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Adorno and Habermas

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Deborah Cook
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University of Windsor, Canada

Published online: 21 Oct 2014.

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Habermas on the Human Condition, Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology, 33:3, 236-259, DOI:
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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 33. No.3. October 2002

ADORNO AND HABERMAS ON THE HUMAN

CONDITION

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DEBORAH COOK
For millennia philosophers have defined human beings as rational
animals. But they have differed in the stress they place on these definiens.
For Plato, reason is humanity's divine spark, but desire is by far the largest
and most powerful element in human existence. In a metaphor as vivid as his
cave allegory, Plato compared desire to an unruly horse, "huge, but crooked,
a great jumble of a creature, with a short, thick neck, a flat nose, dark color,
grey bloodshot eyes, the mate of insolence and knavery, shaggy-eared and
deaf, hardly heeding whip or spur."' Hence, reason was assigned the role of a
charioteer who would reign in the dark horse of bodily desire and lead the
soul towards the idea of the good. Centuries passed before philosophers like
Hume would draw the opposite conclusion: reason is, and ought to remain,
subordinate to the passions. Philosophers were quick to respond to Hume's
audacious attack on the sovereignty of reason. Kant ascribed to reason the
power to structure experience with its transcendental categories, and Hegel
proclaimed the real rational and the rational real. By the mid-nineteenth
century, however, Marx tried to unmask these claims using ideology critique,
while Nietzsche argued that reason resides in the body and its will to power.
With his theory of the instincts as the basis of behaviour, Freud also
wounded our narcissistic understanding of ourselves as masters of our acts
and thoughts. Yet, with some important qualifications, the aim of
psychoanalysis is largely Platonic: where the irrational id was, there the
rational ego shall be.
This dispute about the relationship between reason and desire has taken an
interesting tum in the work of Theodor W. Adorno and Jiirgen Haberrnas.
Where Adorno adopts Freud's instinct theory, and sees a conflict between
reason and the instinctual dimension of human existence, Habermas
maintains that reason has superseded the instincts during the course of social
evolution. Indeed, these social theorists have strikingly divergent views
about the evolutionary course of reason in human history. In a third point of
contrast, Adorno maintains that reason today is largely pathic; it distorts
those instincts that might otherwise counter its reifying effects. Against this,
Haberrnas postulates an advanced stage of communicative reason that serves
as a counterweight to the distortions of communicative action caused by
incursions into the lifeworld of the functionalist rationality of the economic
and political systems. So, although both agree that reason in at least one of
its contemporary guises poses a threat to human welfare, they differ strongly
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in their views about the nature of this threat, and about how it may best be
foiled. In what follows, these three aspects of Adorno's and Habermas' work
will be assessed. After comparing their divergent conceptions of human
nature by examining the relationship between reason and desire that each
theorist posits, I shall outline their conflicting views about the evolution of
reason. Finally, Adorno's and Habermas' disparate claims about the more
evolved forms of reason in modern societies will be evaluated. The
significance of their debate extends beyond theory; it ultimately concerns our
capacity effectively to change existing political, economic, and social
conditions such that these conditions become more beneficial to human life.
Our fate is bound inextricably to the vicissitudes of an evolving reason
whose controversial character will be plumbed in this paper.
The Human Being
If philosophers have generally agreed that human beings are rational
animals, Adorno appears at times to give greater weight to the animal over
the rational dimension of human existence. When he speaks of the
preponderance or precedence (Vorrang) of the object in Negative Dialectics,
for example, Adorno is referring (among other things) to the preponderance
of the somatically-based drives or instincts over mentation. If philosophers
like Kant allowed "no movens of practice but reason," Adorno rehearses the
objections of many other thinkers (from Hobbes, through Hume, to MerleauPonty) when he writes that "practice also needs something else, something
physical which consciousness does not exhaust, something conveyed to
reason and qualitatively different from it." 2 In his critique of Kant's idea of
freedom, Adorno posits a physical addendum (das Hinzutretende), originally
untamed impulse, "the rudiment of a phase in which the dualism of
extramental and intramental was not thoroughly consolidated yet, neither
volitively bridgeable nor an ontological ultimate" (ND, 228). Conceding that
this addendum may, at most, be sublimated, Adorno also states that its
complete elimination would render action impossible. 3 Hence, the freedom
of Kant's transcendental subject is entirely illusory: to the extent that
freedom entails the freedom to act, the only freedom possible belongs to the
embodied subject situated in space and in time.
Adorno infers the precedence of the object from the possibility of
conceiving an object that is not a subject and the concomitant impossibility of
fully conceiving a subject that is not an object (ND, 183). Disembodied and
supposedly "pure," Kant's transcendental subject is ultimately unthinkable or
unintelligible. 4 At the same time, Adorno warns against placing "the object on
the orphaned royal throne once occupied by the subject." To give the object
logical primacy would be to tum it into "an idol." For Adorno, the "purpose
of critical thought" is not to make the object usurp the place of the subject, but

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rather "to abolish the hierarchy" (ND, 181 ). Like Merleau- Ponty, Adorno
battles on two fronts. Against idealism, he argues that in order to exist at all,
the subject must first exist as an object; it must be something objective itself
in order to grasp objects. Reason is a thing of this world and, as such, its
development reflects that of the animal life of the human species. Against
empiricism, Adorno argues that a subjective "moment" necessarily inheres in
the idea of an object, qua idea. Struggling (sometimes unsuccessfully) to
advance a dialectical account of the relationship between subject and object,
Adorno criticizes Hume's conception of an objectivity completely detached
from the subject: if the object "lacked the subject as a moment, then its
objectivity would be nonsense. " 5
The subject is ineliminably material, objective. Yet it is also the case that
the capacity for abstraction, for thinking in universal concepts, defines the
subject. Simply put: "Abstraction is the subject's essence" (ND, 181 ). By
virtue of its cognitive development, consciousness has secured a degree of
independence not only from objects but also, and by extension, from its own
material substance. With anthropogenesis: "the consciousness that has
become independent, and is epitomized in carrying out cognitive
performances, has branched off from the libidinous energy of humanity's
species being." Adorno immediately adds that human nature is not
indifferent to this development because our very diremption from the
instincts nonetheless implies that consciousness remains "a function of the
living subject" (ND, 185; translation altered). Since "mental activity can be
attributed to no one and to nothing but the living," it follows that a "natural
element infiltrates even the concept which most highly overshoots all
naturalism: the concept of subjectivity as the synthetic unity of
apperception" (ND, 20 I). What the diremption of consciousness from nature
ultimately means is that "everything mental is modified physical impulse."
So, even as he dismisses the question of whether the mind or the body has
priority because this question abstracts from our lived experience, Adorno
also cites Schelling: "Urge [Drang] ... is the mind's preliminary form" (ND,
202; translation modified).
The modification of physical impulses - which Adorno links to the
emergence of the capacity for self-reflection - has had both positive and
negative consequences. Viewed positively, it entails a "qualitative recoil into
what not merely 'is'," or a capacity for thinking beyond the given, for
speculation (ND, 202). It is in this way that humanity has succeeded in
raising itself above nature. Following Hegel, Adorno argued that thinking
always involves "an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced
upon it." It represents "a revolt against being importuned to bow to every
immediate thing" because thought resists "mere things in being," and intends
in the object "even that of which the object was deprived by objectification"

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(ND, 19 passim). Twenty years earlier, in Dialectic of Enlightenment,

Adorno and Max Horkheimer had even sounded a Habermasian note when
they remarked that "[e]scape from the dismal emptiness of existence calls for
resistance, and for this speech is essential." However, the resistance that
speech offers to mere things in being, or to the dismal emptiness of
existence, also has negative consequences. To the degree that cognition
inevitably involves the subsumption of particular objects under universal
concepts, thought has become coercive and the subject deluded about both
the world and itself. If other animals lead "dreary and harsh lives" because
they lack concepts or words "to seize the identical in the flux of phenomena,
to isolate the same species in the alternation of specimens, or the same thing
in altered situations," 6 homo sapiens often uses its concepts violently to
subjugate both external nature and its own internal nature. Indeed, Adorno
also maintains that reason as it currently exists "is pathic; nothing but to cure
ourselves of it would be rational" (ND, 172).
Adorno based his philosophical anthropology on these reflections about
the relationship between reason and desire - reflections that have been
central to theories of human nature from the inception of Western
philosophy. Still, it must also be noted that Adorno does not offer a fullfledged philosophy of human nature. As Simon Jarvis observes, Adorno
maintained in his 1965 debate with the anthropologist Arnold Gehlen that the
"only possible anthropology is a 'negative anthropology' or a 'dialectical
anthropology' ." 7 This issue is raised again in Negative Dialectics where
Adorno launches an attack on existentialism. Sartre's and Heidegger's
"eureka" (existence precedes essence) loses its "evidential character" upon
the slightest reflection. It is not yet possible to say what humanity is because
"[m]an today is a function, unfree, regressing behind whatever is ascribed to
him as invariant." Anthropology mistakenly abstracts from "the
dehumanization that has made the subjects what they are," as well as from
"the de-subjectifying process that has paralleled the historic subject
formation since time immemorial." The fact that "we cannot tell what man is
... vetoes any anthropology" (ND, 124 ). Still, it should also be clear that
Adorno does follow the philosophical tradition when he identifies reason and
desire as the very "stuff' of human existence. Owing to their mutilation by
social conditions, however, human beings have not yet been able to develop
freely as both reasoning and desiring beings. Currently, reason subjugates
desire by distorting needs and instincts. To the present day, human history
has been the history of domination of man by man. Only when domination
ends will it be possible to say what it is to be human.
Aligning himself with an equally venerable philosophical tradition,
Habermas successively distances himself from Adorno as he begins to
emphasize the rational dimension of human existence over the instincts. In
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Knowledge and Human Interests, Habermas was already arguing that

language elevates human beings above mere nature because it embodies a
form of 'reason' which simultaneously means 'the will to reason' .8 The
quasi-transcendental interests in technical control, mutual understanding, and
emancipation are derived from nature, but they also stem "from the cultural
break with nature." Although they realize or actualize natural desire, these
interests have simultaneously "incorporated the tendency toward release
from the constraint of nature." Still, at this early stage in his philosophical
career, Habermas could sound very much like his former mentor. Like
Adorno, Habermas was prepared to acknowledge that an "enticing natural
force [is] present in the individual as libido." 9 And, both theorists make
reference to our diremption from nature. Nevertheless, by the time the
magisterial Theory of Communicative Action appeared in 1981, Habermas
had thoroughly assimilated the demands of the libido to those of reason.
Habermas attempted to incorporate "enticing natural desire" into his
burgeoning linguistic theory as late as 1974. Yet in this attempt, his
fundamental differences with Adorno actually emerge all the more clearly. The
psychoanalyst Joel Whitebook explains that in "Moral Development and Ego
Identity," 10 Habermas was trying to overcome the Kantian dichotomy between
inclination and duty when he recommended that a seventh stage be added to
Lawrence Kohlberg's psychological theory of moral development (a
recommendation he would later abandon). In the seventh stage, content from
inner nature was to be (re)introduced into cognition. But Whitebook objects
that Habermas managed to reconcile inclination with duty only by
linguistifying inner nature, arguing that inner nature is already sprachfiihig, or
capable of being articulated in speech. In fact, as Whitebook also points out,
Habermas had already broached this argument in Knowledge and Human
Interests." There, reconciliation was ultimately achieved at the cost of
subsuming eros under logos - a move that even Plato, with his view of reason
as sublimated, "spiritualized," desire in The Symposium and Phaedrus would
not have sanctioned. What Whitebook overlooks, however, is an equally
controversial move that occurred later in The Theory of Communicative Action
where Habermas denies altogether that desire is a natural force. Rather than
existing objectively as part of nature, or the natural dimension of our species
being, desire is deemed completely subjective. In contrast to our "cognitions,
beliefs, and intentions," which "belong to the subjective world" but also "stand
in relation to the objective world," human desire has no relation whatsoever
"to elements of the objective world." 12 Conflating desires and feelings, by
claiming that both are rooted in need, Habermas now maintains that desire the volitional side of need - "can only be expressed as something subjective;"
it "cannot be expressed otherwise, cannot enter into relation with the external
world, whether the objective or the social" (TCA I, 91 ).

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By demoting human desires to the status of subjective expressions that lack

any natural, material, or even social, referents, Habermas has ensured that the
instincts can no longer upstage reason. The diremption with nature discussed
in Knowledge and Human Interests is apparently now complete. Having
subjectified and linguistified inner nature, Habermas also insists that it submit
to the demands of reason. Just as cognitive claims about states of affairs and
normative claims about what ought to be done can be judged rational or
irrational, so too expressions of needs are more or less rational, depending on
the degree to which they fulfill the ideal presuppositions of communicative
reason. With this notion of reason, Habermas makes "a prior decision for a
wider concept of rationality connected with ancient conceptions of logos."
Like these early conceptions, in which reason was associated with speech,
Habermas' logos "carries with it connotations based ultimately on the central
experience of the unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force of
argumentative speech, in which different participants overcome their merely
subjective views and, owing to the mutuality of rationally motivated
conviction, assure themselves of both the unity of the objective world and the
intersubjectivity of their lifeworld" (TCA I, I 0).
Communicative reason finds its limits only in the functionalist rationality
of the political and economic subsystems, and the strategic, instrumental, or
purposive rationality of individuals. But Habermas also deems these other
modalities of reason, which he concedes have had pathological effects on
communicative action, "derivative moments that have been rendered
independent from the communicative structures of the lifeworld." 13 Indeed,
before it could be distorted by functionalist or instrumental forms of reason,
communicative action had to develop more or less autonomously in a
process that Habermas calls the "rationalization of the lifeworld". In this
process, "reaching understanding" revealed itself to be "the inherent telos of
human speech" (TCA I, 287). 14 The rational potential of communicative
action is located in the ideal presuppositions that underlie attempts to reach
understanding or agreement about cognitive, moral, and expressive validity
claims. Among other such presuppositions, "[p]articipants in argumentation
have to presuppose in general that the structure of their communication, by
virtue of features that can be described in purely formal terms, excludes all
force - whether it arises from within the process of reaching understanding
itself or influences it from the outside - except the force of the better
argument (and thus that it also excludes, on their part, all motives except that
of a cooperative search for the truth)" (TCA I, 25). The rational potential in
communicative action is actualized when this ideal presupposition, and
others like it, are satisfied.
Whereas Adorno thinks that a now pathic reason has inflicted a great deal
of damage on an inner nature that is both "intramental and somatic" (ND,
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228), Habermas believes that a more holistic and salubrious form of reason
envelops even desire. Of course, many philosophers have claimed that
rationality marks our specific difference from other animals. On Habermas'
view, however, we are the bearers of a reason that appears to have removed
us completely from the animal realm by emancipating itself from what Plato
once called the taskmaster of desire. Rather than trying to bring our rational
powers into harmony with desire or the instincts, Habermas offers a
controversial conception of desire as the subjective expression of
disembodied needs that are potentially rational because they can be
articulated in speech. Even as desiring beings, then, we are always already
rational. Inverting Nietzsche's claim, "body am I entirely, and nothing else;
and the soul is only a word for something about the body," 15 Habermas
seems to believe that human beings are entirely mind (or "soul"); and the
body is only a word for something about the mind. Indeed, with his monistic
conception of the human being as rational, Habermas hopes to obviate the
difficulties encountered by Adorno and other modem philosophers with their
allegedly Nietzschean invocation of an Other of reason. Refusing to pit
reason against a supposedly heteronomous Other, to turn it into the
"plaything of unmediated forces working upon it, as it were, mechanically,"
Habermas proposes his "diremption model" of reason which "distinguishes
solidary social practice as the locus of a historically situated reason in which
the threads of outer nature, inner nature, and society converge." 16 The only
limits to communicative rationality are the limits of reason itself.
The Evolution of Reason
Like Habermas, Adorno claims that reason has evolved historically. But
Habermas has objected strenuously to Adorno's account, arguing that in
Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer "expand instrumental
reason into a category of the world-historical process of civilization as a
whole." With their notion of instrumental reason, they "project the process of
reification back behind the capitalist beginnings of the modem age into the
very beginnings of hominization" (TCA I, 366). Yet, despite these
objections, Habermas expands his own notion of communicative reason into
a category in an over-arching world-historical civilizing process. Where he
and Adorno actually differ is in their views about the form of reason that has
evolutionary primacy. For Adorno, humanity evolved its rational structures
in response to threats posed by external nature. In fear, the human species
slowly differentiated itself from objects while attempting simultaneously to
assimilate them by equating them with its concepts. As in Habermas, then,
reason develops with the emergence of speech, but speech was not originally
(or inherently) motivated by the attempt to reach understanding. Rather
language evolved as a means to the end of controlling nature, putting an end
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to the fear of its untamed powers. In their primitive attempts to gain mastery
over nature - attempts that often involved the violent subjugation of nature human beings were also obliged to control or subdue their own inner nature.
And, "with the denial of nature in man not merely the telos of the outward
control of nature but the telos of man's own life is distorted and befogged." 17
In the beginning was the species. Arguing that the individual is not
temporally primary, Adorno countered that in "the history of evolution, a
more likely presumption would be the temporal prius, or at least the
contemporaneousness of the species." He finds evidence for this assertion
about the priority of the species in nature itself which "on its lower levels
teems with unindividuated organisms." 18 Agreeing with Hegel in The
Philosophy of Mind, Adorno argues that it is out of the primal mud of
species being that we first began to individuate ourselves and to develop
egos. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, the ego emerges specifically with the
introversion of sacrifice. This transformation of sacrifice into subjectivity is
itself associated with the development of language and reason, and is
epitomized in Odysseus' cunning during his confrontation with Polyphemus
in which he was prepared to deny himself as "Nobody" in order to save
himself. 19 Once the species had distanced itself by means of language from
the nature of which it was nonetheless inextricably a part, egos increasingly
devoid of content (empty "I''s) were hollowed out, and the fully human self
was sacrificed. These observations about the progressive individuation of
the species are repeated with different emphases in Negative Dialectics
where Adorno again links the emergence of the ego to the evolution of
rationality. Arguing for materialism, and against Kant's "thesis of
subjective apriority," Adorno criticizes Kant's denial of nature in the
subject, insisting that "no subject of immediate data, no 'I' to which they
might be given, is possible independently of the transsubjective world." In
this context, he also asserts that "in the evolutionary course of rationality
and ego principle, the two have come into opposition to each other; yet
neither is without the other" (ND, 196).
Exercising the capacity conceptually to abstract from nature with a view to
controlling it, individuated egos emerged that opposed themselves to nature
both in practice and in theory. But, once again, and in stark contrast to
Habermas, Adorno insists that we have not fully severed - nor could we ever
fully sever- our connection with nature. In Knowledge and Human Interests,
Habermas had also advanced the view that reason does not merely serve "as
an organ of adaptation for men just as claws and teeth are for animals" 20
because it has broken with nature in the course of its evolutionary trajectory.
Adorno's view runs diametrically counter to this. Along with Horkheimer, he
maintained that, ever since homo sapiens began to sever itself from nature by
means of language, reason has served the function of an organ of adaptation. 21
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Identifying the human race with reason, Adorno and Horkheimer advance the
claim that the "human race with its machines, chemicals, and organizations which belong to it just as teeth belong to a bear, since they serve the same
purpose and merely function more effectively - is the dernier cri of
adaptation in this epoch." 22 So, where Habermas not only thinks that human
beings have broken with nature but views this evolutionary break as
emancipatory and self-affirming, Adorno denies that human beings can ever
break fully with nature, while condemning our unceasing attempts to do so
through language as repressive and self-negating.
Adorno's speculations are not only sketchy, they are as controversial as
all philosophical accounts of the process of hominization. Indeed, Habermas
has often objected that Adorno smuggles into his account a philosophy of
history. In The Theory of Communicative Action, for example, he criticizes
Adorno for shifting "the primordial history of subjectivity and the selfformative process of ego identity into an encompassing historicophilosophical perspective" (TCA I, 380). Habermas' interpretation of
Adorno as presupposing a philosophy of history is certainly plausible.
Although he maintains that it consists in "the discontinuous, chaotically
splintered moments and phases of history - the unity of the control of
nature, progressing to rule over men, and finally to that over man's inner
nature," Adorno does postulate a line of universal historical development
that has led from "the slingshot to the megaton bomb" (ND, 320). However,
other commentators have resisted the temptation to interpret Adorno's work
as offering a straightforwardly unilinear and teleological account of history,
a '"retrogressive anthropogenesis' ." 23 For example, Martin Jay maintains
that this interpretation, while "justifiable in part," is "too one-sided"
because Adorno also believed that human history "displayed ... the ability to
break dramatically with the course it had been following and open itself up
to something radically different." 24 Simon Jarvis concurs: while domination
has accompanied the evolutionary course of reason like a shadow, human
nature is not "irrevocably founded on domination." With an implicit shot at
Habermas, Jarvis adds that, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and
Adorno reject "the cultural idealist denial that there can be anything natural
in social life, the insistence that social life is cultural 'all the way down'. " 25
A future reconciliation of human beings with both outer nature and their
own inner instinctual nature cannot simply be excluded by fiat. And, if such
a reconciliation remains possible, history may radically change course for
the better.
Despite his criticisms of Adorno, and his protestations to the contrary,
Habermas' s own theory of social evolution may also conceal a philosophy of
history. His theory takes shape in a bricolage of speculative anthropologies
dealing with the process of hominization, of conjectures by Mead about the
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historical emergence of language, Durkheim' s hypotheses about the origins of

religion, and Piaget's and Kohlberg's cognitive developmental psychologies,
among other theories. According to Habermas, human history consists in a
progressive movement forward "to a growing decentration of interpretive
systems and to an ever-clearer categorical demarcation of the subjectivity of
internal nature from the objectivity of external nature, as well as from the
normativity of social reality and the intersubjectivity of linguistic reality." 26
Examining this evolutionary pattern under the rubric of the rationalization of
the lifeworld, Habermas attempts to do nothing less than to demonstrate that
the more developed forms of communicative reason (the terminus ad quem of
social evolution defined as rationalization) satisfy "universalistic claims," or
that the "rational internal structure of processes of reaching understanding" in
the West today are "universally valid" (TCA I, 137).
Although he contends that he has avoided the pitfalls of a philosophy of
history by undergirding the "thematic of rationalization" with scientific
hypotheses about social evolution (TCA I, 151) - this claim has a hollow ring.
To be sure, Habermas tried to support it in 1976 when he distinguished a
Hegelian-like logic of social evolution (or "the rationally reconstructible
pattern of a hierarchy of more and more comprehensive structures") from
empirical evolutionary processes (or "the processes through which the
empirical substrates develop"). With respect to the latter, he wrote, "we need
require of history neither unilinearity nor necessity, neither continuity nor
irreversibility." 27 The historical course of communicative reason has never run
entirely smoothly. In Nazi Germany, for example, reason became regressive. 28
At the same time, however, the overall pattern or logic of history reveals the
cunning of reason: the logic of history is one of increasingly comprehensive
rational structures. Indeed, Habermas is also prepared to concede that he does
have a teleological view of history: historical processes exhibit a direction
defined in part by "the maturity of forms of social intercourse." 29 In this
respect, Habermas may be interpreted as advancing a conception of history
that Adorno would emphatically reject, namely, that a universal history leads
"from savagery to humanitarianism" (ND, 320).
Learning processes separate us from the "opaque figures of mythical
thought" and the "bizarre expressions of alien cultures." 3 Citing Axel
Honneth, Whitebook explains that those '"processes of rationalization, in
which he [Habermas] attempts to conceive the evolution of society'" actually
involve '"a suprasubjective learning process carried by the social system' ."31
Although Honneth' s interpretation is somewhat problematic because
Habermas did acknowledge in his early work that there is a "circular process
between societal and individual learning" 32 - or between what Habermas
calls phylogenesis and ontogenesis in The Theory of Communicative Action
(TCA II, 5) - there is certainly more than a kernel of truth to it. For, when
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Habermas claims that historical materialism need not assume "a species
subject that undergoes evolution," and focuses instead on the evolution of
"societies and the acting subjects integrated into them," 33 the "suprasubjective system" does become one of the carriers of reason. 34 Without
rehearsing the objections of methodological individualists to the view that
society can be conceived independently of the individuals who comprise itobjections Adorno himself attempted to refute - it should be clear that
Habermas has radically altered the meaning of the word "phylogenesis"
which usually refers to the evolution of the species, not societies. Not
surprisingly, given the foregoing, it should also be noted that Habermas'
theory of social evolution as a process of societal rationalization expressly
rejects the idea that there is an ongoing natural evolution of the species to
which rationalization is bound. Whereas earlier stages of hominization did
involve both organic and cultural changes, Habermas maintains that "at the
threshold to homo sapiens ... this mixed organic-cultural form of evolution
gave way to an exclusively social evolution. The natural mechanism of
evolution came to a standstill." 35
Societal evolution involves the rationalization of both the economic and
political subsystems and the lifeworld. But the rationalization of the former
depends upon the evolution of learning processes (rationalization) in the
latter because "the lifeworld remains the subsystem that defines the pattern
of the social system as a whole" (TCA II, 154). Once we had learned to
distinguish clearly between the objective, the social, and the expressive
domains - domains that were often confused or conflated in tribal societies
based on kinship relations and, later still, in societies with religious and
metaphysical worldviews - formal procedures for redeeming validity claims
in each of these domains were developed. And, with the discursive
redemption, through argumentation, of these three distinct types of validity
claim, communicative action's rational potential has been more fully
actualized. Anthony Giddens offers a succinct account of the evolutionary
course of communicative reason when he writes: "The more we are able
rationally to ground the conduct of our lives in the three main spheres of
existence - relations with the material world, with others, and in the
expressive realm of aesthetics - the more advanced our form of society can
be said to be." 36 It was only when this process of rationalization had
advanced sufficiently that the political and economic systems began to
differentiate themselves from the lifeworld, forming more or less
autonomous subsystems with their own functionalist rationalization
processes that move in the direction of greater complexity. Thus,
communicative reason indirectly gave rise to functionalist reason. As greater
demands were placed on the lifeworld to redeem validity claims that had
once been accepted without argument in more traditional cultures, everyday
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language became overloaded or overburdened and its material reproductive

functions were taken over by the political and economic subsystems with
their delinguistified media of money and power (TCA II, 155).
Before I discuss this other form of reason, I shall briefly summarize the
differences between Adorno's and Habermas' evolutionary theories.
According to Adorno, reason evolved in the course of humanity's attempts to
deal with an environment perceived as hostile. To this extent, there is some
(albeit limited) validity to Habermas' objection that Adorno focusses
exclusively on epistemological concerns. Our relations with external nature
have determined the evolutionary trajectory of reason; reason has developed
as an adaptive response to the threats that nature poses to self-preservation.
That reason and nature are antagonistic - despite the embeddedness of
reason in nature - emerges especially clearly in Negative Dialectics where
Adorno appears to agree with Marx: "Human history, the history of the
progressive mastery of nature, continues the unconscious history of nature,
of devouring and being devoured" (ND, 355). In stark contrast to this view,
Habermas focuses on the development of reason through cooperative
linguistic endeavours that are oriented (once again) to reaching
understanding. In order to act effectively, we needed to coordinate our
actions, and it was language that allowed us to do so. Communicative
interaction made it possible for us to work together more or less
harmoniously in groups, tribes, and ultimately nations. Thus Habermas
views communicative action as a "switching station for the energies of social
solidarity" (TCA II, 57).
So, apart from their opposing accounts of the role of desire or the instincts
in human life, these theorists' conceptions of what one might call (with some
qualifications) the state of nature are also quite distinct. For Habermas, the
state of nature is actually a state of incipient culture comprising a set of
linguistically generated social relations that enabled families to combine into
ever larger groups, creating a "network of lasting reciprocities" (TCA II,
161). Against this pacific conception, which hearkens back in some respects
to Rousseau, Adorno views the state of nature in a more Hobbesian fashion.
Acting largely instinctually and aggressively, human beings forged weapons
of reason to conquer and subdue external nature, each other, and, finally,
themselves. Of course, Adorno's conception of the state of nature is just as
speculative as Habermas', and each has long found a place within the
philosophical tradition. It is therefore impossible to say that one is right and
the other wholly wrong. However, I would like to end this section by
suggesting that the two conceptions could perhaps be reconciled if
theoretical emphasis were placed (as Adorno did not, and Habermas did, but
only by subjectifying and linguistifying it) specifically on the erotic
component of human existence. Whereas Adorno pays much less attention to

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eros - which he nonetheless once described as the instinctual basis for

democratic tendencies prevalent in countries like the United States - than he
does to thanatos because of his concerns about the recurrence of fascism,
Habermas eviscerates eros, ultimately undermining his democratic theory.
The social solidarity he rightly claims democracy needs cannot, in fact, be
reduced to something that is generated only symbolically.
Reason Today
Of course, Habermas also strongly objects to Adorno's analysis and
critique of existing conditions. On his view, Adorno lacks a standpoint from
which to carry out these activities successfully. He supposedly places
himself on the side of an Other of reason, and so cannot adequately
comprehend the pathic rationality against which he constantly inveighs.
However, Habermas does not take seriously enough Adorno's claim that
philosophy, in the form of a critical social theory, "must strive, by way of the
concept, to transcend the concept" (ND, 15). In fact, Adorno advocated
rational identity-thinking as the means by which existing conditions could
adequately be assessed (ND, 147). Such thinking is rational to the extent that
it involves speculation on the basis of concepts inherited from the
Enlightenment- concepts like freedom, autonomy, and individuality.
Because these emphatic concepts are not identical with the experiences to
which they refer (though they are often used in an identitarian fashion), and
they point to something qualitatively different and better than these
experiences, the liberal ideology that developed during the Enlightenment
contains an historically conditioned moment of truth against which existing
states of affairs can be judged. Indeed, throughout his work, Adorno judged
late capitalist societies against the better potential intimated in their own
normative concepts. His critique is grounded in the truth content, or index
veri, of these concepts. With rational identity-thinking, which respects both
the "concept's longing to become identical with the thing" as well as its nonidentity with existing things, the critical theorist apprehends both the
unfulfilled promise in these conditions and their current, distorted state (ND,
149). Society as it now exists can be shown to be false because it does not
live up to its own self-understanding as democratic, free, autonomous, etc.J7
It does not do so owing to the pervasiveness of what some theorists have
called instrumental reason.
Max Horkheimer often used the terms "subjective reason" and
"instrumental reason" as synonyms for Weber's "purposive rationality." In
the work of both these theorists, instrumental, subjective, or purposive
reason consists in the prevailing tendency abstractly to classify, infer, and
deduce without giving due consideration to the reasonableness of the goals
of these processes of abstraction.3 8 For his part, however, Adorno seldom

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used the term "instrumental reason" to refer to the type of reason that
predominates today. Instead, he spoke about the prevalence of the exchange
principle (Tauschprinzip) in late capitalist societies. Reduced to numerically
defined units of value (income, consumption levels and patterns, etc.),
individuals now act in accordance with the dictates of exchange. Underlying
these dictates is a principle of identification: "through exchange, nonidentical individuals and performances become commensurable and
identical." According to Adorno, exchange serves as the "social model" for
the repressive identitarian form of thinking that predominates today (ND,
146 passim; translation altered). Although the exchange principle itself has a
truth content to the extent that it carries with it the idea of "free and just"
exchange (in the "free market economy," for example), Adorno counters the
untruth in this totalizing principle "by convicting it of nonidentity with itself
-of the nonidentity that it denies, according to its own concept" (ND, 147).
Under the spell of identity-thinking, liberal ideology's more emphatic
concepts are increasingly used in an affirmative way to endorse existing states
of affairs. For example, individuals often fail to comprehend the normative
content of a concept like freedom, identifying it instead with the existing
freedom to consume an apparently endless array of commodities. Democracy
is often equated with existing political institutions and practices, such as
infrequently held elections, or the choice between two or more political
parties, for example. Indeed, Adorno feared that the more critical and
emphatic dimension of concepts like freedom, autonomy, and democracy
might be surrendered entirely as individuals lost their capacity to think
beyond the given. As the capacity even to imagine a world other than this one
wanes, liberal ideology has been succeeded by a more pernicious ideology:
positivism. When Adorno claims that reason today is currently pathic, he is
referring largely to the pervasiveness of positivistic modes of thought. If fear
of nature originally prompted human beings coercively to identify reality with
their own concepts - concepts which might nonetheless retain a moment of
nonidentity with respect to that reality - positivism marks a further
degeneration in rational activity. Because cognitive dissonance is now only
infrequently experienced between the way things are and the way they ought
to be, what things are in themselves -their essence or form - is often equated
or identified with what they are under existing conditions. Consequently,
ideology today has become "the authority for a doctrine of adjustment"(ND,
148). On a positivistic reading of it, history has effectively ended.
As we lose the capacity to recognize "the contradiction between what
things are and what they claim to be" (ND, 167), even the suffering caused
by the denial of inner nature may appear acceptable, a matter of course. Still,
while painful experiences seem inescapable under late capitalism, their
"physical moment" may also effectively reveal to some individuals "that
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suffering ought not to be, that things should be different" (ND, 203). Indeed,
Adorno deems pain and negativity to be the "moving forces" behind his own
philosophical resistance to existing states of affairs in rational identitythinking (ND, 202). Among the more important sources of suffering today
are the distortion of needs, the repression of needs, the substitute
gratification of needs, and the continually delayed satisfaction of needs. Yet,
while acknowledging that needs have been distorted under late capitalism,
Adorno also insisted that "material needs should be respected even in their
wrong form." They should be respected because "in the needs of even the
people who are covered [erfaj3t], who are administered, there reacts
something in regard to which they are not fully covered - a surplus of their
subjective share, which the system has not wholly mastered" (ND, 92;
passim). Unsatisfied needs may also serve to promote resistance to existing
conditions. The suffering caused by the distortion of needs "is as bound to
press us to reverse the denial as the need alone will not reverse it" (ND, 93).
Thus Habermas is correct in his somewhat exaggerated claim that Adorno
locates resistance to the reifying effects of the exchange principle in the
"rage of nature in revolt." It is, however, questionable whether this "rage of
nature in revolt" is really as "impotent" as Habermas believes it to be (TCA
II, 333). Indeed, Habermas never directly engages or refutes Adorno's claims
about the potency of instinctual dissatisfaction, and its role in sparking
resistance to reifying tendencies in the 1960s. He merely contents himself
with a summary rejection of these claims - a rejection he buttresses only
indirectly with his equally summary dismissal of Freud's instinct theory and
his concomitant endorsement of object-relations theory. Furthermore,
Habermas is simply mistaken when he argues that the only possible basis for
resistance in Adorno's work is instinctual, mimetic, or artistic. An astute
commentator like J.M. Bernstein, has correctly described this interpretation
of Adorno as a "massive misunderstanding and distortion of his thought." 39
Adorno does not surrender "all cognitive competence to art in which the
mimetic capacity gains objective shape" (TCA I, 384). To the extent that he
employs rational identity-thinking, Adorno's negative dialectics itself offers
rational resistance to the bad rationality of existing conditions.
Habermas also misconstrues Adorno when he accuses him of inflating
"instrumental reason" into the only form of reason extant today. Furthermore,
it is not instrumental reason, but the identitarian exchange principle, that is the
primary target of Adorno's critique. Still, Habermas is not altogether off the
mark when he charges that the "confusion of system rationality and action
rationality prevented Horkheimer and Adorno, as it did Weber before them,
from adequately separating the rationalization of action orientations within
the framework of a structurally differentiated lifeworld from the expansion of
the steering capacity of differentiated social systems." Habermas' crucial
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objection to Horkheimer and Adorno is encapsulated in the claim that they

"failed to recognize the communicative rationality of the lifeworld that had to
develop out of the rationalization of worldviews before there could be any
development of formally organized systems of action at all" (TCA II, 333). If
Adorno believes that needs or instincts serve as a potentially resistive force,
and opposes the reifying effects of the exchange principle with rational
identity-thinking, Habermas posits a qualitatively different counterweight to
reification. In his work, communicative reason serves as a practical foil for
the functionalist reason of the political and economic subsystems as well as
for instrumental or strategic action in the lifeworld.
Only after communicative reason had developed sufficiently, could the
functionalist rationality peculiar to the economy and the state take shape,
regulating many of the tasks of material reproduction formerly carried out in
the lifeworld. As Maeve Cooke has shown, however, Habermas has not
always distinguished consistently between the functionalist rationality of the
economic and political systems and the cognitive-instrumental rationality that
also comprises one dimension or aspect of communicative reason in the
lifeworld. At times he claims that it is the one-sided inflation of instrumental
rationality that poses the greatest threat to action oriented to reaching
understanding in the lifeworld, and he ascribes this form of rationality to the
subsystems. At other times, the capitalist economy and the welfare state are
the carriers of a distinctive functionalist rationality that poses the same threat.
Yet Cooke rightly points out that the two types of rationality are connected. 40
If action regulated by instrumental rationality involves using others as means
to the end of achieving one's own profit- or power-oriented goals, in
functionalist rationality, the consequences of these strategic actions become
the means by which the subsystems maintain themselves. 41 This view of the
functionalist rationality of the economic and political subsystems recalls
Adam Smith's benign invisible hand. Steered by the media of money and
power, and obeying their own functionalist logics, the welfare state and the
capitalist economy make use of the consequences of the self-interested
actions of individuals in such a way that these consequences now serve the
goal of maintaining and enhancing processes of material reproduction that are
also of signal importance for the lifeworld. Thus, without intending it, even
self-seeking individuals advance the material interests of society as a whole.
Functionalist rationality therefore also has a benign and beneficial aspect.
Against Marx, Lukacs, and Adorno, Habermas argues that the functional
subsystems alone perform the indispensable task of materially reproducing
society as a whole. At the same time, he is prepared to concede that
functionalist rationality currently poses a threat to human welfare. That it
does so is the point of his thesis about the colonization of the lifeworld.
Principles of "societal integration" in Western countries are on a collision
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course. Social integration, which is engendered by "the mechanism of

linguistic communication that is oriented to validity claims - a mechanism
that emerges in increasing purity from the rationalization of the Iifeworld" is
now being undermined by system integration which, for its part, is achieved
by means of "those de-Iinguistified steering media through which systems of
success-oriented action are differentiated out" (TCA I, 342). Functionalist
rationality became malignant when its "mechanisms of system integration"
started to "encroach upon spheres of action that can fulfill their functions
only under conditions of social integration" (TCA II, 305).
Unfortunately, Habermas nowhere spells out in any detail or depth the
pathological effects of the encroachments of functionalist rationality on
communicative rationality in the lifeworld. Very generally, however, he does
argue that these effects include the supplanting of communicative action by
action geared towards profit maximization and the enhancement of power.
Again conflating functionalist with instrumental rationality, Habermas offers
a preliminary sketch of the communication pathologies caused by
colonization in Volume One of The Theory of Communicative Action. Such
pathologies, he writes, "can be conceived as the result of a confusion
between actions oriented to reaching understanding and actions oriented to
success" (TCA I, 332). With the colonization of the Iifeworld by the
subsystems, then, speech increasingly fails to fulfil the goal or telos inherent
in it as individuals pursue private initiatives and interests. Habermas deems
"the relationship of clients to the administrations of the welfare state" which he studies under the rubric of juridification - to be "the model case for
the colonization of the Iifeworld" (TCA II, 322). With juridification,
"welfare-state guarantees" that are "intended to serve the goal of social
integration" actually promote "the disintegration of life-relations when these
are separated, through legalized social intervention, from the consensual
mechanisms that coordinate action and are transferred over to media such as
money and power" (TCA II, 364).
So, where Adorno stresses the effects of the exchange principle on our
ability to think beyond the given, along with its effects on the instincts,
Habermas is primarily concerned with the effects of functionalist rationality
on the symbolic generation of social solidarity. For Habermas, once again,
the Iifeworld rests on a fundament of cooperative communicative interaction
geared to understanding or agreement; it is this fundament that is endangered
or threatened when colonization occurs. A second major difference between
the two thinkers can be found in their conceptions of the emancipatory forces
that range themselves against reification. In Adorno's work, instincts
potentially serve as the more effective resistive force against the debilitating
effects of the now ubiquitous exchange principle. Rational identity-thinking
- which also resists these effects - is itself motivated by the suffering that
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the repression of instincts has caused. By contrast, in Habermas' work what

is ultimately at issue is the predominance in society of one form of reason to
the detriment of the other, understanding that even communicative
rationality has its place - the lifeworld - from which it can stray only at the
cost of subverting functionalist rationality and compromising material
reproduction. Moreover, in a further point of contrast to Adorno, for whom
the pathic rationality of the economic system currently finds a weak counter
in human suffering and rational identity-thinking, Habermas maintains that
the functionalist rationality of the economic and political subsystems always
collides or clashes with an inherently resistive communicative rationality.
Communicative reason, with its distinctive mode of social integration, can
never entirely be breached. Where Adorno criticizes all-pervasive exchange
relations under late capitalism for repressing and distorting the very instincts
and needs that might otherwise serve as as resistive force against
domination, Habermas celebrates the emancipatory force of a
communicative reason that has not only sublated the instincts in the course
of social evolution, but serves as a more or less effective foil for the
encroachments of its own offspring on its process of symbolic reproduction.

Concluding Remarks
In Legitimation Crisis, Habermas criticized Adorno for endorsing the
pessimistic views of conservative critics of culture, namely, that socialization
processes today are so overwhelmingly corruptive that they have actually
succeeded in liquidating the individual. In his sarcastic response to this
account of existing conditions under late capitalism, Habermas objects that:
"Until now, no one has succeeded in extracting the thesis of the end of the
individual from the domain of the malaise and self-experience of
intellectuals and made it accessible to empirical test." 42 To this thesis,
Habermas opposes his claim that social integration is communicatively
generated within the lifeworld. Against Adorno's top-down model of
socialization mediated through exchange, he contrasts his conception of
relatively egalitarian and "lateral" processes of personality formation and
social integration in communicative relations within the family and other
groups and institutions. On this basis, he argues that the welfare state always
confronts the "independent development of normative structures" - in new
social movements, for example - "that are irreconcilable with the
suppression of generalizable interests."43
Yet Habermas also concedes that it is not possible empirically to decide
which interpretation of new social movements is correct: the one that sees
their normative demands as entirely peripheral to the autopoietic political
system, or the one (his own) which contends that their demands are rational
and ought to be given a hearing. 44 And he also admits that it is not possible to
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determine empirically which view of the political system is correct - the

pessimistic one that portrays it as acting entirely independently of the will of
the people, or his own, which states that the political system find its limits in
the lifeworld. 45 Yet, despite these important concessions, Habermas insists
that we recognize what is at stake in the choice between these two positions.
Opting for his own position, he states, entails a parti pris for reason. Indeed,
Habermas even contends that positions like Adorno's (which he often
conflates with Niklas Luhmann's) do not permit a similar appeal to reason.
Once again, Habermas claims that Adorno views reason as utterly perverted
and distorted by the economic and political systems and so is left with no
referent for his appeal. Here Habermas restates his long-standing objection
that Adorno lacks a foundation for his critique of reason.
As I have tried to show, however, the differences between the two
theorists cannot be summarized in Habermas' constantly repeated criticism
that Adorno rejects reason outright, while he himself retains an emphatic
view of reason. Both Habermas and Adorno have a rational basis for their
criticisms of reification; both ascribe a normative content to reason; and both
are opposed to reified social conditions, hoping these conditions will become
more rational in the sense of being more conducive to human life. However,
like Freud, Adorno also insists that the demands of our inner instinctual
nature be given their due. That he is concerned to reconcile reason and desire
suggests that desire cannot simply be subordinated to reason as Habermas
has done. At the same time, it also suggests that desire does not, as
Habermas claims, play the role of an Other of reason from which reason is
radically excluded - otherwise reconciliation would be impossible. Indeed,
Habermas seems to make the mistake of many who have taken the linguistic
turn: from the proposition that needs and desires can be expressed only in
language, he infers that needs and desires are themselves inherently
linguistic. Although he offers a number of arguments in support of the claim
that humanity has liberated itself from nature, the most contentious by far is
that speech by itself has fully emancipated us from nature.
Adorno never fully describes what a more emancipated relationship
between the instincts and reason might look like. However, he does believe
very generally that society will only become more fully rational if it
recognizes and responds satisfactorily to the needs of all individuals. This is
in part what he means by the reconciliation of the universal social order and
the particular individuals in it. So, as he noted in "Sociology and
Psychology," the "resolution of the antinomy of universal and particular
remains mere ideology as long as the instinctual renunciation society expects
of the individual neither can be objectively justified as true and necessary
nor later provides him with the delayed gratification." 46 Projecting his
utopian ideal of reconciliation into the future, Adorno also maintains that
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radical political practice will be necessary before individuals are able

adequately to identify their instinctually-based needs, and society orients
itself primarily to the satisfaction of these needs. It will take the protracted
efforts of the species as a whole to ensure that reason ultimately prevails
over the irrationality of the economic system. By contrast, while explicitly
rejecting on theoretical grounds the view that there is, or ever could be, a
subject of history (and fearing the reemergence of a nationalist subject- the
German Volk, for example), Habermas also thinks that improved conditions,
in the form of a more rational world order, are now at hand. Indeed, his
partiality for reason has often appeared recently in the positivistic claim that
the real is already more or less rational. This claim is clearly enunciated at
the beginning of his recent work, Between Facts and Norms, where
Habermas admits that he is presupposing "an internal connection, however
mediated, between society and reason." 47 Although both he and Adorno
argue that there is a rational potential immanent in existing conditions, it is
sufficient for Habermas that communicative practices become what they
already are, that is, that they fully actualize their existing potential in the
further course of their apparently unstoppable and progressive evolution.
Curiously, however, and despite his belief that communicative reason
currently provides a relatively effective counter to the functionalist
rationality of the political and economic systems, Habermas also severely
restricts the compass of reason when he insists in Between Facts and Norms
that the communicative power of the people limit itself to influence over the
political system. Even in the few exceptional cases when it is generated by
new social movements and other groups, communicative power must take a
back seat to parliaments and courts. It is ultimately up to the political system
to decide whether or not to act on the discursively generated and rational will
of the people by (among other things) making public opinion pass a
"generalizability of interests" test. 48 So, while observing that Western states
are now permanently in crisis because they usually operate independently of
the concerns of their citizens, and while acknowledging at the same time that
citizens are often able rationally to identify what lies in the general interest
of society as a whole, Habermas nonetheless asserts that liberal democratic
political systems alone should decide what lies in the general interest.
Unlike Adorno, who thinks that the economic system should submit to the
rational directives, Habermas is also content to allow the capitalist economy
to continue to operate as an autonomous, invisible hand that is guided only
indirectly by the influence citizens already (albeit infrequently) exert over
the political system. Indeed, it is somewhat ironic, given his many objections
to Luhmann's systems theory, that Habermas concedes so much to the
latter's idea of autopoietic systems that he is prepared to accept their
complete functional separation from the lifeworld, as well as to shield the
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economy's morally neutral imperative of profit-making from all but the most
indirect forms of rational control. Communicative reason has its place; it
ought not to stray too far beyond the lifeworld contexts that spawn it. To
allow the rationally generated interests of citizens to direct the operations of
the capitalist economy would allegedly run the risk of undermining material
reproduction (among other things). Admitting that the economic system is
completely norm-free, that it is utterly bereft of a normative orientation
towards the material satisfaction of all members of society, Habermas also
argues that the economic system operates, and should be allowed to continue
to operate, outside of any moral considerations or constraints.
To say the least, the "self-limitations" that Habermas proposes for
communicative reason are puzzling. It might well be argued that, if there is any
truth to his strong claim that communicative practices today remain relatively
healthy despite colonization - claims that are specifically intended to counter
Adorno's "pessimism"- then there are no good grounds for curtailing the role
ofreason in society today. Notwithstanding Habermas' self-declared partiality
for reason in the face of what he sees as Adorno's abandonment of it, I would
argue that it is Adorno who actually shows the greater partiality for reason
when he insists that all aspects of society be brought under rational control and
directed towards emphatically rational ends. To the extent that the demands
and interests of citizens are rational in Habermas' sense of that term, they
should take precedence over the one-dimensional and derivative functionalist
rationality of the capitalist economy and the welfare state. Even if we accept
the entirely problematic claim that needs have no objective referents, it could
certainly be argued that, as long as the subjective expression of needs is
rational, material reproduction should be oriented towards their satisfaction. It
is not sufficient for Habermas to describe (vaguely) the lifeworld as defining
the pattern of the political and economic systems. If- and this is admittedly a
big "if," which Adorno himself would contest - members of the lifeworld have
really become as rational as Habermas contends, then lifeworld members
ought to assume the role of defining the pattern of society as a whole. Both the
political and the economic systems ought to subordinate themselves to the
rationally generated interests and needs of citizens. A true partiality for reason
would support no lesser demand.
University of Windsor, Canada
References
l. Plato, Phaedrus, trans. W.C. Helmbold and W.G. Rabinowitz, (New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company, 1956), p.38.
2. Theodor W. Adorno. Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, (New York: Continuum
Books, 1973) p.229 passim. Cited henceforth in the text as ND.
3. In his path-breaking work on Adorno's materialist ethics, which appeared shortly after
this paper was written, J. M. Bernstein describes the addendum in this way: "the

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5.

6.

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7.

8.
9.
10.
II.

12.

13.
14.

addendum is figured as an ancient impulse, suppressed, sublimated, withered, but

necessarily weakly present if real willing is to be intelligible; and as such, it figures as a
promise of a reconciliation between mind and nature that is not now actually
conceptualizable." See Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001) p.256.
Cf. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998) pp.l55-6.
Theodor W. Adorno, "Subject and Object," trans. E.B. Ashton, The Essential Frankfurt
School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, (New York: Urizen Books, 1978)
p.509. (Translation altered).
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John
Cumming, (New York: The Seabury Press, 1972) pp.246-7 passim.
Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, op. cit., p.70. On Rolf Wiggershaus'
remarkably evocative account of it, the debate between Gehlen and Adorno sounded as
though ''The Grand Inquisitor from Ivan Karamazov's story in Dostoevsky's The Brothers
Karamazov was talking to a Jesus who was no longer silent." See The Frankfurt School:
Its History, Theories, and Political Significance, trans. Michael Robertson, (Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 1994) p.588.
Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro, (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1971) p.314.
Ibid., p.312.
Idem, "Moral Development and Ego Identity," in Communication and the Evolution of
Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979) pp.69-94.
Joel Whitebook: Perversion and Utopia: A Study in Psychoanalysis and Critical Theory,
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995) pp.86-9. Habermas' view of the Sprachfdhigkeit
of inner nature is expressed, among other places, on page 285 of Knowledge and Human
Interests: "At the human level, we never encounter any needs that are not already
interpreted linguistically and symbolically affixed to potential actions."
In Ideals and Illusions (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991) p.147, Thomas McCarthy
argues that there is a contradiction in Knowledge and Human Interests between the claim
that our knowledge of nature is bound exclusively to the interest in technical control over
nature and the claim that "nature is the ground of spirit." McCarthy argues that Habermas'
reduction of our relationship to nature to an objectivating and purposive relationship is
incompatible with his "notion of a 'nature preceding human history' in the sense of a
'natural process that, from within itself, gives rise likewise to the natural being man and
the nature that surrounds him'." Habermas responds to McCarthy by stating that there may
be other, non-objectivating, relations with nature. Nowhere does he answer the more
important criticism concerning the incompatibility of his conception of nature as natura
naturans, or as the ground or source of human nature, and his diremption thesis. See
Jiirgen Habermas, "A Reply to My Critics," trans. Thomas McCarthy, Habermas: Critical
Debates, eds. John B. Thompson and David Held, (London and Basingstoke: The
Macmillan Press, 1982) pp.242-50.
Jiirgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. I: Reason and the
Rationalization of Society, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984) p.92 passim. Cited henceforth in
the text as TCA I.
Idem, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick
Lawrence, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987) p.315.
Though Habermas and his many commentators tend to stress the Kantian dimension of his
work, the Hegelian resonances should also be sounded. So, in the preface to his
Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977)
p.43, Hegel writes: "For it is the nature of humanity to press onward to agreement with
others; human nature only really exists in an achieved community of minds. The antihuman, the merely animal, consists in staying within the sphere of feeling, and being able
to communicate only at that level."

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15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter
Kaufmann, (New York: Viking Penguin Inc., 1982) p.l46.
16. Jtirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p.306 passim.
17. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p.54.
18. Theodor W. Adorno, "Subject and Object," op. cit., p.510.
19. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p.60.
20. Jtirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, op. cit., p.312.
21. In Habermas: A Critical Introduction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) pp.58-9,
William Outhwaite remarks that there is "a fairly clear distinction between [evolutionary]
theories which emphasize the Darwinian theme of the adaptation of systems to their
environments and those based on a notion of development - what Giddens has called an
'unfolding model'." He adds that "Habermas' version is closer to the latter." However,
Outhwaite does not comment on the fact that Habermas' unfolding model of social
evolution presupposes that human beings have broken with nature, making the Darwinian
model inapplicable to human development.
22. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, op. cit., p.222.
23. Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p.ll4, cited in Martin Jay, Adorno, (London:
Fontana Paperbacks, 1984) p.l07.
24. Martin Jay, Adorno, (London: Fontana Paperbacks. 1984) pp.l 07-8 passim.
25. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: An Introduction, op. cit., p.39.
26. Jtirgen Habermas, "Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures,"
in Communication and the Evolution of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy, (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1979) p.106.
27. Idem, "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism," in Communication and the
Evolution of Society, op. cit., p.l40.
28. Ibid., p.l41.
29. Ibid., p.l42. In this passage, Habermas is also prepared to "defend the thesis that the
criteria of social progress singled out by historical materialism as the development of
productive forces ... can be systematically justified." However, as Tom Rockmore points
out in Habermas and Historical Materialism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 1989) p.96, by the time he wrote The Theory of Communicative Action,
Habermas would no longer consider Marx's historical materialism to be "even a potentially
viable [theoretical] option." Marx's "old philosophy of history is irreparably defective, its
inadequacies cannot be remedied through its reconstruction or in other ways."
30. Idem, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of
Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987) p.400. Cited
henceforth in the text as TCA II.
31. Axel Honneth, The Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory, trans.
Kenneth Barnes, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991) p.284. Cited in Joel Whitebook,
Perversion and Utopia, op. cit., p.83.
32. Jtirgen Habermas, "Historical Materialism and the Development of Normative Structures,"
in Communication and the Evolution of Society, op. cit., p.l21.
33. Idem, "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism," in Communication and the
Evolution of Society, op. cit., p.l40.
34. Joel Whitebook, Perversion and Utopia, op. cit., p.83.
35. Jtirgen Habermas, "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism," in
Communication and the Evolution of Society, op. cit., p.l33.
36. Anthony Giddens, "Reason without Revolution? Habermas's Theorie des kommunikativen
Handelns," in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Richard J. Bernstein, (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1985) p.l 00.
37. I have argued this point in "Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique," Philosophy and
Social Criticism 27, no. I (2001) pp.l-20. and (with different emphases) in "Critical

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Stratagems in Adorno and Habennas: Theories of Ideology and the Ideology of Theory,"
Historical Materialism 6 (Summer 2000) pp.67-87.
38. Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: The Seabury Press, 1974) pp.3-4.
39. J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Ethics and Disenchantment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 200 I) p.4.
40. See Maeve Cooke, Language and Reason: A Study of Habermas's Pragmatics (London
and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1994) pp.l45-6.
41. See TCA II, p. 150: The goal-directed actions of members of the lifeworld "are coordinated
not only through processes of reaching understanding, but also through functional
interconnections that are not intended by them and are usually not even perceived within
the horizon of everyday practice. In capitalist societies the market is the most imponant
example of a nonn-free regulation of cooperative contexts. The market is one of those
systemic mechanisms that stabilize nonintended interconnections of action by way of
functionally intermeshing action consequences, whereas the mechanism of mutual
understanding harmonizes the action orientations of panicipants."
42. Jtirgen Habennas, Legitimation Crisis. trans. Thomas McCanhy, (Boston: Beacon Press,
1973) p.l28.
43. Ibid., p.l35.
44. Ibid., p.l30.
45. Ibid., p.l35.
46. Idem, "Sociology and Psychology,'' trans. Irving N. Wohlfarth, New Left Review 47 (1%8)
p.85.
47. Jtirgen Habennas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of
Democracy, trans. William Rehg, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996) p.8.
48. Ibid., p. 371.

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