’) level, Adorno’s naturalistic meta-critique of idealism brings us to an awareness of how a fully practical, hence fully actualized (or ‘concrete’), reconciliation of reason and nature is obstructed by the particular shape taken by the domination of nature under late-capitalism.

I begin with McDowell’s diagnosis of the ‘transcendental anxiety’ of modern philosophy, show how he envisions both coherentism and the Myth of the Given as responding to that anxiety, and why only something like Hegel’s conceptualism offers us the ‘equipoise’ needed to assuage the anxiety (section I). In his account, McDowell’s appeal to ‘the disenchantment of nature’ looms large, but in a way that reveals a half-hearted historicism; correcting this requires something much more like Adorno’s ‘the cognitive utopia’ (section II). The cognitive utopia is an ideal for rational cognition that is enlightened about itself. But the ideal is blocked or prevented from being realized, as indicated by Adorno’s ‘naturalistic’ interpretation of Kant. Adorno’s interpretation corrects McDowell’s appropriation of Hegel’s critique of Kant in a way that McDowell himself ought to appreciate (section III). Whereas McDowell turns to Hegel to avoid the lingering traces of the Myth of the Given in Kant, Adorno goes past Hegel to avoid the lingering traces of constitutive subjectivity that Hegel retains. I shall argue both that Adorno’s account of the origins of the domination of nature is superior to McDowell’s account of the disenchantment of nature and that McDowell’s failure to engage seriously with Adorno’s perspective marks a profound limitation on his part – a limitation that can be traced to his own insufficiency in taking Hegel as seriously as he ought (section IV). In concluding (section V), I will have shown how a fascinating project of contemporary analytic philosophy bears within itself traces of the point at which it is tempted to become, and may thereby refuse to become, something other than philosophy as delimited by the prevailing norms of contemporary academic discourse and practice.

I McDowell’s route from oscillation to equipoise

The revival of philosophical interest in Hegel in analytic, or perhaps better ‘post-analytic’, philosophy has begun to receive sustained attention (Redding, 2007; Maher, 2012). The spirit of Hegel has been reborn in Pittsburgh, much as the spirit of Aristotle was reborn in Oxford at the height of ‘ordinary-language philosophy’. But unlike Sellars and Brandom, McDowell emphasizes that human beings are a peculiar sort of animal, a rational animal, so that correctly understanding perception and action requires correctly understanding how our basically animal capacities are saturated with and transformed by uniquely rational capacities. By reconstructing McDowell’s relation to the idealism of Kant and Hegel in terms of his relation to naturalism, I hope to show that McDowell’s synthesis of domesticated idealism and liberal naturalism is not a completely adequate solution to the problems posed.

To rehearse the well-known narrative: McDowell aims to dissolve what he calls the ‘transcendental anxiety’ (2009a: 243) distinctive of modern philosophy as expressed in the thought: ‘How is empirical content [of thought] so much as possible?’ (ibid.). We remain caught in the grip of this anxiety if there can even seem to be a gulf between thought (what is thinkable) and world (what is the case). If my thought, ‘There is salt on the table’ is true, then it is the case that there is salt on the table. But for my (and our) thoughts to be true (or false), they must be about the world as present in my (and our) experience of it. For this reason, vindicating direct realism requires dislodging the transcendental anxiety that installs an unbridgeable gulf between mind and world. So we must dissolve the temptations which lure us away from affirming the perfectly innocuous claim that our judgments, when they are true, do not stop anywhere short of the fact that things are thus and so. (It is crucial for McDowell that the anxiety that prevents us from affirming common-sense realism is both transcendental in content and historical in context; I shall return to this below.)

As long as the modern transcendental anxiety remains in place, we will be caught in an oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism. Since we require reassurance that we are in cognitive contact with the world, and that our judgments are answerable to how things are, we look for something in experience not of our own making. In its most general form, McDowell construes the Myth of the Given as the idea that the space of reasons is wider than the space of concepts (McDowell, 1996: 7) – a point that will be crucial in the interpretation of Adorno (section II). The Given is any experienceable content that plays a justificatory role without having any conceptual structure. As deVries and Triplett (2000) put it, in the context of explicating Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (published in 1967), the myth is the idea that there be experienceable content that is simultaneously epistemically efficacious (having a justificatory function) and epistemically independent (not deriving its justificatory function from its relations with any other contents with justificatory functions).

Although the Myth of the Given is typically understood as epistemological – and it surely is that as well – the Myth (and its criticism) in the Kant–Hegel tradition is best seen in terms of the right structure for cognitive semantics. ¹ Whereas epistemology identifies criteria for normative assessment of evidence, warrant, goodness of inference, etc., cognitive semantics identifies the criteria for anything to count as a thought (judgment, assertion, statement, etc.). McDowell’s concern with cognitive semantics follows Kant and Hegel – with the intelligibility of thought as such, and, in particular, with the intelligibility of empirical content. As a cognitive-semantic fallacy, the Myth of the Given posits non-conceptual content by locating those contents as playing their cognitive-semantic roles and by characterizing the relevant cognitive-semantic roles played, independently of how those contents function within, or with respect to, judgments – which, in turn, have their cognitive-semantic statuses partly constituted by their role in reasoning. ²

The recoil from the Myth occurs because, on the assumption that all thinking is discursively articulated, our access to non-conceptual contents in their cognitive-semantic roles seems mysterious. Unable to guarantee that we have found the lever of Archimedes, coherentism threatens, according to which our judgments do not stand in a cognitive-semantic relation to the world as experienced. So coherentism undermines that ‘minimal empiricism’ necessary for our judgments to even seem to have empirical content; ‘the frictionless spinning in the void’ (McDowell, 1996: 11) threatens. On the one hand, judgments must stand in an epistemic and semantic – McDowell would say ‘rational’ – relation to the world, and not merely a causal one. On the other hand, judgments could have a rational relation with the world only if there were an identifiable point of contact with the world – some cognitive-semantic content apart from the game of giving and asking for reasons. Since that criterion seems impossible to satisfy, we are thrown back onto coherentism, and from thence back into the Given, and so on without respite. Having a grip on the notion of ‘judgment’ at all requires that we satisfy both conditions at once; the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism arises because we cannot see how to do so.

With the right distinctions in place, however, McDowell thinks that we can satisfy both conditions – judgments are externally, rationally constrained by the passive actualization of conceptual capacities in sensory consciousness. ³ We should not confuse what is external to judgment with what is external to experience, nor should we posit non-conceptual content to explicate the possibility of experience. Rather, perceptual experience necessarily involves the passive actualization of conceptual capacities – as distinct from the active exercise of those same capacities in judgment – and so perceptual experience can be the external and rational constraint on judgment needed to avoid the oscillation. Since the constraint lies in the passive actualization of conceptual capacities, rather than in their active exercise, it is external to thought; since the constraint involves our conceptual capacities, it counts as genuinely rational rather than merely causal. ⁴ To avoid the oscillation we need only accept that ‘receptivity does not make an even notionally separable contribution to the co-operation [of receptivity and spontaneity]’ (McDowell, 1996: 9). If the contribution of receptivity were even notionally separable from their cooperation, then we could specify the cognitive-semantic roles of some contents independent of how they function in judgments. So the Myth of the Given assumes that cognitive-semantic roles can be specified independent of their role in judgments, even though cognitive semantics just is the articulation of judgments and subjudgmental contents, as sub-judgmental. We have no grip on any cognitive-semantic roles if we abstract entirely from all judgmental function, as the Myth requires.

We reject the idea that the space of reasons can be wider than the space of concepts by accepting that the space of concepts/reasons is wider than the space of judgments (in which conceptual capacities are actively exercised); conceptual capacities are always and already at work in the perceptual episodes that permeate the sensory consciousness of a rational animal. McDowell explicitly identifies his idealism by insisting upon ‘the Hegelian image in which the conceptual is unbounded on the outside’ (McDowell, 1996: 83; cf. ibid.: 26–9): there is nothing in our experience that utterly transcends all possible conceptual classification (even if only by demonstrative phrases). ⁵

But how exactly is idealism compatible with vindicating direct realism or therapeutically dissolving the transcendental anxiety of modern thought? McDowell’s response to this question turns on how he understands the route from Kant to Hegel that goes through the Transcendental Deduction. On McDowell’s reconstruction, Kant’s cognitive semantics is undermined by his tacit commitment to non-conceptualism; Hegel’s correction of this flaw then paves the way for McDowell’s own ‘naturalized idealism’. The Deduction is supposed to establish ‘equipoise between subjective and objective’ (2009d: 75); as Kant puts it, ‘the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of objects of experience’ (CPR A158/B197; original emphases). Yet Kant failed to overcome the transcendental anxiety because he retained an independent role for sensible intuitions:

The most Kant might be able to claim universally, about sensibility as such, is that any sensibility – at any rate any sensibility that partners with a discursive intellect in yielding empirical knowledge – would allow the formation of pure intuitions, reflecting the way the sensibility is formed as the formal intuitions of space and time reflect the way our sensibility is formed. But in his picture it remains a sort of brute fact about us – given from outside to the unifying powers of apperceptive spontaneity, and not determined by their exercise (not even in the extended sense of being intelligible only in a context that includes their exercise) that the pure intuitions that reflect the forms of our sensibility are intuitions of space and time. (2009d: 75–6)

In other words, Kant can show us that any discursive (as distinct from intuitive) intellect must be joined with sensible (as distinct from intellectual) intuition to yield empirical judgments, but he cannot account for why sensible intuition must be spatial and temporal. That our sensible intuition must be spatial and temporal is mere subjective imposition, and so Kant’s transcendental idealism ‘stands revealed as subjective idealism’ (2009d: 76).

In Kant’s cognitive semantics, our conceptual capacities are constrained by something non-conceptual, namely intuitional form. This spoils the ‘equipoise’, as McDowell puts it, at which Kant aimed and which can alleviate the transcendental anxiety. As McDowell understands Kant’s account:

…our sensibility is the way it is independently of the character of things in themselves, and independently of our capacity for apperceptive unification, to which it furnishes materials, [and] that means there is an unassimilated subjectivity, a subjectivity with no balancing objectivity, within what purported to be the objective side of a proto-Hegelian equipoise…corresponding to this unassimilated subjectivity at the putatively objective pole of the attempted equipoise, there is an unassimilated objectivity, the perhaps non-spatial and non-temporal thing in itself, left outside the equipoise altogether, and looking as if it would have to be the genuine article. (2009e: 151)

In other words, Kant fails to achieve the equipoise between thought and experience because he cannot account for our access to intuitional form; hence he concludes that our conceptual capacities cannot reach all the way out to how things really are. The Hegelian alternative is to dispense with non-conceptual content altogether; if there is nothing outside the conceptual, then the conceptual itself contains a subjective and objective pole. This vindicates common-sense realism by guaranteeing that there is no even apparent gulf between the subjective and the objective.

Importantly, McDowell does not dispense with Kantian intuitions altogether – but his treatment of them contrasts importantly with Adorno’s. In ‘Avoiding the Myth of the Given’ (2009f), McDowell both clarifies how conceptual capacities permeate experience and rejects his previous assumption that ‘to conceive experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, we would need to credit experiences with propositional content, the sort of content that judgments have’ (ibid.: 258; original emphasis). Instead, McDowell now distinguishes between discursive conceptual content (what judgments have) and intuitional conceptual content (what experiences have). Non-discursive, intuitional content counts as conceptual because ‘every aspect of the content of an intuition is present in a form in which is suitable to be the content associated with a discursive capacity, if it is not – at least not yet – actually so associated’ (ibid.: 264). ⁶ In other words, intuitional content is actually conceptual because it is potentially propositional. Along these lines, McDowell also clarifies that sensibility and understanding are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for both intuitional content and discursive content; it is not that each capacity contributes its own distinct content. This clarification places McDowell significantly closer to Hegel than to Kant. ⁷

If the Myth of the Given holds that the space of reasons extends further than the space of concepts, and since the unboundedness of the conceptual is needed to avoid the Myth, then either sensed particulars have no intrinsic cognitive authority, or we must expand the conceptual to include sensed particulars. McDowell chooses the latter:

If an object is present to one through the presence to one of some of its properties, in an intuition in which concepts exemplify a unity that constitutes the content of a formal concept of an object, one is thereby entitled to judge that one is confronted by an object with those properties. The entitlement derives from the presence to one of the object itself, not from a premise for an inference, at one’s disposal by being the content of one’s experience. (2009f: 271)

The experienced presence of an object entitles us to judge that the object is as presented because the objectual presentation is itself conceptual, though non-propositional, and thus accounts for how sensed particulars have rational authority over judgments. The mutual adjustment of judgments in light of experiences, and vice versa, constitutes Hegelian equipoise, and equipoise is coherent only if the conceptual is at work in both dimensions; that is why the equipoise avoids the oscillation, completes the Deduction and dissolves the transcendental anxiety.

Moreover, dissolving the transcendental anxiety also allows us unproblematically to accept that ‘rational capacities, and hence availability to apperception, permeate our experience itself, including the experience we act on unreflectively in our ordinary coping with our surroundings. Such is the form that animal engagement with the perceptible environment takes in the case of rational animals’ (2009f: 272). We would now accept that ‘the thinking thing is the rational animal’ (McDowell, 2009b: 274, n. 36), and that ‘a res cogitans is also a res dormiens, a res ambulans, and so forth’ (ibid.). The identification of the thinking thing with the rational animal undermines the sheer formality of the Kantian conception of the subject as the sort of thing that can take up a disengaged or detached attitude towards its own conditions of sensibility.

We need to reconcile reason and nature by acknowledging that our rational capacities are themselves natural – but not natural in the natural-scientific way of finding nature intelligible, which consists of constructing testable explanations. ⁸ To do so, we need to acknowledge the sui generis character of our conceptual capacities, vis-à-vis nature qua the realm of law (denying ‘bald naturalism’), while on the other hand holding the door shut against any ‘transcendence of biology’ (McDowell, 1996: 115) (denying ‘rampant platonism’). Whereas bald naturalism dismisses the transcendental anxiety, acknowledging the sui generis character of our responsiveness to reasons as such risks conceiving of ourselves as metaphysically split, with ‘disastrous consequences for perception and action’ (ibid.: 108 ff.).

What is metaphysically special, in one sense – the uniquely human kinds of freedom and obligation – is also metaphysically innocuous, in another sense. This delicate balance turns on Aristotle’s notion of ‘second nature’, reinterpreted through the notion of Bildung. Second nature, or Bildung, consists of those capacities or abilities acquired through training, rather than intrinsic to the kind of thing an entity is. (For example, it is part of the second nature of a domesticated dog to obey certain commands.) Likewise, human beings acquire their rational capacities through that particular kind of training called ‘enculturation’. ⁹ By identifying culture with Hegel’s ‘spirit’ [Geist], McDowell naturalizes spirit: the dualism between spirit and nature becomes the distinction between naturalized spirit – the acquired conceptual capacities of the rational animal – and spiritless nature.

Importantly, McDowell does not contest the disenchanted conception of nature with respect to the natural sciences – only that this conception of nature is the whole truth about nature, because our rational capacities, sui generis though they be vis-à-vis the natural sciences, are nevertheless actualizations of our distinctive kind of animality. With the correct picture of our conceptual capacities in a liberated, non-scientistic conception of nature, we can accept that we are fundamentally animals – rational animals. The result is a naturalized Hegelian equipoise that satisfies our need for an adequate cognitive semantics that dissolves the tensions of modern thought.

I now turn to a serious criticism of McDowell’s naturalized idealism: that he does not fully understand the historical roots of the transcendental anxiety he aims to dissolve. As he sees it, the intelligibility of our cognitive access to reality is threatened by the rise of the natural-scientific conception of nature, according to which nature is ‘disenchanted’ (McDowell, 1996: 70) or ‘the realm of law’ (ibid.: esp. 73 ff.). ¹⁰ After the rise of the natural-scientific conception of nature, the operations of sensibility come to be seen as part of the law-governed causal nexus, and so it seems mysterious how our responsiveness to the world as experienced could be a rational response, one answerable to experience. In discussing the rise of this conception, McDowell points out that, while the ancient atomists did anticipate the disenchanted conception of nature, for them

…the thesis that nature is empty of meaning and value lacks a certain status it has in modern thinking. It does not figure as another way to formulate a rightly entrenched view of the kind of understanding aimed at by properly scientific investigation: a view that is not open to dispute, but part of what one must take for granted if one is to count as an educated person. (1996: 181)

But it is precisely here that a blind-spot in McDowell’s historicism distorts the entire account, including his appeal to Hegel. On the one hand, he is fully aware that modernity is marked by the cultural-political status invested in the disenchanted conception of nature. On the other hand, he lacks any corresponding awareness of the actual historical and material processes whereby this conception acquired that status, and especially of the role of science, technology, industry and capitalism in promoting the disenchanted conception of nature as the legitimizing ideology. ¹¹

Without greater historical specificity, McDowell cannot appreciate that the cultural-political status of the disenchanted conception of nature is itself explained in terms of what Adorno calls ‘the domination of nature’. ¹² McDowell provides historicism without materialism, disenchantment without domination, and so cannot appreciate that Kant’s failure to achieve equipoise is not an idiosyncratic blind-spot, but, as Adorno shows, a feature of capitalist modernity that finds expression in Kant. To explain why Adorno reads Kant as he does, I now turn to Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics’ and the challenge it raises to McDowell’s Hegelian solution to the problem of cognitive semantics.

II ‘The cognitive utopia’: Adorno’s quartum quid

One guiding theme throughout Adorno’s work is his Hegelian-Marxist critique of ‘the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’ (Adorno, 1973: xx) as an underlying theme of western culture in general and as culminating in German Idealism in particular. ¹³ Adorno both explains the origins of constitutive subjectivity in systematically unjust conditions of political economy and criticizes constitutive subjectivity for failing to understand itself adequately. Central to his analyses is what Adorno calls ‘the cognitive utopia’. Here I shall argue that the cognitive utopia is a quartum quid, a ‘4th thing’, in relation to the three options that figure in McDowell. Whereas McDowell avoids the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism by appealing to equipoise, Adorno criticizes both the oscillation and equipoise. If Adorno is right, then there is a 4th position that McDowell has not taken into account; if McDowell is right, then Adorno’s position must collapse into one of the other three. (Here I will only distinguish Adorno’s cognitive utopia from McDowell’s equipoise; what prevents that ideal from being realized – the domination of nature – will figure prominently in section III.)

Much like McDowell, Adorno aspires to avoid resorting both to the merely given and to constitutive subjectivity, which has McDowell’s notion of ‘coherentism’ as a clear parallel. Constitutive subjectivity, which Adorno sees as both the inner logic of western epistemology and the expression of western bourgeois individualism, holds that all cognitive significance – what can be taken as authoritative by and for us – is grounded entirely in the capacities belonging to rational subjectivity; no cognitive significance transcends the subject’s rational powers. But, in its anxiety that it makes no contact with the real, the subject desperately seeks (in order to control) something simply Given to it. Adorno discerns this unstable oscillation between constitutive subjectivity and the Given in Husserl’s phenomenology; on the one hand, the transcendental subject is the sole ground of all meaning-analysis, and yet at the same time, it commits the Myth of the Given at a methodological level:

…at the Archimedean point of his [Husserl’s] philosophy ultimately, like Bergson, dogmatically contrasted to scientific procedure in concept formation a differently constituted procedure, rather than reflecting scientific procedure itself. He could be led to this abstract negation of the scientific procedure – which first became completely obvious to his students – by the uncritical acceptance of the positivistic principle, and the cult of the given and of immediacy.

Like McDowell, Adorno also locates in the Kant–Hegel position the resources for avoiding the oscillation between constitutive subjectivity and the Given. Yet, unlike McDowell, Adorno contends that constitutive subjectivity threatens even idealism itself, and so motivates a transition past Hegel to overcome the lingering traces of constitutive subjectivity that Hegel retains. But how can Adorno avoid both the Myth of the Given and constitutive subjectivity without committing himself to equipoise? McDowell’s challenge to Adorno, then, asks how Adorno can avoid all three of Hegelian equipoise, coherentism/constitutive subjectivity, and the Myth of the Given. What is Adorno’s quartum quid?

The answer lies in what Adorno calls ‘the preponderance of the object’ (Adorno, 1973: 183) through which he makes substantial what he announces as his attempt ‘to give the Copernican revolution an axial turn’ (ibid.: xx). The ‘preponderance’ of the object does not mean that we reject Kant’s reorientation of philosophy from epistemology to cognitive semantics. Rather, the intelligibility of discourse presupposes that the sensuous particularity of objects transcends their conditions of intelligibility. The correct cognitive semantics discloses the ‘non-identity’ of concept and object, in contrast to the ‘identity thinking’ that has prevailed throughout the history of western culture, became firmly entrenched in the Enlightenment, and the meaning of which became fully actualized in the Holocaust. ¹⁵

In Adorno’s philosophy of history, western philosophy culminates in constitutive subjectivity because it is the furthest development of ‘identity-thinking’, which ‘devalues a thing to a mere example of a type or species’ (1973: 146). Whereas all identity-thinking subsumes the object to the classifying concept, constitutive subjectivity swallows the object whole, so to speak, so there is nothing left of any cognitive significance other than rational subjectivity itself. Unlike McDowell, Adorno sees even idealism as vulnerable to this allegation; ‘the system is the belly turned mind’ (ibid.: 23); Hegelian equipoise is too close to coherentism for it to do the required work. But, although the subject must break out of constitutive subjectivity, this cannot be done by mere fiat. Rather, we must criticize constitutive subjectivity through reflection informed by sociological, historical and psychological explanations.

When Adorno announces that ‘[t]he matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest. They are non-conceptuality, individuality, and particularity’ (1973: 8), he stresses the independence of the object that spoils the perfectly symmetrical equipoise at which idealism aims, and indeed seems poised to tumble, however malgré lui, into the Myth of the Given. ¹⁶ If McDowell is right, then only Hegelian equipoise fully avoids the oscillation between coherentism and the Myth of the Given. How does the preponderance of the object establish Adorno’s quartum quid?

The solution lies in Adorno’s asymmetrical equipoise, what he calls ‘the cognitive utopia’ (1973: 10), which is grounded in his transformed conception of ‘reconciliation’ or ‘remembrance’: ‘the remembrance that is no longer hostile to the many, which is anathema to subjective Reason’ (ibid.: 6), a type of cognition that acknowledges (rather than suppressing or negating) ‘the multiplicity of differences’ (ibid.). Remembrance discloses the possibility of ‘the cognitive utopia’, which would ‘unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without making it the same as themselves’ (ibid.: 10). Implicit in Adorno’s cognitive semantics is the Kantian thesis that concepts are always general terms, so that identification of particulars requires non-conceptual cognitive-semantic contents, even though, on pain of relapsing into the Myth of the Given, we have no independent grasp on them as such. ¹⁷

Whereas equipoise obtains between the subjective and the objective poles of the conceptually structured world as held in view, the cognitive utopia obtains between the conceptual and that non-conceptual moment in cognition that Adorno calls ‘mimesis’ (1973: 14) or ‘the somatic moment’ (ibid.: 187, 193, 203). ¹⁸ The ‘mimetic’ or ‘somatic’ moment of cognition consists of our bodily comportment towards sensible particulars whereby our norm-governed judgments are exposed to possible questioning. Much like McDowell, Adorno aims at vindicating and explicating the cognitive authority of sensed particulars, but with this crucial difference: McDowell distinguishes between the discursive and the conceptual, but identifies the conceptual with the rational, and so extends the conceptual to include particulars (intuitional conceptual form). By contrast, Adorno identifies the discursive with the conceptual, and so extends the rational beyond the sphere of discursivity in order to include sensed particulars.

At this point, the following objection arises: since McDowell’s conception of the Myth just is the extension of the space of reasons beyond the conceptual, does not Adorno commit the Myth after all? What prevents Adorno from falling into the Myth is twofold: the transcendental considerations he brings to bear on the introduction of non-conceptual (somatic or mimetic) content, and the ‘negativity’ with which he characterizes it. In appealing to ‘the strength of the subject to break out the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity’ (1973: xx), Adorno shows that the object’s ‘preponderance’ is grounded in ‘the intentio obliqua of the intentio obliqua, not the warmed-over intentio recta; the corrective to the subjective reduction, not the denial of a subjective share’ (Adorno, 1998: 250). That is, the cognitive authority of sensuous particulars over conceptual norms is itself justified by reflection on what must be the case in order for those norms to function as norms. For us to have reasons for revising our social practices, our norms must be open to experience, which could not be the case if our subjectivity were constitutive. The sensed particulars must have a kind of cognitive authority over those norms (under some conditions) without those sensed particulars having any conceptual status. Hence Adorno says that ‘[t]he name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy’ (Adorno, 1973: 5). That is, not only are objects never wholly subsumed under concepts, but also the very process of cognition leaves a ‘remainder’, a trace of the alterity of the object, which it is the task of philosophy to recover as traces and assemble into a ‘constellation’ (ibid.: 162–3) to remind us of what has been lost. ¹⁹

By reflecting on the conditions of reflection itself, we discover that we could not have our self-conscious thoughts about experience if there were no non-conceptual component – the somatic or mimetic moment – whereby we make genuine cognitive contact with the particulars that comprise the world-as-experienced. ²⁰ Since our cognition of particulars is posited through reflection on reflection, Adorno expresses himself indirectly or negatively: ‘If the thesis that likeness alone has that capacity makes us aware of the indelible mimetic element in all cognition and all human practice, this awareness grows untrue when the affinity – indelible, yet infinitely removed at the same time – is posited as positive’ (1973: 150). In other words, it is only when the mimetic is ‘posited as positive’ that one falls prey to the Myth of the Given. His rhetorical appeals to ‘nonconceptuality’, to ‘nonidentity’ and to ‘negative’ dialectics function as indicators of how cognitive semantics must embody its own awareness of its dependence on non-conceptual, mimetically recognized sensuous particulars.

That critical reflection thus generates the idea of the cognitive utopia as that which ‘would be nothing other than full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection’ (1973: 13). The ‘full, unreduced experience’ is our sensori-motor engagements with particulars (the ‘mimetic’ or ‘somatic’ element in cognition); the ‘medium of conceptual reflection’ is our discursively structured deployment of generals. To translate Adorno’s criticism into McDowell’s language, idealism collapses into coherentism and cannot rescue us from the threat of ‘frictionless spinning’. The cognitive utopia would be a transformation of our discursive practices: though individual concepts would continue to be used to classify and discriminate (since that is just what concepts do), the judgments in which those concepts figure would be arranged in order to promote, rather than hinder, an awareness of their insufficiency to accommodate the richness of sensuous particulars. The cognitive utopia is the rational ‘equipoise’ of the discursive and the mimetic, rather than the conceptual equipoise of the discursive and the intuitional. ²¹

To transform equipoise into the cognitive utopia, Adorno transforms the concept of mediation. He objects that Hegel’s concept of mediation turns on an ‘equivocation’ between the concept of particularity and the particulars themselves: ‘The unity of that which general concepts cover differs fundamentally from the conceptually defined particular. The concept of the particular is always its negation at the same time; it cuts short what the particular is and what nonetheless cannot be directly named, and replaces this with identity’ (1973: 173). ‘Particularity’, as a concept, is itself a general term; it is easily shown that the concepts ‘particularity’ and ‘generality’ symmetrically depend on one another. But that does not show that the particulars themselves are symmetrically dependent on concepts, because the concept of particularity is not the same as the particulars themselves.

Correcting this, we notice that ‘the qualitative difference between subjective and objective poles of cognition cannot be erased or forgotten just because both are mediated’ (1973: 173). Though each is mediated by the other, the dimensions of interdependence are fundamentally different. There are two philosophically substantive bases for this claim. First, subjectivity is characterized by intentionality; if there were no objects for our intentional acts, then our acts would lack content and a basic condition of subjectivity would be unfulfilled. If a thinker has nothing to think about, then it does not really have thoughts and so does not really count as a thinker in the first place. Second, subjectivity is necessarily embodied, and even our bodies are ‘objects’ in the sense of being part of the natural world, subject to time and causation. Though Adorno would agree that the conditions for the intelligibility of objects lie in the categories and concepts that we bring to bear on experience, he also recognizes that the existence of subjects depends upon the existence of objects, not the other way around. This qualitative difference between the conceptual and mimetic poles of experience cannot be effaced just by appealing to the mediation of each by the other.

To express this qualitative difference, concepts in the cognitive utopia cannot merely subsume their objects. A true reconciliation of subject and object, reason and nature, ‘does not annex the alien with philosophical imperialism; rather it would have its happiness in this: that the alien stays, in its permitted nearness, the distant and the different, beyond its heterogeneity and beyond its own’ (1973: 191). I concur with Finke (2001) in characterizing Adorno as calling for an ‘enlarged space of reasons’ (ibid.: 175), insofar as cognitive authority extends beyond conceptual norms to the sensuous particulars themselves. ²² Our cognition of the sensuous particularity and specificity of things requires an unacknowledged somatic or mimetic moment. Adorno’s cognitive utopia does not commit the Myth of the Given – recalling that, for McDowell, the Myth just is extending the space of reasons beyond the sphere of concepts – because the enlargement of the space of reasons to include the mimetic or somatic moment of cognition results from reflection on cognition itself, and so is not merely Given.

III Adorno’s historical-materialist reading of Kant

Having explicated Adorno’s cognitive utopia as a quartum quid – neither coherentism nor the Myth of the Given nor the perfectly symmetrical relation of Hegelian equipoise – I now turn to the claim that the cognitive utopia is only an ideal for us because it has not been realized. Recall that McDowell thinks that the equipoise is available as an intellectual position once we have overcome the oscillation and fulfilled the Deduction. Adorno, by contrast, thinks that the cognitive utopia must be characterized ‘negatively’, as an absence, because the necessary conditions for its actualization are prevented by ‘the domination of nature’. Though much has been written about the domination of nature, I shall focus on this problematic notion through Adorno’s reading of Kant. Above (section I) I showed that McDowell follows Hegel in accusing Kant of subjectivism due to the unknowability of the things in themselves. Adorno reinterprets Kant’s thesis to show how the domination of nature obstructs the actualization of the cognitive utopia. The equipoise is an abstract solution to a theoretical problem – the problem of the transcendental anxiety. The cognitive utopia is a concrete solution to a practical problem – the problem of the domination of nature, including human nature.

For Adorno, Kant’s subjectivism shows why true reconciliation between reason and nature, the conceptual and the mimetic, is elusive under existing socio-political conditions. To rescue this truth, Adorno provides a naturalistic meta-critique of what he calls Kant’s ‘doctrine of the block’: that we cannot know what things in themselves are (or are like), despite the constraints on how we can and must conceive of them. On Adorno’s reading, Kant expresses truths that he cannot articulate, and the truth-content of transcendental idealism must be liberated from its own framework. As Adorno puts the doctrine of the block, ‘our world, the world of experience, really has become a world familiar to us; the world in which we live has ceased to be ruled by mysterious, unexplained powers…we encounter nothing that is incompatible with our own rationality’ (Adorno, 2001: 110). More emphatically:

…[t]he demystification or disenchantment of the world…is identical with our consciousness of being locked out, of a darkness in which we are enclosed…the more the world in which we live, the world of experience, is commensurate with us, the less commensurate, the more obscure and the more threatening the Absolute, of which we know that this world of experience is only a detail, becomes…the more secure we are in our own world, the more securely we have organized our own lives, then the greater the uncertainty in which we find ourselves in our relations with the Absolute. (2001: 111)

While Kant says this, there is more to what Kant says than what he says, because ‘in their objective form theories of cognition are a kind of reflex of the labor process’ insofar as ‘when consciousness reflects upon itself, it necessarily arrives at a concept of rationality that corresponds to the rationality of the labor process’ (2001: 172). Though Adorno endorses Hegel’s criticism of the doctrine of the block, he interprets Hegel’s categories as forms of social labor. Consequently, Adorno maintains that what Kant articulates as the impossibility of noumenal knowledge also expresses a specific moment within the historical development of modernity: the moment of realization that nature-for-us is nature-as-dominated.

Yet Adorno does not regard transcendental idealism as merely a pathology of modernity; Adorno’s Kant recognizes that ‘science does not necessarily represent the last word about nature’ (2001: 175) and that ‘the object of nature that we define with our categories is not actually nature itself’ (ibid.: 175–6), because ‘our knowledge of nature is really so preformed by the demand that we dominate nature (something accomplished by the chief method of finding out about nature, namely the scientific experiment) that we end up understanding only those aspects of nature that we can control’ (ibid.: 176). The doctrine of the block, suitably reinterpreted, means that scientific knowledge requires mutilating objects to fit them into our conceptual scheme, and that since nature-for-us is nature-as-dominated, then nature-in-itself is other than nature-as-dominated. This mutilation prevents scientific reason from being aware of, hence unable to articulate, what it expresses; conversely, a liberated conception of nature would require the rational critique of reason (and vice versa).

Instead of regarding Kant’s failure to achieve equipoise as demonstrating the need to abandon non-conceptualism, Adorno sees Kant’s failure to achieve the cognitive utopia as expressing the domination of nature. Yet what prevented Kant from achieving the cognitive utopia also prevents us from doing so. Though we can better understand what genuine reconciliation of thought and being would require, the cognitive utopia is not merely a theoretical standpoint at which cognitive semantics comes to rest, but also a practical condition in which nature (including, importantly, the drives and affects of our ‘inner nature’) is no longer subjected to systematic violence and control.

We can now understand better why Adorno only indicates the cognitive utopia negatively and says nothing of how it might be actualized. In criticizing the ideology of late-capitalism, Adorno indicates that the rational, universal, subjective and conceptual dimension of experience must be reconciled with the affective, particular, objective and mimetic dimension – and ‘the cognitive utopia’ indicates this reconciled state. But as a Hegelian-Marxian cultural critic, Adorno maintains that actual reconciliation of reason and nature would require fundamental transformations in currently existing institutions. ²³ Under existing conditions, the reconciliation (like the socialist revolution) cannot be actualized, and so cannot be fully described either. In our historical moment, we simply cannot know what the reconciliation of reason and nature would look like in concrete actuality; any positive description of the cognitive utopia, using the very language itself shaped by the domination of nature, would therefore be itself a refusal or failure to acknowledge our historical situation. From Adorno’s standpoint, then, McDowell’s merely theoretical reconciliation of reason and nature – rehabilitating equipoise as the actualization of the capacities of a rational animal – is itself, ironically, ideology. ²⁴

IV ‘Reconciling’ Adorno and McDowell

Thus far I have explicated McDowell’s argument for Hegelian equipoise to avoid the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism, Adorno’s cognitive utopia as a quartum quid vis-à-vis McDowell, and how the domination of nature explains the disenchantment of nature. McDowell can be brought into conversation with Adorno because McDowell problematizes philosophy of mind and epistemology within an account of modernity, with a sharp eye on the role played by the disenchanted conception of nature and the transcendental anxiety that it engendered. In contrast to Adorno, it is clear that disenchantment without domination, historicism without materialism, is half-hearted at best. I will now turn to three recent attempts to articulate the similarities and differences between McDowell and Adorno, before concluding the present assessment.

In his ‘Re-enchanting Nature’ (2002), Bernstein notes a deep convergence between McDowell and Adorno, and contends that the differences count for less than the similarities between their philosophical projects:

The transcendental separation of nature from the space of reasons, the natural from the normative, is the disenchantment of nature, nature thus becoming a thing wholly apart from human activity and meaningfulness; significant activity and meaning, including knowing, cannot survive the separation, which is precisely what the transcendental anxiety feels and expresses. Assume that the transcendental anxiety is not narrowly epistemological but also expresses the pervasive modern anxiety about the possibility of meaningfulness in general, about whether a wholly secular form of life can be rationally coherent and affectively satisfying; then Adorno’s position converges with McDowell’s. (2002: 217–18)

In response, McDowell distances himself from Bernstein’s convergence between his position and Adorno’s by insisting on a distinction between the activity of professional philosophers and the task of societal transformation:

It would surely be absurd to suggest that unmasking a scientistic conception of the natural as a prejudice, at least to the satisfaction of some people, is not a sensible project until, say, capitalism has been overthrown…No doubt loosening the cultural grip of that conception of the natural in a general way (as opposed to persuading occasional intellectuals that they need not swim with the currents of their time) and undoing all its deleterious effects on modern life (as opposed to showing why a certain sort of activity is not an obligation for philosophers) would require social change, and presumably something along these lines is Adorno’s point. But my purposes do not require such ambitions.

In short, McDowell contends that the reconciliation between reason and nature, as he understands it, is wholly independent of the critique of the capitalist mode of production developed by the Frankfurt School in general and by Adorno in particular. ²⁵

In contrast with Bernstein, Short (2007) and Foster (2007) argue that ‘reconciliation’ between Adorno and McDowell leaves out far too much of what is central to Adorno’s vision of experience and of language. Short construes McDowell as concerned with ‘self-contained epistemological problems’ (2007: 198) in contrast to Adorno’s interpretation of ‘epistemology, and indeed philosophy in general, as a text symptomatic of deeply social and historical ills’ (ibid.). Similarly, Foster (2007) argues that McDowell is vulnerable to criticisms similar to those Adorno leveled against Husserl and Bergson. Husserl and Bergson each made an ‘outbreak attempt’: an attempt to side-step constitutive subjectivity. All outbreak attempts are doomed to failure because ‘the attempt to describe what is outside of causal-mechanical thinking with classificatory concepts will end up with the empty husk of the concept in its possession, not the richness of the nonconceptual’ (ibid.: 94). If the domination of nature affects the very concepts with which we think, then any positive description of non-dominated nature will itself be ‘contaminated’ by those concepts.

Foster regards McDowell as a ‘contemporary break-out attempt’, although McDowell has sufficient historical consciousness to trace ‘the philosophical problems surrounding the relation of mind and world to the growth to prominence of a certain natural-scientific way of understanding the world’ and call for ‘a re-enchantment of nature that would situate subjective capacities as an outgrowth of the natural world’ (2007: 167). But Foster ultimately regards McDowell’s project as yet ‘another failed outbreak attempt from the confines of the constituting subject’ (ibid.: 168) because he neither grounds the disenchantment of the world in material practices of the domination of nature nor reflects on how the domination of nature shapes the very concepts we use to examine it. McDowell’s diagnosis of the disenchantment of nature is historical, but not historical-material; he does not link disenchantment to domination, as Adorno does, nor does McDowell examine how the social practices that sustain the domination of nature affect the cognitive semantics through which he diagnoses it.

How far we can go in ‘reconciling’ Adorno and McDowell depends, then, on the following: is McDowell’s focus narrowly epistemological, as Bernstein and Short claim? And what could motivate the transition from McDowell’s concerns to Adorno’s concerns? As I see it, the difficulty with Bernstein’s argument is this: ‘Assume that the transcendental anxiety is not narrowly epistemological but also expresses the pervasive modern anxiety about the possibility of meaningfulness in general’ (Bernstein, 2002: 217–18; emphases added). There are two problems with how Bernstein motivates the transition from McDowell to Adorno: first, that the transcendental anxiety is ‘narrowly epistemological’ to begin with; second, that the transition from the epistemological to the cultural-political dimension of that anxiety is an ‘assumption’.

First, McDowell correctly refuses to classify his concern as ‘narrowly epistemological’. A merely epistemological theory, in McDowell’s view, focuses on maximally successful cognition – when we successfully grasp how things are. But he is much more interested in what I have been calling cognitive semantics: elucidating the conditions of possibility of empirical content per se – that our judgments even so much as seem to be about what is thus and so. In describing the very possibility of empirical content, McDowell’s concern is not epistemological; he is engaged in a cognitive semantics that explicates the conditions of possibility for empirical content and in a historical-therapeutic dissolution of the dualism of reason and nature that has structured modern thought in light of the disenchantment of nature and made empirical content seem unintelligible. But disenchantment without domination, historicism without materialism, is half-hearted at best. It is that half-heartedness that generates the difference between McDowell’s abstract but specified reconciliation (‘equipoise’) and Adorno’s concrete but unspecifiable reconciliation (‘the cognitive utopia’).

Second, the transition from the cognitive-semantic to cultural-political sense of the transcendental anxiety is not merely assumed. Though there is a real difference between McDowell and Adorno on the scope of philosophical critique, it can be grounded precisely in their different receptions of Hegel. In Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel calls the reader’s attention to the difference in the type of investigation to be pursued when we must reflect on the nature of ‘spirit’:

Spirit is the ethical life of a nation in so far as it is the immediate truth – the individual that is a world. It must advance to the consciousness of what it is immediately, must leave behind the beauty of ethical life, and by passing through a series of shapes attain to a knowledge of itself. These shapes, however, are distinguished from the previous ones by the fact that they are real Spirits, actualities in the strict meaning of the word, and instead of being shapes merely of consciousness, are shapes of a world.

The contrast between ‘shapes of consciousness’ and ‘shapes of a world’ constitutes the real fault-line between McDowell and Adorno, because it marks the difference between a transcendental, cognitive-semantic inquiry into the grounds of the intelligibility of our conceptual frameworks and a historical-material inquiry that encompasses the political and economic contexts within which conceptual frameworks arise, hold sway and dissipate. ²⁶

Put otherwise: McDowell, in his concern with shapes of consciousness, notices that conceptual frameworks are intrinsically social and historical phenomena, but only in a generic sense. Adorno, by contrast, notices that categories such as ‘society’ and ‘history’ need to be made concrete by paying scrupulous attention to the actual ways in which human beings organize and coordinate their activities – that is, to the details of our political and economic lives. McDowell replaces an inadequate cognitive semantics (that of Kant) with a more adequate one (that of Hegel); Adorno follows through on Hegel’s own trajectory past cognitive semantics and into the material praxis of culture, politics and economics – that is, into critical theory. For this reason, Adorno can explain what McDowell merely notices: how the disenchanted conception of nature became part of what one must accept in order to count as an educated person.

V Variations on Hegelian themes

To return to McDowell’s response to Bernstein: why should criticizing how the transcendental anxiety of modernity obstructs a correct cognitive semantics depend on criticizing how advanced capitalist societies promote the domination of nature? The answer is, if one does not do so, then one is not following through all the way on Hegel’s critique of Kant, and so one’s project is undermined on the very basis on which it is constructed. Whereas McDowell superbly criticizes how our conception of empirical content is distorted by the ideology of disenchanted nature, Adorno criticizes the material underpinnings of that ideology in our practice of the domination of nature. McDowell can specify the envisioned reconciliation of nature and reason precisely because he is concerned with conceptions, which Adorno would regard as abstractions from concrete practices. By contrast, since Adorno is concerned with the possibility of a concrete reconciliation between reason and nature, such a reconciliation would require substantial transformations in how we actually comport ourselves towards nature – indeed, transformations that would probably require transcending the limits of capitalism.

In conclusion: McDowell’s vulnerability to an Adornian criticism turns on whether philosophical conceptions can be neatly separated from politics and culture generally. If they can be separated (even if not ‘neatly’), then perhaps there is no need to carry through the turn from disenchantment – which is a matter of having the wrong conceptions – to domination – which is a matter of having the wrong social practices. But I submit that such a separation, though constitutive of the self-conception of analytic philosophy, is antithetical to the spirit of Hegel. ²⁷ Rather, we should see domination as logically prior to disenchantment, because we can explain disenchantment in terms of domination: disenchanted nature is how nature is conceptualized due to material practices of domination. Adorno envisions the reconciliation of nature and reason as a concrete reconciliation that requires fundamental social transformation, rather than, as in McDowell, an abstract reconciliation that involves only an alternation in our conceptions. The contrast between Adorno and McDowell reveals a major blind-spot yet remaining in the Hegel revival currently under way among disciplinized philosophers in the analytic tradition, in contrast to that interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary theoretical activity of which Adorno was such a remarkable exemplar.