ABSTRACT
One of the less violent ways in which inhabitants of the former East Germany were constantly reminded that they were living in a Utopia was by large billboards declaring, alongside the image of a chiselled Karl Marx, ‘Seine Ideen haben wir verwirklicht’ (‘We have realized his ideas’). That inhabitants of former Eastern Bloc countries needed to be informed that they were living in a society finally fit for humanity by propaganda like this – which clearly echoes Western adverts for car insurance, pet food and the various other goods for sale in the ‘free market’ – is evidence enough that no such society had been achieved. The failure of the realization (Verwirklichung) of philosophy’s emancipatory kernel is the situation in which Adorno’s great philosophical work, Negative Dialectics, finds itself. This situation is most explicitly addressed in the famous opening paragraph of the book’s ‘Introduction’: ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete,’ Adorno begins, ‘keeps itself alive because the moment to realize it was missed’ (ND: 3 [translation modified]). This striking claim clearly develops the line of thought inaugurated by Minima Moralia’s sense that ‘life does not live’. The continued value of philosophy cannot simply be assumed and must be accounted for. In the ‘Introduction’ to Negative Dialectics, Adorno goes on to allude to Marx’s well-known comment, in the texts that Engels entitled ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, that ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (Marx 1975: 423). The precise
implications of this saying – which has often served as a stick with which to beat allegedly self-indulgent theorizing – was central to Adorno’s thinking from the beginning of his career. He sets out his view of philosophy as, precisely, a kind of interpretation in ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’. This view of philosophy-as-interpretation is not simply a rebuttal of Marx’s dictum; rather, it involves an attempt to overcome the stark opposition between interpreting the world and changing it. ‘The interpretation of given reality and its abolition are connected to each other,’ Adorno claims, ‘not, of course, in the sense that reality is negated in the concept, but that out of the construction of a configuration of reality the demand for its [reality’s] real change always follows promptly’ (AP: 129). That is, interpretation has what we might describe as an active – rather than merely passive – and polemical sense, for Adorno. Interpretation views the given world in terms of what the world ought to be. In grasping the discrepancy between how the world is and how it ought to be, interpretation demands change. It is thus that ‘When Marx reproached the philosophers, saying that they had only variously interpreted the world, and contraposed to them that the point was to change it, . . . the sentence receives its legitimacy not only out of political praxis, but also out of philosophic theory’ (AP: 129). Marx’s rebuke does not simply demand the renunciation of philosophy and the leap into activism but, rather, that actual practice must be informed by the most profound insight if it is not to risk blindness. Denunciations of theory on behalf of practice must be stripped of their intimidating menace. No practical change for the better has actually come about in the world, nor is any such change immediately on the horizon. Theory is still required if there is even to be hope that the right practice will replace the wrong one.
