R A D I C A
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85
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Osborne, Stella Sandford, Sean Sayers,
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Stella Sandford
Reviews editor
Sean Sayers
Contributors
Simon Bromley teaches International
Political Economy at the University of
Leeds. He is the author of Rethinking
Middle East Politics (Polity Press, 1994).
Simon Jarvis teaches English at Robinson
College, Cambridge. His book Adorno: A
Critical Introduction is forthcoming from
Polity Press, Spring 1998.
Craig Brandist is HRB Research Fellow
in the Bakhtin Centre and Department of
Russian and Slavonic Literature at the
University of Sheffield. His publications
include Carnival Culture and the Soviet
Modernist Novel (Macmillan, 1996).
Bruce Robbins is Professor of English
and Comparative Literature at Rutgers
University. His books include Secular
Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism,
Culture (Verso, 1993). He is an editor of
the journal Social Text.
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Published by Radical Philosophy Ltd.
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© Radical Philosophy Ltd
L P H I L O S O P H Y
socialist and feminist philosophy
CONTENTS SEPT/OCT 1997
COMMENTARY
CULTURE CLASH
Simon Bromley .............................................................................................. 2
ARTICLES
THE COASTLINE OF EXPERIENCE: MATERIALISM AND
METAPHYSICS IN ADORNO
Simon Jarvis .................................................................................................. 7
BAKHTIN, CASSIRER AND SYMBOLIC FORMS
Craig Brandist .............................................................................................. 20
COSMOPOLITANISM AND BOREDOM
Bruce Robbins .............................................................................................. 28
REVIEWS
Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde
Gordon Finlayson ........................................................................................ 33
Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and
the Theory of Ideology
Alex Callinicos ............................................................................................. 36
Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The Myth of the Unconscious
Donald Levy, Freud Among the Philosophers: The Psychoanalytic
Unconscious and its Philosophical Critics
David Snelling .............................................................................................. 38
Linda Martín Alcoff, Real Knowing: New Versions of the Coherence Theory
Gill Howie..................................................................................................... 40
Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach
David Archard............................................................................................... 41
Christopher J. Arthur, ed., Engels Today: A Centenary Appreciation
Ian Hunt ........................................................................................................ 43
Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Lévy, Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews
David Macey................................................................................................. 44
Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzscheʼs Zarathustra
Francesca Cauchi ......................................................................................... 45
Robyn Ferrell, Passion in Theory: Conceptions of Freud and Lacan
Margaret Whitford ....................................................................................... 46
John D. Cash, Identity, Ideology and Conflict: The Structuration of Politics
in Northern Ireland
Paul Gilbert .................................................................................................. 47
Alan How, The Habermas–Gadamer Debate and the Nature of the Social:
Back to Bedrock
Ian Craib ....................................................................................................... 48
Véronique M. Foti, ed., Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting
Diana Coole .................................................................................................. 49
NEWS
DICTATING RESEARCH: Feminist Philosophy and the RAE
Christine Battersby ...................................................................................... 50
The Case of Economics
Frederick S. Lee and Sandra Harley........................................................... 51
OBITUARY
Wal Suchting, 1931–1997
John Rosenthal............................................................................................ 55
COMMENTARY

Culture clash
Simon Bromley

A
lmost as soon as the Cold War framework of Western and United States
foreign policy began to dissolve in the early 1990s, the op-ed pages of the
Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and such conservative periodicals as
The National Interest and The Atlantic Monthly began to feature articles about ʻThe
West and the Restʼ, ʻThe Roots of Muslim Rageʼ, and ʻThe Coming Anarchyʼ. Not to
be outdone, and ever-ready to distil the conservative preoccupations of the US foreign
policy elite into the sedulous prose of academic political science, in the summer of
1993 Samuel Huntington published his now famous article, ʻThe Clash of Civilizationsʼ,
in Foreign Affairs. He has now expanded, modified and embellished the original argu-
ment into a sustained meditation on the new conjuncture of global politics in The Clash
of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).
The Clash of Civilizations has been widely acclaimed by figures such as Kissinger,
Brzezinski and Fukuyama, and it has been respectfully, if not uncritically, reviewed
in such liberal journals as the New York Review of Books and the London Review of
Books. The attention that Huntington has received once again attests to his unparalleled
ability to articulate and popularize a certain conservative common sense, but to do so
by engaging in an apparently meaningful dialogue with the political adversaries of that
common sense. It is above all this timely capacity to play to the gallery, to resonate
widely with friend and foe, that has marked Huntingtonʼs career ever since his rise
to fame in the year of the Tet Offensive, with the publication of Political Order in
Changing Societies (1968). For while Huntington has played only a relatively minor
role in the formulation of US foreign policy as compared with his near contemporaries
at Harvard, Kissinger and Brzezinski, he has risen to the presidency of the American
Political Science Association and has had a distinguished academic career.
In his new book Huntington puts these personal and political attachments to work in
attempting to develop a new doctrine for Western, and specifically US, foreign policy
after the Cold War. The striking claim at the centre of Huntingtonʼs argument is that
the bipolar world of superpower ideological rivalry is being replaced by the clash of
civilizations: ʻBosnia is everyoneʼs Spain.ʼ Global politics is still primarily a world of
power politics among states, but states, especially the core ones of each major civiliza-
tion, are increasingly bandwagoning with their cultural kin and balancing against the
cultural other. In turn, this claim is elaborated in two contrasting registers which are
not always coherently orchestrated, and it is in the ensuing discordance that the real
meaning of Huntingtonʼs message may be heard. On the one hand, he advances a series
of linked propositions about the importance of civilizations in human history and the
current rise of what he sees as civilizational consciousness. On the other, he is con-

2 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

cerned to diagnose the predicament of one particular civilization: the West. And in the
end, it is a deeply conservative rendition of the Western predicament that dictates the
overall composition of Huntingtonʼs argument and the new doctrine flowing from it.

Modernization and the West

To begin with, Huntington draws a sharp distinction between the processes of ʻmod-
ernizationʼ (economic and technological development, growing social differentiation
and popular mobilization, state-building and nation-formation), and the cultural
attributes of ʻWesternizationʼ (individualism, secularism, notions of universal human
rights, the rule of law, and pluralist forms of representation). In the shadow of the rise
to global dominance of the West, countries have three choices: they may resist both
Westernization and modernization (parts of Africa?), though this is not a long-term
option; they may attempt to modernize by Westernizing (Turkey and Japan, Russia and
Mexico); and they may modernize without significant Westernization (China and the
contemporary Islamic world). According to Huntington, the latter path is increasingly
the dominant one: ʻIn fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less
Western.ʼ Huntington suggests that this is clearly the case for those societies currently
modernizing as the Westʼs power declines: ʻThe revolt against the West was originally
legitimated by asserting the universality of Western values; it is now legitimated by
asserting the superiority of non-Western values.ʼ He also suggests that it is increas-
ingly true even for those societies which originally modernized in the era of Western
dominance: ʻInitially, Westernization and modernization are closely linked, with the
non-Western society absorbing substantial elements of Western culture and making
slow progress towards modernization. As the pace of modernization increases, however,
the rate of Westernization declines and the indigenous culture goes through a revival.
Further modernization then alters the civilizational balance of power between the West
and the non-Western society and strengthens commitment to the indigenous culture.ʼ
Next, Huntington argues that the illusion that modernization was synonymous
with Westernization merely reflected the temporary ascendancy of Western power in
European imperialism and US hegemony; that a ʻuniversal civilization can only be
the product of universal powerʼ; and that as the dynamism of Asian (predominantly
Chinese) economic and Islamic demographic growth rates overwhelm those of the West,
so Western universalism will increasingly be seen – and rightly so, in Huntingtonʼs
neat accommodation with the self-conceptions of his foes – as Western arrogance: ʻThe
dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arro-
gance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.ʼ Moreover, Huntington maintains
that there is an internal, domestic corollary to this false and immoral identification of
Western values as universal: by denying its uniqueness in the face of internal challenges
from strangers in its midst, the West is in danger of being undermined by ʻproblems of
moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunityʼ.

Universal chauvinsm or liberal universalism?

Who are these strangers? In Europe they are the Muslims; in the United States
they are the Black and the Hispanic populations. Huntingtonʼs ultimate concern is
with the USA, and what he presents as the multicultural challenge to its identity as
a part of Western civilization: ʻIf the United States is de-Westernized [by non-
White multiculturalism], the West is reduced to Europe … a minuscule and declin-
ing part of the worldʼs population on a small and inconsequential peninsula at the
extremity of the Eurasian land mass.ʼ
Huntingtonʼs diagnosis has given as much comfort to conservatives at home as
it has to those proclaiming their cultural peculiarity abroad. For all its resonance,
however, the argument is not only false, but also ugly and pernicious. As his

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 3

liberal critics have noted, Huntingtonʼs argument is false because cultures are not
unified, closed totalities centred upon univocal religious doctrines, but are rather
multiform, open and contested – subject to interpretation and contestation in rela-
tion to different interests and contexts. Indeed, Huntingtonʼs own attempt to portray
the conflicts and issues of contemporary international politics is in fact remarkably
conventional: it is all about the control of territory, peoples, sea lanes, markets,
military capability, etc., with cultural alignments being mobilized as means to these
ends. Nowhere does Huntington actually identify a significant conflict over culture.
More importantly, however, Huntingtonʼs schema of a bipolar world characterized
by ideological division being replaced by a multi-polar civilizational order is radically
insufficient to make sense of the contours of contemporary global politics. What he
spectacularly fails to explain is what ʻthe rise of the Westʼ and the response to it have
all been about. Though the ʻrevolt against the Westʼ began before the First World War,
it was essentially a post-Second World War phenomenon and, as such, intersected in
complex ways with the Cold War. Important as this latter conflict was, however, it was
not the only development of major international significance. At least as important were
two other developments, each very closely related to the other: namely, the reconstruc-
tion of the unity of the capitalist world market and its increasing expansion on a global
scale; and the generalization of state sovereignty as the political form of the modern
international system. These developments, though Western in (geographical) origin, are
now universal in scope, if uneven in penetration. (Indeed, it was the very strength of the
consolidation of these forms of economic and political power in their capitalist forms on
a global scale that rendered the communist challenge redundant in the long run.)
Throughout this epoch attempts to foster economic growth and consolidate legitimate
political authority across the national territory have been the fixed points around which
the politics of the South have turned, both domestically and internationally. Within this
matrix of developmental possibilities, the forms of ideological or cultural imaginings are
now, of necessity, predominantly nationalist. In this context, the ʻreligiousʼ revival that
Huntington and others read as a sign of the weakening of national identification, and as
a rise of ʻkin-countryʼ international politics, is nothing of the sort. On the contrary, both
domestically and internationally, these movements represent a fundamental continuity
with the postwar co-ordinates of development noted above: they re-present new forms
of a basically nationalist project. This can be seen in a number of ways once we move
beyond the incipiently racist imagin-ings of Huntington and others (ʻraceʼ has now
become ʻcultureʼ).
In relation to the
Islamic world, for example,
Huntingtonʼs optic is an
instance of the temptation,
in Sami Zubaidaʼs helpful
phrase, to ʻread history
backwardsʼ, ʻseeing the
current “revival” as the
culmination of a line of
development of Islamic
politics, rather than as
the product of recent
combinations of forces and
eventsʼ. Domestically, the
fact is that the dominant
literate discourses of the
Middle East have been

4 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

local adaptations of the social and political thought of the West, and ʻIslamʼ (which
is neither a culture nor a civilization, but a religion, and like all religions is socially
indeterminate) has only ever prospered as a political force when it has adapted to their
terrain; political Islam was born when it adapted to the matrix framed by the sovereign
state, to nationalism (see, especially, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities [1993]
and Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism [1993]). Equally, internationally, there is precious
little that is pan- about the advent of political Islam. Of course, there are demonstration
effects; there is mutual interference in the ʻinternalʼ affairs of other states; there is
money (mostly Saudi) flowing around; and so on. Cross-border co-operation between
co-religionists is not only strikingly rare; even where it does occur, it is based not on
general feelings of mutual religiosity, but on specific political calculations of interest
and advantage. As to Huntingtonʼs thesis of a Sino-Islamic alliance against the West,
perhaps the least said, the better – since the most powerful military state in the world
seeks to limit the acquisition of military technology by China and Iran, why do we
need to invoke civilizational considerations to explain their co-operation in military
matters?

A gathering racism?
Huntington makes much of what Ronald Dore has called the ʻsecond generation indi-
genization phenomenonʼ – the turning away from Western secular ideologies towards
indigenous religions and cultures by the masses and second-generation, post-independ-
ence elites. In Huntingtonʼs reading, multiculturalism in the West represents exactly the
same phenomenon. This is undoubtedly a powerful and important development, but the
image of a return to an indigenous culture is misleading, since what is mobilized is
invariably a reworked version of the old, more or less appropriate to the circumstances
of the new. And, as Dore has himself pointed out, to the extent that this second-genera-
tion culture cannot cope with the demands of modernization, which in popular terms
now includes many of the freedoms that Huntington takes to be specifically Western,
it is in turn rejected or reworked by the subsequent generations. To that extent, the
culture of the West has become global and universal: conflicts and negotiations around
individual rights (including freedom of thought), the rule of law, and pluralist forms of
politics are now present within all civilizations. Huntington simply refuses to listen to
these voices in other places, preferring to indulge the siren calls of cultural chauvinism.
In an exactly parallel fashion, Huntington presents multiculturalism within the West
(particularly in the United States) as an attempt to reject the Westʼs cultural heritage
and to overthrow its liberal political arrangements. A more convincing interpretation,
one more ready to engage with these new voices in the spirit of liberal tolerance and
negotiation, would see them as attempts to expand and develop the freedoms of Western
societies to incorporate all, and not just their White, people. Again, Huntington refuses
to attend to these voices; refuses to recognize the legitimate claims of peoples who are
not cultural others, but who are for the most part simply involved in the continuing
attempt to elaborate and expand notions of rights and freedoms on a more inclusive,
universalist basis. Against this, Huntington would have conservatives in the West make
themselves the implicit allies of illiberal authoritarians in the rest of the world – and in
the name of what? Well, in defence of the inherited position of the Whites in the United
States. In sum, Huntington advocates an inversion of the liberal combination of univer-
salism abroad and multiculturalism at home to give us universal White domination at
home and an inter-civilizational modus vivendi among diverse chauvinisms abroad.
When, early in his career, Huntington advocated the mass bombing of the rural
peasantry in Vietnam to drive them into the urban areas of government control, one of
his colleagues remarked that the trouble with Sam was that he didnʼt know the differ-
ence between pacification and genocide. It is a sobering comment on the reaction of

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 5

conservative America to its loss of ideological bearings after the certainties of the Cold
War that The Clash of Civilizations concludes with Huntington now being unable to tell
the difference between the realpolitik remaking of world order and a racist attack on
some of the better aspects of Western liberalism.

6 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

The coastline of experience
Materialism and metaphysics
in Adorno
Simon Jarvis
Such a critique confines all our speculative claims
rigidly to the sphere of possible experience; and it
does this not by shallow scoffing at ever-repeated
failures or pious sighs over the limits of our reason,
but by an effective determining of these limits in
accordance with established principles, inscribing
its nihil ulterius on those Pillars of Hercules which
nature herself has erected in order that the voyage
of our reason may be extended no further than the
continuous coastline of experience itself reaches
– a coast we cannot leave without venturing upon
a shoreless ocean which, after alluring us with
ever-deceptive prospects, compels us in the end to
abandon as hopeless all this vexatious and tedious
endeavour.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason1
This passage from the transcendental dialectic of the
Critique of Pure Reason argues for the need to set
properly determined limits to metaphysical speculation.
The metaphor reveals a redundance in the procedure
of the transcendental dialectic. Critique inscribes its
ʻnihil ulteriusʼ, but on pillars which nature herself has
already erected. The limit which the critic is to set is
one that already exists. Its ʻnihil ulteriusʼ, moreover, is
misleading: there is not nothing beyond these limits,
but an (albeit shoreless) ʻoceanʼ. These difficulties are
not contingent upon this metaphor but are incident to
the whole project of reasonʼs self-limiting critique. It
is not clear why criticism should need to ʻsetʼ a limit
which is regarded as naturally inherent in reason: or
rather, this need raises the acute difficulty that reason
is supposed to be both naturally transgressive and
critically self-limiting. So that while criticism may beat
its bounds, it cannot put a stop to lawless speculation.
Such speculation is ʻinseparable from human reason,
and even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, will
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
not cease to play tricks with reason and continually
entrap it into momentary aberrations ever and again
calling for correction.ʼ2
These passages from Kantʼs work offer a useful
introduction to the difficulty of thinking without illu-
sions. Materialists have usually regarded themselves
as the bearers of just such illusionless thinking. But
it often appears more difficult to say what materialism
is. Why should this be? Surely materialism is the
most straightforward of philosophical creeds, not one
requiring any complex negotiation with idealism, with
phenomenology, with ʻfundamental ontologyʼ? So at
least the confidence with which this word is sometimes
put about in the human sciences would suggest. But
Adornoʼs materialism starts from a painful awareness
that it is much more difficult really to think as a
materialist than it is to lay claim to that label; through
an awareness, indeed, that it is often just where this
label is most vehemently and immediately claimed that
a particularly unreflective kind of metaphysics is all
the more powerfully at work. For all the unfashionable-
ness of its diction, what Adornoʼs attempt to rethink
materialism without dogmatism is centrally addressing
is nothing other than the problem of ʻgivenness, or, to
use the Hegelian term, immediacyʼ,3 which has proved
of such continuing importance, in radically divergent
ways, not only for phenomenology, fundamental ontol-
ogy and deconstruction, but also for much recent work
in analytical philosophy.4
The problem may be put like this. All attempts
to avoid idealist claims of the type that thought
constitutes, shapes, or is identical with, its objects
appear to run the opposite risk of claiming access to
immediacy, to a transcendence which is just ʻgivenʼ. In
7
such invocations, as Hegel himself forcefully pointed
out, we are effectively invited to have faith in some
datum or framework for data which is sheerly given.
Our knowledge of such ʻgivensʼ is mistakenly thought
of as being purely passive.5 Enquiry must simply halt
before them. Dogmatic materialism of this kind is not
at all free from metaphysics in the way it supposes.
When thinking comes to a halt with an abstract appeal
to history, or society, or socio-historical material
specificity, or any other form of givenness, it might
as well stop with God. The lesson which Adorno
draws is that whether thinking is really materialist
is not decided by how often the word ʻmaterialismʼ
is repeated, but by what happens in that thinking.
Materialist thinking would need to ask how thinking
about that which appears to escape conceptuality is
even imaginable.
In this article I want to attempt to understand
the connection between the materialist and the meta-
physical motifs in Adornoʼs thinking. This attempt
will focus on Adornoʼs relationship to Kantʼs critical
thought, in order to explicate what Adorno means by
referring to his own thinking as critical thinking freed
from the armour of transcendental method. The article
falls into three main parts. In the first and longest part,
I give an account of Adornoʼs reflections on trans-
cendental epistemology and his reasons for thinking it
unworkable. In part two I ask whether these objections
to transcendental epistemology need oblige Adorno to
adopt a fundamental ontology or a fully-fledged meta-
physic of his own. In part three I consider the status of
Adornoʼs appeals to negativity in his answers to these
questions. Finally, a brief conclusion attempts to sketch
the relation of these epistemological and metaphysical
problems to problems of praxis which for reasons of
space cannot be fully covered in this article.
The metacritique of transcendental
epistemology
It is unfortunate that Adornoʼs book on phenomen-
ology – ʻOn the Metacritique of Epistemologyʼ – has
been translated into English under the title Against
Epistemology, because the idea of ʻmetacritiqueʼ is an
important one to him.6 Adornoʼs approach to epistem-
ology is a metacritique in the sense that it performs
a further critique on critical enquiry itself. It asks
not only ʻwhat are the conditions of the possibility
of experience?ʼ, but ʻwhat are such a transcendental
enquiryʼs own conditions of possibility?ʼ The pivot
of this metacritique is an account of Kantʼs transcen-
dental subject. Adorno proceeds by radicalizing Kantʼs
own insistence that all knowledge of objects must be
8 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
mediated through experience. In making this insist-
ence, Kant wants to distinguish between what we can
claim knowledge of, and what we can only think of.
The pure concepts of the understanding by themselves
afford no knowledge of objects. But we must be able
to think of an object as it is in itself, irrespective of
all experience of it. If we could not think of things in
this way, Kant argues, we would be left in the absurd
position of positing appearance without anything that
does the appearing.7 Yet although we must be able to
think the idea of a thing ʻconsidered as it is in itselfʼ,
it is nevertheless beyond our experience. We can only
know things considered as they ʻappearʼ to conscious-
ness, only as ʻphenomenaʼ.
Adorno, however, points out that a pure form with-
out any content is not merely unknowable, but also
unthinkable. A thought which is not a thought of
anything will be not merely ʻemptyʼ, as Kant concedes,
but also blind, not a thought at all.8 If the categorial
forms specified by Kant are the conditions of the
possibility of experience, the reverse is equally true:
the categorial forms themselves are only made possible
by the experience whose conditions of possibility they
are supposed to provide.9 Accordingly those forms
could not be invariant, but would necessarily change
as experience changes.
It is sometimes thought that this argument rests
on a misunderstanding of Kantʼs categorial forms as
though they designated not pure forms but beings.10
This is a mistake. It is true that Adorno does not
believe that we can intelligibly refer to a pure form
without any substance, any more than a substance
without any form is thinkable.11 His target, however,
is not the ontological status of the conditions of the
possibility of experience, but the supposed invariance
of these conditions.
Adornoʼs account of Kantʼs transcendental subject
is motivated by a wish to arrive at a different kind
of concept of experience from Kantʼs.12 Kant insisted
that all experience requires a concept, or form of
understanding, to be joined with a (sensible) intuition.
Without intuitions, my experience would simply be
empty, nothing, because concepts have no content
of themselves. Nor is it any easier to imagine the
possibility of experience without conceptual forms, in
Kantʼs view, since not only would there be no sense in
which I could be said to ʻhaveʼ my experiences, but it is
not possible to imagine what a substance devoid of all
form could actually be like. But this did not mean that
concepts and intuitions could not be separated out by
philosophers. On the contrary, it was ʻa strong reason
for carefully separating and distinguishing the one
from the otherʼ for epistemological purposes. Adorno
is less convinced that this kind of methodological
separation is possible. The result of any such separa-
tion, for Adorno, is that experience comes to look as
though it were something which was somehow added
up by joining concept with intuition,13 or, to put the
matter more precisely, as though it were manufactured
by the pure activity of concepts upon the raw material
of intuition.14
These considerations throw a rather different light
on Kantʼs ʻblockʼ – his insistence that pure concepts
of the understanding cannot by themselves provide
knowledge of objects. This prohibition on dogmatic
metaphysics, Adorno suggests, is itself dogmatically
formulated, because of the claim that the conditions
of the possibility of experience are timeless. This
invariance has the result of converting certain features
of variable experience itself into invariants. In particu-
lar it implies that it is impossible for us to experience
(rather than just ʻthinkʼ or ʻpostulateʼ) freedom, or our
own subjectivity in general. It also suggests that it is
impossibile to know things as they are in themselves
rather than as they appear to consciousness.15
Adorno does not think that Kant simply made
a mistake about experience. He argues that Kantʼs
enquiry into the conditions of the possibility of expe-
rience truthfully bears witness to certain structural
features of modern natural-historical experience. The
Kantian object [Gegenstand] produced by ʻpureʼ con-
ceptual activity upon the material of intuition closely
resembles the commodity as a supposed product of
ʻpureʼ or abstract labour.16 The insistence that for
experience to be possible, a concept must work upon an
intuition, is conditional upon what experience itself is
increasingly becoming: a production of exchange-value
for its own sake. For Adorno, this is both the truth and
the untruth of Kantʼs ʻexperienceʼ. It is a true index
of the real historical emptying-out of our experience.17
Any attempt simply to wish away that prohibition in
advance of a real change in our experience would
amount to a merely hopeful or dishonest declaration
that an unfree society is in fact free. To this extent
Kantʼs prohibition remains in force.
Yet at the same time, because Kantʼs is a trans-
cendental account, it implies that this emptied expe-
rience, bereft of real content, is the model of what
experience itself has been and must be like. Adornoʼs
interest here is in suggesting that this transcendental
account of experience need not be taken as legislative
for all future experience. If our experience were differ-
ent, both these transcendental blocks – on experiencing
freedom and on knowing the thing as it is in itself
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
– might no longer apply. However, like all attempts
to criticize transcendental inquiry by ʻradicalizingʼ it,
Adornoʼs attempt to think with and against Kant has
remained liable to the suspicion that, far from really
radicalizing transcendental inquiry, it instead falls
back from it, into one or other of the bad alternatives
which Kant was attempting to get beyond. Its appeal to
experience can be seen as a relapse into a historicizing
or sociologizing dogmatism, which thinks about Kant
from a perspective already set up by some dogma-
tically posited opinions about social history. Its attack
on the prohibition on the experience of transcendence,
conversely, can be seen as a relapse into pre-critical
metaphysics. The charge of a relapse into pre-critical
metaphysics is discussed later. Here we need to focus
in more detail on Adornoʼs arguments about experi-
ence and its conditions of possibility.
As Hans-Georg Gadamer has remarked, the concept
of experience is one of the least clarified concepts used
by philosophers and yet one of those to which appeal
is most often made.18 Adornoʼs use of the concept
appears to struggle beneath this difficulty more than
most others. The concept of experience is a constant
point of reference in his criticisms of the philosophical
tradition since Kant, yet he refuses to provide an
unambiguous definition for it. What is more, it is not
hard to think of plausible defences against Adornoʼs
criticisms of the transcendental concept of experi-
ence. A Kantian might point out that for Kant, the
conditions of the possibility of experience yielded by
transcendental inquiry are not simply the conditions
of the possibility of ʻourʼ experience at present or
to date, but, rather, the conditions of the possibility
of any thinkable experience whatever. The point is
not that historical and/or current experience is made
possible by these conditions, but that we cannot in
principle even imagine any experience which would
be intelligible without these conditions. They make
possible all possible, not merely actual or historical,
experience.
If Adornoʼs reformulation of the concept of experi-
ence rested only on the argument that because experi-
ence itself changes the conditions of its possibility
must change, it would clearly have failed to take this
objection into account. But this is the conclusion, not
the presupposition of Adornoʼs argument. The argu-
ment rests instead on a thoroughgoing re-examination
of what Kant splits up for epistemological analysis as
the two indispensable components of human experi-
ence, understanding and sensibility. To understand this
re-examination, it is useful to draw on a course of
lectures Adorno gave in 1957–58, the second half of
9
which comments in more consecutive fashion than was
Adornoʼs habit on some central issues in the Critique
of Pure Reason.19 If we look in more detail at his criti-
cism of Kantʼs concept of experience, we will see that
it marshalls three primary sets of arguments, the first
addressing Kantʼs account of the intellectual conditions
of knowledge, the second addressing his account of
the sensible conditions of knowledge, and the third
addressing Kantʼs account of the connections between
these. All three groups of argument are contentious,
and open to many objections. The first set is intended
to show why concepts devoid of all reference whatever
to a ʻsomethingʼ are not only ʻemptyʼ, as Kant would
have it, restricted to a logical rather than a synthetic
use, but ʻblindʼ, unthinkable, and consequently devoid
of a logical as well as of a synthetic use. Here Adorno
is clearly in disagreement not only with Kant but also
with his twentieth-century semanticist critics.20 The
second set of arguments is intended to show that an
experience supposedly free from all conceptual media-
tion would not only be ʻblindʼ, as Kant suggests, but
also empty, not experience at all. This second set of
arguments addresses both Kantʼs theory that time and
space needed to be considered ʻpure forms of intuitionʼ
which were necessary to all synthetic a priori knowl-
edge, and his characterization of phenomenal reality
as a ʻsensuous manifoldʼ devoid of qualities prior to
conceptual determination. Here Adornoʼs arguments,
perhaps surprisingly, have something in common with
those of Kantʼs semanticist and empiricist critics.
10 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
These two sets of arguments lead on to a more general
case about the project of transcendental enquiry itself.
Adorno argues that such enquiry dogmatically answers
its own questions in advance by asking how synthetic
a priori judgements are possible rather than whether
they are possible.21 What links the arguments as a
whole may be understood by saying that for Adorno,
Kant indeed provided a critique of pure reason, but
one which rested on a failure to criticize the notions
of pure understanding and pure sensibility. Adornoʼs
critical thinking understands itself as a radicalization
rather than a relapse from critical thinking in that
it criticizes not only pure reason but the very idea
of ʻpure conceptsʼ and ʻpure intuitionsʼ. ʻThinking
without purityʼ is the model for Adornoʼs attempt to
free critical thinking from the armour of its trans-
cendental method.22
Let us examine the first limb of Adornoʼs account
of the concept of experience. He attempts to argue that
pure concepts of the understanding are not only empty
but blind: that they are by themselves unthinkable, not
just lacking in content. It might initially be thought
that this argument is making the mistake of trying to
use empirical means, to argue from the way human
beings happen to be able or unable to think, to settle
a non-empirical point about the validity of logical
concepts. It might be thought, that is, that this is a
psychologistic argument. Kant himself had already
argued that this kind of argument could be of no
help in transcendental thought. Pure concepts of the
understanding could not be simply inductive abstrac-
tions from experience, because otherwise we could
not account for the ʻfactʼ of that scientific knowledge
which we can possess a priori: ʻnamely, pure math-
ematics and general science of nature.ʼ23 Adornoʼs
argument, however, rests on an account of the con-
ditions of intelligibility of a proposition. This is what
makes it a metacritical rather than a psychologistic
argument. For Kant non-contradictoriness is a suf-
ficient condition of intelligibility. In his discussion of
the possibility of thinking freedom, intelligibility is
taken as synonymous with non-contradictoriness: ʻI
can none the less think freedom (that is to say, the
representation of it is at least not self-contradictory)ʼ;24
ʻI can think whatever I please, provided only that I do
not contradict myself, that is, provided my concept is
a possible thought.ʼ25 The subjective intelligibility of
the pure concepts of the understanding is taken as
read; the question of their referential content – what
Kant calls their objective validity and reality – is
addressed later in the transcendental deduction and
is not regarded as essential to their intelligibility. For
Adorno, the referential content of concepts is a neces-
sary condition of their intelligibility. Without reference
to a ʻsomethingʼ, no formal logic could be thinkable.26
A thought which is not a thought of anything is not
only empty but unintelligible: ʻthe meaning of logic
itself demands facticity.ʼ27
Here not only Kantians but their positivist or seman-
ticist opponents may have a strong objection. It can
be protested that Adorno is confusing the question of
how logical propositions are arrived at – their ʻgenesisʼ
– with whether they are true – their validity. Another
way of putting this would be to say that he confuses
the quid juris of a transcendental deduction – what
right do we have to these concepts? – with the quid
facti of an empirical deduction – how do we come
by these concepts?28 As I argue elsewhere, Adorno
does not think that the genesis and validity of logical
propositions can be quite so easily separated. More
importantly here, for Adorno intelligibility is not a
merely psychological criterion. It is inseparable from
the very notion of validity. Validity can never be
meaningfully ascribed to a proposition which is in
principle unthinkable, even an analytic one: ʻEvery
judgement, even, as Hegel showed, an analytical one,
carries within itself, whether it will or no, the claim
to predicate something which is not merely identical
with the bare subject-concept.ʼ29 Adornoʼs critique is
thus directed from the start against the notion that pure
concepts of the understanding really are ʻpureʼ. The
condition of their even being thinkable, not only of
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
their having any content, lies for Adorno precisely in
their not being pure, but rather already contaminated
with some reference, however minimal. (I shall discuss
later the charge that this view necessarily obliges
Adorno himself to develop a positive ontology.)
If we move now to look at the second limb of
Adornoʼs account of Kantʼs concept of experience,
we can see that it rests on some complementary argu-
ments. Kantʼs account of the sensible conditions of
human knowledge in the transcendental aesthetic is
notoriously complex. Adorno at some point or other
discussed most of its arguments, and it would be
impossible to give a complete catalogue here. Instead
an especially critical instance, Kantʼs account of time
and space as pure forms of intuition, will be discussed.
What does it mean to describe space and time as
ʻpure forms of intuitionʼ? Adorno is sympathetic to
the impulse which lies behind such a description. Any
attempt simply to define space and time will inevitably
appeal to spatial and temporal concepts. But our right
to use such concepts is precisely what an account of
space and time is supposed to ground. This, of course,
is itself an argument in favour of the need for a trans-
cendental account of spatial and temporal concepts.
They are concepts which we cannot not use.30 Space
and time, such an argument runs, cannot be inductive
abstractions from experience because they are already
presupposed in any attempt to describe experience. Yet
they cannot be pure concepts of the understanding,
according to Kantʼs view of such concepts, otherwise
they would be empty, whereas Kantʼs account of them
is supposed to show how synthetic a priori knowledge
is possible. Accordingly Kant regards space and time
as ʻpure forms of intuitionʼ, or, as he elsewhere puts
it, ʻpure intuitionsʼ31 – that is, as a kind of a priori
form of sensibility.
Adorno argues that the vacillation between these
two formulations is not accidental but symptomatic.32
Kant must place the emphasis he does on the argument
that space and time are not categories because other-
wise the immediate givenness of sensibility would
be endangered. Kant would have to concede that the
ʻmaterialʼ which the activity of the categorial forms is
supposed to shape is already preformed, a subjectified
object. Hence the description of space and time as ʻpure
intuitionsʼ. Yet at the same time space and time must
not be empirical intuitions, otherwise the possibility of
synthetic a priori knowledge itself would fall. Hence
the description of space and time as ʻpure forms of
intuition.ʼ Adorno, by contrast, argues that ʻspace and
time as developed by the transcendental aesthetic are,
despite all assurances to the contrary, concepts: in
11
Kantian parlance, representations [Vorstellungen] of a
representationʼ.33 For Adorno, this fact is not simply
a mistake on Kantʼs part, but rather testifies to the
impossibility of freeing space and time from all con-
ceptual mediation whatever. ʻPure intuition would be
wooden iron, experience without experience.ʼ34 Yet this
ʻexperience without experienceʼ is arrived at precisely
by a realist impulse to preserve a moment of sensibility
from all mediation by concepts.
Kant insisted, of course, that the separation in his
work of concept and intuition, of understanding and
sensibility, had an epistemological rather than an onto-
logical status. These were not opposed kinds of being
for Kant, but an opposition between form and content.
It is important to recognize that the above argu-
ments do not misattribute an ontological separation
between concept and intuition to Kant. They are not
complaining that the pure concepts and pure intuitions
discussed by Kant are non-entities, that there are ʻno
such thingsʼ, but rather that their very epistemological
ʻpurityʼ renders them unintelligible. Adorno expresses
this by a joke. In Kantʼs epistemology, Adorno sug-
gests, adding nothing to nothing produces something.35
What Adorno is pointing to is that the very rigour
of Kantʼs exclusion of any ontological moment from
his epistemological separation makes it unworkable,
because unintelligible, as epistemology. Pure under-
standing and pure sensibility have not been subjected
to the same critique as pure reason. Or rather: how
they may legitimately be used has been intensively
discussed. But what these expressions signify, what
pure concepts and pure intuitions ʻareʼ, cannot be made
intelligible without already destroying the methodo-
logical separation in which they are supposedly held
apart for epistemological analysis.
It is here that we come to the third limb of Adornoʼs
account, his examination of the connection between
Kantʼs accounts of pure understanding and pure sen-
sibility. The aim of the transcendental deduction (most
clearly in the version provided in the second edition of
the Critique of Pure Reason) is to establish a connec-
tion between the conditions of the possibility of human
knowledge provided by the understanding and those
provided by sensibility: to show, crudely summarized,
that the categories have a synthetic rather than a
merely analytic use. In one sense, of course, the trans-
cendental deduction does not have the decisive status
for Adorno that it so often takes on in assessments
of the success or failure of transcendental idealism,
since he has already argued that the notions of ʻpureʼ
concepts and of the sensible manifolds that they are
12 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
to determine in order to make experience possible
are not merely empty but unintelligible. Nevertheless,
the transcendental deduction is of special interest to
Adorno because it offers to show in just what way
the two sets of conditions of human knowledge which
Kant has been investigating in isolation are connected
to each other. It provides further confirmation in
Adornoʼs view of the internal difficulties produced
by an epistemological separation of understanding
and sensibility. It shows how hard it is subsequently
to put back together what has first been analysed in
radical separation.
The transcendental deduction is littered with the
bones of the many attempts to provide an exhaustive
interpretative account of it – not least because of
the many important differences between the form it
takes in the first and second editions of the Critique
– and such an account certainly cannot be attempted
here. Instead discussion will have to be limited to one
crucial aspect to which Adorno points – the factic-
ity of the categories. In one passage of the second
edition of the transcendental deduction, Kant answers
the question of why it is that ʻour understanding …
can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by
means of the categories, and only by such and so
manyʼ by ruling it out of court: it is ʻas little capable
of further explanation as why we have just these and
no other functions of judgement, or why space and
time are the only forms of possible intuition.ʼ36 The
categories and the logical functions of judgement are
at this point regarded as raw givens no less than the
forms of sensibility. For Adorno this, if true, means
that the deduction has in fact not taken place. In the
transcendental deduction itself we come to a halt
before ʻsomething given, something simply to be taken
up [etwas Hinzunehmendes], something which can no
longer properly be deduced at allʼ.37 In this sense the
question quid juris – with what right do I use these
concepts? – has become, with this appeal to brute
givenness, a question quid facti – how did I get hold
of them? Adorno is dissatisfied with the way in which
the question of right is itself thus modelled on facticity
in the heart of the deduction – with what he thinks is
the dogmatic aspect of transcendental method itself.
How, then, has the concept of experience been
reformulated? First, Adorno has argued that experi-
ence is both somatic and conceptual. It is so, not only
in the sense that two elements must come to-gether
for experience to be possible, but also in the sense
that these cannot be separated out as ʻelementsʼ for
analysis in isolation from each other. There can be no
account of exper-ience without an account of experi-
ences. Second, it has been
suggested that the future
of experience cannot be
legislated for in the image
of its past. This dual refor-
mulation has consequences
for every aspect of the
project of transcendental
inquiry. It remobilizes the
whole series of methodical
separations – of form from
content, of spontaneity
from receptivity, of think-
ing from knowing – upon
which Kantʼs account of
transcendental subjectivity
depends.
We have already seen
why Adorno thinks his argument can be sustained
against Kantian objections to it. But two different
kinds of objection may already have become clear.
First, his reformulation of the concept of experience
is deeply indebted (although, as we shall see, by no
means identical) to Hegelʼs earlier and more systematic
criticism of all Kantʼs radical separations. This debt is
a clear difficulty for Adornoʼs own account of Kant.
How far does Adornoʼs critique of Kant commit him
to just that idealist identification of thought and being
which a negative dialectic is supposed to help us out
of? This is a question that I have begun to approach
in an earlier paper.38 Second, do Adornoʼs criticisms
of Kantʼs transcendental account of experience obligate
Adorno himself to provide a fundamental ontology,
an examination of what is meant by ʻbeingʼ, or even
a fully fledged metaphysics? It is this latter question
that I want to attempt to answer here.
The problem of metaphysics
The problem around which these difficulties circle is
that which has dominated the history of philosophy
in the twentieth century: whether thinking may free
itself from metaphysics; how this might happen; and
whether such an escape, if feasible, is even desir-
able. One very powerful tradition in twentieth-century
thought, that of logical positivism, has, of course,
regarded this as not really a problem at all. For Rudolf
Carnap, for example, so-called metaphysical prob-
lems were ʻpseudo-problemsʼ which were the result of
incautiously allowing words with no meaningful refer-
ent into philosophical talk.39 But most other European
philosophical traditions have regarded metaphysics
as not so easily liquidable. Adorno, indeed, does not
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
regard the liquidation of metaphysics as of itself desir-
able, despite – indeed, as will be seen, precisely on
account of – his materialism. Instead, he regards
a moment of metaphysical speculation as currently
ineliminable from thinking which is to be thinking
at all, including materialist thinking.
What, then, ʻisʼ the metaphysical moment which
Adorno thinks of as currently ineliminable from think-
ing? In order to answer this question, we need to go
back once more to his encounter with Kant, and this
time less to motifs originating in Kantʼs analytic than
to those originating in his dialectic. Adorno recognizes
that the Critique of Pure Reason itself already aimed
at a critical rescue of certain aspects of metaphysical
thinking, rather than a simple liquidation of metaphys-
ics.40 Although it is Kantʼs view, in Adornoʼs words,
that the result of the antinomies is that certain ques-
tions ʻmay not really be askedʼ, the very premiss of
Kantʼs attempt, in the transcendental dialectic, to set
clear limits to the use of the pure concepts of the
understanding is an admission that reason is naturally
transgressive of these limits. Kant points to ʻa natural
and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason … inseparable
from human reason … which, even after its deceptive-
ness has been exposed, will not cease to play tricks
with reason and continually entrap it into momentary
aberrations ever and again calling for correctionʼ.41
This element in Kantʼs work can prompt Adorno to
speak of a ʻmetaphysical experienceʼ which ʻinspiresʼ
Kantʼs thought:
In order to be spirit, spirit must know that it is not
exhausted in that to which it extends; that it is not
exhausted in the finitude which it is like. Thus spirit
thinks what would be beyond it. Such metaphysical
experience inspires Kantʼs philosophy, once it has
13
 been broken free of its armour-plated method. Any
consideration of whether metaphysics is still at
all possible must reflect the negation of the finite
demanded by finitude. Its riddle-image [Raetselbild]
animates the word ʻintelligibleʼ.42
Such a passage seems to raise more problems than
it solves. How, in particular, can spiritʼs ʻthoughtʼ of
what would be beyond it be compared to ʻmetaphysical
experienceʼ? Surely Kantʼs idea of the intelligible as
such depends on just this distinction between our
capacity to think the intelligible and the restriction
of our experience to what appears?43 However, it is
in turn just this gulf between thinking and knowing,
between thinking and experiencing, that Adorno has
in his sights when he refers to freeing criticism from
transcendental method. Freeing Kantʼs thought from
the armour of its method is what Adorno takes the
metacritique of transcendental enquiry to have accom-
plished.
Kantʼs antinomies arise in the course of illegitimate
attempts to use the pure concepts of the understanding
as though they could by themselves yield knowledge
of objects. Adorno, however, regards the concept of
intelligibility itself as aporetic. To Kantʼs antinomies,
as we have seen, he adds a further antinomy which,
as Albrecht Wellmer puts it, ʻplaces not only the
knowability, but also the thinkability of the intel-
ligible world in question. The antinomy consists in
the fact that objective reality cannot be attributed to
the transcendental ideas, and yet if they are to be the
expression of a meaningful thought, reality must be
attributed to them.ʼ44
Adornoʼs critique of Kantʼs ʻblockʼ, then, is moti-
vated by the attempt to criticize the separation between
our real experience and a really possible future experi-
ence through a philosophical interpretation of the
former. In this criticism it is not cognition of external
metaphysical entities which is at stake. The loss of
metaphysical dogmas is irreversible, and all hope for
such knowledge already testifies in the terms express-
ing it to its own impossibility. What is at stake is how
the moment of freedom in thinking testifies to the
real possibility of a future experience not bound to
self-preservation, a future experience in which spirit
could relinquish its infinite postponement of material
satisfaction.
As Wellmer has remarked in his lucid discussion
of this aspect of Adornoʼs thought, for Adorno it is
as though with this idea ʻa thin crack had opened up
through which a weak glimmer of light might fall
from redemption upon the darkened world, enough to
contest the right of Kantʼs metaphysical agnosticism
14 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
to have the last word. Instead of “we cannot know”:
“we do not yet know”.ʼ45 But Wellmer goes on to raise
an important objection to Adornoʼs line of argument:
ʻWe can already know that what we cannot even
consistently think as actual, we cannot anticipate as
actual either.ʼ46
This objection by no means exhausts the issue,
however. For Wellmer, Adorno becomes a pre-critical
dogmatic metaphysician when he helps himself to a
speculative Hegelian argument – the argument that the
prohibition on the misemployment of pure concepts
of the understanding is dogmatically formulated.47
But this argument, if accepted, means that the very
distinction between pre-critical and critical thinking
which Wellmer, like almost all second-generation criti-
cal theory, takes as a bench-mark, cannot be taken
as absolute. Indeed the whole point of this argument
is that transcendental inquiry has not managed, and
could not in principle manage, radically to separate
itself from pre-critical ʻmetaphysicsʼ. It is in fact quite
central to Adornoʼs reflection on the demise of meta-
physics, and part of the point of his ʻmetacritiqueʼ,
that transcendental enquiry was never as distinct from
rationalism as it has sometimes subsequently been
painted.
The motive for this argument is not to suggest that
therefore it is legitimate to go back to pre-critical
rationalism as though Kant had never happened, but
rather to suggest that metaphysics may be ineliminable
from thinking in a different way than was supposed
by Kant. It need not be the case that, as Wellmer
objects, this argument asks us to anticipate as actual
what we cannot even consistently think as actual. Such
a demand clearly would constitute a decisive objection
to Adornoʼs account of his relation to metaphysics. The
argument, instead, is a negative one. It points out that
we cannot liquidate as chimerical what we cannot even
consistently think as chimerical: the transcendence in
thinking.
Adorno described Kantʼs statement that ʻthe criti-
cal path [in philosophy] alone remains openʼ beyond
dogmatism and scepticism as ʻone whose truth-content
is incomparably greater than what it means in its par-
ticular contextʼ.48 Indeed critical thinking, for Adorno,
may almost be defined as that thinking which manages
in fact rather than merely in intention to take this path.
It is in this context that Adornoʼs difficult remarks
in the closing lines of Negative Dialectics on the
ʻsolidarityʼ between his own thinking and metaphysics
are finally to be understood.49 Materialism and meta-
physics alike violate both the Kantian prohibition on
the misemployment of transcendent concepts and what
Adorno sees as Hegelʼs total ʻcontext of immanenceʼ.
Materialism and metaphysics are both untrue wherever
they claim access to immediate givenness. But they
are both true where they show how the prohibition on
dogmatism is itself dogmatically formulated. This is
the basis upon which Adorno can argue that ʻmaterial-
ism is not the dogma which its shrewdest opponents
accused it of being, but rather the dissolution of some-
thing which has for its part been seen through as
dogmatic. Hence materialismʼs rights [Recht] within
critical philosophy.ʼ50 Kantʼs prohibition on the misuse
of transcendent concepts is true to aspects of our
present and past experience, but untrue in so far as it
seeks to legislate for all future experience:
Socially, it may be suspected with good reason that
this block, the limitation on the absolute, is one
with the need to work, which really does hold hu-
mans in the same spell which Kant transfigured into
philosophy. The captivity in immanence to which
he, with brutal honesty, confines spirit, is a captivity
in self-preservation … if this beetle-like natural-
historical care were broken through, the positioning
of consciousness with respect to truth would be
changed.51
The prohibition is ʻhonestʼ about natural-historical
experience. It is only ʻbrutalʼ in so far as it confines
such experience within supposedly immutable con-
ditions of its possibility, and to this extent prohibits
experience from changing. Brutal honesty becomes
brutally dishonest, Adorno suggests, by this appeal
to invariance. The critical ʻblockʼ which prohibits
experience of transcendence relies on a presentation
of experience as invariably the pure work of concep-
tual forms upon the content of intuition. The block
cannot be thought away. But thought can show how
the experience on which the block rests is both real
and changeable. A changed experience would change
whatever are taken as the conditions of its possibility.
A society in which our experience itself was no longer
identitarian might be one in which the prohibition
on the experience of transcendence would no longer
apply.52
Negativity without nihilism
Adornoʼs account of the entanglement between materi-
alism and metaphysics, then, depends centrally on this
double move. To liquidate the possibility of experienc-
ing transcendence would make thinking impossible;
yet this does not of itself mean that immediate access
to such experience has thereby been secured. This is
why Adorno takes care to refer to his thinking on this
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
topic as ʻsolely negativeʼ.53 The magical, mystical and
theological terms which Adorno uses to designate the
possibility of an escape from pure immanence or from
self-preservation – as where he talks of ʻbreaking the
spellʼ of the context of immanence or of a ʻsalvationʼ
or ʻredemptionʼ of natural-historical life – need to be
understood in the context of this negative thinking.
Such expressions are, instead, a twofold ʻanamnesisʼ,
thoughtʼs attempt to recollect, instead of suppress,
what it depends on. They recollect both instrumental
reasonʼs own history of pre-instrumental rationality,
its inability to rid itself of the magical and mythical
thinking which it has suppressed, and the concealed
transcendence of prohibitions on transcendence. They
are determinate negations of these prohibitions which
make visible the experience implicitly sedimented in
them.
How far does Adorno, then, appeal to negativity
itself as a panacea? When Adorno and Horkheimer
discussed the possibility of a materialist dialectic in
1939, Horkheimer was on one occasion driven to an
exasperated outburst: ʻSo all we can do is just say
“no” to everything!ʼ54 Adornoʼs reply does not attempt
to conceal the extent to which he identifies thought
itself with determinate negativity: ʻThere is no other
measure of truth than the specificity of the dissolution
of illusion.ʼ55 We need, finally, to consider in more
detail just what Adorno means by negativity, as well
as some of the more cogent among the many counter-
arguments that have been offered to his conception.
Michael Theunissen has given a critical account of
ʻNegativity in Adornoʼ that is all the more powerful for
its engagement with the philosophical tradition from
which Adorno emerges. Theunissen argues that, unlike
most philosophers, Adorno does not use negativity
to refer to non-being, but rather to something which
is existent, which negates, and which ought not to
be: the existing negativity of identificatory thinking
and the domination that it accompanies and makes
possible.56 The point of negative thinking, in this
sense, is not a limitless scepticism which will negate
any positive content whatever, but a negation of this
existing negativity. Its point, that is, is the reverse of
scepticism. It is conceived of as a negation of sceptical
negativity which will overcome the prohibition on the
experience of transcendence. Theunissen goes on to
distinguish two primary conceptions of negative dia-
lectic. On the one hand, he suggests, negative dialectic
is conceived of as (1) a ʻconsistent “consciousness of
non-identity”ʼ;57 on the other as (2) an ʻontology of the
wrong state of thingsʼ.58 Negativity means something
different in each case. The non-identical is not itself
15
negative, except from the standpoint of identificatory
thinking. In sense (1), then, the negativity is, as it
were, within quotation marks. In this sense, nega-
tive dialectic is not really negative. In sense (2), by
contrast, the negativity referred to is the negativity of
that which should not be, the ʻwrong state of thingsʼ.
In this sense, negative dialectic is not really dialectical.
The result, for Theunissen, is that negative dialectic
is ʻa dialectic which transcends itself, as it makes a
transition into metaphysicsʼ.59 A dialectic which was
imagined as entirely self-sufficient would be making
an entirely undialectical claim to exclusivity. Accord-
ingly, dialectic depends on an ʻundialecticalʼ moment.
It is in invoking the ineliminability of this undialec-
tical moment, in the raising of the non-identical to an
absolute, Theunissen suggests, that Adornoʼs dialectic
goes over into metaphysics.
The force of Theunissenʼs criticism, unusually, is
that what he calls Adornoʼs ʻnegativismʼ is not, in
a certain sense, negative enough.60 It depends on
a series of pre-negativistic or even anti-negativistic
arguments. In particular, it depends on the argu-
ment that total despair is unintelligible, because as
a minimal condition of the possibility of despairing
determinately of the world as it is, consciousness must
have a sense of some element that is not negative:
ʻWhen philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape
of life has grown oldʼ;61 but ʻ[c]onsciousness could
not even despair over the grey, did it not harbour the
notion of a different colour, whose dispersed traces
16 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
are not absent in the negative whole.ʼ62 The negative
is not the whole in the sense that there really is
nothing positive – this would be the nihilism of ʻall
is nothingʼ against which Adorno sets himself – but in
the sense that everything is shaped by negativity. The
result, Theunissen argues, is that Adornoʼs negative
thinking founders in contradictions which cannot be
excused as the manifestation of historical antagonism,
but which are, instead, of its own making: between
insisting, for example, on the one hand that exchange
is a distorted prolepsis of true reconciliation, and
on the other that the work of art is a prolepsis of
the thing which would no longer be mutilated by
exchange;63 or between insisting, on the one hand,
that the world as it exists is ʻfalse to its innermost
coreʼ64 and insisting, on the other, that ʻeven in its
most questionable state society is the epitome of the
self-producing and reproducing human lifeʼ65 – ʻthat
isʼ, as Theunissen comments, ʻfor all its negativity,
never simply negativeʼ.66 Only if negative thinking
were to be able to free itself entirely from metaphys-
ics could it avoid such ʻbad contradictionʼ.
This is clearly a series of objections which goes to
the heart of Adornoʼs work. Since negative dialectic so
openly confesses its own aporetic quality, objections
that merely point to contradiction are not addressing
the decisive issue, which is, instead, to what extent
and in which cases negative dialecticʼs claims that
its moments of contradiction aporetically manifest
real antagonism are justified. The question is partly
a hermeneutic one which demands an examination
of how to read a contradiction such as that between
the claims of the type that (1) the existing world is
false to its innermost core and claims of the type that
(2) even in its most questionable state society is the
epitome of the self-producing and -reproducing life of
mankind. Claims of the first type, Adorno wants to
suggest, cannot be made intelligible without already
hearing claims of the second type sounding within
them. Arguments to the effect that ʻthe existing world
is false to its innermost coreʼ can never be read as
completely literal in Adornoʼs work, not at all because
Adorno has in some way decreed that they should not
be read literally, but because if taken with total literal-
ness they are not thinkable. In the very act of thinking
such a claim we provide ourselves with evidence of
the extent to which it is untrue. That if we are to
despair determinately we cannot make despair into
an absolute – which Theunissen rightly emphasizes
as being what distinguishes Adornoʼs negative think-
ing from nihilism – also affects, rather than being a
matter of indifference for, the hermeneutic status of
Adornoʼs claims.
Here many may think that their worst fears have
been confirmed. The problem of contradiction is to
be evaded in favour of a frankly aestheticized reason,
which skips argument by an easy appeal to context and
removes contradiction by suggesting that one limb of
a contradictory pair was not meant literally. The argu-
ments raised here, however, are not simply aesthetic
but concern the extent to which Adornoʼs thought
remains not only dialectical but speculative. The model
for what the ʻspeculative momentʼ in thinking means
for Adorno is provided by the idea that we are already
unable not to hear claims of the second type sounding
in claims of the first type. A moment of unliteralness
is non-liquidable from such claims to despair, because
if they were meant with absolute literalness they could
not even be thought. For Hegel, speculative thinking
was famously able to see ʻthe rose in the cross of
the presentʼ. Adornoʼs thinking is speculative to the
extent that this motif can be reread in the light of
his own thesis about the unthinkability of complete
despair. Every line which, if read with sheer literal-
mindedness, speaks despair, bespeaks hope. What
philosophical argument bespeaks, as well as what it
speaks, cannot in Adornoʼs view simply be reassigned
to the aesthetic, and used as the basis for a charge of
an aestheticization of reason, as though it were the
place of strictly philosophical argument only ever to
read what is written with absolute literalness, because
absolute literalness is itself a chimera.
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
None of these arguments brings forward consider-
ations of which a series of objections like Theunissenʼs
is unaware. Rather, the weight resting on an argument
such as the claim that complete despair is not fully
thinkable is just what Theunissen means by arguing
that Adornoʼs negative dialectic transcends itself in so
far as it goes over to metaphysics. What the perspective
outlined above would want to question, however, is
Theunissenʼs suggestion that there can be a negative
thinking which is fully freed from metaphysics without
becoming a nihilism. Theunissenʼs own work has
drawn attention to what he calls ʻthe critical functionʼ
of parts of Hegelʼs logic – ʻthe logic of being exposes
positivism as metaphysics; the logic of essence exposes
metaphysics as positivism.ʼ67 On Adornoʼs account
the condition of such a critical logic, which, despite
Theunissenʼs criticisms of Adorno, remains very close
to the intentions of a negative dialectic, would be an
acknowledgement of the impossibility of liquidating
metaphysical speculation. It could not be expounded as
a negativism absolutely free from metaphysics without
delusively making just the kinds of claim to exclusivity
which Theunissen himself regards as the reason for
negative dialecticʼs own ʻtransition to metaphysicsʼ.
Kant protested that any thought that, like Adornoʼs,
wanted to resist both dogmatism and the procedure
of a critique of pure reason could only have the
sceptical aim of ʻchanging work into play, philosophy
into philodoxyʼ.68 For Adorno, the work of thought is
negativity. Positivity is where thought comes to rest,
comes to a halt. The negativity of Adornoʼs thought
represents its unceasing labour, its refusal to come
to rest in a posited standpoint or fact or method. But
the manual labour which ʻsmooths the pathʼ for this
ʻlabour of the conceptʼ continues, and thought con-
tinues to live off it. For this reason, to come to rest
in invariant positivity whilst work goes on all around
is indeed to change ʻwork into play, philosophy into
philodoxyʼ. Adorno does want to change work into
play, but really to change it, not in thought alone, nor
for thinkers alone. Only on this condition can negative
thinking be distinguished from nihilism.
The hope of Adornoʼs negative thinking, then, is
not to protect its own negativity but, in truth, to bring
negativity to an end. Hegel referred to the course of
thought as a self-correcting or ʻself-perficientʼ scepti-
cism. Adornoʼs negativity too would be self-perficient,
yet could not regard such self-perficience as guar-
anteed, nor as satisfactorily to be accomplished in
thought alone:
17
 If thought … gropes beyond itself in such a way
that it names the other as something simply in-
commensurable with it, which it yet thinks, it will
find no shelter but in the dogmatic tradition. In such
a thought thinking is alien to its content, unrecon-
ciled with it, and finds itself once again condemned
to two separate kinds of truth, which would be
irreconcilable with the idea of truth itself. Meta-
physics rests on whether it is possible to escape
from this aporia without any sleight of hand. To this
end dialectic, at once the impression [Abdruck] of
the universal context of delusion and its critique,
must in one final movement turn itself even against
itself.69
Adornoʼs ʻnon-identicalʼ, as he has emphasized
throughout, is not ʻsimply incommensurableʼ with
thought. Any statement of such ʻsimple incommen-
surabilityʼ is already a thought, after all. Dialectic
ʻturns against itselfʼ, not by exhaustedly lurching into
a dogmatism it has managed to stave off until the last,
but by making visible its own conditionedness. Adorno
suggests, indeed, that charges of dogmatism will fall
on any attempt to think the conditionedness of thought:
ʻWhatever convicts the subject of its own arbitrariness,
whatever convicts the subjectʼs prius of aposteriority,
will always sound to the subject like a transcendent
dogma.ʼ70 The two apparently opposed complaints
most often addressed to Adornoʼs thought – that he
makes an inadmissible leap into sociology, and that
he takes flight into metaphysics or mysticism – are in
truth deeply related. Both take Adorno as dogmatic in
just the sense to which he here refers.71
But the statement also indicates just why it is so
important to Adorno to contest the prohibition on the
experience of transcendence. The impulse to thematize
an ineliminably metaphysical moment in thinking is
not the impulse once and for all to liberate spirit
from its body: quite the reverse. The possibility of
the experience of transcendence is at once that of the
experience of freedom and that of thoughtʼs ability
to think its own conditionedness. Without such a pos-
sibility thought will be unable to think what it lives
off. Thought which fails to think what it lives off is
not thinking. The reproach of dogmatism or of contra-
dictoriness addressed to the idea of the non-identical
– as though from blessed islands where these hydras
have long been slain – does not succeed in eliminating
either dogmatism or contradiction. The life of nega-
tive dialectic lies in contradiction; it does not aim to
eradicate contradictions in thought, but to understand
the possibility of reconciling antagonism. ʻNur wenn,
was ist, sich ändern läßt, ist das, was ist, nicht allesʼ:
ʻonly if “that which is” can be changed is “that which
is” not all there isʼ.72
18 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
Notes
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman
Kemp Smith, Macmillan, London, 1933, p. 361 (Kritik
der Reinen Vernunft [KrV], A395–96). I wish to thank
Nick Walker, Drew Milne, Nigel Mapp, Jay Bernstein,
Chris Thornhill. For a paper on a partially related topic
cf. Carrie L. Hull, ʻThe Need in Thinking: Materiality
in Theodor W. Adorno and Judith Butlerʼ, Radical Phil-
osophy 84, July/August 1997, pp. 22–35.
2. Ibid., p. 300; KrV, A 298/B354–55.
3. Wilfrid Sellars, ʻEmpiricism and the Philosophy of
Mindʼ in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Sci-
ence. Volume 1: The Foundations of Science and the
Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, edited by
Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven, University of Min-
nesota Press, Minneapolis, 1956, pp. 253–329, p. 253.
4. Cf. John McDowell, Mind and World, Harvard Univer-
sity Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994.
5. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V.
Miller, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1977,
pp. 351–2.
6. The German title of the work translated as Against Epis-
temology by Willis Domingo (Blackwell, Oxford, 1982)
is Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie [ME] (Towards
a Metacritique of Epistemology). Adorno, however, had
initially wanted the work to be called The Phenomeno-
logical Antinomies; he was planning in 1935 to subtitle
the work ʻProlegomena to a Dialectical Logicʼ. The final
title was a compromise with the publisher. For a discus-
sion of the title of this book see Vorlesung zur Einleitung
in die Erkenntnistheorie 1957–58 [VEET] Junius, Frank-
furt am Main, n.d., p. 18. Readers should be aware that
Domingoʼs version is not always accurate.
7. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 27; KrV, Bxxvi.
8. Negative Dialektik [ND], Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main,
1975, p. 383; Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton,
Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973, p. 391.
VEET, p. 50. ʻDer Essay als Formʼ, Noten zur Literatur,
Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1974, pp. 9–13, p. 17;
Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2
vols, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991–92,
vol. 1, p. 10. Readers should be aware that Ashtonʼs
translation of Negative Dialektik is often defective.
9. ND, p. 379; Negative Dialectics, p. 386. Philosophische
Terminologie [PhT], 2 vols, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am
Main, 1973–74, vol. 2, p. 98 (4.xii.1962).
10. Cf. Carl Braun, Kritische Theorie versus Kritizismus
([Kantstudien: Ergänzungshefte, 115] de Gruyter, Berlin,
1983, passim.
11. VEET, p. 90. Cf. Helga Gripp, Theodor W. Adorno:
Erkenntnisdimensionen negativer Dialektik, Schöningh,
Paderborn, 1986, pp. 73–4.
12. Cf. Anke Thyen, Negative Dialektik und Erfahrung. Zur
Rationalität des Nichtidentischen bei Adorno, Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt am Main, 1989.
13. ND, p. 189; Negative Dialectics, p. 188.
14. ND, pp. 379–80; Negative Dialectics, p. 387.
15. PhT, ii, p. 48 (20.xi.1962).
16. Ibid.
17. ND, p. 382; Negative Dialectics, p. 389.
18. Cf. Ludwig Pongratz, ʻZur Aporetik des Erfahrungs-
begriffs bei Theodor W. Adornoʼ, Philosophisches Jahr-
buch 93, 1986, pp. 135–42, p. 142.
19. VEET, pp. 185–320. An edition of this text overseen
 by the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv is to appear shortly
as section 4, volume 1 of the Nachgelassene Schriften
[Posthumous Works], published by Suhrkamp. Adornoʼs
1959 lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason will ap-
pear as section 4, volume 4 of the same series.
20. For whom, see J. Alberto Coffa, The Semantic Tra-
dition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station,
edited by Linda Wessels, Cambridge University Press,
Cambridge, 1991.
21. VEET, p. 187. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 128; KrV,
B127–28.
22. ND, p. 384; Negative Dialectics, p. 392.
23. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 128; KrV, B128.
24. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 28; KrV, Bxxviii.
25. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 27n; KrV, Bxxvi n.
26. ND, p. 139; Negative Dialectics, p. 135.
27. ME, p. 84; Against Epistemology, p. 78.
28. Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 120–22; KrV, A84–87/
B116–19.
29. ND, p. 78; Negative Dialectics, p. 71. Cf. G.W.F. Hegel,
Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, George Allen &
Unwin, London, 1969, pp. 412–16.
30. VEET, p. 288.
31. ʻPure forms of intuitionʼ: Critique of Pure Reason, p.
67; KrV, B36/A22. ʻPure intuitionsʼ: Critique of Pure
Reason, p. 69; KrV, B39/A24.
32. ME, p. 151; Against Epistemology, p. 146.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. VEET, p. 215. Cf. VEET, p. 182.
36. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 161; KrV, B145–46.
37. VEET, p. 225.
38. S. Jarvis, ʻThe “Unhappy Consciousness” and Con-
scious Unhappiness. On Adornoʼs Critique of Hegel
and the Idea of an Hegelian Critique of Adornoʼ, in
G.K. Browning, ed., Hegelʼs Phenomenology of Spirit:
A Reappraisal, Kluwer Press, Amsterdam, 1997, pp.
57–72.
39. Rudolf Carnap, ʻPseudoproblems in Philosophy: The
Heteropsychological and the Realism Controversyʼ,
in The Logical Structure of the World, trans. Rolf A.
George, Routledge, London, 1967, pp. 301–43.
40. ND, p. 374; Negative Dialectics, p. 381.
41. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 300; KrV, A298/B355.
42. ND, p. 384; Negative Dialectics, p. 392.
43. See, for example, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 28; KrV,
Bxxviiii: ʻThough I cannot know, I can yet think free-
dom; that is to say, the representation of it is at least not
self-contradictory, provided due account be taken our
critical distinction between the two modes of represen-
tation, the sensible and the intellectual, and of the re-
sulting limitation of the pure concepts of understanding
and of the principles which flow from them.ʼ
44. Albrecht Wellmer, ʻ“Metaphysik im Augenblick ihres
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
Sturzes”ʼ, in Metaphysik nach Kant? Stuttgarter Hegel-
Kongreß 1987, edited by Dieter Henrich and Rolf-Peter
Horstmann, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart, 1988, pp. 767–83, p.
767.
45. Ibid., p. 773.
46. Ibid., pp. 773–4.
47. Ibid., p. 773.
48. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 668; KrV, A856/B884.
Adorno, ʻÜber Traditionʼ, in Gesammelte Schriften
10.1, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, pp. 310–20,
p. 315.
49. ND, p. 400; Negative Dialectics, p. 408.
50. ND, p. 197; Negative Dialectics, p. 197.
51. ND, pp. 381–82; Negative Dialectics, p. 389.
52. Ibid.
53. ND, p. 384; Negative Dialectics, p. 392.
54. ʻDiskussionsprotokolleʼ, in Max Horkheimer, Gesam-
melte Schriften, volume 12: Nachgelassene Schriften
1931–49, edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Fischer,
Frankfurt am Main, 1985, pp. 349–605, p. 490.
55. Ibid.
56. Michael Theunissen, ʻNegativität bei Adornoʼ, in
Adorno-Konferenz 1983, edited by Ludwig von Friede-
burg and Jürgen Habermas, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am
Main, 1983, pp. 41–65.
57. ND, p. 17; Negative Dialectics, p. 5.
58. ND, p. 22; Negative Dialectics, p. 11.
59. Theunissen, ʻNegativitätʼ, p. 46.
60. Ibid., p. 61.
61. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
edited by Allen Wood, trans. Barry Nisbet, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 23.
62. ND, p. 370; Negative Dialectics, pp. 377–8.
63. Ästhetische Theorie [AT], Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am
Main, 1970, p. 337; Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor, Athlone, London, 1997, p. 227.
64. ND, p. 41; Negative Dialectics, p. 31.
65. AT, p. 335; Aesthetic Theory, p. 226. (Translation
mine.)
66. Theunissen, ʻNegativitätʼ, p. 53.
67. Theunissen, Sein und Schein. Die kritische Funktion
der Hegelschen Logik, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main,
1980, p. 33.
68. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 33; KrV, Bxxxvii.
69. ND, p. 397; Negative Dialectics, pp. 405–6.
70. ND, p. 183; Negative Dialectics, p. 181.
71. For an account aware of the link between these two
charges, see Michael Theunissen, Hegels Lehre vom
absoluten Geist als theologisch-politischer Traktat, de
Gruyter, Berlin, 1970, pp. 27–40.
72. ND, p. 391; Negative Dialectics, p. 398. On the per-
sistence of dogmatism, cf. especially lecture 23 from
PhT ii, pp. 44–55 (20.xi.1962).
19
Bakhtin, Cassirer and
symbolic forms
Craig Brandist
Many have seen in Bakhtinʼs theory of the novel
something relevant for a wide variety of disciplines,
from literary studies, narrowly defined, to political
theory and anthropology. Accordingly, it has been
noted that the theory incorporates an ideal history of
literary forms, a philosophy of culture, a typology of
discursive relations, and a theory of conflicting social
forces. The sources of such a wide-ranging theory
seem to be diverse: from Marburg Neo-Kantianism
to Russian Formalism, Marxist political theory and
classical aeshetics. However, there seems a wealth
of evidence to suggest that behind the eclecticism
of Bakhtinʼs theory lies a unifying feature: Hegelian
philosophy as modified by the work of Ernst Cassirer.
I believe there are many areas in which the influence
of Cassirer on Bakhtinʼs group can be traced, including
the concept of the sign and the way such periods as
the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are conceived,
but here I shall limit my attention to the influence of
Cassirerʼs work on Bakhtinʼs theory of the novel. As
we shall see, while Bakhtinʼs own terminology differs
significantly from that of Hegel and Cassirer, the struc-
tural features common to their works are too pervasive
to be passed off as one influence among many.
Revised Hegelianism
If the structural parallels between these thinkersʼ
works are as pervasive as I suggest, it would be
reasonable to ask why, when such a huge amount of
critical material about Bakhtin has been produced
in recent years, no systematic analysis of Cassirerʼs
influence on Bakhtin has appeared.1 One reason is the
lack of a definitive, chronologically organized edition
of Bakhtinʼs work, which is itself a product of the
vicissitudes of intellectual life in the Soviet Union.
Another reason derives from the way Cassirerʼs work
has been understood until quite recently. As John Krois
notes, Anglo-American writers have tended to present
Cassirer as ʻa scholarly investigator and historian of
ideas, a representative of historicism without a position
of his ownʼ, while in Germany he has been seen to
20 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
represent Marburg Neo-Kantian epistemology.2 Thus,
while many have noted the importance of Neo-Kan-
tianism in Bakhtinʼs work, though with little or no
archival evidence, Cassirer has remained simply one
among many thinkers. Recently published interviews
with Bakhtin shortly before his death make it very
clear, however, that Cassirerʼs 1923–29 three-volume
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was one of the
most important influences on Bakhtinʼs mature work,3
while Brian Pooleʼs forthcoming archival research has
uncovered notebooks in which Bakhtin made copious
notes from Cassirerʼs work. At a deeper level, research-
ers have tended to take Bakhtinʼs negatively tinged
overt references to Hegelʼs philosophy at face value,
assuming that they implied a rejection of Hegelianism
in its totality. This is based on Bakhtinʼs objection to
interpretations of Dostoevskyʼs novels which confuse
the way Hegel treats different perspectives on reality
as stages in a single, linear development with Dosto-
evskyʼs presentation of ʻa plurality of independent and
unmerged voices and consciousnessesʼ which unfold
in the course of the novel without each ʻbecom[ing] a
simple object of the authorʼs consciousnessʼ.4 There is
no doubt that Bakhtin is with Dostoyevsky and against
Hegel here. However, Bakhtinʼs comment is almost
identical to a remark by Cassirer, whose central work
is profoundly Hegelian,5 that the main problem with
Hegel is that philosophy deprives ʻvarious cultural
forms … of their autonomous and independent value
and subordinates them to its own systematic purpose.
Here is the point of contrast with Kant.ʼ6 Despite this
reservation, there seems little doubt that Bakhtinʼs
account of the emergence and development of the novel
is profoundly Hegelian, and that the novel itself takes
over many of the functions of Hegelʼs philosophy, but
now cleansed of its monologic inclinations.
For Hegel, phenomenology studies the way Geist 7
ʻappearsʼ – that is, objectifies itself in things in order
to appear ʻfor itselfʼ as something opposite to itself.
Bakhtin follows Hegel closely here, arguing that the
novel studies and recalls the way life is objectified in
language. This recollection is not only historical but
also, like Hegelʼs phenomenology, the study of the
essential. The philosophy of Geist is characterized
by Hegel as the representation of the route natural
consciousness takes to true knowledge as a matter of
necessity. ʻEssenceʼ must ultimately ʻappearʼ at the
end of a course of development. Bakhtinʼs 1934–35
essay ʻDiscourse in the Novelʼ is an account of how
the ʻessenceʼ of the novel as a genre ʻappearsʼ, that is,
comes to fully present ʻall the social and ideological
voices of its era [heteroglossia], that is, all the eraʼs
languages that have any claim to being significantʼ.8
The parallel is explicitly outlined at one stage of this
work:
Heteroglossia ʻin-itselfʼ becomes, in the novel and
thanks to the novel, heteroglossia ʻfor-itselfʼ: lan-
guages are dialogically implicated in each other and
begin to exist for each other. It is precisely thanks
to the novel that languages are able to illuminate
each other mutually; literary language becomes a
dialogue of languages that both know about and
understand each other.9
This extraordinary recasting of the Hegelian dia-
lectic was based upon a crucial amendment made to
Hegelʼs system by Cassirer in 1923: the insistence that
ʻphilosophical awareness arises only in and through
languageʼ.10 Indeed, it may well have been the appear-
ance of the first volume of Cassirerʼs The Philosophy
of Symbolic Forms in that year that led Bakhtin and
his group into a prolonged and extremely productive
study of the relations between language in everyday
life and in literature.
Like Bakhtin, Cassirer followed Hegel in shifting
the concept of ʻcultureʼ11 from the aesthetic sense it
still maintained in Kantʼs writing to an anthropological
sense where it helped to effect a shift in political theory
from problems of ideology to questions of hegemony.12
However, Cassirer added a semiotic dimension by
replacing Hegelʼs ʻlogicʼ with the ʻlawʼ of symbolism
that underlies the development of symbolic forms: art,
language, myth, science, history, and so on. There
are three stages in the development of these forms,
which Cassirer calls ʻmimeticʼ, ʻanalogicalʼ and ʻpurely
symbolicʼ. In the case of language, the first stage is
reached when the sound uttered tries to ʻapproach the
sensory impression and reproduce its diversity as faith-
fully as possibleʼ. Here, there is no attempt to make
ʻgeneral designationsʼ; rather, a phonetic nuance tries
to reproduce every nuance of the sensory impression.13
In an argument that strongly echoes Bakhtinʼs narra-
tive, Cassirer argues that this breaks down as different
cultures and languages come into contact with each
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
other and as a result of the internal criticism of lan-
guage.14 At this stage ʻcontext is … communicated by
a formal analogy between the phonetic sequence and
the sequence of contents designatedʼ,15 the sign has a
referential relationship to reality and communicates the
speakerʼs relationship with reality. Ultimately language
makes a ʻvirtue … of the ambiguity inevitable in the
linguistic signʼ and relinquishes ʻthe last semblance
of any mediate or immediate identity between reality
and symbolʼ.16 Understanding is thereby liberated from
close adherence to the concrete world of sense impres-
sions, through orientation towards the activity of the
subject and towards the full realization and application
of the symbolic character of interpretation. In a key
passage from the volume on language, Cassirer argues
that the value and specific character of both linguistic
and artistic formation lie in the ʻprogressive removalʼ
from ʻthe immediately givenʼ, for ʻthe distance from
immediate reality and immediate experience is the
condition of their being perceived, of our spiritual
awareness of themʼ.17
The general lines of the parallels with Bakhtinʼs
account of the emergence of novelistic discourse
should be apparent even after this short sketch. For
Bakhtin, it is precisely the breakdown of the period of
sealed-off national languages (monoglossia) at the end
of the Hellenic period that allowed the decentring of
cultural consciousness represented in and by the novel
to develop. No longer was there an absolute faith in the
correspondence of language and reality; only a formal
analogy was now sustainable. Yet even this was subject
to pressure from the relativizing influence of reflexive
and self-aware (purely symbolic) forms of discourse
promoted by speech diversity. Critical consciousness
thus begins to emerge from the fetters of myth as
the dissociation between ʻlanguage and intentions,
language and thought, language and expressionʼ is
made clear. By ʻdissociationʼ Bakhtin makes it clear
that he is talking about ʻa destruction of any absolute
bonding of ideological meaning to language, which
is the defining factor of mythological and magical
thoughtʼ. The absolute domination of language by
mythological thought is, argues Bakhtin, ʻlocated in
the prehistorical … past of language consciousnessʼ18
from which language and literature emerged and began
to limit the influence of myth over thought by exposing
the distance between language and reality.
Myth as a symbolic form
For Cassirer, all symbolic forms must ʻbe emancipated
from the common matrix of myth.… Theoretical,
21
practical and aesthetic consciousness, the world of
language and morality, the basic forms of commu-
nity and the state – they are all originally tied up
with mythico-religious conceptionsʼ.19 Myth, like art,
science and language, is a configuration towards being,
but the specificity of myth lies not in its content but
in ʻthe intensity with which it is experienced, with
which it is believed – as only something endowed with
objective reality can be believedʼ.20 Mythic thought
allows no detachment; it stands in awe of what con-
fronts it, having ʻno will to understand the object by
encompassing it logically and articulating it with a
complex of cause and effects; it is simply overpowered
by the objectʼ.21 The mythical world is one of con-
flicting powers, every natural phenomenon is imbued
with those powers and it is therefore perceived as
itself permeated by emotional qualities. Everything
in the mythical world is friendly or inimical, alluring
or repellent, fascinating or threatening because the
primitive mentality views nature as sympathetic – that
is, as a fundamental ʻsolidarity of lifeʼ in which the
viewer has no unique and privileged place. Scientific
thought has systematically to liberate the observer
from observed phenomena and obliterate all trace of
mythical perception, but such activity only restricts
it to certain spheres; it does not, and indeed cannot,
destroy myth itself. Myth remains in the ʻexpressive
functionʼ of symbolism, where there is no differ-
ence admitted between ʻimage and thing, the sign
and what it designatesʼ,22 where ʻevery phenomenon
discloses a definite character … which belongs to it
immediatelyʼ.23 Art, like myth, is dependent on the
perception of expression, but, as we shall see, there
are significant differences between the two. Myth is
overwhelmed by this perception, whereas art couples
depth of feeling with ʻthe distance accompanying the
universality of objectificationʼ. Human life is ʻbound
and fetteredʼ in mythical experience, whereas in art
it becomes ʻaesthetically liberatedʼ.24
As well as being an ideal history of the unfolding
of autonomous symbolic forms from the common
matrix of myth, Cassirerʼs work also presents a theory
of conflicting social forces. As for Bakhtin, the main
conflict here is that between mythical and non- (or
anti-) mythical conceptions of the world: a dialectic
of mythical and critical symbolic forms. Although a
distinct and irreducible symbolic form, myth can and
does enter into combinations with other forms and has
a particularly close kinship with both language and art.
It is especially apparent in openly emotional language
and in lyric poetry.25 It is also there in mythic rites,
where time is arrested and man can enter the ʻoriginal
22 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
timeʼ of the gods. In rituals surrounding birth and
death, puberty and marriage, a sort of abstract ʻbio-
logical timeʼ is felt rather than thought in an abstract
sense.26 Mythic experience and expression are ʻa mere
passivity, a being-acted-upon rather than actingʼ, and
this receptivity stands in evident contrast to that kind
of spontaneity in which all self-consciousness as such
is groundedʼ.27 In the repetition of rites critical discern-
ment and consciousness of personality are lulled asleep
and the mythical conception of the world can extend
its influence.28 This became particularly pertinent for
Cassirer at the end of his life when he reflected on
the rise of Nazism in Germany. Myth there became
a ʻtechnique of rulershipʼ based on the shifting of
language from descriptive to emotional speech; the
ritualization of social life; the replacement of ideal
values with concrete images of good and bad; and the
development of a sort of prophesy based on scientific
and philosophical claims.29 The spontaneity of thought
and action is limited and authoritative substitutes are
provided.
While it is highly unlikely that Bakhtin read Cas-
sirerʼs last work, the ritualization of everyday life
and the unprecedented ideological centralization of
Soviet society in the 1930s were undoubtedly enough
to compel Bakhtin to treat myth as a contemporary
as well as a historical and formal question. Thus
while Bakhtin was to treat the absolute domination
of language and literature by myth as an issue that
receded into the distant past, the relative power of
myth in these spheres is treated as an eternal ques-
tion. Having accepted the irreducibility and incompat-
ibility of ʻsymbolic formsʼ, Bakhtin follows Cassirer
in posing the struggle between different orientations
as irreconcilable in principle. Within the sphere of
language, Bakhtin sees all forces towards linguistic
centralization as evidence of a mythical influence
on language, while within the realm of literature he
follows Cassirer in positing ʻpoetryʼ, the ʻdiscourse of
pathosʼ and the epic as manifestations of the influence
of the mythic. The unitary language imposes ʻspecific
limitsʼ on heteroglossia, brings about the ʻenslavementʼ
of other languages by ʻthe process of illuminating them
with the True Wordʼ.30 Unitary language limits the
spontaneity of thought and action by limiting its verbal
embodiment, and it ʻpositsʼ itself as universally valid,
directly expressive of reality itself. Coinciding with
this, the disciplines which study this language have
tended to assume the passive reception of this ideologi-
cally ʻneutralʼ discourse as synonymous with verbal
understanding as such, essentially obscuring and thus
strengthening the influence of myth on language.
Similarly in poetry and poetics the mythical con-
ception of the world has been dominant. As Bakhtin
puts it: ʻany sense of the boundedness, the historic-
ity, the social determination and specificity of oneʼs
own language … and therefore a critically qualified
relationship to oneʼs own language … is foreign to
poetic styleʼ. The poet is thereby dangerously close to
a mythical conception of language, having no critical
distance from his own language, in which he is ʻutterly
immersedʼ.31 The language of the poet presents itself as
at one with his immediate experience, it only exists for
him from the inside. For lyric poetry, notes Cassirer,
ʻthere is nothing external; it is always withinʼ; it main-
tains an apparently infinite ʻinnernessʼ to the extent
that ʻit is never completely expressible or exhaustible;
but this is an infinity of content not extensionʼ.32 The
object of poetic discourse, whether externally per-
ceived or internally felt, has an ʻinexhaustible wealth
and contradictory multiplicityʼ to which the poetic
word is never equal, but it need never assume other
acts of ʻverbal recognitionʼ.33 Like that of the lyric
poet, the ʻdiscourse of pathosʼ also ʻhas the appearance
of directly intentional discourseʼ. Although it appears
in the novel, it does so ʻto restore some other genre,
genres that, in their own unmediated and pure form,
have lost their base in realityʼ, and it is thus usually
conditional.34 A discourse of pathos appears in the
novel to resist the critical forces at work within it:
ʻThe discourse of pathos and the kind of representation
it represents were born and shaped in the distanced
image; they are organically linked with the hierarchi-
cally evaluated concept of the past.ʼ35 This discourse
thus shares with poetry the expressive function as a
dominant aspect, but it is also linked with a type of
view of the past which dominates the world of epic and
is an aspect of mythical time. For epic is concerned
with the ʻabsolute pastʼ and ʻsacrosanct traditionʼ,
which, like the mythical ʻoriginal timeʼ of the gods,
is ʻimpossible to change, to rethink, to re-evaluateʼ.
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
Passive reverence is the only possible relationship with
this time; it is a mythical time that excludes any active
engagement; it is a ʻvalorised, hierarchical categoryʼ,
all points of which are equidistant from the present,
active, open moment. 36 The ʻabsolute pastʼ is a mythic
realm it is no longer possible to enter, but it has
authority in the present, being a time of ʻbeginningsʼ
and ʻpeak timesʼ, of ʻfirstsʼ and ʻbestsʼ.37 The epic poet
gives prophesies in a language that originates in the
valorized past, which cannot be doubted; a language
from an authoritative time before which the listener
and singer stand in awe.
Myth and hegemony
This complex of myth and language is thus oriented
against the decentralizing, critical forces of culture,
seeking to limit those forces and present a single
viewpoint as directly expressive of natural existence.
The term Bakhtin gives to language that is oriented
in a mythical fashion is ʻauthoritative discourseʼ. In a
famous passage he notes that
The authoritative word demands that we acknowl-
edge it, that we make it our own; it binds us, quite
independent of any power it might have to persuade
us internally; we encounter it with its authority
already fused to it. The authoritative word is located
in the distanced zone, organically connected with a
past that is felt to be hierarchically higher.38
Bakhtin then goes on to pronounce the kinship of this
ʻwordʼ with taboo, a central plank of Cassirerʼs volume
on myth. The ʻauthoritative wordʼ is a ʻname that
must not be taken in vainʼ;39 it can be unconditionally
accepted or rejected, and its authority along with it.
As in myth, ʻobligation has a purely social character
and is experienced as an external force. Deliberation
is unnecessary in the rigidly prescribed social sphere
of mythic thoughtʼ.40
As I have argued elsewhere,41 what Bakhtin is
describing in his discussion of monologism, poetry
and ʻauthoritative discourseʼ is less a type of dis-
course than an orientation towards other discourses.
He speaks of relationships between languages as a type
of language itself rather than as a mode of interaction
or ʻhegemonic principleʼ. ʻAuthoritative discourseʼ is
really an authoritative relationship between privileged
and subordinate perspectives. The confusion seems to
emanate from Bakhtinʼs adoption of irreducible and
ideal symbolic forms: myth, science, history, language
etc., which remains consistent only as long as language
is treated, as Cassirer treats it, in a general, abstract
fashion. Once each specific language is considered as
an autonomous symbolic form in itself, then it is no
23
longer possible to talk about myth, art and so forth as
symbolic forms in the same sense. There is a crucial
difference between stylistic and generic categories,
which Bakhtin does not admit. Myth, in this sense,
refers to the absolute hegemony of one language, the
ideal limit of the authoritative hegemonic principle.
This redefinition becomes necessary as soon as any
attempt is made to stratify language internally in any
systematic sense. This was perhaps the single most
important advance made by Bakhtin over Cassirer: the
attempt to stratify language according to sociological
principles and orientations. However, Bakhtin was not
prepared to take the next logical step: to correlate
linguistic evaluation and orientation with the insti-
tutional co-ordinates of social life in anything but the
most general terms. In the absence of this, Cassirerʼs
dialectic of mythical and critical forms of culture are
grafted onto a populist dialectic of the official and
the popular. Cassirerʼs conceptual structure, forged
from within the traditions of German liberalism, is
now attached to a structure adopted from Russian
populism.42
Popular laughter and radical scepticism
The main features of this grafting are apparent in the
importance Bakhtin accords to the role of folk laughter
and parody in the development of critical forms of
culture. Laughter, argues Bakhtin, ʻdemolishes fear
and piety before an objectʼ, making ʻinvestigative
experiment – both scientific and artisticʼ possible by
bringing the object up close to examine it with bold
familiarity. The destruction of ʻepic distanceʼ, strip-
ping the object of its ʻhierarchical ornamentationʼ,
is ʻan extremely important and indispensable step
in making possible free, scientifically knowable and
artistically realistic creativity in European civilisationʼ.
Through laughter, ʻanalysis, dismemberment, turning
things into dead objectsʼ reigns supreme.43 Turning
things into ʻdead objectsʼ is the antithesis of mythical
perception as found in Cassirerʼs work, but here it is
correlated with popular culture. In the carnival squares
of early modern Europe Bakhtin saw the antithesis
of the monolithically serious official world-view of
the ruling culture.44 Playing with sacred images and
official language served to destroy its fear-inspiring
ornamentation and claims to ultimate, mythical valid-
ity. However, argues Bakhtin, it was only with the
entry of the spirit of the carnival square into literature
that the critical impulse implicit in popular travesty
could achieve ideological structuredness. The epitome
of this transposition of popular humour into literature
Bakhtin famously found in the work of Rabelais.
24 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
Similar accounts of the role of laughter in litera-
ture, though without the populist gloss or centrality
bestowed upon it by Bakhtin, appear in Cassirerʼs
work. In one of his last books, Cassirer noted that
ʻcomic art possesses in the highest degree that faculty
shared by all art, sympathetic visionʼ. Human life
appears to us with all its defects and foibles. Whereas
the lyric poet can revitalize mythic feelings, the comic
artist is particularly realistic:
We become observant of the minutest details; we
see this world in all its narrowness, its pettiness,
and silliness. We live in this restricted world, but
we are no longer imprisoned by it. Such is the na-
ture of the comic catharsis. Things and events begin
to lose their material weight; scorn is dissolved into
laughter and laughter is liberation.45
In the 1932 book The Platonic Renaissance in
England, Cassirer singled out the works of Cervantes,
Boccaccio, Rabelais, Hans Sachs and Shakespeare as
representatives of the use of comedy as a ʻliberating,
life-giving, and life-forming power of the soulʼ. In
these works excessive seriousness and pedantry are
revealed:
To the pedant, as to the zealot, freedom of thought
is an abomination; for the former takes shelter be-
hind the dignity of knowledge, the latter behind the
sanctified authority of religion. When both retrench
themselves behind a false gravity, nothing remains
but to subject them to the test of ridicule and ex-
pose them.46
These Renaissance authors effectively inaugurate a
comic and parodic testing of the charactersʼ discourse
and their claims to universality. Again, this is a very
short step from Bakhtinʼs analysis as it appears in
1934–35, where all the examples given by Cassirer that
appear in novelistic texts appear in ʻDiscourse in the
Novelʼ. Following through the logic of his fusing the
dialectics of symbolic forms with populism, Bakhtin
finds in the novel the literary equivalent of popular
parody: it is quite the antithesis of ʻofficialʼ genres,
parodying their roles as genres, and has no canon of
its own.47
As a ʻpopularʼ genre and a critical symbolic form,
the novel evolved in and through its struggle with
myth in the form of ʻpoetryʼ, those ennobled forms
of literature which assumed an immediate or mediate
correspondence between sign and referent. In such
ʻpre-novelisticʼ genres as the minor parodic genres
( fabliaux, schwänk, street songs etc.), Bakhtin saw the
emergence of an inherent ʻphilosophy of discourseʼ,
in essence a ʻprofound distrust of discourse as suchʼ.
What concerns such genres is not the direct meaning
or emotional content of the word, but
the actual and always self-interested use to which
the meaning is put and the way it is expressed
by the speaker, a use determined by the speakerʼs
position (profession, social class etc.) and by the
concrete situation. Who speaks and under what
conditions he speaks: this is what determines the
wordʼs actual meaning. All direct meanings and di-
rect expressions are false, and this is especially true
of emotional meanings and expressions.48
In response to the falsity of pathos-ridden truth
claims by knights, priests, scholars and so on, one
sees the ʻgay deceptionʼ, the intelligent lies of rogues
or the foolʼs lack of comprehension. Deception meets
(dubious) truth claims, and incomprehension meets
(pseudo) intelligence in a polemical fashion. Some-
times the rogue dons the mask of the fool and becomes
the clown ʻto motivate distortions and shufflings of
languages and labels, thus unmasking them by not
understanding themʼ.49 Thus evolves a ʻradical scepti-
cism … bordering on rejection of the very possibility
of having a straightforward discourse at all that would
not be falseʼ.50 The further this freeing of discourse
from heavy pathos proceeds, the more open it is to
a further development: a dialectical synthesis of the
heroʼs discourse about himself and his world with
the authorʼs own thought about him in the image of
the heroʼs language. Now one can take a variety of
attitudes towards ʻthe argument sounding within the
image, … take various positions in this argument and,
consequently … vary the interpretation of the image
itself. The image becomes polysemic, like a symbolʼ.51
In the novelistic image the negation is itself negated
and a new, qualitatively different type of knowledge
is born.
In a key section of The Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms, to which we alluded above, Cassirer develops
exactly the same argument with regard to the role of
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
scepticism in the philosophy of language (sophism).
In seeking to expose the nullity of knowledge and
language, scepticism ultimately demonstrates some-
thing rather different: ʻthe nullity of the standard by
which it measures themʼ:
In scepticism the ʻcopy theoryʼ is methodically and
consistently demolished by the self-destruction of its
basic premises. The farther the negation is carried
in this point, the more clearly a positive insight fol-
lows from it. The last semblance of any mediate or
immediate identity between reality and symbol must
be effaced, the tension between the two must be
enhanced to the extreme, for it is precisely in this
tension that the specific achievement of symbolic
expression and the content of the particular symbol-
ic forms is made evident. For this content cannot be
revealed as long as we hold fast to the belief that
we possess ʻrealityʼ as a given, self-sufficient being,
prior to all spiritual formation.52
The novelistic image for Bakhtin is just such a ʻtensionʼ,
an unresolved argument in a form ʻlike a symbolʼ, what
Cassirer called a ʻcoincidentia oppositoriumʼ.53 What
is now revealed in the novel is that ʻthe meaning
of each form cannot be sought in what it expresses,
but only in the manner and modality, the inner law
of expression itself.ʼ54 Dialogism, the relationality of
languages, is that ʻinner-lawʼ for Bakhtin, for it is
here that the myriad voices of heteroglossia are united
into a single problem and solution. Their diversity and
richness are forms of human ʻspiritualʼ life, but, as
Cassirer puts it, ʻof spiritual life which bears the stamp
of inner necessity and hence objectivityʼ.55
The novel
As an artistic form, the novel presents us with a
particular and indispensable type of knowledge. One
is immediately struck by the wealth of visual meta-
phors Bakhtin utilizes in his description of the novel,
from the ʻrefractionʼ of the intentions of the speaker,
through the ʻprismʼ of heteroglossia, to the novelistʼs
presentation of the ʻimageʼ of a language. For Bakhtin,
as for Cassirer, ʻimage worldsʼ are the sole means of
seeing and possessing ʻrealityʼ.56 Art, argues Cassirer,
teaches us how to ʻvisualise thingsʼ, giving us a ʻricher,
more vivid, and more profound insight into its formal
structureʼ.57 By objectifying his ʻsympathetic visionʼ,
giving expressive meaning an objective form, the artist
reveals the ʻinner-formʼ of the object. In the novel,
argues Bakhtin, the ʻinner-formʼ, the ideological struc-
ture, of a language is revealed in the ʻimage of the
languageʼ. Moreover, the novel presents ʻa system of
images of languagesʼ,58 a variety of viewpoints on the
world mutually illuminated through their interaction:
25
 Languages of heteroglossia, like mirrors that face
each other, each reflecting in its own way a tiny
corner of the world, force us to guess at and grasp
for a world behind their mutually reflecting aspects
that is broader, more multi-levelled, containing more
and varied horizons than would be available to a
single language or a single mirror.59
Bakhtin here follows closely an argument presented
by Cassirer in his 1927 study of Renaissance phil-
osophy. All the perspectives of an era must be col-
lected into ʻthe unity of a vision, a visio intellectualisʼ
which illustrates the absurdity of the proposition that
the absolute can be perceived through an individual
point of view, and also the lack of priority to be given
to any single perspective ʻbecause only the concrete
totality of them can mediate a true picture of the
Whole for usʼ. The ʻaccidentality and necessityʼ of
every single viewpoint is ʻincluded and recognizedʼ,
each view including ʻthe thing seen as well as the
manner and direction of the seeingʼ.60
Bakhtinʼs novelist creates an artistic world as
the ʻliving vehicleʼ of perception; as in the work
of Leonardo, ʻfantasy guides perception and gives
it significance, its sharpness and its definitivenessʼ.61
Selected perspectives become ʻpregnant factorsʼ which
guide the ʻsynthetic spatial imagination in certain
directionsʼ.62 Thus, the novelist ʻforces all … socio-
logically alien and distant worlds to speak about them-
selves in their own language and their own style – but
the author builds a superstructure over these languages
made up of his own intentions and accents, which
becomes dialogically linked with themʼ.63 The very
shape of the artistic work develops in accordance with
the essential truth of things, as the sort of imaginative
model Cassirer found first theorized in the aesthetics of
Shaftesbury.64 The authorʼs own perspective becomes
decentred among the various perspectives on offer, his
own biases and preferences subdued to a ʻcommunity
of sensibility with othersʼ. The novel becomes the
image of democratically organized social relations, of
a different hegemonic principle. In this new world it is
not the authoritative, mythic use of language as a law
to be obeyed that is operative, but a critically active
selection, rejection and assimilation from a plurality of
social perspectives. Like Hegelʼs philosophy, the novel
becomes a model for social relations. What Bakhtin
calls internally persuasive discourse refashions the
human subject ʻfrom the inside, informing its subtlest
affections and bodily responses with this law that is
not a lawʼ.65 It is a sort of implicit ethical ideology
which is ʻhalf-ours and half someone-elseʼsʼ; it ʻorgan-
ises the mass of our words from withinʼ and struggles
with other ideologies, only to be selected or rejected
26 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
in new contexts of usage. In its most fully developed
form, the novel is a model of the transcendence of the
opposition between the individual and society, of com-
pulsion and internal impulse through the democratic
hegemonic principle.
The novel takes on the role of a philosophy of
culture in that it aims to reveal the basic formative
principle behind verbal images of the world. Common
and typical principles of formation are revealed behind
diverse and dissimilar discourses: in a ʻnovelʼ sense
the unity of ʻspiritʼ behind the multiplicity of its
manifestations. The diversity of the ʻproducts of the
human spirit sustains and confirms the unity of the
productive processʼ.66 Following Shaftesbury, both
theorists argue that the aesthetic turns man away
from created things and towards the creative process:
ʻthe operative forces which have shaped this universe
and constitute its inner coherenceʼ. It is here that the
synthesis of subject and object, man and God is made
possible, for man is no longer simply a creation but
also a creator.67 A religious man, but nevertheless one
who maintained a rigorous kenoticism of the intellect,
Bakhtin followed through the Hegelian logic of his
argument to its natural, but unspoken, conclusion – the
absolute is the manifestation of God:
The ideal towards which our knowledge must strive,
then, does not lie in denying and rejecting particu-
larity, but in allowing it to unfold in all its rich-
ness. For only the totality of faces gives us the One
view of the Divine. The world becomes the symbol
of God … in that we pass through it in all of its
forms, freely submitting ourselves to its multiplicity,
to its antitheses.68
In so far as Bakhtinʼs theory of the novel provides
a dynamic model of ʻindividuals woven into an inti-
mate unity with no detriment to their specificityʼ,69 it
continues the hegemonic project of Enlightenment aes-
thetics. Dialogism, like Hegelʼs Geist, runs throughout
all epochs and social orders, and as such it describes
the social whole; but as an epoch or order might
fail to recognize the norms of social and political
behaviour that it puts forward as a type of imperative,
dialogism stands, like Geist, ʻin critical judgement over
against the historical givenʼ.70 Dialogism becomes, in
Bakhtinʼs last work, the ʻsuperaddressee … whose
absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed,
either in some metaphysical distance or in distant
historical timeʼ.71
Notes
1. I acknowledge Brian Pooleʼs illuminating paper on the
sources of Bakhtinʼs cultural messianism delivered to
the Bakhtin centenary conference at Sheffield Univer-
 sity in 1995 as an important exception here, and one
which prompted me to examine the relationship between
Bakhtin and Cassirer at greater length. I believe, how-
ever, that the focus of my article is quite different to that
of Poole.
2. John M. Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History,
Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London,
1987, p. 4.
3. N.I. Kolyshkina, ed., Besedy V.D. Duvakina s M.M. Ba-
khtinym, Progress, Moscow, 1996, pp. 42, 240.
4. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Problems of Dostoevskyʼs Poet-
ics, trans. Caryl Emerson, Manchester University Press,
Manchester, 1984.
5. On this, see Donald Verene, ʻKant, Hegel and Cassirer:
The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Formsʼ, in
Journal of the History of Ideas 30, 1969, pp. 33–48;
David Lipton, Ernst Cassirer: The Dilemma of a Liberal
Intellectual in Germany 1914–33, University of Toronto
Press, Toronto, 1978, pp. 70–82.
6. Quoted in Charles Hendel, ʻIntroductionʼ, in Ernst Cas-
sirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms [PSF], Vol. 1:
Language, trans. R. Manheim, Yale University Press,
New Haven CT and London, 1955, pp. 1–65, p. 34.
7. Note Cassirerʼs use of this term, which in the translated
texts quoted below appears as ʻspiritʼ: ʻWe should use
it in a functional sense as a comprehensive name for all
those functions which constitute and build up the world
of human cultureʼ (Krois, Cassirer, pp. 77–8).
8. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans.
M. Holquist and C. Emerson, University of Texas Press,
Austin, 1981, p. 411.
9. Ibid., p. 400.
10. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 117.
11. Cassirer defines ʻcultureʼ as ʻthe totality of activities that
produce … human historyʼ (Krois, Cassirer, p. 73).
12. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Basil
Blackwell, Oxford, 1990, p. 145.
13. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 190.
14. Krois, Cassirer, p. 101.
15. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 193.
16. Ibid., pp. 197, 188.
17. Ibid., p. 188.
18. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 369.
19. Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth, trans. S. Langer,
Harper & Bros, New York, 1953, p. 44.
20. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol.
2: Myth, trans. R. Manheim, Yale University Press, New
Haven CT and London, 1955, pp. 5–6.
21. Ibid., p. 74.
22. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol.
3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. R. Manhe-
im, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London,
1957.
23. Ibid., p. 72.
24. Krois, Cassirer, p. 139.
25. See Ernst Cassirer, Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays
and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer 1935–45, Yale University
Press, New Haven CT and London, 1979, pp. 188, 253–
5; and An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Phil-
osophy of Culture, Yale University Press, New Haven
CT and London, 1945, pp. 154–6.
26. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 2, p. 109; Krois, Cassirer, pp. 87–
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
8.
27. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 3, p. 75.
28. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State, Yale University
Press, New Haven CT and London, 1946, pp. 284–5.
29. Krois, Cassirer, pp. 192–5.
30. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 270–71.
31. Ibid., p. 285.
32. Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities, Yale Uni-
versity Press, New Haven CT and London, 1961, p.
210.
33. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 278.
34. Ibid., p. 394.
35. Ibid., p. 395.
36. Ibid, pp. 17, 18.
37. Ibid., p. 13.
38. Ibid., p. 342.
39. Ibid, p. 352.
40. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 2, p. 175.
41. Craig Brandist, ʻThe Official and the Popular in Gramsci
and Bakhtinʼ, Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 13, no.
2, 1996, pp. 59–74, pp. 70–72.
42. On Cassirer and liberalism, see Lipton, Ernst Cassirer.
43. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 23–4.
44. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans.
H. Iswolsky, Indiana University Press, Bloomington,
1984.
45. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 150.
46. Ernst Cassirer, The Platonic Renaissance in England,
trans. J. Pettegrove, Nelson, London, 1953, p. 184.
47. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 269.
48. Ibid., p. 401.
49. Ibid., p. 405.
50. Ibid., p. 401.
51. Ibid., pp. 409–10.
52. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 188.
53. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Re-
naissance Philosophy, trans. M. Domandi, Harper &
Row, New York, 1963, p. 38.
54. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 188.
55. Ibid., p. 111.
56. Ibid.
57. Cassirer, An Essay on Man, p. 170.
58. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 416.
59. Ibid., pp. 414–15.
60. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, p. 32.
61. Ibid., p. 158.
62. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 108.
63. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 409.
64. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment,
trans. F. Koelln and J. Pettegrove, Beacon Press, Boston
MA, 1955, pp. 318–27.
65. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, pp. 39, 42.
66. Cassirer, PSF, Vol. 1, p. 114.
67. Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 316.
68. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, p. 37.
69. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, p. 25.
70. Ibid., p. 149.
71. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Es-
says, trans. V. McGee, University of Texas Press, Austin,
1986, p. 126.
27
Cosmopolitanism and
boredom
Bruce Robbins
ʻIn the course of my lifeʼ, Joseph De Maistre famously
observed, ʻI have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians;
I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be
a Persian; but man I have never met.ʼ De Maistreʼs
genteel snubbing of ʻmanʼ is still remembered often,
and usually with satisfaction. But the propriety of this
snub has never seemed so open to doubt. Even if one
could assume, with De Maistre, that the abstract uni-
versal ʻmanʼ is vague and ungraspable, recent history
has made it difficult to pretend that this abstraction can
be neatly opposed to particular nationalities, assumed
to be palpable and real. Those Frenchmen De Maistre
has seen with his own eyes: are we sure they werenʼt
Alsatians or Occitanians of uncertain allegiance and
identity? Could it be that his Russians were not really
Russians at all, but Ukrainians or Georgians, Chechens
or Abkhazians whose day of national recognition had
not yet arrived – and would arrive only to be contested
in turn? Nationality, it would appear, is also an artifice,
a fragile historical generalization rather than a given
fact of nature. And precisely because France and
Russia must be acknowledged to be abstractions, it is
harder and harder to avoid at least a nodding acquaint-
ance with ʻman,ʼ who is nothing but a more unruly,
less institutionally grounded abstraction.
This devious line of argument expresses some of my
ambivalence about Martha Nussbaumʼs essay ʻPatriot-
ism and Cosmopolitanismʼ and the essays gathered
around it in For Love of Country.* In part because
of my own discomfort with the universal ʻmanʼ, I did
not set out with overwhelming sympathy for Nuss-
baumʼs cosmopolitan project, the project of educating
people into a primary allegiance to what she calls ʻthe
worldwide community of human beingsʼ. According to
this Stoic and Kantian ideal, there could be only one
cosmopolitanism, one ʻworld citizenshipʼ, for there is
only one ʻworldwide community of human beingsʼ.
Paradoxically, then, Nussbaum could only defend the
*
Martha C. Nussbaum with Respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, edited by Josh Cohen,
Beacon Press, Boston MA, 1996, 151 pp, $15.00, pb., 0 8070 4313 3.
28 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
rest against the West by means of an unrepentant
reassertion of Western philosophical universalism.
I warmed somewhat to Nussbaumʼs argument,
however, for two reasons. The first was a sense of
sneaky incoherence in positions that, like De Maistreʼs,
base their counter-appeal on the unquestionable self-
evidence of the particular. After all, it is not just an
abstract, universal ʻmanʼ, but very particular groups
of non-citizens who can be treated as if they were
not there, and are still treated as if they were not
there, because of a code of intellectual courtesy that
prides itself on recognizing only particulars. A second
reason for putting my doubts on hold was seeing what
massive hostility that argument provoked, how much
more unwilling I was to join her attackers – and, last
but not least, how disquietingly the arguments of her
attackers echoed the epistemological modesty of the
American cultural Left itself. Most of the essays in
For Love of Country are less interesting as critiques of
Nussbaumʼs cosmopolitanism than as instances of an
emergent form of American nationalism that becomes
visible against it.
To the rest of the world, American nationalism may
still seem first and foremost a hypocritical version of
idealist universalism. Its primary associations are with
the borderless-world globalism, at once capitalist and
electronic, that hypes McDonaldʼs and MTV along
with free markets and carefully selected human rights.
But recently there has been a retrenchment, a circling
of the wagons, a scaling-down of American national-
ism in the direction of Realpolitik. These days there
are many American policy-makers and media pundits
who no longer bother to pretend that whatʼs good for
us is good for the world. With a menacing modesty,
they are now content to champion one national interest
against all others. The mood is neo-medieval. And
the flower of the national clerisy, at least as far as it
is represented in this book, seems intent on declaring
itself unwilling or incompetent to pass judgement
on this melee from anywhere outside or above it.
With a silent bow in the direction of poststructuralist
commonplace, they seem to say that if there is indeed
no metalanguage, no metadiscourse, then so much the
better for us; this limitation on thought turns out to
have unexpected benefits for the worldʼs most powerful
nation, which can present itself as just another tiny
particular locked in battle with a tyrannical, totalizing
universalism. Faced with criticism of their country
from the outside, liberal and rightist intellectuals can
claim the protection that the cultural Left has accorded
to smaller and more vulnerable collectivities.
Unlike, say, Alain Finkielkraut in The Defeat of
the Mind or David Hollinger in Postethnic America,
Martha Nussbaum does not set her cosmopolitan ideal
against the perceived excesses of atavistic nationalists
abroad or academic multiculturalists at home. For
Love of Country began as an essay in the Boston
Review in late 1994 that protested against recent state-
ments by Sheldon Hackney, chairman of the National
Endowment for the Humanities, and the philosopher
Richard Rorty. Hackney, speaking for the Clinton
administration, had recently called for shared values
and national unity to counter the threats of excessive
pluralism. In a much-debated editorial in the New
York Times entitled ʻThe Unpatriotic Academyʼ, Rorty
had sternly cautioned the cultural Left to show more
deference to ʻthe emotion of national prideʼ.
Nussbaum, a distinguished classical scholar, could
hardly be mistaken for one of those mythical multi-
culturalists who supposedly refuse to teach the Greeks.
Indeed, her counterattack has nothing either multi-
or cultural about it. No multiculturalist could have
written, as she does, that ʻ[t]he accident of where one
was born is just that, an accident.ʼ For the cultural Left,
the culture one is born and raised in could hardly be
deemed accidental. Whatever controversy may exist
over when cultural diversity should matter, or how
and how much, there is widespread agreement that in
one way or other it does matter. But for Nussbaum,
culture has nothing to do with ʻmoral worthʼ, hence it
is ʻmorally irrelevantʼ. Her demand is not that greater
reverence be paid to the diversity of cultures. What she
wants is respect for a universal ethical standard.
Nussbaum thus resembles the cultural Left only in
that she too insists on obligations and commitments
that do not stop short at the borders of the nation.
But those obligations and commitments may provide
an ultimately more significant marker of current
political alignments than the usual clashes of philo-
sophical position, including that between Kantian and
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
communitarian political philosophies. At any rate,
the refusal to recognize foreign obligations and com-
mitments certainly gathers up her critics into a sudden
and coherent collectivity.
It is quite a show. With few exceptions, liberals and
conservatives join in a shockingly smooth bipartisan
consensus against this or, it seems, any challenge to
the American nation. Michael Walzer, forgetting what
Stalin did to those he called cosmopolitans, tries to tar
cosmopolitanism with the brush of Stalinism. Foreign-
ers canʼt be granted the moral rights of fellow citizens,
says Nathan Glazer. Otherwise, we would be forced to
allow an unlimited number of Third World refugees
into the USA. (This is a neat bit of illogic, on a par
with believing that socialism means having to share
your toothbrush.) Our boat is full. But cosmopolitan-
ism itself is empty. According to Robert Pinsky, who
not coincidentally has just been named our new Poet
Laureate, cosmopolitanism is as empty of affect and
constituency as Esperanto. Cosmopolitanism is ʻa view
of the world that would be true only if people were
not driven by emotionsʼ.
Emotions are among the many local particulars
that the respondents, following De Maistreʼs lead,
throw in the face of Nussbaumʼs fidelity to ʻmanʼ.
Benjamin Barber argues that to ʻbypassʼ the local is
to end up ʻnowhereʼ, in mere ʻabstraction and disem-
bodimentʼ. For Gertrude Himmelfarb, cosmopolitan-
ism ʻobscures and even denies … the givens of life:
parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, heritage,
history, culture, tradition, community – and national-
ityʼ. Many of the arguments in the book follow the
curve of this last sentence. The local, intimate ʻgivensʼ
lined up before the dash – ʻparents, ancestors, family,
race, religionʼ, and so on – are identified with the term
after the dash – ʻnationalityʼ – so as to lend to the
nation their warmth, inevitability, inviolability. Only
the dash itself hints at an unbridgeable difference in
scale and kind. Religion and nation-state, it is implied,
are both local. Since religion deserves protection from
state interference, it becomes an apparent argument for
sheltering the US state itself, suddenly radiant with
borrowed divinity, from any critique of its behaviour
toward non-citizens.
It is customary to see the American academy as a
sanctuary of secular intellectuals sheltered from the
often eccentric religiosity of the American majority.
To judge from these responses, however, it would
seem that academic opinion on US nationalism – or
the absence of acknowledgement that such nationalism
exists – reflects with uncanny exactness the petulant
sensitivity of the sectarian believer. There is more than
29
one irony in this. Multiculturalism is often charged
with an uncritical celebration of cultural givenness.
But one finds a much cruder celebration of cultural
givenness here, among writers who are mainly vehe-
ment opponents of multiculturalism, than in multi-
culturalism itself, where a shared interest in diversity
tends to force at least some relativizing of everyoneʼs
given culture.
Nussbaumʼs own favoured image for how local
givens relate to concern for humanity is concentric
circles. Borrowed from the Stoics, this image mini-
mizes conflict between humanity and the local, urging
us merely to make the outermost circle (humanity as a
whole) more and more like the inmost circle (self and
family). Yet it does suggest, however gently, the need
for an educative progress from narrower to broader
loyalties. This is already too much of an either/or for
most of the respondents. They insist, rightly enough,
that larger loyalties need not preclude or replace
smaller loyalties: ʻWe will not love those distant from
us more by loving those close to us less.ʼ (Of course,
as Charles Taylor observes, Americans have not thus
far displayed abundant love toward those closest to
them: ʻthe widespread opposition to extremely modest
national health care proposals in the United States
doesnʼt seem to indicate that contemporary Americans
suffer from too great a mutual commitment.ʼ) It is
30 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
absurd to think that most of us can or should spend
our time trying to fight free of our nations or local
entanglements. Nussbaum herself notes that the local
deserves priority in at least one ethical sense: itʼs in
your power to affect it more directly, for example as a
parent. Mrs Jellyby, the character in Bleak House who
neglects her children in favour of what Dickens calls
ʻtelescopic philanthropyʼ, remains an object lesson.
Her eyes ʻhad a curious habit of seeming to look a
long way offʼ, as Michael Sandel reminds us in his
case against cosmopolitanism. ʻAs if … they could see
nothing nearer than Africa.ʼ But let us pause to note
that in his frequently less familial moods, Dickens
himself could be considered a practitioner of telescopic
philanthropy. And his Mr Vholes in the same novel,
the Chancery lawyer who endlessly reminds everyone
that he both has and is a father, offers an opposite but
equally instructive lesson in how tender solicitude for
oneʼs family can stand in the way of reform. Dickens
sums up Vholesʼ position like this: ʻMake man-eating
unlawful, and you starve the Vholeses!ʼ
Like Mr Vholes, Nussbaumʼs respondents treat
local attachments as peremptory and absolute. Neither
cannibalism nor the Court of Chancery shall be out-
lawed, they imply, if such measures mean that their
loved ones will eat one morsel less. Walzer writes:
ʻMy allegiances, like my relationships, start at the
center.ʼ Starting at the centre, Walzer gives us
no reason to believe that his allegiances will
go any distance away from that centre. Michael
McConnell quotes Edmund Burke: ʻto love the
little platoon we belong to in society is … the
first link in the series by which we proceed
toward a love to our country and to mankind.ʼ
McConnell does not address the question of
whether we do in fact proceed in that direction,
or proceed far enough. The actual platoons,
companies, and battalions that America has
sent out into the world give some cause to
wonder.
Amy Gutmann argues in a similar vein that
ʻasking us to choose between being, above
all, citizens of our own society or, above all,
citizens of the worldʼ is ʻmorally misguided
and politically dangerousʼ. But if choosing is
not always called for, could one not at least
acknowledge that sometimes it may be? Along
with the necessity of choice, Gutmann and most
of the others throw out even its hypothetical
possibility. Thus they refuse to confront the
real core of Nussbaumʼs case, which is simply
that loyalty to oneʼs nation can and sometimes
does contradict the manifest demands of justice as
seen from any extra-national perspective, even a sub-
universalistic one. They acknowledge no moral or
political leverage against the profound rootedness of
caring first and always for our own.
Many of the respondents balk at being asked to treat
strangers as lovingly as they would treat their own
family or friends. One can see their point. As Elaine
Scarry argues, it is quite possible that the confusion
of strangers with friends is both unnecessary and a
mistake. You donʼt have to pull off the neat trick
of relating to the worldʼs distant peoples with full
imaginative and emotional intensity in order to lobby
for better policies with respect to their wellbeing. And
feeling obliged to try may lead you to neglect the legal
machinery of the state, with which cosmopolitans must
be glad to cooperate when they can, as well as NGOs
operating in the politically ambiguous but increasingly
material domain of international civil society. A third
alternative would involve thinking of distant strangers
neither as objects of loving concern nor as objects of
policy, but as interlocutors with whom one must enter
into dialogue, common participants in a transnational
public sphere whose goal would be coordinated action.
This path might seem a very mild and unthreatening
extension of existing belief in participatory democracy.
But the theorists of American democracy represented
here decline to venture down it. ʻAmerican patriotismʼ,
Benjamin Barber asserts defiantly, is ʻitself the counter
to the very evils Nussbaum associates with American
patriotism.ʼ
Barberʼs patriotism, like the constitutional patriot-
ism of Habermas, resembles that antidote to ethnic
nationalism that Michael Ignatieff and others have
called civic nationalism: ʻthe only guarantee that
ethnic groups will live side by side in peace is shared
loyalty to a state.ʼ This remains the crucial concept
allowing Americans (and a few deluded others, such
as Elie Kedourie) to deny that there is nationalism
in the USA at all. But respect for the constitution
unfortunately guarantees very little. Quiet and consti-
tutional rather than ethnic or tribal, American national-
ism arguably has been and remains one of the worldʼs
most dangerous.
Whatever might be said on behalf of constitutional
patriotism, it is of little use to non-citizens and non-
residents, especially those who are touched by US
power without living on US soil. Even the most judi-
cious interpretation of the constitution will not make it
protect those who stand outside it. Internally, constitu-
tional patriotism may calm things down, shielding the
status quo against bloody outbreaks of ethnic violence.
But it cannot speak to the desperate need to change the
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
status quo that is Nussbaumʼs point of departure. In
order to get the haves mobilized behind a significant
transfer of resources to the have-nots, you would need
more than even a cosmopolitan extension of decorous
constitutionalism. You would need something like
religious fervour.
The true opposite of such fervour is not consti-
tutionalism, however, but boredom. On the defensive
from the outset, Nussbaum rejects again and again
the charge that cosmopolitanism is as ʻboringly flatʼ
as it may seem. But this is a point that could be
made more aggressively. Nussbaum could have said
that boredom and indifference name the truth not
about cosmopolitanism, but about nationalism. For in
countries like the USA, at least, nationalism may do
the most damage today not by its racist and xenophobic
enthusiasms, real as these are, but rather because it
encourages inertia, compassion fatigue, a normalizing
of our all-too-human satedness with the demands
of the distant, even when distant events are nothing
but the sensational result of routine domestic policy.
Strangely enough, many of Nussbaumʼs respondents
seem to agree with her implication that the single
largest cause of the worldʼs curable unhappiness today
is global capitalism. (More concerned with ethics
than with politics, Nussbaum herself is a bit vague
on this point.) Indeed, they engage her in a spirited
game of more-anti-capitalist-than-thou. They accuse
her of naively ignoring the complicities between her
cosmopolitan ethics and ʻthe market-driven globalism
currently being promoted by transnational corporations
and banksʼ. Or, more damningly still, they treat her
cosmopolitanism as if it were simply global capitalʼs
official line.
This rather pervasive style of romantic anti-capi-
talism is worth pausing over. It looks very much
like the dominant, academically respectable form that
American nationalism is coming to assume. One dis-
tinctive feature is that capitalism is attacked only or
primarily when it can be identified with the global.
Capitalism is treated as if it came from somewhere
else, as if Americans derived no benefit from it – as if,
rather than being penetrated and to a large extent even
defined by many decades of capitalist development,
American society and American nationalism were
among its pitiable victims. Again and again, the case
against cosmopolitanism is framed as a call to renew
ʻour various intact moral communitiesʼ, to defend
vestigial enclaves against an outside seen as chill and
inhospitable. By refusing to acknowledge that these
warm insides are heated and provisioned by that cold
outside, they allow the consequences of capitalism to
disappear from the national sense of responsibility.
31
McDonaldʼs and the IMF could not ask for better
protection from ethical scrutiny.
A second distinctive feature of this supposed anti-
capitalism is that economic suffering registers only or
primarily when it can be blamed on the globalists. One
example among many is the demagogic description
of cosmopolitanism as ʻthe village of the liberal
managerial classʼ. Class is indeed an issue well worth
raising here. But if they are so interested, why do
her respondents want nothing to do with Nussbaumʼs
numbers, the relative and absolute indicators of one
populationʼs wealth and anotherʼs desperate, almost
unfathomable misery? If life expectancy is 78.2 years
in Sweden and 39 in Sierra Leone – with recent events
in Sierra Leone, Iʼm sure the figures are now even
worse – then ʻwe are all going to have to do some
tough thinkingʼ, as Nussbaum says, ʻabout the luck
of birth and the morality of transfers of wealth from
richer to poorer nationsʼ. Who among her respondents
talks about transfers of wealth? Who offers to explain
why such ideas are aborted in the richer nations before
they can even be proposed, victims of an ethical ennui
or paralysis that is perhaps the truest face of national-
ism in the so-called developed world?
Almost no one concedes any connection between
the unbearably unequal distribution of the worldʼs
resources and the future shape of American society.
Only a few (Richard Falk, Amartya Sen, Immanuel
Wallerstein) enter critically and constructively into
Nussbaumʼs project by extending it beyond the domain
of the ethical. No one at all, including Nussbaum
herself, invokes or even questions the hypothesis that
the riches of the West were and are produced by the
active underdeveloping of those areas of the world
that are now the poorest, and that the demand for
redistribution is thus not a plea for benevolent humani-
tarianism but merely for restitution.
At this point one has to note the limits of staking
hopes for change, as Nussbaum does, on moral reason-
ing directed to the free individual conscience. For a
rich country like the USA, despite its glaring and
increasing inequalities, more equitable redistribution
on a global scale would certainly entail some sacrifice
in living standards, some willingness to postpone or
dilute self-interest, even for ordinary or (as we say)
ʻmiddle classʼ people. In the USA, then, Nussbaumʼs
high-minded universalism may prove a paradoxically
necessary way of getting down to the grassroots, where
ʻfairnessʼ and the moral autonomy of the individual
are influential notions. Soysal argues that European
32 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
states ʻhave expanded their comprehensive welfare
apparatuses to guestworkers and their families. How-
ever, there is nothing inherent about the logic of the
welfare state that would dictate the incorporation of
foreigners into its system of privilegesʼ (p. 138). They
are compelled to seek closure, exclusion…
Perhaps Nussbaumʼs high moral line can be seen,
rhetorically, as an oblique but practical means of
addressing unnamed social collectivities. Still, one
would like to know more about the collectivities
– domestic or transnational, given or elective – that
might be capable of translating her moral universal-
ism into a historical force. Nussbaum is uninterested
in this question, even when such collectivities are
transnational rather than domestic and thus potential
vehicles for or embodiments of cosmopolitan ideas
like her own. And she is uninterested in negotiating
the messy, soiling compromises between the normative
and the descriptive that would inevitably follow from
engagement with them. The only agent that can sustain
the unblemished purity of the normative is, of course,
ʻmanʼ. Nussbaumʼs love for this large and clumsy
figure of Enlightenment is understandable. But there
is an argument to be made that this is a moment for
transnational politics to turn from Kant to Hegel – that
is, from the purity of the normative to the impurity of
the already existing, to plural cosmopolitanisms that
are non-European and non-elitist, if also sometimes
ineligible. These lesser abstractions – ethnic minori-
ties, diasporas, religions, worker solidarity movements,
feminist and ecological organizations, and even (why
not?) sovereign states – may attract equally passion-
ate feelings toward cosmopolitan aims without the
same pretension to absolute universality. No less trans-
national than humanity, one can only hope that these
actually existing cosmopolitanisms will be more politi-
cally effectual. For the times, as Nussbaum reminds
us, are desperate.
One does not require Nussbaumʼs prolonged
acquaintance with classical Greece in order to feel
that a great and tragic conflict of loyalties is brewing
around ʻthe limits of patriotismʼ, perhaps even a trans-
national equivalent of the conflict between family
and polis that generated the Antigone. When and if
national and cosmopolitan values reach this intensity
of confrontation, extreme passions will be thrown up
(perhaps cathartic ones) out of the very distance and
dispersal of the global system. The result may be an
answer to George Steinerʼs old challenge: proof that
the modern era can indeed produce high tragedy. In
any event, the spectacle will not be boring.
REVIEWS
Time for the future
Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde, Verso, London, 1995. xv + 272 pp., £39.95
hb., £14.95 pb., 0 86091 482 8 hb., 0 86091 652 9 pb.
In the Preface to The Politics of Time Peter Osborne
claims that it comprises two books: ʻa book about the
philosophy of time which grew out of a book about
the culture of modernityʼ (p. x). The reason for this is
that metaphysical questions about time and temporal-
ity inevitably confront anyone who inquires deeply
enough into the concept of modernity. In the light of
such questions, Osborne attempts to make explicit the
metaphysical assumptions that underlie the cultural
and political debate concerning modernity, modernism
and postmodernism that dominated cultural studies
and continental philosophy in the 1980s.
In so doing, Osborne is exploring an avenue of
thinking opened up by the suggestive, if somewhat
gestural, opening lecture of Jürgen Habermasʼs Philo-
sophical Discourse of Modernity on ʻModernityʼs
Consciousness of Timeʼ. Like Osborne, Habermas
touches on Koselleckʼs account of the historical emer-
gence of the concept of modernity, Heideggerʼs Being
and Time, Gadamerʼs conservative reinterpretation of
ʻeffective historyʼ; and he discusses the philosophical
significance of the time-consciousness of modernity in
Hegel and in Walter Benjaminʼs critique of historicism.
Habermas argues that modernity ceases to draw on
the normative resources of the past and turns instead
to the resources of the present. This concern with the
present is constitutive of the project of modernity; and
Hegel, preoccupied as he was with the formulation of
a self-grounding conception of reason, is seen as the
modern philosopher par excellence. As is well known,
Habermas thinks that Hegel failed in his attempt,
because in his mature work he conceives his phil-
osophy in the metaphysical categories of subject and
object, although his early work contains the lineaments
of a philosophy of intersubjectivity that holds out the
prospect of a more robust way of contributing to, if
not completing, the project of modernity.
Despite his critique of Hegelʼs conception of subjec-
tivity, Habermas allies himself with Hegel in two ways:
he understands his own philosophy of intersubjectivity
as a development of Hegelʼs early work; and he sees it
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
as a contribution to the same modern project of clari-
fying and mobilizing the normative resources of the
present. The significance of this move becomes clear
when one considers that the first-generation Frankfurt
School critical theorists understood themselves to be
part of a very different project. In its anxiety to break
with the present, of which it had every reason to be
deeply suspicious, Critical Theory aimed to draw on
the normative resources of the future. The norms that
would obtain in a future rational society underwrite
its criticism of present injustice. This is explicit in
Horkheimerʼs early work, and is implicit in most of
Adorno and Benjaminʼs writing.
The Politics of Time addresses many of these same
questions about the time-consciousness of modernity,
in a more detailed and sustained argument which
draws very different conclusions. These locate
Osborne, despite his enthusiasm for Heidegger, Hegel,
and phenomenological ontology, firmly in the tradition
of first-generation Frankfurt School Critical Theory,
for he attempts to establish a materialist and future-
orientated conception of political practice. Given the
sphere of interests that guides Osborne, one might
have expected an extended polemical engagement with
Habermasʼs essay; after all, his book contains polemics
against just about every other recent or contemporary
theorist of modernity, with the notable exceptions of
Ricoeur, Heidegger and Benjamin, who are accorded
lengthy exposition and attentive, nuanced critique.
Although Osborne enrols Habermasʼs support when
venting his spleen against the conservative function
of ʻtraditionʼ in Gadamerʼs hermeneutics, he does not
seriously engage with the Philosophical Discourse
of Modernity. Indeed, he dismisses Habermas as an
ʻorthodox Kantianʼ (p. 32).
One reason for this absence of an engagement with
Habermas may be that, apart from the opening chapter,
where Osborne has some very percipient and illumin-
ating things to say on the debate about modernity
and postmodernity, the theme of modernity is pushed
below the surface by the very weighty metaphysical
33
problem of time and time-consciousness. This is the
other main difference between them. For Habermas
talks about the time-consciousness of modernity,
but not about time and time-consciousness as such,
whereas Osborne wants to make use of the ʻphilo-
sophical resourcesʼ (p. xiii) of the discourse about time
and time-consciousness for the purposes of explaining
the culture of modernity.
His overall argument goes something like this.
Time has to be thought both subjectively, as tensed
experience, and objectively, as infinite succession.
Without the former, experience would fragment into
an aggregate of unrelated now points; all acts, physi-
cal and mental, would be inconceivable. Without the
latter, the relations of before and after could not be
intersubjectively identified and real relations between
events would not perdure through time. But subjec-
tive and objective time cannot be different times;
they mutually support each other and must form part
of one and the same time. So what is this totality
of which subjective and objective time form part?
Osborneʼs deceptively simple answer is ʻsocial ontol-
ogyʼ. Just as for Heidegger Dasein is a being whose
Being is a question for it, modernity is a being whose
Being is a question for it. Just as Daseinʼs temporal-
ity is its being-towards-death, so the temporality of
modernity is its being-towards-extinction. What this
consciousness of finitude is supposed to do is awaken
modernity to the radical openness of the future. This
move allies Heideggerʼs analytic of Dasein with Ben-
jaminʼs concept of historical time. Benjamin used
the concept of messianic redemption to dispose of
what he called ʻhistoricismʼ, a Hegelian legacy that
emphasized the continuity between past and present,
thereby confining the radical openness of the future
within the narrow horizon of present expectation. The
twin threats of environmental catastrophe and human
extinction have, on the one hand, brought out the social
significance of Heideggerʼs analysis of Dasein and, on
the other, put secular flesh on the theological bones of
Benjaminʼs apocalyptic theory of time. A politics of
time is supposed to emerge once modernity realizes
the dialectical connection between its abstract myth
of infinite progress and the concrete lack of political
and historical change. Thus modernity is driven back
to a concern with everyday life as the locus of what
Osborne calls ʻthe social production of possibilityʼ
(p. 198).
My reservations about The Politics of Time are
of two kinds. The first concerns methodology and
style. In one sense, it is a strength of the book that
Osborne manages to compress so much material into
34 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
each chapter. He shows considerable insight and dex-
terity in bringing a formidable and diverse array of
material under one theme. Each chapter consists in a
self-contained medley of critical expositions of works
of contemporary theory which expound or implicitly
trade on a conception of time-consciousness. For the
most part, I found his expositions lucid and informa-
tive in themselves. For example, in the final chapter
he delivers a crisp cameo critique of the theoretical
motivations for Heideggerʼs political accommodation.
On certain important matters, however, his analysis is
altogether too brief and superficial, particularly in the
case of Kantʼs conception of time and history. I also
felt that more explanation of the theories of Aristotle,
Augustine and Husserl was needed, if only to get the
philosophical problems into focus; and that filtering
their views through the optic of (Osborneʼs reading
of) Ricoeurʼs account of them in Time and Narrative
only added to the confusion.
This problem of having to condense the exposition
of very difficult theories stems from Osborneʼs chosen
method of ʻtheory construction through appropriative
critiqueʼ (p. xiii). Perhaps this is not the best way to
approach such an intractable metaphysical problem; or
perhaps his critical appropriations were not selective
enough. Either way, he does not do justice to the
complexity of the issues of time and time-conscious-
ness. The constant introduction of new material and
the lack of concrete examples makes it difficult to
follow his argument. I am still not sure in what sense
Osborne takes himself to be advancing a ʻmaterialistʼ
theory of time, despite his mention of the Marxist
account of the advent of standardized clock-time. On
this point, a discussion of the well-known arguments
for the ideality of time advanced by Kant or McTaggart
would have helped to clarify his position.
This brings me to my second set of worries: the
conception of political praxis advanced in The Politics
of Time. For I think that Osborneʼs account of time
risks bringing metaphysical confusion to the social
and political questions he addresses. In conceptual
terms Benjaminʼs notion of redemption is problematic
enough. Can we make any real sense of the thought
that a temporal relation can be constituted by a relation
to something outside time? Certainly the threat of
human extinction and environmental destruction make
sense, but these are in no sense outside time. And, if
that is so, the politics of time seems to be saddled with
a notion of political and social change of mysterious
theological origin.
A more pressing problem can be raised apropos an
exquisitely apposite typing error in the discussion of
Heidegger and Benjamin on ʻ“averageness” (Durch-
schmittlichkeit)ʼ (sic) – a word which, if it existed,
would mean ʻthoroughly Schmitt-likeʼ. Osborne empha-
sizes the ʻuncanny convergence between Benjamin and
Heideggerʼs views on historical timeʼ (p. 175), and
acknowledges the problem with their (and Schmittʼs)
ʻdecisionisticʼ conception of practice. The charge of
ʻdecisionismʼ can be understood as the objection that
the notion of an authentic mode of existence, reso-
luteness in the face of oneʼs finitude, cannot supply
any determinate theoretical constraints on action that
could serve in place of moral principles. Since almost
any action could, in the right circumstances, count
as authentic, Heideggerʼs destruction of metaphysics
invites ethical catastrophe. Osborne argues convinc-
ingly that Heideggerʼs decisionism alone does not
underwrite his political capitulation to authority. The
fault lies with his epochal view of ʻrepetitionʼ, which
understands the future as the ʻreturn to a new begin-
ningʼ, in the shape of the destiny of a people. Thus,
argues Osborne, Heidegger fails to understand the
future as ʻradical opennessʼ and thinks of it, instead, as
the inauguration of a forgotten past. The real political
danger of Heideggerʼs Being and Time, Osborne claims
provocatively, is that it is not decisionistic enough (p.
174). More decisionism, not less! Osborne answers
the problem by denying that there is one. Surely
the problem is and always was, not that decisionism
leads Heidegger to a naive identification with political
authority, but that decisionism permits such a course of
action, because it is ethically indifferent. This ʻethical
indifferenceʼ is common to Schmitt, Heidegger and
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
Benjamin, who, despite manifest differences, agree
on this: that praxis consists in a radically contin-
gent break with all present concerns. Whatever their
political allegiances, there is a remarkable similarity
between Benjaminʼs messianic motif of ʻpulling the
emergency cordʼ of history and Schmittʼs invocation of
the ʻstate of emergencyʼ; and it ought to be politically
disquieting.
Osborneʼs position is ambivalent. At times he
appears to want to condemn any constraint on the
radical openness of the future as reactionary or con-
servative. This view is mistaken. Normative criti-
cal theory, like moral philosophy, must be oriented
towards the future. But it must also be action-guiding
to some extent. It must be able, from the standpoint of
the present, to rule out certain practices and actions
in the future. At others, Osborne acknowledges that
there is a problem with the practical indeterminacy
of Benjaminʼs revolutionary conception of politics,
and argues that it can be solved by repositioning a
politics of time within the ʻeverydayʼ. The solution lies
in the dialectical thought that the break with present
concerns is immanent to those concerns; the rupture
with everyday experience is inscribed within it. Actu-
ally, Osborne is arguing that this ʻsurrealʼ texture of
the everyday is the solution to the problem of ʻrepeti-
tionʼ. It remains unclear to me that ʻthe mystery of the
everydayʼ even addresses the problem of the ethical
indifference of a decisionistic praxis.
Finally, there is Osborneʼs conclusion that a mate-
rialist theory of culture needs an awareness of ʻthe
social production of possibilityʼ. This claim can be
understood as a challenge to a thought that runs like
a red thread through the political thought of Arendt,
Adorno and Habermas: that we think political pos-
sibilities as socially produced is not the solution to the
absence of political praxis; it is part of the problem.
For political possibilities are largely possibilities of
doing and acting differently, of different social prac-
tices, and these cannot be ʻmadeʼ or ʻproducedʼ like
things. The extent to which we think they can only
reflects the extent to which intersubjective relations
have been reified under modern conditions. Osborneʼs
readiness to break with lines of thought now familiar
on the reconstructed ʻLeftʼ is admirable in itself, and
quite in keeping with his own theory. He is nothing if
not controversial. To my mind, however, the reasons
that cast a shadow over the utopian content of the
model of production are not defeated by the ecstatic
vision of the everyday with which The Politics of
Time concludes.
Gordon Finlayson
35
A good man fallen among individualists
Michael Rosen, On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology, Polity Press,
Cambridge, 1996. xi + 289 pp., £45.00 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 7456 0595 8 hb., 0 7456 1596 1 pb.
ʻWhat has to be explained is not the fact that the man
who is hungry steals or the fact that the man who
is exploited strikes, but why the majority of those
who are hungry donʼt steal and why the majority of
those who are exploited donʼt strike.ʼ These words of
Wilhelm Reich define, according to Michael Rosen, the
question that the theory of ideology seeks to address.
In its most developed form, within Marxism, this
theory answers Reichʼs question through the concept of
what Adorno calls ʻnecessary false consciousnessʼ. The
best-known version of this concept is probably Marxʼs
declaration in The German Ideology that ʻthe ideas of
the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideasʼ:
by means of this ideological domination the exploited
are persuaded to accept their exploitation as just.
Rosen pursues a double strategy in this long-awaited
book. On the one hand, he traces the historical develop-
ment of the concept of false consciousness, from its
origins in the Enlightenment (De la servitude volon-
taire, by Montaigneʼs friend La Boëtie, thus, despite
providing Rosen with his title, forms part of ideologyʼs
prehistory), to its latest development by the Frankfurt
School. On the other hand, he undertakes a work of
conceptual clarification and, above all, of philosophical
critique. Of Voluntary Servitude, its opening sentence
declares, is ʻwritten againstʼ the theory of ideology.
It seems intended to allow Rosen more generally to
settle accounts with Marxism, and thereby to help
establish how ʻegalitarian valuesʼ and ʻprojects of
human emancipation, perhaps … even socialist onesʼ,
can survive it.
Anyone familiar with Rosenʼs brilliant The Hegelian
Dialectic and its Criticism (1982) will know that
he brings to this challenging undertaking both tre-
mendous historical erudition and great philosophical
rigour. These are displayed most successfully in the
chapters where he outlines the historical emergence
of the ʻtwo background beliefsʼ which, he argues, ʻpro-
vide the core of Marxʼs answer to Reichʼs question: the
belief that societies are self-maintaining entities, and
the belief that, in the case of prima facie illegitimate
societies, the way in which they do this is by means
of false consciousness on the part of those who live
in them.ʼ Rosenʼs discussions of Hume, Rousseau,
Smith and Hegel are outstanding, as is his sensitive
and illuminating treatment of Benjamin towards the
end of the book.
36 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
Nevertheless, perhaps because of the enormous
scope of the project, Rosen is unable to avoid a degree
of unevenness in his accounts of individual thinkers.
For example, Adam Smith is not the only member
of the Scottish historical school to offer a theory of
ʻthe connection between economic life, political insti-
tutions, customs and ideasʼ, as John Millarʼs Origin
of the Distinction of Ranks bears witness. Again, it
wonʼt do to criticize Habermas and Foucault for a
parallel error they commit in their writings of the
1960s, while ignoring the way in which each later
modified his theory in part to take account of the fault
identified by Rosen.
Omissions of this kind do not affect Rosenʼs overall
argument. But his surprisingly inaccurate discussion
of Darwin does relate to his central preoccupations.
He follows G.A. Cohen in drawing parallels between
explanations in evolutionary biology and functional
explanations in social theory. There is nothing wrong
with this in principle. Rosen, however, tends towards
a Lamarckian interpretation of Darwin, attributing to
him, inter alia, the beliefs that a species has welfare-
furthering characteristics ʻprecisely because they
further its welfareʼ, and that ʻthere exists a mechanism
– natural selection – which ensures that over time,
species come to acquire characteristics which further
their welfare.ʼ
Now, of course, precisely what the theory of natural
selection does not explain is the acquisition and inher-
itance of characteristics by organisms: relative to the
theory, variations are random, not in the sense that they
are uncaused, but that, as Elliott Sober puts it, they
ʻdo not occur because they would be beneficialʼ. What
Darwin predicts is that where a variation occurs which
enhances an organismʼs fitness – that is, its chances
of survival and reproduction – and is passed on to
its descendants, the latter tend to increase in number
relative to other populations. While Darwin thus dis-
tinguishes between the causes of fitness-enhancing
variations and their role in natural selection, it was
Lamarck who argued that evolution consisted in organ-
isms acquiring and passing on adaptations because of
their beneficial effects, a goal-oriented process – in
Lamarck, writes François Jacob, ʻadaptive intention
always precedes realizationʼ – reflecting the ʻplanʼ at
work in nature to achieve ever greater perfection of
biological structure.

This slide into a teleological conception of evolu-
tion is related to Rosenʼs ascription to Marx of the
ʻbackground beliefʼ that, as Cohen puts it, treats ʻsocie-
ties or economic units as self-maintaining and self-
advancingʼ. This belief, which invites us to conceive
society as an end-in-itself and therefore to explain
its features teleologically, in terms of their contribu-
tion to the process of social reproduction, is, Rosen
believes, central to Marxʼs theory of ideology. Indeed,
he claims that Marx lacks anything amounting to a
properly articulated theory of ideology. Instead, we are
confronted with a series of ʻmodelsʼ usually governed
by a metaphor that substitutes for the specification of
a mechanism.
Thus The German Ideology offers, in addition to
the ʻinterests modelʼ (the idea that capitalist society is
kept going by means of bourgeois ideological domin-
ation), the ʻreflection modelʼ, according to which
ideology, like a camera obscura, gives an accurate,
but inverted, depiction of social reality. Marxʼs later,
more ʻscientificʼ writings also contain the ʻcorres-
pondence modelʼ, best represented by Cohenʼs attempt
to show that the ideologico-political superstructure is
functionally explained by its tendency to reproduce
the economic base; and the ʻessence and appearance
modelʼ implied by the theory of commodity fetishism,
according to which the operations of the market lead
participants to perceive the capitalist mode of produc-
tion in a systematically misleading way.
Rosen briskly disposes of each of these models in
turn. The interests model treats the working class as a
passive object of manipulation. The metaphors inform-
ing the reflection and essence and appearance models
dis-integrate on closer inspection. The correspondence
model presupposes the idea, already encountered, of
ʻsociety as a self-maintaining systemʼ. This concept,
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
however, in turn depends on an analogy
between persons and societies. But while
we intuitively treat individual human
beings as coherent and autonomous
entities, ʻwe do not have a commonly
agreed “ folk sociology” to match the “
folk psychology” by which we explain
peopleʼs everyday beliefs and actions.ʼ
Many of Rosenʼs criticisms of Marxʼs
models are well taken. But it is not clear
that they inflict fatal damage on the
theory of ideology. The interests model
has more life to it than he suggests, pro-
vided we stop regarding the exploited as
simply the passive recipients of ruling-
class ideas and treat social consciousness
as the outcome of an active struggle between the
classes. Gramsciʼs notion of ʻcontradictory conscious-
nessʼ, a composite – indeed compromise – formation
containing beliefs corresponding to the interests of
divergent classes, is particularly suggestive in this
context. Taking this line would mean dropping what
is sometimes called the ʻdominant ideology thesisʼ,
expressed in Marxʼs assertion that ʻthe ideas of the
ruling class are … the ruling ideas.ʼ Yet, although
Rosen is careful to dissociate the concept of ʻneces-
sary false consciousnessʼ from that of a ʻdominant
ideologyʼ, and indeed to deny that it requires that
false consciousness be ʻthe sole meansʼ whereby unjust
societies are reproduced, he gives no consideration to
this possible strategy.
The reason for this failure lies, I think, in the
emphasis he lays on Marxʼs ʻbackground beliefʼ in
society as a self-maintaining system. Rosen argues that
both the existence of this assumption, and the extent
to which even the later Marx remains dependent on
Hegel, are shown by the way in which ʻthe Grund-
risse presents an account of capitalist production as a
self-unfolding process with capital as its subjectʼ, an
account also implicit in Capital. Now the presence of
strongly Hegelian motifs in the Grundrisse is familiar
enough. Both Edward Thompson and some of the
Althusserians he smote in The Poverty of Theory drew
attention to them. Much of the work of the German
ʻcapital-logicʼ school was vitiated by the tendency to
take up the hints offered by the Grundrisse, and treat
capital as a secularized version of the Absolute Idea,
necessarily actualizing itself through its contingent
empirical manifestions.
Rosen, however, ignores the series of system-
atic conceptual recastings which Marx undertook
in the decade 1857–67, during which he wrote first
37
the Grundrisse, then the 1861–63 Manuscript, and
finally Capital itself. Perhaps the best discussion of
the general direction these changes took is provided
by Jacques Bidet in Que faire du ʻCapitalʼ? (1985).
He notes that in Capital Marx lays far greater stress
than in his earlier economic writings on ʻstructuresʼ
– empirically identifiable mechanisms arising from
class relations and from inter-capitalist competition
– to explain the global ʻtendenciesʼ of the system,
where previously he had been prone either to deduce
these tendencies directly from the abstract concept of
ʻcapitalʼ, or to derive them ʻdialecticallyʼ through some
piece of word-play. Consequently, Capital does not rely
on the idea of capital as a self-maintaining system to
anything like the extent that Rosen claims it does.
He does not notice these changes perhaps because
he seems to share the belief of analytical Marxists (or
ex-Marxists) like Jon Elster that the only alternative
to treating social structures as the unintended conse-
quences of individual actions is to hypostasize society
as a Hegelian macro-subject. But this is plainly false.
While rejecting the functionalist conception of society
as a self-maintaining system, several contemporary
theorists have sought to conceptualize social structures
as, in Anthony Giddensʼs formulation, ʻthe unacknowl-
edged conditions and the unanticipated consequencesʼ
of human action. Such a position, though incompatible
with methodological individualism, is consistent with
different substantive social theories, ranging from Gid-
densʼs neo-Weberian sociology, through Roy Bhaskarʼs
marxisant ʻCritical Realismʼ, to Erik Olin Wrightʼs and
my own variously orthodox Marxisms.
Rosenʼs failure to consider this line of thought may
reflect the malign influence of Elsterian rational-choice
theory. This influence is certainly evident in his alter-
native to the theory of ideology. ʻCompliance without
false consciousnessʼ occurs in unjust societies thanks
to the free-rider problem. In other words, the exploited
do not rise up against their oppressors, not because
they believe their exploitation is just, but because it is
instrumentally rational for each to let others incur the
risks involved in revolt, since any individualʼs partici-
pation will make no difference to the outcome.
This ʻanswerʼ to Reichʼs question, outlined in a
couple of pages, is, to say the least, feeble. It does not
begin to explain recent mass revolts – for example,
the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79, the Polish strikes
of August 1980, and the South African township insur-
rections of 1984–86 – all of which developed spontane-
ously, in times when the costs of rebellion were still
very high. Like Elster, Rosen stresses the vanguard
role played by minorities of ʻnon-instrumentally moti-
38 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
vated agentsʼ (East European dissidents in the 1970s
and 1980s, for example), but, in thus highlighting the
limited role of instrumental rationality in explaining
collective action, he unintentionally draws attention to
what a clumsy tool rational-choice theory is.
Maybe the root of the problem lies in Rosenʼs earlier
book on Hegel. There he argues that the dialectical
method necessarily leads, pace Engels, to mystifying
and idealist consequences. It seems to be the drive to
exorcize social theory of any taint of Hegelian idealism
that has thrust Rosen into Elsterʼs arms. Lenin called
Bernard Shaw ʻa good man fallen among Fabiansʼ.
Well, Of Voluntary Servitude is the work of a good
man fallen among methodological individualists. Their
influence ensures that, for all its undoubted strengths
and incidental pleasures, the bookʼs overall argument
must be accounted a failure.
Alex Callinicos
Freud against
Wittgenstein
Jacques Bouveresse, Wittgenstein Reads Freud: The
Myth of the Unconscious, trans. Carol Cosman, Prin-
ceton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1995. xx + 143
pp., £22.50 hb., £9.95 pb., 0 691 03425 7 hb., 0 691
02904 0 pb.
Donald Levy, Freud Among the Philosophers: The
Psychoanalytic Unconscious and its Philosophical
Critics, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and
London, 1996. 189 pp., £18.50 hb., 0 300 06632 5.
As Jacques Bouveresse informs us, Wittgensteinʼs brief
and scattered remarks on psychoanalysis do not add
up to a ʻthorough and systematic critiqueʼ (p. 3). Witt-
gensteinʼs attitude to psychoanalysis seems ambiguous;
he calls himself a ʻdisciple of Freudʼ (ibid.), and yet
psychoanalysis is a ʻdangerous and foul practiceʼ (p.
xix). His ambivalence reflects a profound pessimism
about the role of science in our culture. Tellingly,
Bouveresse reports that Wittgenstein ʻhesitated over
whether the real problem was with psychoanalysis
itself or rather how it was used … in an age like
oursʼ (ibid.). Wittgenstein is a harsh critic of the
pretensions of psychoanalysis to scientific status; and
this may lead us to think that he should be aligned
with those philosophers of science, like Karl Popper
and Adolf Grünbaum, who have been equally scathing
about Freudʼs scientific shortcomings. But as both
Bouveresse and Donald Levy stress, this would be a
mistake. Wittgenstein wishes to resist the scientistic
approach to understanding human beings which he
thinks psychoanalysis exemplifies.
He has two main objections to psychoanalysis.
First, that Freud elevated the characteristic sin of
philosophical theorizing – the tendency to think that
understanding something means deriving some essence
from a typical or central case upon which a general
theory can be erected – into a scientific principle.
Second, that the kinds of theories Freud provides
only appear to be scientific. What they actually do is
redescribe the phenomena of mental life in a way that
makes sense to us and which we find attractive and
convincing, notwithstanding Freudʼs contention that
we resist the repellent nature of psychoanalytic truths.
Indeed, for Wittgenstein, the fact that such ideas repel
explains their peculiar ʻcharmʼ: we feel such things
must have great significance.
Psychoanalysis thus provides a mythology, which
can impose a pattern on our lives and give significance
to what is otherwise meaningless. It tells a story to
which we respond: Yes – it must be like that. This
is quite different from explanation in a real science,
which provides objective evidence for testable causal
hypotheses, the bases for genuine predictions. None of
this is present in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is a
persuasive enterprise, both in the wider world and on
the couch. Freudʼs readers are seduced by the sense-
making charm of his constructions; while the patient
on the couch assents to the truth of interpretations
– assent being the main criterion of their truth for
the psychoanalyst, Wittgenstein thinks – because of
the analystʼs powers of suggestion.
Levy tackles Wittgensteinʼs criticisms as part of a
wider project: clarifying the notion of the unconscious
in Freud through removal of misunderstandings per-
petuated by previous commentators. Thus he analyses
the positions of a number of critics besides Witt-
genstein, chief among them being William James,
Alasdair MacIntyre and Grünbaum. The closest of
these in spirit to Wittgenstein is William James, who
attacked the idea of the unconscious before Freud.
James seeks to resist the reduction of consciousness
to non-conscious mental ʻatomsʼ (ʻmind-dustʼ, in his
phrase). Levy is able to show that the psychoanalytic
concept of the unconscious is not reductive in this
way. MacIntyre and Grünbaum, on the other hand,
offer full-blown positivist critiques of psychoanalysis.
Either the unconscious is an unobservable and non-
explanatory metaphysical construct (MacIntyre);
or psychoanalysis is unable to test its hypotheses
according to strict inductivist standards ʻon the couchʼ
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
(Grünbaum). In either case, psychoanalysis fails to
furnish a scientific justification of its claims. Levy
shows that these complaints, in common with those of
Wittgenstein, do not present an adequate picture of the
Freudian unconscious; they misunderstand that Freudʼs
unconscious cannot be separated from the phenomena
of transference and resistance – phenomena which can
only be properly characterized within Freudʼs general
theory of the mind and its development, and which
can only be observed in the free associations of the
patient in the analytic setting.
Bouveresse sets out to give a unified exposition of
Wittgensteinʼs comments on psychoanalysis, and in
so doing he too extends the discussion to encompass
the views of others. Both books could serve as intro-
ductions to issues in the philosophy of psychoanalysis;
neither presumes detailed specialist knowledge on the
part of the reader. So it appears that we have here two
similar treatments of the same subject matter. But the
methods and results, the whole style of thinking, of
each writer differ greatly.
Levy makes a number of important new contrib-
utions to the debate around these topics, which signifi-
cantly advance the argument. In contrast, Bouveresse
remains within the orbit of Wittgensteinʼs thought. He
is content to endorse Wittgensteinʼs positions in toto
and to recruit arguments from a motley array of recent
hostile critics of psychoanalysis to bolster them. But
psychoanalysis is currently receiving a lot of favourable
attention from analytical philosophers (the tradition to
which Bouveresse and Levy both belong, Bouveresse
having made a reputation over the years as that rarest
of philosophical animals, an ʻanalytical Frenchmanʼ).
This work, associated in particular with Marcia Cavell,
Donald Davidson, Sebastian Gardner, Jim Hopkins,
Jonathan Lear, Thomas Nagel and Richard Wollheim,
sees psychoanalysis as an extension of the kind of
explanation of motive and action employed in everyday
ʻcommon-senseʼ psychology. Explanation by ascription
of beliefs and desires in common-sense psychology
is supplemented and extended in psychoanalysis by
invoking mental states with different, more primitive
features, which it was Freudʼs achievement to have
discovered.
Levyʼs book is potentially continuous with this
development. Indeed, he provides in passing what is
in effect a summary of it (p. 92). Bouveresse, though
obviously aware of such ideas, gives them no part
to play. This is regrettable for two reasons, one of
them deeply ironic. First, the common-sense extension
view stakes out a middle ground between (everyday)
explanation by reasons and (scientific) explanation by
39
causes, which Wittgenstein thinks are confused in
Freud. Bouveresse grants, following Davidson, that
reasons can be causes, but denies that this helps psycho-
analysis, which pretends that it has a scientific route
to causal explanation. But this does not admit the
possibility, now generally acknowledged, that there can
be motivating mental causes which are not reasons,
and that citing such motives in explaining behaviour
is a properly psychological form of causal explanation,
as Freud always said it was.
The irony lies in the fact that one of the main
precursors of the common-sense extension view is
Wittgenstein. The basis of ascription of mental states
in common-sense psychology is interpretation: the
conditions which make interpretation possible – the
grounding of interpreter and interpretee in a shared
world which is logically prior to the subjectʼs identifi-
cation of her inner states – being first described by
Wittgenstein. Bouveresseʼs book thus has important
limitations.
Adequate discussion of Levyʼs arguments exceeds
the scope of this review. In particular, however, I
would single out his treatment of Grünbaum. Levy
articulates a generally held and just appreciation of
Grünbaum in saying that he has written ʻby far the
most important philosophical rejection of the scientific
credibility of Freudʼs work ever to appearʼ (p. 129).
All the more significant for psychoanalysis, then, if
Grünbaumʼs critique can be overthrown. Levy offers a
definitive refutation. This and the whole book deserve
the widest and most careful attention.
David Snelling
Internally real
Linda Martín Alcoff, Real Knowing, New Versions
of the Coherence Theory, Cornell University Press,
Ithaca NY and London, 1996. x + 240 pp., £25.50
hb., 0 8014 3047 X.
Alcoffʼs Real Knowing is an attempt to span the so-
called continental and Anglo-American philosophical
divide. Her explicit aim is to present an epistemological
theory which can both provide the grounds for a nor-
mative, evaluative theory of knowledge and explain
the interconnections between knowledge, power and
desire. As part of this project, Alcoff attempts to dem-
onstrate how a coherentist epistemology can answer
problems of justification, without reducing truth to
justification. This can be done, she argues, by retaining
but revising realist commitments.
40 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
When we try to understand what someone says,
we presume that what they say makes sense; and
this idea of ʻmaking senseʼ is the key to Alcoffʼs
argument. First, we assume that the speaker can and
will attempt to provide a coherent account of his or
her own experience. Second, we presume that the
experience itself provides material which can sustain
a coherent account. Third, we will consider new infor-
mation justified to the extent that it coheres with, or
increases the coherence of, the general picture. If we
eschew naive realism, or consider experience to be
already an effect of an interpretative scheme; and if
we believe that we, in the attempt to understand, are
also interpreters – then it appears that we are caught in
an uneasy position. But it is at this point that Alcoffʼs
attempt to bridge analytic and continental traditions
is at its strongest. She argues that Foucaultʼs idea of
a discursive practice can be employed to understand
that both speaker or text, and reader or interpreter, are
part of the same tradition, that there is an internal or
conceptual dependence between terms such as truth,
justification and belief, but that truth is still irreduc-
ible to justification. Within the Foucauldian account,
a statement is held to be true, or a unit of knowledge,
when it fits, or coheres with, other units or state-
ments which are all formed in a regular manner by a
discursive practice.
Thus Alcoff can explore a concept of realism
which is, in a sense, contextual. We can accept both
that claims to know something are actually about
something (experience), and also that the experience
is produced or organized through the discursive prac-
tice – as are our ways of presenting, representing
or analysing that experience. Coherence works as a
theory of justification because the discourses con-
stitute the objects of which we speak in a regular
manner, and criteria for truth and falsity are ways of
reasoning internal to each conceptual scheme. Given
that we can talk about a discursive field, we can also
talk about subjugated and dominant knowledges and
their differential relations to power. Because there
is no overarching scheme or framework, we can
argue that truth is irreducibly plural. Taking on the
problem of ʻaboutnessʼ – the irreducibility of truth to
justification – Alcoff draws from Putnam a version
of internal realism which can support a non-reduc-
tive account of a mind-independent world. First, ʻthe
worldʼ underdetermines theoretical descriptions, so
that there can be a plurality of theoretical schemes.
Second, although experience determines the truth-
value of statements, experience is itself part of an
interpretative scheme. Lastly, truth-value is dependent
on the fit between experience (as interpretation) and
theoretical description.
The concluding chapter is an argument for the idea
of plural truths and a rejection of the claim that this
results in an absolute relativism. The argument runs
like this: truth-claims concern the fit between experi-
ence and theoretical description; different schemes will
have different truth variables; disagreement between
schemes does not prove incommensurability; therefore
conflicts can be resolved (at a local level). The most
productive, true, theoretical description will be one
which aims for adequacy: a coherent and compre-
hensive account of the constellation of elements that
make up experience.
The argument in Real Knowing is basically of the
transcendental deductive kind: given x, p must be true
(as the condition of x), where x is understanding rather
than knowledge or belief, and p the principles of coher-
ence and discursive formations. Aside from general
problems with arguments which take this form, there is
a further problem concerning internal realism. To take
an example suggested by Alcoff, both Marxism and
neo-classical economic theories are comprehensive,
but incommensurable, schemes for analysing economic
behaviour. The difficulty, as I see it, is that within
either scheme beliefs will be considered true or false
depending on whether or not they maximize coherence
and thereby explain experience. Alcoffʼs suggestion
appears to be that the falsity of one scheme will be
figured in terms of its inadequacy. This figuring will
take place at a local level, and will be based on a
lived dissonance between experience and theoretical
description. Although internal realism is supposed to
accommodate the idea that ʻthe realʼ constrains our
theoretical descriptions or analyses, we need a harder,
or more detailed, empirical theory to make sense of
the concept ʻinadequacyʼ. Following on from this, a
more thorough assessment of the differences between
subjugated and dominant knowledges would have been
useful, as this distinction is used to bypass difficulties
associated with theories of false belief, false conscious-
ness and ideology.
On the whole, Real Knowing is an impressive,
astute and clear guide through difficult and compli-
cated arguments from both traditions. Alcoff manages
to demonstrate the commensurability of concerns,
interests and questions which run through philoso-
phers as diverse as Gadamer, Davidson, Blackburn,
Quine, Putnam and Foucault. It is unlikely that the
arguments for internal realism will convince many
purist Anglo-American philosophers. Similarly, some
postmodernists may find the form of argument ques-
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
tion-begging and this might lead them to describe the
drive to maximize coherence – for Alcoff, the drive
to resolve conflict – as yet another example of the
authoritarian drive to truth. Luckily, however, few of
us are so ʻpureʼ. By gleaning the best from feminist
empiricism and feminist standpoint theories, Alcoff
manages to present a coherent account of justification
and truth, without reducing one to the other, and offers
an insight into the grounds of real knowing directed
towards future practice.
Gill Howie
Unworldly models
Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A
Conceptual Approach, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996.
x + 592 pp., £45.00 hb., 0 19 827532 3.
This is a large, ambitious and very rewarding book. It
supplies a comprehensive survey of the central political
ideologies of the past two centuries: liberalism, con-
servatism and socialism. Feminism and green ideology
are briefly discussed at the end of the study. At the
same time Freeden defends a particular approach to
the study of ideology which is exemplified in the
survey. He takes his stance in opposition to two other
approaches. One is that which represents ideologies as
organized doctrines of little or no intellectual merit,
to be understood solely in causal or functional terms.
The other is the approach of political philosophy which
evaluates any theory in pure and abstracted terms of
truth or rightness. On both approaches an ideologyʼs
conceptual character is simply neglected, as irrelevant
or absent.
Freeden sees ideologies as ʻparticular patterned
clusters and configurations of political conceptsʼ. Each
ideology has a shape which is given by the relationships
between what Freeden terms ʻcoreʼ, ʻadjacentʼ and
ʻperipheralʼ concepts. Within the core of liberalism,
for instance, is the concept of liberty; the concept is
ʻdecontestedʼ – that is, given a clear single meaning.
Adjacent and peripheral concepts are further from
the core, but it is central to Freedenʼs approach that
the relationship between an ideologyʼs concepts is not
simply ʻlogicalʼ, but also cultural and historical. Thus,
concepts at the edge of an ideology are not simply
those at the furthest intellectual remove from its core
but also those that define an ideologyʼs engagement
41
with the world of politics – particular policy proposals,
for instance. Each ideology has its own ʻspecific morph-
ologyʼ in which the main political concepts – liberty,
equality, democracy, and so on – assume their place.
Freeden offers the metaphors of a map or road grid
within which a given number of towns are situated, and
of a room within which a common pool of furniture
is placed. On his approach the political theorist can
engage with and understand the distinctively ideological
structure of political ideas, without adopting the stance
of the political philosopher who constructs unworldly
pre-scriptive models out of
such ideas.
The approach is immen-
sely illuminating. One not
only sees the ideational
architecture of each ide-
ology; one can also rec-
ognize what one might call
the higher-order features of
each architectural style, the
intellectual temperament of
an ideology. Thus, liberal-
ism displays a self-critical
spirit which encourages flexi-
bility in the arrangements
of its conceptual furniture.
Conservatism, on the other
hand, organizes its concepts
in response to its perceived ideological opponents. It
is a ʻmirror-imageʼ ideology of reactive self-aware-
ness. Socialism, finally, is an ideology structured as
a critique of the present which projects an imagined,
but yet to be actualized, future.
There are minor cavils. It might have been inter-
esting to see nationalism treated as an ideology in
its own right. It might have been more worthwhile
to extend the treatment of feminism in its ideologi-
cal function of deconstructing the existing political
language, than to pair it with the very young and
incomplete ʻgreenʼ ideology. However, it is in relation
to political philosophy that Freedenʼs work is most
revealing. Freeden identifies a dominant Anglo-Ameri-
can political philosophy which is mainly liberal in
its allegiances. Not only is such philosophy charged
with being insensitive to its own ideological character;
it is blind to the history and morphology of the par-
ticular ideology – liberalism – of which it is the latest
42 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
instalment. Freedenʼs target here is the American East
Coast Rawlsianism which has launched a thousand
doctorates. Freedenʼs approach allows him to make
telling points. For instance, philosophical liberalism
is famously subject to a communitarian critique for
its neglect of community. Yet strong conceptions of
community and the common good did, as Freeden
claims, have a solid pedigree in the American liberal
tradition. That trail has gone cold as the philosophical
variant of American liberalism has cut itself off from
its own ideological history. In consequence, philo-
sophical liberalism has also denied itself the political
potential and usage a richer American liberal ideology
might possess.
The relationship between an ideology and political
philosophy also broaches one very crucial issue. In
concentrating on the structure or syntax of an ideol-
ogy, Freeden is careful to bracket the question of its
truth. At one point (p. 310) he is explicit that since the
book deals with ideologies, not political philosophies,
his interest lies not in the ʻrightnessʼ of one approach
but in how that approach relates to existing ideological
systems. Political philosophies which forget that they
are ideologies thereby jettison their politics – that is,
a grounding in ʻadjustable social practicesʼ. However,
there is a converse problem. As Freeden says, ideolo-
gies are not only power structures that manipulate
human actions, but also ʻideational systems that enable
us to choose to become what we want to becomeʼ (p.
553). Ideologies which forget that they are political
philosophies may thereby sacrifice their claim on us
to change the world in a certain prescribed way. It
seems too simple to suggest, as Freeden does on his
last page, that the evaluative investigation of ideologies
can readily be ʻsuperimposedʼ on the bookʼs findings.
Any system of political thought must combine an
adequate reflexivity about its historical, cultural and
political conditions of possibility with a warranted
normativity – that is, a compelling claim upon us to
realize its ideas. Doing that is an immensely complex
task. The outstanding merit of Freedenʼs work is that
he has shown what political philosophy presently lacks,
and has done so by demonstrating that ideologies
should not be dismissed as merely the ʻpoor cousinsʼ of
philosophies. Both political theory and political phil-
osophy have a great deal to learn from this book.
David Archard
Engels in his own right
Christopher J. Arthur, ed., Engels Today: A Centenary Appreciation, Macmillan and St Martinʼs Press, London
and New York, 1996. xiv + 214 pp., £40.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 0 333 63324 5 hb., 0 333 66531 7 pb.
This centenary collection usefully steers between two
extreme responses to Engelsʼs role in the development
of Marxism, neither attributing all errors and crudi-
ties in the official doctrine to his baneful influence,
nor merely portraying him as playing second fiddle
to Marx. However, its main focus is not an attempt
definitively to settle Engelsʼs relationship to Marx, but
rather a review of what in Engelsʼs works still occa-
sions debate. This includes his views on class struggle
and ʻscientific socialismʼ, philosophical naturalism,
feminist issues, and political economy. While there is
some unevenness in the collection, it succeeds in its
aim of showing that Engels had views which warrant
critical discussion.
Terrell Carver and Andrew Collier discuss Engelsʼs
views on the politics of class struggle, arguing that he
should be seen as a democrat. Terrell Carver notes
that Engels could only enter into an uneasy alliance
with other supporters of secular democratization in
Europe. He suggests a parallel between the struggles
of 1848, in which Marx and Engels participated, and
popular revolts against Communist rule in Eastern
Europe, claiming that both were crucially inspired by
a demand for constitutional government, which, for all
its limitations, ʻimplies power sharing with citizens
[and] respect for them and their viewsʼ (p. 23). I doubt
this. Hayekʼs constitutionalism, for example, seems
rather to imply suspicion of citizens and their views.
Constitutionalism as such can be seen as a device
to restrict appropriation of wealth through political
power. It has democratic overtones when directed
against feudal lords, but not as a safeguard against
redistribution of wealth by popular majorities.
Andrew Collier absolves Engels of responsibil-
ity for subsequent retreats among social-democratic
parties from social revolution to reform and, finally, to
mere management of capitalism. Collier asks whether
socialist revolution is indeed necessary or possible
given its prerequisites, and then proceeds to show
what Engels contributes to this question. According
to Collier, Engels makes ʻtwo main tendential predic-
tions: that the proletariat will grow as a proportion of
the population; and that military technology will shift
the balance of forces in the stateʼs favourʼ. He also
makes ʻthree main constraint predictions: that social-
ism cannot be brought about without a revolution,
that revolution cannot be made without the organized
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
support of a large majority, and that revolution cannot
be made against the militaryʼ (p. 40). Collier finds that
these predictions are supported by historical evidence,
but criticizes Engels (and Marx) for failing to appreci-
ate that revolutions are ʻalways exceptionalʼ (p. 42).
His summary (pp. 43–4) stresses Engelsʼs ʻexemplary
realismʼ, thus leading into the issue of philosophical
naturalism.
Various aspects of this topic are covered by John
OʼNeil, Ted Benton and Sean Sayers. Ted Benton
considers what can be learned from Engels about the
prospects of a realignment of red and green politics.
He claims that Engelsʼs The Condition of the Working
Class in England demonstrates a link between the
class position of the English working class and the
poor health and environment it suffered, and thus
can be seen as a foundational text for an ecologi-
cal socialism. Sean Sayers, meanwhile, argues that
Engelsʼs non-reductive materialism is the viable alter-
native to idealism and physicalism (equating this with
the mechanistic materialism that Engels rejects). For
Sayers, as for Davidson, this position asserts that all
ʻmaterial things are physical in natureʼ, yet denies
that ʻall material phenomena are fully describable
or explicable in terms of physicsʼ (p. 159). However,
Sayers rejects Davidsonʼs ʻanomalous monismʼ because
it gives a ʻnon-realist account of the mental standpointʼ
(p. 161). This charge might stick for the mental, since
on Davidsonʼs account what counts as a correct mental
description or explanation is partly determined by
a presumption that others mostly believe and think
rationally as we do (the ʻPrinciple of Charityʼ). But the
charge may not hold for other areas, such as biology; or
even for the view that the mental is ʻanomalousʼ, if that
is simply a consequence of denying determinism.
The collection is balanced by some serious criti-
cisms of Engelsʼs views. While applauding Engelsʼs
vision of how men and women might live, Lisa Vogel
argues that he fails to integrate his various sources into
a coherent theory of the oppression of women. She
suggests a need to go beyond socialist feminism to a
critique of Marxism. If, however, historical material-
ism can be interpreted sufficiently broadly to contain
approaches such as Christine Delphyʼs, it may be that
feminism needs only to reject timid, conventional
Marxisms. Chris Arthur argues that gratitude for
43
Engelsʼs contribution to Capital should be tempered
by recognition of the muddles involved in his concept
of ʻsimple commodity productionʼ and his attribution
of a ʻlogico-historicalʼ method to Marx. Arthurʼs claim
that theory need not recapitulate history is well taken.
He also shows that value can be a fully developed
social relation of production only under capitalism.
His further assertion that categories such as ʻvalueʼ
cannot apply to pre-capitalist commodity exchange
relies, less plausibly, on claiming that labour time has
a ʻnecessaryʼ influence only on capitalist exchange.
Engels Today provides useful food for thought now
that the work of Marx and Engels is no longer, as a
matter of course, engulfed in ideological fall-out from
the collapse of Communism.
Ian Hunt
Whose last words?
Jean-Paul Sartre and Benny Lévy, Hope Now: The
1980 Interviews, trans. Adrian Van Den Hoven, with
an introduction by Ronald Aronson, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1996. 135 pp.,
£15.95 hb., 0 226 47630 8.
ʻItʼs other people who are my old age. An old man
never feels like an old manʼ, protests the seventy-five-
year-old Sartre. The recall of the famous ʻHell is other
peopleʼ is one of the few flashes of the old brilliance
to be found in these interviews, first published in the
weekly Nouvel Observateur only weeks before Sartreʼs
death in April 1980. His interloctor is his young
secretary Benny Lévy, the rabbinical reincarnation of
the Maoist chief formerly known as Pierre Victor.
The interviews immediately provoked controversy
and were given a hostile reception by the Sartre
ʻfamilyʼ. Simone de Beauvoir, in particular, was vitri-
olic, accusing Lévy of ʻabductingʼ and manipulating
an old man who no longer had the intellectual strength
to defend himself. In his very informative, but perhaps
over-generous, introduction Aronson argues that, in
Beauvoirʼs view, respecting the new direction that
Sartre appears to be taking here would imply disre-
spect for the Sartre she had known in his prime. He
then asks why Sartre should not be able to change
in yet another direction. The question is legitimate,
as is the reminder that the image of Sartre which
emerges from Beauvoirʼs autobiographical writings
is a highly contrived and controlled one. To claim
that Hope Now is one of the few occasions on which
44 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
Sartre can be seen actually working with someone
else and being contested is more dubious; Lévyʼs
questions are often aggressive and he tries too hard to
keep his own hands clean. The criticisms of Sartreʼs
fellow-travelling would, for instance, be much more
palatable if they were accompanied by a self-critical
reflection on Lévyʼs starring role in the tragi-comedy
of French Maoism. Some of the retractions prompted
by Lévyʼs questions are startling. Sartre is now critical
of his notorious endorsement of the use of a cleansing
violence in his Preface to Fanonʼs Wretched of the
Earth. Whilst it is true that the piece has not aged
well, it is hard not to see Sartreʼs admission that he
found it ʻunpleasantʼ to be against his own country as
a surrender to the collective amnesia surrounding the
horrors of the Algerian War. It is heartbreakingly sad
to see Sartre retreating from his honourable position
of old.
The central issue addressed in these interviews
is that of constructing new foundations for the Left
after the eclipse of Marxism. Sartre and Lévy explore
the possibility of a new ethics of fraternity and look
forward to a future in which each person will be a
human being, and in which collectivities will be equally
human. Parties will give way to mass movements with
definite and specific goals. At times the discussion
is alarmingly abstract and divorced from political
realities. The rise of Mitterrandʼs Socialist Party and
the electoral victory of 1981 may well have resulted
in new disappointments, but it is perverse to see them
as signalling the demise of political parties.
The references to an ethics of fraternity would
simply be a banal coda to Sartreʼs political evolution,
were it not for the discussion of messianism, and
particularly Jewish messianism, in the final interview.
In Anti-Semite and Jew, which, it now transpires, was
written without any recourse to documentation or
research, Sartre claimed that the Jew would finally
discover that he is ʻa manʼ and not merely a creation
of the anti-Semite. Sartre argues that the Jewish vision
of the end of the world as resulting in the appearance
of a new world, and in the emergence of an ethical
existence in which men live for one another, is an
essential ingredient in any revolutionary politics.
The reappearance of religious themes, and of posi-
tive references to monotheism, are commonplaces of
French political thought from the so-called New Phil-
osophers onwards. Yet it is still surprising to find
Sartre subscribing to such ideas. If the comments made
by Lévy in his Afterword are a faithful reflection of
Sartreʼs thinking, the old atheist was looking forward
to the coming of the Messiah – the reign of man and
of the universal. Was Sartre being overinfluenced by a
dialogue with someone who went so rapidly from what
he now calls ʻmilitant stupidityʼ to religious Judaism?
Is this the authentic voice of the dying Sartre? Beau-
voir claimed that Lévy brought pressure to bear on
the blind Sartre, who finally gave in from exhaustion
and agreed to his secretaryʼs arguments. If that is true,
Lévy appears not to have changed; Foucault is likewise
reliably reported, in the very different context of a
discussion of ʻpeopleʼs justiceʼ, as having surrendered
to the unrelenting arguments of the then Pierre Victor
… out of exhaustion, to make him happy, to shut him
up. Despite Aronsonʼs attempts to argue that these
interviews reperesent a new departure for Sartre, some
doubt must remain as to their authenticity. Just whose
last words these are is far from certain.
David Macey
Rhetorical
rotundities
Stanley Rosen, The Mask of Enlightenment: Nietzscheʼs
Zarathustra, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,
1995. xviii + 264 pp., £35.00 hb., 0 521 49889 9.
The title of Rosenʼs trenchant critique of Nietzscheʼs
Zarathustra refers to ʻthe role of rhetoric in the revo-
lutionary movement known as the Enlightenmentʼ.
Rhetoric, we are told, is the means by which dangerous
philosophical truths are hidden behind noble lies, and
Nietzsche, as the subtlest of rhetoricians, is cast as
the most dangerous revolutionary of them all. Having
stripped away the smiling rhetoric of rational progress,
Nietzsche dared to expose not merely the latent grimace
of scepticism and materialism, but the far deeper terror
of the certainty of chaos and ʻthe eternal return of the
sameʼ. Finding himself face to face with the horror of
nihilism, he too felt constrained to fashion a revivify-
ing rhetorical mask. Anthropomorphizing force into
will and flux into freedom, he sought to conceal chaos
behind creativity, notwithstanding the rigid determin-
ism of an eternal return which spurns the rhetorical
rotundities it illegitimately spawns.
The focal point of Rosenʼs book is Zarathustraʼs
ʻdouble rhetoricʼ: a dual invocation of subjective free-
dom and absolute necessity which juxtaposes exoteric
exaltation and esoteric despair. Indeed, it is the tenac-
ity of Rosenʼs hold on the equivocal character of
Zarathustraʼs discourse – its ʻincoherent synthesisʼ
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
of creative overcoming and amor fati, free will and
determinism – that constitutes the principal strength
of his inquiry. Rosen shows how the nihilism required
for the destructive preliminary stage of Zarathustraʼs
revolutionary ideology necessarily precludes the all-
important creative stage. He further shows how the
correlatively dual role of will to power, as ever-shift-
ing ground of fragmented subjectivity on the one
hand, and defining act of integrated subjectivity on the
other, is inherently ʻselfʼ-defeating. As Rosen astutely
concludes, Nietzscheʼs attempt to derive individual sig-
nificance from chaos is like trying ʻto pull a rabbit out
of an empty hatʼ. The failure of Zarathustraʼs teaching
is thus seen to lie in a double rhetoric which flourishes
and founders on its internal contradictions. While
the destructive determinist instinct in Zarathustraʼs
doctrine of the eternal return flourishes in hearts hard
enough for nihilism, the creative flourish of the vulgar-
ized doctrine luxuriates in swampy hearts yearning for
salvation. In the former, wisdom confines life; in the
latter, art refines wisdom and thereby reanimates life.
In both, the ʻlived wisdomʼ which Rosen locates at the
core of Zarathustraʼs prophetic mission falters on the
common disjunction between theory and practice.
What Rosen fails to mention, however, is that
the split between theory and praxis is in no greater
evidence than in the person of Zarathustra himself;
nowhere is the pathos of personal failure more
affecting, especially if one sees in Zarathustra partial
projections of his author. One must of course be
mindful of the boundary between work and author,
blurred though it is by the fluctuations of chaotic
ʻsubjectivityʼ. But while Nietzscheʼs hermeneutic tool
of ʻbackward inferenceʼ from the work to the author
would reject any simple identity between Nietzsche
and Zarathustra, it would consider equally untenable
Rosenʼs representation of Zarathustra as ʻthe expres-
sion of Nietzscheʼs loneliness purged of its purely
subjective or personal elementsʼ. To portray a tragic
and psychologically complex figure, a man torn apart
by violent inner conflict, as ʻthe highest and purest
aspect of Nietzscheʼs spiritʼ, is to rob Nietzscheʼs
most cherished (and to my mind, most personal) work
of its clumsily masked confessional content. Rosenʼs
sanitized spiritualization of Zarathustra diminishes not
only the latterʼs all-too-human weaknesses, which bar
his way to self-overcoming, but the specific allegori-
cal significance, persistently overlooked by Nietzsche
scholars, of the kindred spirits (the ʻhigher menʼ of
Part IV), who strew the path of his inner journey. It
is surprising indeed that a critic who places so much
emphasis on the spiritual perceives neither the clear
45
connection between the spirit of Romantic pessimism
(personified by Schopenhauer) and the soothsayer, nor
that between the spirit of Romantic art (personified
by Wagner) and the sorcerer. Consequently, Rosenʼs
reading of Part IV of Zarathustra is by far the weakest
section of the book.
Even more surprising, however, is Rosenʼs failure
to connect the subtlety of Zarathustraʼs double rheto-
ric with the forked tongue of his cunning serpent.
For if, as Rosen claims, ʻserpents are a metaphorical
expression of … the wisdom of deceit and poisonous
attackʼ, and Zarathustraʼs serpent is a metaphor for
cunning intelligence, then the latterʼs intrinsic relation
to Zarathustraʼs rhetorical duplicity is self-evident.
Furthermore, Rosenʼs claim that, ʻas personifications
of natural force (including the human spirit), [Zar-
athustraʼs] animals do not represent [his] personal
subjectivityʼ is seriously undermined by Zarathustraʼs
prior claim that the spirit is a tool and toy of the
body. Once again, Rosenʼs hermeneutic bent towards
the abstract and the spiritual deprives Zarathustra of
his quintessentially human characteristics.
These reservations aside, Rosenʼs The Mask of
Enlightenment is the most penetrating interpretation
of Zarathustra to have appeared in recent years.
Francesca Cauchi
Sacred facts
Robyn Ferrell, Passion in Theory: Conceptions of
Freud and Lacan, Routledge, London and New York,
1996. viii + 118 pp., £35.00 hb., £10.99 pb., 0 415
09019 9 hb., 0 415 09020 2 pb.
In Robyn Ferrellʼs account of psychoanalysis, Freud
was a committed empiricist who evolved a theory that
challenges the premisses of the empirical sciences.
Briefly, her argument runs as follows: as early as The
Interpretation of Dreams (1900), when his theorizing
starts to becomes recognizably psychoanalytic, Freud
offers two hypotheses: the first, that the primary mental
item is not the sense-perception but the hallucination;
the second, that the wish, originating in the body, is
more basic than the thought. The consequence is to
disturb the assumption ʻthat the objective view is a
valid – or even a possible – intersubjective referenceʼ
(p. 29). The real can no longer be equated with the
external objective world that is taken as a yardstick by
the sciences. It is not so much that scientific empiricism
46 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
– the reference to neuro-physiology, chemistry and so
on – is disqualified; it is rather that the foundational
objectivity apparently guaranteed by the reference to
the external world is put into question.
The question which Freud goes on to raise in
respect of any theory – and that includes not only
empiricism but also his own metapsychology – is
whether it can avoid projecting unconscious desires,
in the shape of its concepts, back onto the material
it is using the concepts to organize. On this view,
theory would always be an elaborated kind of second-
ary revision (to use the term applied to the narrative
that the dreamer imposes on the elements of his/her
dream), informed by interior psychic structures. This
does not mean that we cannot make legitimate dis-
tinctions between hypotheses. (In Freudʼs example
of geology, it is plausible to assume that the core of
the earth is molten rock; it is not plausible to assume
that it is strawberry jam.) It does, however, entail that
theory is never completely free of unconscious desire.
Science and reason cannot be neutral, in the sense
of disconnected from their source in unconscious,
desiring psychical reality – which means, ultimately,
their source in the body.
It is not until the very last pages of the book that we
discover where the argument is heading. When science
claims, implicitly or explicitly, that it has access to the
most ʻrealʼ kind of reality, what we are witnessing,
in Ferrellʼs view, is the religion of our times. Science
itself ʻis a species of theology … the description of fact
is the sacred writing of the contemporary world, and
that world worships where things are taken literallyʼ
(p. 98). On this interpretation, ʻfacts are expressive of
contemporary desireʼ (ibid.). So real is the ontology
produced by science, Ferrell writes, that we do not
see that this reality is a theological one. The desire
that empiricism embodies is for the objective real to
be unrelated to our desire, whereas for psychoanalysis,
without desire there would be no connection with
the world at all. Love is ʻan epistemological rela-
tionʼ (p. 99) (which is why transference is not just
a phenomenon of clinical work, but a key concept
in psychoanalytic theory). For empirical science, the
subjectivity of the observer has to be neutralized,
ʻfixedʼ, in order to establish the validity of the scientific
observation. That is all well and good, says Ferrell,
provided we remember that the neutralization of the
subject-pole itself corresponds to a desire. The same
problem arises, of course, in psychoanalysis when it
aspires to be scientific. The recurring clash between
the essential mobility and destabilizing power of the
id and the need for both epistemological stability and
therapy is often thought to be exemplified in Lacanʼs
eventful career and contradictory heritage.
It makes sense to see Ferrellʼs short study as belong-
ing in many respects to the genre of the philosophical
essay: offering a series of reflections which are often
pithy and epigrammatic in expression. Its rhetorical
qualities are simultaneously seductive (the pleasure
of seeing complex ideas condensed so satisfactorily);
demanding (in the effort required to consider whether
the condensation is accurate, or whether one needs to
question further); and an obstacle (the condensation
is a barrier at those points where one is not in a
position to do the unpacking). Its account of Freud is
remarkable in its conciseness and pertinence, although
I imagine the book will leave the sceptics unconvinced
and believers confirmed in their views. But part of
Ferrellʼs point is that we cannot be literally dispas-
sionate about any of our theories: neutrality is not
an option.
Margaret Whitford
Ulster defence
mechanism
John David Cash, Identity, Ideology and Conflict:
The Structuration of Politics in Northern Ireland,
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1996. x +
230 pp., £30.00 hb., 0521 55052 1.
Under capitalism, says the Communist Manifesto, ʻall
fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient
and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away.ʼ
Not, apparently, in Northern Ireland; nor in those
numerous other countries where the so-called ʻethnic
revivalʼ increasingly dominates political life. How are
we ʻto comprehend the persistence and regeneration
of ideologies of ethnicityʼ (p. 6)? This is the question
Cash sets out to answer. The difficulties we have in
answering it are, he believes, due to defective theories
of ideology. This he sets out to remedy in the first part
of the book. In the second he puts his own theory to
work in explaining the ideological formations of one
particular ethnic group: Ulster Unionists.
Cash defines ideology as ʻa dynamic and relatively
autonomous system of signification, communication
and subjection which operates by constructing a
social and political order and subjecting individual
human beings to cathected positions within this orderʼ
(p. 70). His objection to existing theories of ideology
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
is that they are either too sociological, and therefore
unable to treat it as operating autonomously through
the activity of individuals; or too psychological, and
hence disabled from appreciating its role in structur-
ing intersubjective relations. Cash seeks to overcome
this duality through an appeal to Giddensʼs theory of
structuration, whereby the structure of social systems
is both the medium of individual action and the effect
of it. The structuration of ideology is, Cash claims,
governed by unconscious rules which should, so he
questionably infers, be specified in psychoanalytic
terms. Thus the Kleinian paranoid-schizoid position
gives rise, as a defence mechanism, to dehumanizing
or persecutory ideological formations; the depressive
position to an ambivalent one which, unlike the former
sorts, is able to treat its objects as whole people
with good and bad aspects, so that ʻthe capacity for
reality testing, vis à vis the prior positions, is greatly
enhancedʼ (p. 88).
Cash combines this psychodynamic account with
aspects of Kohlbergʼs cognitive-developmental theory
to devise rules governing the structuration of identi-
ties and relations in Northern Ireland. He discerns
four modes of ideological reasoning: two corporate
ones which constitute persons by their ethno-religious
category, the instrumental through shared objectives
and the affiliative through allegiance; and two liberal
ones, the conventional and the post-conventional,
which constitute them as citizens and as human beings
respectively. The suitability of the corporate modes to
the dehumanising or persecutory positions, and of the
liberal to the ambivalent one, is evident. Terms like
ʻProtestantʼ and ʻRoman Catholicʼ thus have a different
significance, depending on whether the corporate or
liberal modes are employed, and incorporate either
exclusivist or inclusivist constructions of the social
world. This is the basis of Cashʼs ʻdepth hermeneutic
of Unionist ideologyʼ (p. 111).
Cash rejects both pluralist explanations in terms of
the continuity of ethnic identities, and modernization
accounts which sharply contrast the rational pursuit
of group interest with irrational ethnic regressions.
Instead, he emphasizes the fluctuations in Union-
ist ideology, attempts at inclusivist policies towards
Nationalists alternating with exclusivist reactions
to political crises. Through analysis of speeches by
Unionist politicians he identifies the changes from
liberal ambivalence to corporate dehumanization or
persecutory anxiety and back again.
If the strength of Cashʼs theory of ideology is to be
judged by its power to explain Unionist politics, then
it cannot be judged a complete success. His somewhat
47
one-dimensional account does not take us far beyond
recording the readily observable affective reactions of
Unionists to political events. Although he dwells on the
paradox of a Loyalism which defies British authority
and asserts a right of self-government, his scheme
fails to elucidate what Britishness means to Unionists.
Nor does his downplaying of their Protestantism as
just a potentially exclusionary label help capture their
complex identity. But it is his reluctance to look outside
his confiningly pathological framework that is finally
unsatisfying: Nationalists are described as exclusivist
when, for them, ʻthe enemy was trying to continue
with its regime of oppression and discriminationʼ (p.
154). But it was, wasnʼt it?
This last criticism survives, even if we grant that it
would be unfair to judge Cash by his failure to shed
light on a situation whose explanation is nearly as
intractable as its resolution. There is a good deal of
independent interest here, including useful discussions
of Althusser and Habermas on ideology. Its application
is at least a serious attempt to get beyond the usual
journalistic banalities.
Paul Gilbert
Suspicion and faith
Alan How, The Habermas–Gadamer Debate and the
Nature of the Social: Back to Bedrock, Avebury,
Aldershot, 1995. xi + 251 pp., £37.50 hb., 1 85628
179 5.
It is a pleasure to find a book where one disagrees,
sometimes profoundly, with the author, but which one
still feels able to praise. This is an excellent text. It
is written clearly and – an all too rare phenomenon
– with the reader and his or her sensibilities in mind,
rather than as a display designed for the satisfaction of
the author. It does what it sets out to do, no more and
no less, and bears the stamp of a good teacher and a
careful thinker. I can see myself referring students to
it for some time to come and I am sure that I will be
referring myself to it as well. It is the best account of
the Habermas–Gadamer debate that I have found.
The author announces his prejudice for Gadamer
at the beginning and tries to show that in the debate
between the two, Habermas is guilty of the greater
misinterpretation. In the process of demonstrating
this, he does us the service of succinct summaries
48 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
of the origins of the dispute in the Adorno–Popper
controversies, and of the main themes of Gadamerʼs
Truth and Method. He offers the best account of the
concept of ʻapplicationʼ available, and a useful account
of the differences between Gadamer and Peter Winch.
When faced with teasing out the Habermas–Gadamer
debate myself, I react as I might if I were asked to
separate two gridlocked Sumo wrestlers. How himself
deals with it as a contest over four rounds, carefully
describing the punches and scoring the points, arguing
that Gadamerʼs hermeneutics is capable of producing
critiques of ideology, that the emphasis on tradition
does not entail obedience to authority, and so on. Yet
I find I am not convinced by these arguments.
In his introduction, How calls on a distinction made
by Ricoeur between a hermeneutics of suspicion and a
hermeneutics of faith, which seems to me to be a very
clear way of distinguishing between the contestants;
and towards the end he recognizes the possibility
– perhaps the necessity – of being able to move
from one to the other. But he also wishes to defend
Gadamerʼs conception of language – the basis of faith
– in a way that leaves me uneasy. Language becomes
the source of sociality, which is fair enough, but also
the way the world discloses itself to us, and this is
too close to a theological conception to be accepted
uncritically: ʻIn the beginning was the word … and
the word was God.ʼ I am not sure that Howʼs defence
of it is actually compatible with his more even-handed
assessments. Everything – and perhaps especially
the subjective and the individual – is absorbed into
such a conception which, in a strange paradox given
Gadamerʼs intentions, produces in theory a form of
totalitarianism where there is no room for critique.
Language can be many things – a link with Being,
an instrument, a reflection, a self-revelation and a
persuasion. But it can also be an enemy, something
which strips us of our intuition, and with which we
must struggle.
There is one sentence in which How opposes the
two thinkers in a typically succinct way: ʻGadamerʼs
most basic attitude orients him towards seeing the
connectedness between things, finding complicity
even between oppositions. Habermasʼ attitude actively
heightens dualisms, for example setting off reason in
direct opposition to traditionʼ (p. 166). Yet these are
precisely the moments of dialectical thought – the
separation and contradiction and the bringing together.
If we seek only connectedness, we move towards
mysticism, and there is no development, nothing new
emerges; if we seek only contradiction, we move
towards fragmentation. We need to hold on to faith
and suspicion at the same time and move between the
two, giving each one priority in turn. Perhaps the most
important thing about this book is that it stimulates
thinking about these issues in an accessible way.
Ian Craib
Unengaged
Véronique M. Fóti, ed., Merleau-Ponty: Difference,
Materiality, Painting, Humanities Press, Atlantic
Highlands NJ, 1996. 201 pp., $55.00 hb., 0 391 03904
0.
The editor introduces these twelve essays by sug-
gesting that the need for exposition of Merleau-Pontyʼs
work has now passed, and that what is required is
a dialogue with him in the context of recent post-
phenomenological and post-structuralist philosophies.
For members of the Merleau-Ponty circle, from one of
whose conferences these papers are loosely derived,
this is probably true; and they have indeed taken the
injunction against exegesis to heart. It is possible to
imagine some intriguing debate surfacing during their
meeting, but as a collected volume the book does not
work well because there is no real engagement with
Merleau-Pontyʼs texts, or any sense of the overall
project on which these writings bear, or of how they
relate to subsequent developments in continental phil-
osophy. The task of the editor should surely have been
to provide some such overview and contextualization,
but instead Véronique Fótiʼs introduction merely offers
a brief summary of each article. She does, however,
divide the contributions according to what she sees
as the three main issues to be confronted: difference,
materiality and painting.
Fóti registers surprise that among these Merleau-
Ponty scholars, the question of materiality seemed to
incite the most interest, and the essays in this section
do offer some suggestive explorations of matter vis-à-
vis Merleau-Pontyʼs ontological category of the flesh.
Here materiality loses its inertia and opacity to appear
as inexhaustible rather than impenetrable; as a field of
forces and a style of existing, rather than Cartesian
extension or Kantian spatiality. Olkowskiʼs reading
of Merleau-Ponty through Bergson is especially provo-
cative in this regard. Somewhat confusingly, the editor
also concludes that difference is the ʻfocal problematicʼ
of these scholars. However, this part of the collection
is the least satisfying. It is never made clear by any of
the writers in what sense they are using difference, and
it often seems to amount to no more than a skimpy
Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)
comparison between Merleau-Ponty and some other
thinker (such as Nietzsche or Derrida). Fromanʼs final
remarks on similarities between flesh and différance,
for example, are interesting but the issue is touched
on much too sketchily.
The final category, on painting, seems a rather
less obvious priority, but reflects Fótiʼs own interests.
Intriguingly, she notes that the conference was held
in conjunction with an exhibition of post-Abstract
Expressionist art and in her own piece she relates
the works on display to Merleau-Pontyʼs own writing
on painting, noting that it offers probably the most
sensitive yet audacious discussion of this topic to
come out of contemporary continental philosophy. In
many ways I found this to be the best piece in the
collection, since it combines a real engagement with
Merleau-Pontyʼs work in this area with some innova-
tive ways of applying, extending and criticizing it.
Situating his interest – primarily in Cézanne – within
broader French concerns with vision and his own onto-
logical inquiries into the appearing of the visible as a
phenomenology of perception, Fóti finds a tension in
Merleau-Pontyʼs work between ʻperceptual originʼ and
ʻpureʼ or ʻdifferentialʼ nascency, or as she also puts it,
between ʻfoundational unityʼ and ʻungrounded crea-
tive differentiationʼ. It is in the latter – predominant
in The Visible and the Invisible, which returns us to
the generativity of the flesh with its ʻplay of energies
in irresoluble tensionʼ – that she finds the possibility
for an oblique extension to, and theoretical resource
for, the abstract painting of which Merleau-Ponty was
himself quite dismissive. Given the rather difficult yet
superficial treatments most of these pieces offer, it
would nevertheless be preferable for readers to return
to the original texts, whose elegant prose is too often
merely parodied here in strings of metaphors without
any real guiding purpose.
Diana Coole
49
NEWS

Dictating research
Feminist philosophy and the RAE

In an essentially contested subject such as philosophy, it makes little sense for a

small Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Panel to make judgements across the
whole breadth of the discipline, however well-intentioned that panel might be. As I
work between the ʻcontinentalʼ and ʻanalyticalʼ traditions – in the field of feminist
philosophy, which was (and always has been) completely unrepresented on the
RAE Panel – I feel this very acutely.
In practice, little work in feminist philosophy was submitted in the course of
the RAE to the Philosophy Panel. But that is precisely the problem. I know from
discussions in the Society of Women in Philosophy (UK) that many junior (and
sometimes also senior) colleagues working in this field were either dissuaded by
their heads of department from submitting ʻfeministʼ pieces, or were persuaded
to submit ʻoutsideʼ Philosophy, under the entirely inappropriate heading of Sociol-
ogy, for example. Such a strategy prevents the development of the discipline of
philosophy – and also fails to register the 180 plus women who are part of this
network, including those who have responded to recent SWIP questionnaires in
ways that show that many see their academic future in fairly grim terms.
If we have to continue with the absurd process of RAE assessment (as I fear we
must), it is absolutely essential that the discipline recognizes the need for separate
sub-panels for different philosophical traditions. There was nobody on the panel
this time, for example, who had skills in recent French philosophy, and ʻContinen-
tal Philosophyʼ is certainly not a homogeneous tradition, even though it is often
equated with all that is not ʻanalyticʼ. In Europe, after all, a similar RAE exercise
would have a variety of ʻContinentalsʼ, and probably only one person who was
supposed to have skills in the whole ʻAnalyticʼ area.
My suggestion is that next time round there be at least four sub-panels. It has
been suggested by some that there might be sub-panels in ʻanalyticʼ, ʻcontinentalʼ
and ʻappliedʼ philosophy. However, I would like to add to this suggestion by request-
ing that consideration be given to a further sub-panel that should be set up to deal
with interdisciplinary work in philosophy. Furthermore, I would propose that some
person or persons on this interdisciplinary sub-panel should have the skills neces-
sary to judge work on sexual difference and race: work that emerges from a variety
of philosophical traditions, but that is usually not ʻapplied philosophyʼ. It should be
clear that ʻapplied philosophyʼ is an inappropriate category for assessing work in
such lively research areas as feminist epistemology, feminist meta-ethics or feminist
political philosophy. Nor can ʻapplied philosophyʼ embrace my own two primary
areas of research specialism: feminist metaphysics and feminist aesthetics.
Interestingly, when I recently assembled the self-descriptions of the women
serving on the editorial board of the Womenʼs Philosophy Review (UK), what
was striking was the impossibility of telling from the lists of research expertise
whether a particular board member was trained in the analytic or continental tradi-
tions. Here, what matters more is the necessity forced on those working within

50 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

feminist philosophy to familiarize themselves with a broad range of philosophical
argument and interdisciplinary debates.
The RAE process is already acting like the Medusaʼs gaze, freezing the disci-
pline of philosophy into anachronistic modes of self-definition that block innova-
tion. If the only philosophy that is financially rewarded as ʻgoodʼ philosophy is
ʻpureʼ philosophy – and if ʻpureʼ philosophy is judged in a way that marginal-
izes interdisciplinarity – then we might expect further ʻcutsʼ and ʻblocksʼ to the
development of radical and ʻnon-standardʼ philosophy (including feminist phil-
osophy). And what should be a vigorous discipline, open to a plurality of voices
and conceptions of philosophy, will be unable to defend itself effectively against
those university managers and administrators who are looking for easy targets in
this time of financial stringency. As we are already seeing, the RAE judgements
have already meant that posts are ʻaxedʼ or ʻfrozenʼ, and at least one English phil-
osophy department is threatened with dispersal and closure. It is urgent that we
discuss questions of future strategy now before too much more damage is done.
Christine Battersby
Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick

The preceding article is reprinted from the ʻViews and Commentsʼ section of the Womenʼs Philosophy
Review, no. 17, Summer 1997. It represents the personal views of the editor of that journal, which is
affiliated to the Society of Women in Philosophy (UK). It is based on a letter that was posted to the
e-mail discussion group for philosophers, philos-l@liverpool.ac.uk.

The case of economics

The Research Assessment Exercise carried out by the Higher Education Funding
Councils (HEFC) for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland and their
predecessors was established as an institutional mechanism to provide the govern-
ment with a rationale for distributing research funds among university departments
of a given subject area. Central to the Exercise is the subject assessment panel
made up of pre-eminent peers who rate the research excellence of a department
and thereby determine the amount of research monies it will get. Perhaps not
initially intended to affect the areas of research carried out by British academ-
ics, the assessment panels in fact have that capability through their control of the
allocation of research monies.
The first exercise seemed to have little impact on economists and their research.
However, by the time of the 1989 RAE, the so-called ʻDiamond Listʼ of core
mainstream economic journals had been drawn up and there was a strong belief
amongst economists that this list was used by the assessors to inform their judge-
ment of the quality of research in economics departments in British universities.
Attempts were made to extend this list for use in the 1992 RAE. At the 1994
Royal Economic Society Annual Conference the chairman of the economics panel
for the 1992 RAE claimed that the assessors did not discriminate against non-
mainstream research and that the research assessment exercise should not be used
by economic departments to do so. He added that he did not believe that British
economists would actively discriminate against non-mainstream economists and
their research. However, at the same conference a flyer appeared which announced

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 51

that one old university was in the market for nine economists who would raise its
economics department research profile in mainstream economics. Advertisements
for posts in other institutions similarly specified that applicants must be working
within mainstream economics and linked this explicitly to either maintaining or
improving their ranking in the assessment exercise. It is clear that, as a result of
the RAE, economics departments were discriminating positively in their hiring
practices towards mainstream economists and their research as a way to maintain
and/or enhance their rating in the next research assessment exercise.*
Central to the assessment exercise is the peer review system, which can be
defined as a system by which the intellectual excellence of a piece of research is
judged by a committee or panel of researchers working in, or close to, the field
in question. According to researchers on peer review, for the system to work it is
necessary that each member of the panel be pre-eminent in the specialism(s) they
have to evaluate; that the pre-eminent panel members be selected from across the
relevant academic community; that the actual method of selection is open, demo-
cratic, and involves as much of the academic community as possible; and that the
panel be open to unorthodox and interdisciplinary research. Since the RAE utilizes
the peer review system, the HEFC based the selection of panel members on pre-
eminence in research and on the range of specialized expertise needed to cover
the spread of research in the subject area to be assessed; however, they were not
concerned whether or not the methods of selection of the panel peers were open
and democratic and whether the peers may have an interest in the outcome of their
deliberations.
The process by which economists were selected for the economic panels for
the 1989, 1992 and 1996 RAEs was not open or democratic in that the majority
of economists had little say in the selection process. In particular, the panellists
were selected by the HEFC and its predecessors, the Royal Economic Society in
conjunction with the heads of economic departments, and the chair of the eco-
nomics panel. All in all, less than 10 per cent of British economists had any real
say in the selection of the panels; moreover, the selection of nearly a third of the
panel members was done without any consultation whatsoever. Although the main
criterion for panel selection was pre-eminence in research, nearly a third of the
nineteen panel members in the three RAEs had published on average fewer than
three articles over a twenty-five year period and hence did not fulfil the criterion
of pre-eminence in research. As for the subject coverage criteria for panel selec-
tion, after closely examining the journal publication records of the panel members,
it can be concluded that none of the assessment panels covered all of mainstream
economics as represented by the core mainstream journals. Furthermore, our
examination revealed the near absence of publications in non-mainstream economic
journals by members of all three panels (except for the lone Post-Keynesian econo-
mist on the 1996 assessment panel), which suggests that the panel members did not
have the expertise or knowledge to judge the quality of non-mainstream economics
submissions. The consequences of this is made clear in our survey of the 1992
RAE publication submissions of seven 5-rated, eight 4-rated, eleven 3-rated, and
three 2-rated university economics departments. The survey revealed twenty-five
publications in non-mainstream core journals. Four of those publications were in
three 5-rated departments, none were in 4-rated departments, fourteen were in
eight 3-rated departments, and seven were in two 2-rated departments. Thus it
appears that if a department publication submission included a significant propor-

* Economics can be divided into a mainstream, called neoclassical economics, and a non-mainstream,
which broadly consists of Marxian, Post-Keynesian, Institutional and Sraffian economics.

52 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

tion of publications in core non-mainstream journals, it would most likely receive
a 2 or 3 rating.
The combination of peer review and the RAE has produced an institutional
arrangement in the form of an economics panel which, because of its control over
funding, has the power to affect the type of economic research carried out by
British economists. Since the selection process ensured that the members of the
economics panels were nearly all mainstream economists, the message that the
panels sent out was that research in mainstream economics and publication in core
mainstream journals were what was necessary for university economics depart-
ments to maintain or increase their research funding. This message was reinforced
by the evaluation of research submitted to them and the ranking of departments.
Consequently, since the 1992 RAE economic departments have taken steps in the
areas of recruitment policy and the direction of both departmental and individual
work to emphasize mainstream research and de-emphasize and discriminate
against non-mainstream research.

A shift towards the mainstream

We undertook a questionnaire survey of British economists regarding the RAE.
The findings of the survey showed that there has been a noticeable shift towards a
mainstream recruitment policy, with a concurrent positive disinclination to recruit
non-mainstream economists. Advertisements for posts ranging from lectureships to
chairs predominantly favoured mainstream economists, while departmentsʼ criteria
for making appointments narrowed to publications in core mainstream journals.
This resulted in interviews where candidates were directly asked in which core
mainstream journals they intended to publish. It also meant that non-mainstream
economists on probation or temporary contracts were coerced into doing main-
stream research. Thus the impact of the RAE on hiring has been to reduce the
employment possibilities of non-mainstream economists in British university
economics departments and to ʻpressureʼ those departments most open to non-
mainstream economists to hire mainstream economists as well. Furthermore, the
survey revealed that large numbers of British economists felt themselves directly
affected by the economics panelʼs apparent view that national and international
research excellence was restricted to mainstream economics and publishing in core
mainstream journals.
The real threat of financial sanction by the economics panel has, in light of the
declining financial support for universities and research, driven British economics
departments to discriminate against non-mainstream research and the hiring of
non-mainstream economists, as well as to restrict if not eliminate the teaching
of non-mainstream economics to students. This cleansing process clearly gained
steam after the 1992 RAE and has been accentuated by the results of the 1996
RAE. The ongoing discrimination against non-mainstream economists and their
research has resulted in few young non-mainstream economists obtaining univer-
sity teaching and research positions. As a consequence, within ten years or so, the
number of non-mainstream economists in British university economics departments
will decline significantly. Such a decline will result in the virtual disappearance
of non-mainstream economists from the vast majority of economics departments,
with the remainder ageing and increasingly invisible.
From the beginning, it has been apparent that the research assessment exercises
represent a thrust towards managerialism in UK higher education, with increased
competition among institutional providers in quasi-markets and the introduction of
ʻperformance indicatorsʼ to judge quality and determine funding. The fact that this
has been achieved under cover of peer review is of no consolation, as it ignores

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 53

intellectual authority relations. The RAEs give those dominant within a discipline
the power not only to define quality but also to ensure that only that type of
research is done which fits in with their often narrow definition of excellence.
Whilst this is most obvious in a paradigm-bound social science such as economics,
preliminary analysis of Harleyʼs new research findings in other disciplines would
indicate that similar processes may be at work.
Frederick S. Lee and Sandra Harley
De Montfort University

This article is based on research on the impact of the RAE on economics, the full results of which
are contained in S. Harley and F. Lee, ʻThe Academic Labour Process and the Research Assessment
Exercise: Academic Diversity and the Future of Non-Mainstream Economics in UK Universitiesʼ
(Human Relations, forthcoming), and F. Lee and S. Harley, ʻEconomics Divided: The Limitations
of Peer Review in a Paradigm Bound Social Scienceʼ (unpublished). Radical Philosophy readers
who would like copies of these articles are welcome to write to Dr Frederick S. Lee, Department of
Economics, De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester LE1 9BH.

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54 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)

OBITUARY

Wal Suchting, 1931–1997

In March of this year, I received the sad news of the passing of Wal Suchting the previ-
ous January. I never met Wal in person. But, from a correspondence of some hundreds
of pages stretching over five or six years, I felt I had come to know him and I thought
of him as a friend. A fair part of our correspondence consisted of commiserations over
the debased politics of academic life and the difficulties of pursuing a Marxian-oriented
research agenda in an intellectual conjuncture dominated by neo-liberal dogma and
ʻpostmodernʼ dilettantism. Though writing from different continents (North America and
Australia) and occupying opposite ends of the academic cycle of experience (at the incep-
tion of our correspondence, I was still in the process of finishing my Ph.D., whereas Wal
had just accepted early retirement from his post at the University of Sydney, declaring
himself on the occasion ʻvogfreiʼ), Wal would assure me that upon reading my descrip-
tion of some academic horror story or another he could ʻimaginatively place himself in
the situation immediatelyʼ. What followed was always sound advice, often returning in
the most intractable circumstances to the recommendation given by Virgil to Dante when
encountering the ʻlukewarmʼ in Danteʼs Inferno: ʻlet us not speak of them, but look and
pass onʼ.
Wal was one of the authors of a new translation of Hegelʼs Encyclopedia Logic,
although he took issue with some of his co-workersʼ translating conventions in a sepa-
rate preface to the volume (Indianapolis: Hackett 1991). As a philosopher, he defended
a hypothesis which he himself conceded might appear to many ʻquite strange and even
far-fetchedʼ: namely, that Hegelʼs logic – which prima facie would seem to belong to the
broad movement of romantic reaction against modern science – in fact represents a sus-
tained, if only ʻsemi-consciousʼ (Wal used here a Freudian interpretive model, distinguish-
ing the ʻlatent contentʼ of Hegelʼs text from its ʻmanifest contentʼ), engagement with the
protocols of the ʻnewʼ – that is, ʻGalileanʼ – science. I myself never became convinced of
this point as concerns Hegel. But it mattered little – since the substantive guiding thread
of Walʼs research in the last years of his life was, in any case, the character of the ʻnewʼ
science itself, and its distinctiveness from an older ʻAristotelianʼ conception of science
which continued to hold sway in much philosophical discourse about science even long
after it had ceased to play any role in scientific practice proper. Wal was, in effect – even
if Hegel should turn out not to have been – a passionate defender of the scientific revolu-
tion. Wal was a socialist, and indeed in a far stronger and more traditional sense than
that which is usually attached to this word nowadays. Hence, he was especially distressed
to find epistemological relativism gaining ground in ostensibly ʻMarxistʼ circles or even
being marketed to a completely unknowing student public as a characteristically ʻMarxistʼ
ʻepistemological positionʼ. As far as Wal was concerned, the superiority of Marxʼs theo-
retical output, more specifically of his political economy, consisted not in its serviceability
to political interests whose angelic character could be safely assumed a priori, but rather
in its superior cognitive value in enabling us to grasp the nature of capitalist economic
reality.
The last package I received from Wal, around the New Year, contained a long type-
script on ʻThe Concept of Materialism in Althusserʼs Later Thinkingʼ. Althusser was a
constant source of inspiration for Wal – though in a rather unique way, sharing nothing in
common with the ʻAlthusserianismʼ which still makes the rounds, in various permutations,
in the Anglophone academy today. As readers of his autobiographical writings will

Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997) 55

know, Althusser often despaired of the limits of his learning and self-consciously
belittled the significance of narrowly philosophical education – and indeed, it
must be said, he often did so with good reason. Walʼs erudition, by contrast, was
massively imposing: being both encyclopedic, spanning the physical sciences,
mathematics and the humanistic disciplines, and cosmopolitan, inasmuch as Wal
regularly read and drew upon resources in all the major modern European lan-
guages of scholarship plus ancient Greek and Latin. Whereas Althusserʼs style,
moreover, tended towards the lapidary, Wal preferred what he himself called,
following Hume, the ʻtedious lingering methodʼ, a single concept or proposition
being increasingly refined over the course of many pages of analysis, in the light
of various ʻtestsʼ or anticipated objections and in continual (often sharply critical)
dialogue with the results obtained by other scholars in the relevant field or fields.
In this sense, it can be said – though Wal was too modest to have said so himself
– that he often improved upon those suggestions of Althusser which he found
most fruitful or gave them a grounding that they lacked in Althusserʼs original.
In Althusser, he once wrote, ʻthe argument would appear to be not that claims
to knowledge are justified because they are in working-class interests, but rather,
conversely, justified claims to knowledge are in working-class interestsʼ.
This was surely Walʼs conviction: more simply put, that knowledge is progres-
sive – or at least is more likely to be so in the long run than its opposite. This is
not to say that Wal had any illusions about the efficacy in general of theoretical
work. He once remarked wryly that he might as well have placed his writings in
bottles and thrown the latter off a bridge for all the impact publishing them had
had. In fact, apart from his many articles and two books, Wal left behind a large
volume of unpublished typescripts. It could only serve the cause of enlightenment
– which, if Wal was right, is still a just cause – if these gradually found their way
into print.
John Rosenthal

56 Radical Philosophy 85 (September/October 1997)