I. Ernst Bloch and the Hegel debate in the GDR

Hegel was an important influence on Bloch’s philosophy from the very beginning; nevertheless, his Hegelianism increased in significance over time. Peter Zudeick (Reference Zudeick1985: 97) identifies a noticeable increase in Hegel’s importance between the first and second editions of Spirit of Utopia (Bloch Reference Bloch2000). Meanwhile, if Jürgen Habermas’s (Reference Habermas1960) review of The Principle of Hope (1954–55) is to be believed, then at that time Bloch still owed a greater philosophical debt to Schelling than he did to Hegel.Footnote ¹ The fact that Bloch’s final work, Experimentum Mundi (Bloch Reference Bloch1975), is effectively an ambitious reflection on Hegelian conceptual realism appears to support the thesis of Hegel’s increasing importance for his thought.

It was in Subjekt–Objekt. Erläuterungen zu Hegel (Bloch Reference Bloch1962 [1949]) that Bloch developed his reception of Hegel most comprehensively.Footnote ² The book made waves when it was published in the GDR in 1951, above all for its claim—heretical in East Germany—that Hegel’s thought was ‘unfulfilled’ by Marxism (Bloch Reference Bloch1962: 12). In the GDR context, in which ‘bourgeois’ philosophy was seen as complicit in the historical oppression of the working classes, Bloch’s fidelity to Hegel would vex the architects of Soviet domination.

In the early days of Soviet occupation, Hegel was perceived as an ally in East Germany. The journalist and later member of the SED Central Committee Alexander Abusch expressed this sentiment in an article written in 1946, in which he said that contemporary socialists felt themselves to be the ‘appointed heirs of German humanism’, among whose representatives Abusch named Kant, Fichte and Hegel (Abusch Reference Abusch1962: 8). Meanwhile, the future East German Deputy Minister for Foreign Affairs, Anton Ackermann, wrote in the Deutsche Volkszeitung on 5 February 1946 that the aim of a practical socialism was to make the intellectual demands of humanists like Hegel into ‘the demands of the people’ (Cited in Warnke 2000: 197). However, it was not long before the contrary stance became dogma. In 1946, in the journal Neue Welt, a member of the Soviet Military Administration, Wassili Stepanow, argued that although Hegel’s revitalisation of dialectical thinking had been revolutionary, he had used it for ‘conservative purposes’ (Stepanow Reference Stepanow1946: 5). For support, Stepanow looked to none other than Stalin, whose ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’ (1938) had been distributed en masse in the East since 1945. There, the Soviet dictator argued that Hegel had contributed to the rise of fascism by offering a philosophical justification for German nationalism and chauvinism.

A year later, at a philosophy conference in Moscow, Stalin’s propaganda chief Andrei Shdanow argued that in light of the leader’s position, ‘the problem of Hegel [had] long since been solved’ (Shdanow Reference Shdanow1951: 104). Once the text of Shdanow’s intervention was published in German in 1947, party functionaries such as Gerhard Harig, representative for philosophy on the SED Central Committee, called on it to argue that ‘Hegelei’ represented a form of revisionism (‘Hegelei’ was a pejorative term meaning ‘Hegeling around’, which ironically enough was invented by Schopenhauer to criticize young Hegelians like Marx) (see also Warnke Reference Warnke2000: 198). A year later, at the SED’s first cultural congress, Otto Grotewohl presented Stalin’s two-faced Hegel as the official party interpretation: the originator of the progressive dialectical method, who nevertheless espoused a reactionary political philosophy (Grotewohl Reference Grotewohl1948: 4).

Writing on the political implications of reading Hegel in the GDR, Camilla Warnke (Reference Warnke2000: 198) has argued that the entrenchment of the anti-Hegel position between 1946 and 1948 reflected the abandonment of hope for an independent German path to socialism. The question of whether Hegel was a progressive or reactionary thinker was a proxy, Warnke argues, for that of whether the philosophy of this new society would be allowed to draw on its specific cultural tradition, or whether it would be wholly determined by Moscow. In these early years, taking a position on Hegel came to signal one’s allegiance or otherwise to Soviet orthodoxy and control.

It was in this atmosphere that in 1949 Bloch returned from exile in the United States to take up the Chair in Philosophy at the University of Leipzig. In an interview with the party newspaper Neues Deutschland in August that year, he declared himself full of enthusiasm for the project of building a socialist utopia on German soil (Zudeick Reference Zudeick1985: 180). The honeymoon period did not last long. Bloch’s choice to teach classical German philosophy in Leipzig was highly politicized in a context in which philosophy had become an ideological battleground. Within academic circles Bloch quickly became known as a Hegelian, practically a ‘swearword’ in that climate (180). The appearance of Subjekt–Objekt in 1951 did little to dispel this impression. Considering the official GDR line on Hegel, Bloch’s book could only be read as a provocation: he explicitly disputed that studying Hegel constituted ‘Hegelei’ as Harig had claimed (Bloch Reference Bloch1962: 12). In light of the foregoing discussion, Bloch’s denial that Hegel’s work was ‘at an end’, which he called an ‘ideological pretence’, could only be interpreted as a round criticism of those who would see the ‘problem’ of Hegel and what it stood for ‘long since solved’ (12).

Bloch’s central argument in Subjekt–Objekt was that speculative reason, which looks beyond the merely empirical to what connects apparently discrete phenomena, was a critical weapon against totalitarianism. In the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR BXXV), Kant had defined speculative reason as reason applied ‘beyond the boundaries of experience’.Footnote ³ The ‘first usefulness’ of his critique, Kant argued, was that it teaches us ‘never to venture’ beyond these boundaries—or if we do, not to call what we find there knowledge (BXXV). For Hegel, however, the very concepts through which we know the world were themselves speculative constructs. When in the Science of Logic (SL 21.18) Hegel refers to the concept ‘as thought in general, as universal, as against the particularity of the things vaguely parading in their multitudinousness before indeterminate intuition and representation’, he highlights that concepts themselves are not reducible to any specific instance and are thus not empirically available, but are only derived or constructed on the speculative basis of seeing in multiple particulars something that remains always the same.

Hegel thus sought to rehabilitate speculation as the science of universals. Yet according to Hegel, universals were not mere products of transcendental subjectivity, operations of thought to which phenomena conform. He saw natural laws and natural kinds as evidence that realism about universals was a compelling metaphysical position (see EL §21Z, 52–53; Stern Reference Stern2009: 26). If we are to believe what natural science tells us when it says that objects will always fall under gravity, or that human intercourse will always result in the birth of a human child, then we must take seriously the proposition that the speculative structure of the concept does accurately reflect a real logic in the world. As such, Hegel argued, it is reasonable for us to assume that we can know the absolute through concepts.

Marx and Engels followed Kant in dismissing Hegelian speculation as a ‘mystery’. For them, what was most real were not abstract ideas, but the existence of ‘real individuals’ and their historical activity. ‘Where speculation ends’, they argued in The German Ideology, ‘where real life starts, there consequently begins real, positive science’ (MECW 5: 37). By the time Bloch published Subjekt–Objekt, the Marxian rejection of speculation had become a matter of dogma in the GDR; his avowal of speculative thinking thus cut directly against the grain of official doctrine.

For Bloch, Hegelian speculation was an important critical tool for two main reasons. First, speculation as the ‘positive moment of reason’ (Bloch Reference Bloch1962: 151) demonstrated the ability of human thought to go beyond the merely empirical, in other words to transgress the status quo. ‘Thought and its dialectic is the highest human power of production’, he claimed, and even though dialectical thinking must ‘be based on facts’, according to Bloch it does not ‘remain with them as mere sensory contents’ (Bloch Reference Bloch1962: 110–11). This capacity of thought to go beyond the merely given obviously spelled danger for a regime that, as the reaction to Bloch’s Hegel book would demonstrate, increasingly sought to curb all attempts at independent thinking.

Second, Bloch saw the transitivity between concepts and reality asserted by Hegelian metaphysics as evidence of what he called the ‘objectively real possibility’ of utopia (Bloch Reference Bloch1986: 235). He saw the emergence of human consciousness, with its dreams of a better life, as evidence that the world itself is striving towards a state in which reconciliation between subject and object will be achieved at the ontological level. Here again, however, the suggestion that utopia had not in fact been achieved in the present undermined the official Soviet narrative, according to which the establishment of communism represented the de facto realisation of this historic dream. When Bloch argued in the preface to the first edition that Hegel was the ‘teacher of living movement in contrast to dead being’, and of a truth that was ‘no static or completed fact’, but the ‘result of a process’ that still had to be ‘clarified and achieved’, he effectively denied that Soviet communism embodied a historically incontestable truth (1962: 12).

Even Bloch’s central criticism of Hegel in Subjekt–Objekt mobilized him against a Marxism of dogma and stasis. Hegel’s dialectic, Bloch argued, is caught ‘in the circle of anamnesis as if under a spell’, which ‘prevents even the system of development from remaining a system open to development’ (1962: 480–81). Only by accepting that both our knowledge of the world and the world itself are as yet incomplete can we escape the ‘spell of anamnesis’ and perceive the real possibility of utopia in a yet-to-be-determined future.

Subjekt–Objekt did not immediately meet with harsh criticism. Only after Stalin’s death in 1953 could an open debate about Hegel take place, and Bloch now found himself on the wrong side of the party line. In June that year, against the background of mass strikes and demonstrations in the GDR, the dissident philosopher and editor of the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Wolfgang Harich published an article that would ignite a second phase of the Hegel debate. Written by Bloch’s colleague Rugard Otto Gropp, Professor of Marxism-Leninism at Leipzig, the article sharply criticized Hegel in by now ad nauseam familiar terms (Gropp Reference Gropp1954). Bloch responded in coded fashion, denouncing dogmatism and stasis. Initially, however, the exchange was cordial enough to offer some hope that the sectarianism of the past had been overcome. Gropp edited a Festschrift for Bloch’s seventieth birthday in 1955, and Bloch was even awarded national prizes for his work. However, the seeds sown in this mealy-mouthed exchange would later bear bitter fruit for Bloch.

Much happened in 1956 that led to Bloch eventually becoming persona non grata in the GDR. In February, commenting on the twentieth party congress of the communist party, he criticized the suppression of free thought under the personality cult. It was as if ‘Marxism had become a closed doctrine under Stalin’, he argued, ‘nothing more than a connection between quotations’ (Bloch Reference Bloch1970: 364). One month later, in his new capacity as Director of the Philosophy Section of the East German Academy of Science, he convened a conference on ‘the problem of freedom in light of scientific socialism’, which explicitly addressed the issue of academic (un)freedom in East Germany (Zudeick Reference Zudeick1985: 224). In November that year, at an event marking 125 years since Hegel’s death, Bloch expressed his opposition to the regime in the strongest terms yet. Just a month or so earlier Soviet troops had violently quashed demands for freedom in Poland and Hungary, and in his lecture, ‘Hegel and the Violence of the System’, Bloch made it clear that he saw this brutality as of a piece with the same repression of critical thought to which the anti-Hegel line belonged (Bloch Reference Bloch1969: 481–500). A truly Marxist philosophy must ‘try to represent the world in its fullness and crucial depth, not to create a still life out of four or five textual fruits or a schoolmastery of sects and scientific catechisms. Red headmasters remote from life, paper aesthetics remote from art, philosophizing remote from philosophy will not help us’, he insisted (495).

Needless to say the red headmasters did not take this lying down. Gropp mounted a campaign against Bloch, exposing the supposedly parlous state of philosophy under his directorship at Leipzig. With Bloch accused of revisionism by Party Chairman Walter Ulbricht, his students were openly harassed and his publications blocked. In December 1957 Bloch was summoned before a tribunal in which his Hegel speech was the central focus. Bloch was excoriated for having developed an ‘absolutely revisionist conception’ of Hegel’s system according to which it ‘must be judged differently from the way Engels’ had done so (Bloch Reference Bloch1991). In particular Bloch’s claim that dialectical materialism needed to be renewed met with sharp disapproval. Bloch’s philosophy was denounced as un-Marxist, and he was declared unfit to teach.

It is hardly surprising, then, that when the Blochs were visiting West Germany in 1961 and they heard the news that a wall had been erected overnight in Berlin, they decided to seek asylum in the Federal Republic. In his inaugural lecture as honorary Professor at the University of Tübingen, Bloch, now 76, admitted that his hope in the GDR had been ‘disappointed’ (Bloch Reference Bloch1998: 339–45), although he never gave up on his socialist ideals, and became something of a cult figure among protesting students in the late 1960s. Nevertheless, unfettered by the constraints of (self-)censorship, in Tübingen Bloch’s critique of the East became more explicit. When Suhrkamp published a second edition of Subjekt–Objekt in West Germany in 1962, Bloch claimed in the afterword that Hegel was ‘not currently popular in the East, despite the sentence in his Philosophy of Right according to which the parliament has only the task of showing the people that they are ruled correctly’ (1962: 14). Bloch expressly saw Western mistrust towards the ‘closed, humanity violating worldview’ as justified: how true these suspicions had come faced with ‘totalitarian lead’, he said (14). He nevertheless held up the dynamism of Hegelian dialectical thinking against the idea of ‘false accomplishment’ on both sides of the iron curtain (14). In Bloch’s view, Hegel remained relevant in the face of our perpetual ‘duty against incrustation everywhere, in order to maintain existence in transition and fluidity’ (14). Hegel may have denied the future, according to Bloch, but the future would not deny Hegel, since that future was ‘loyal to the truth that is not yet’ (14).

II. Theodor Adorno: Reading Hegel after Auschwitz

A year after the second edition of Bloch’s Subjekt–Objekt appeared in West Germany, Adorno published his Hegel: Three Studies (1993 [1963]), a triptych of essays intended, as he says in the preface, ‘as preparation for a revised conception of the dialectic’ (1993: xxxvi). The first essay, ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, is based on a lecture Adorno delivered in November 1956 at an event in Frankfurt commemorating 125 years since Hegel’s death; in other words, an analogous event to the one in East Germany at which Bloch gave the lecture that contributed to his eventual exile. The second, ‘The Experiential Content of Hegel’s Philosophy’, is an expanded version of a lecture Adorno gave to the German Hegel Society meeting in Frankfurt in October 1958, and was first printed in the Archiv für Philosophie in 1959. The third and final essay, ‘Skoteinos’, was written specifically for the Hegel studies. It is a meditation on what is involved in reading Hegel which emerged from Adorno’s experience teaching Hegel’s philosophy in his Frankfurt seminar.

A number of striking similarities connect Adorno’s project in his Hegel studies with Bloch’s in Subjekt–Objekt. Just as Bloch defended Hegel against an orthodox Marxism that sought either to write him off as either a proto-fascist or an obsolete bourgeois thinker, Adorno’s stated aim in these Studies was to ‘rescue’ Hegel from both ‘the positivists’ dismissal of him as unintelligible’, and the ‘Soviet Marxists’ ideological version of the dialectic’ (Adorno Reference Adorno1993: 125, xx). Adorno’s didactic orientation in his ‘Skoteinos’ essay echoes Bloch’s approach in Subjekt–Objekt, in which exegetical essays are supported by extensive quotations from Hegel’s works.

Questions of the relation between language and thought which Hegel’s work raises are central to both thinkers’ reflections. Adorno defended Hegel’s language against the charge of obscurity levelled at him by his positivist critics. While he admitted that philosophy ‘should not succumb to confusion and destroy the very possibility of its existence’ by grossly neglecting ‘the demand for clarity’, he nevertheless identified this demand in its most puritanical form with a reified consciousness that ‘freezes objects into things in themselves so that they can be available to science and praxis as things for others’ (Adorno Reference Adorno1993: 100). For Adorno, Hegel’s language ‘has the demeanour of the language of doctrine’ only because Hegel himself had not critically reflected on the role of language in his attempt to articulate the absolute (109).

Nevertheless, Adorno argues, Hegel’s dialectics were indeed an attempt to escape the ‘Cartesian ambition’ to conceive of dynamic processes as things ‘pinned down’ and ‘photographable’ (1993: 100). The kind of linguistic clarity required by the Cartesian paradigm, Adorno claimed, ‘can be demanded of all knowledge only when it has been determined that the objects under investigation are free of all dynamic qualities that would cause them to elude the gaze that tries to capture and hold them unambiguously’ (98). For Adorno, on the other hand—and he saw himself as united with Hegel in this respect (102)—the task of all philosophy was to attempt to express this dynamism, this resistance that objects—and indeed, above all, subjects—exercise in the face of language’s inherent tendency towards reification (100). As such, what positivists perceived as Hegel’s unclarity must be understood according to Adorno as the result of a paradox inherent in all philosophy: the need ‘to say clearly something that is unclear’; to respond to ‘the urgent demand that the expression fit the matter expressed precisely, even where the matter at hand for its part does not conform to the customary notion of what can be indicated clearly’ (100). One is reminded strongly here of Bloch’s own essay on Hegel’s language in Subjekt–Objekt. There, he defends Hegel against accusations of obscurity in similar terms: ‘Something dark that is expressed exactly as it is, is quite different from something clear that is expressed darkly’ (Bloch Reference Bloch1962: 20). Bloch and Adorno were thus both fundamentally opposed to ‘watering down’ Hegel’s philosophy (Bloch Reference Bloch1962: 12), and united in the conviction that instead what was needed was to confront head on what Hegel revealed about the difficulties inherent in all critical thought.

Bloch cast those difficulties primarily in terms of imagining a world in which the Hegelian ideal of identity—between subject and object, between the brute fact of existence and the form that existence takes—would be achieved. For Adorno, however, critical thought meant above all overcoming thought’s will to identity, which we find first and foremost in the structure of concepts and judgements. Adorno argued that language and the process of reification were ‘interlocked’ to the extent that the ‘very form of the copula, the “is”, pursues the aim of pinpointing its object’ (Adorno Reference Adorno1993: 100). Like Bloch, Adorno criticized the ‘primacy of Logos’ (21) in Hegel’s work, which he, too, associated with a totalizing impulse. In Hegel’s philosophy, Adorno argued, ‘nothing is to be external to spirit’, and it was ‘the brutality of this coercion that creates the semblance of reconciliation in the doctrine of an identity that has been produced’ (20). For it was only ‘the doctrine of the identity of subject and object inherent in idealism’, Adorno claimed, that gave Hegel’s dialectics ‘the strength of totality that performs the negative labour—the dissolution of individual concepts, the reflection of the immediate and then the sublation of reflection’ (10).

It was thought’s ‘negative labour’, however, that primarily interested Adorno, for he saw in it the only means by which philosophy could even attempt to do justice to the reality of the ‘nonidentity of subject and object, concept and thing, idea and society’ (Adorno Reference Adorno1993: 31). Just as a young Bloch had argued that Kant must be allowed to ‘burn through Hegel’ as the antidote to the latter’s panlogism (Bloch Reference Bloch2000: 187), so too Adorno returned to Kant for the tools with which to think the non-identical with and beyond Hegel. According to Adorno, Hegel ‘attempted to outdo Kant’ by ‘dissolving anything not proper to consciousness … into a positing by the infinite subject’ (Adorno Reference Adorno1993: 11). In Adorno’s view, however, Hegel had mistaken the thing in itself’s resistance to thought as an ‘inconsistency’ in Kant’s philosophy (11, 13). Moreover, he had failed to recognize that ‘the Kantian discontinuities register the very moment of non-identity that is an indispensable part of his own philosophy of identity’ (13). Rescuing Hegel according to Adorno thus meant ‘facing up to philosophy where it is most painful and wresting truth from it where its untruth is obvious’ (125). Against Hegel’s assertion in The Phenomenology of Spirit that ‘the truth is the whole’, Adorno claimed that ‘the whole is the untrue’: the ‘truth in Hegel’s untruth’ was ‘the thesis of totality itself’, which for Adorno was allied with a ‘principle of domination’ in thought and society (87).

To be sure, Adorno was far from simply rejecting the speculative moment of Hegel’s thought that Bloch valued so highly. Interestingly, when, in the ‘Aspects’ essay, Adorno too describes ‘anamnesis’ as essential to Hegel’s thought, it is in defence of the necessity of speculation to his ‘method’ (1993: 3). Indeed, Adorno claimed that the attempt ‘to rescue the material substance from its allegedly outmoded and arbitrary speculation’ would result in ‘nothing but positivism on the one hand and artificial intellectual history on the other’ (3). However, while he shared Hegel’s—and Bloch’s—emphasis on a speculative identity between thought and being, Adorno denied that this identity is achieved positively in actuality. Instead, he emphasized that thought tended violently to impose identity on particular objects, including living human beings, suppressing or ignoring their real differences in the process.

If Bloch’s critique of the totalizing tendency in Hegel’s thought was dynamite in the GDR context, Adorno’s was no less so in West Germany. Already in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, he and Max Horkheimer had appealed to Hegelian dialectics to understand ‘why humanity, instead of entering into a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ (2002 [1944]: xiv). In view of the ‘trajectory of European civilization’ according to which any ‘attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion’, it seemed ‘somewhat whimsical’ to Adorno and Horkheimer to try to ‘construe world history in terms of categories such as freedom and justice’, as Hegel had done (Adorno and Horkheimer Reference Adorno and Horkheimer2002: 9, 184). However, if in the Dialectic ‘abstraction’ was ‘the levelling rule’ that reduced historically singular individual persons and things to mere iterations of nature as the dominion of the stronger, in Three Studies identification—the assertion of subject–object identity—became the crucial mechanism.

Although Adorno and Horkheimer acknowledged an implicit connection between the dynamics of modern philosophy and the emergence of fascist barbarism, the author of the Hegel studies still rejected any strong connection between Hegelianism and fascism. In the ‘Aspects’ essay, Adorno criticized the fact that ‘important thinkers in the West’ had ‘lumped Hegel together with German imperialism and fascism’ (Adorno Reference Adorno1993: 28). The excerpts these critics pointed to in support of their claims, Adorno argued, could be explained by Hegel’s consciousness of the essentially antagonistic character of civil society. Adorno refers in particular to the passage in the Philosophy of Right where Hegel writes that ‘despite an excess of wealth civil society is not rich enough, i.e. its own resources are insufficient to check excessive poverty and the creation of a penurious rabble’, and that this

Far from seeing in passages such as this evidence of Hegel’s ‘restorationist tendencies’, his ‘apology for the status quo’, or his ‘cult of the state’—aspects of Hegel’s thought Jon Stewart (Reference Stewart1996) would later refute as ‘myths and legends’—at this point Adorno reads Hegel along Marxian lines as one who, having accepted the liberal economic theory of capitalism, ‘had no antidote for the fact that poverty … increases with social wealth’ and thus appealed to the state ‘in desperation as a seat of authority beyond this play of forces’ (Adorno Reference Adorno1993: 29).

By the time he published Negative Dialectics in 1966—the ‘revised concept of the dialectic’ for which the Hegel book had been a preparation—Adorno held the Hegelian ‘identifying mode of thinking’ partly responsible for the atrocities of fascist and communist totalitarianisms (Adorno Reference Adorno2004: 147). Hegel’s hypostatization of the mind, Adorno claimed, ‘resembles the political parties … which made their appearance in the twentieth century, tolerating no other party beside them—the parties whose names grin in totalitarian states as allegories of the direct power of the particular’ (Adorno Reference Adorno2004: 199). Rolf Tiedemann explains how Adorno saw the danger of the death camps already implicit in the logic of the Hegelian concept, which subsumes difference under the sign of identity:

In short, Adorno saw Hegel’s doctrine of absolute spirit as apt for corruption by fascism, even if it was also in Hegelian dialectics, namely in its negative moment, that Adorno believed the only possibility for philosophy ‘after Auschwitz’ resided.

The rise of fascism was already a central concern of Dialectic of Enlightenment; however, the word Auschwitz and what it signified came to occupy a major place in Adorno’s thought in the decade between 1956, when he gave the lecture on which ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’ was based, and the publication of Negative Dialectics in 1966. Already in 1950 Adorno protested that in Germany ‘reminding people of Auschwitz was held to be the expression of a tedious resentment’, yet it was not until the late 1950s that he began to intervene decisively in public debates about dealing with the past (Adorno Reference Adorno2003: xii). In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a serious public debate about the historical legacy of Nazism emerged in West Germany, against the background of reparations payments, trials of a number of Nazi war criminals, and increasing scrutiny of the mass reintegration of perpetrators into public life (Gassert and Steinweis Reference Gassert and Steinweis2007: 6; Frei Reference Frei2012). In November 1959, Adorno delivered the lecture ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’ to a conference on education organized by a German organization for Jewish–Christian cooperation. In it he rejected the view, widespread in West Germany at the time, that National Socialism was a thing of the past. He argued that the threat of fascism was still present because its causes had not disappeared, and considered ‘the survival of National Socialism within democracy to be more potentially more menacing than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’ (Adorno Reference Adorno2003: 4). When anti-Semitic graffiti was daubed on the walls of a synagogue in Cologne a month later, it was clear for all to see that the threat of fascism had not died in 1945.

The title of Adorno’s lecture in German ‘Was bedeutet Aufarbeitung der Vergangenheit?’ clearly recalls that of Immanuel Kant’s 1789 essay ‘Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?’, in which Kant had warned against too optimistic an assessment of humanity’s progress in political and moral matters. Like Kant, Adorno emphasized the need for autonomy, arguing that Nazi atrocities were only possible because mass psychological identification encourages individuals to abdicate the responsibility to think for themselves and act according to their own independent judgement. Against a model of working through the past as a process of public memorialization and forgetting, Adorno argued that the past ‘will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated’ (Adorno Reference Adorno2003: 18). Adorno already seems to have seen the dynamics of ‘identification’ as among those causes. The ‘identification with power’ and ‘collective narcisissm’ that ‘increased beyond measure’ under National Socialism were ‘not destroyed at all’ in 1945, he claimed, but ‘continued to exist’, and the threat of fascism with them (10). To be sure, Adorno was far from seeing structures of identification alone as sufficient to explain the appeal and persistence of fascist tendencies: objective economic conditions that maintained individuals in a state of dependence and ‘political immaturity’ were also key. Nevertheless, in 1959 Adorno had already incorporated the concept of identification into his explanation of the Nazi past (13).

If Adorno never expressly mentioned Hegel in the 1959 essay, by the time he published Negative Dialectics in 1966 the question of ‘whether after Auschwitz one can go on living’ had become the impulse for a decisive break with the Hegelian ‘identifying mode of thinking’ (Tiedemann in Adorno Reference Adorno2003: xii; Adorno Reference Adorno2004: 147). It was a question he also addressed in the lecture ‘Education after Auschwitz’, published in 1966, which, as Espen Hammer has argued, ought to be read as a companion piece to ‘The Meaning of Working through the Past’ (Hammer Reference Hammer2013: 69). There, Adorno presents Auschwitz as a new categorical imperative for thought, arguing that the experience of German fascism enjoins us to organize society, and in particular the public education system, so that nothing like the Holocaust should ever take place again. This argument is incorporated into Negative Dialectics in a final section on metaphysics, where Adorno’s association of Hegelian thought with Nazi genocide becomes explicit. Philosophy in the Hegelian mould seemed impossible now, he argued, because ‘actual events have shattered the basis on which speculative metaphysical thought could be reconciled with experience’ (Adorno Reference Adorno2004: 362). ‘Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death’, Adorno claimed, drawing a direct connection between the logic of the concept and the logic of genocide as that of ‘absolute integration’ (362).

Adorno’s insistence on the need to recalibrate thought to be attentive to the non-identical now took on its full political import. Adorno rejected the Hegelian thesis of the ‘identity of identity and nonidentity’, according to which Hegel ‘held the definite particular to be definable by the mind because its immanent definition was to be nothing but the mind’ (Adorno Reference Adorno2004: 7). Without this supposition Adorno claimed that ‘according to Hegel, philosophy would be incapable of knowing anything substantive or essential’ (7). However, for Adorno, thought after Auschwitz must abandon this perspective, which had proven to be allied with the logic of destruction. ‘The matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history’, he argued, ‘are those in which Hegel … expressed his disinterest’, namely ‘nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity’ (8). Thus Adorno came to disavow Hegel via his reception of Hegel itself: in the context of working through the past in post-war Germany, he insisted that the Hegelian identifying mode of thinking must be overcome.

III. Assessing the critical reception of Hegel

In an essay on Bloch’s Hegel reception published in 1965, Iring Fetscher argued that every Hegel interpreter in the twentieth century ‘embraces in the great dialectician that which conforms to the conscious or unconscious purposes of their own philosophy’ (Fetscher Reference Fetscher1965: 83). They ‘seek confirmation in Hegel, or an impulse to think further, toning down whatever does not seem fit to serve one or the other goal’ (83). For Fetscher, Bloch’s interpretation was superior to many others in that it focused neither exclusively on the ‘unhappy consciousness’ of the early years, nor on the ‘flat systematics of the Berlin scholar’, but rather represented Hegel ‘in his full scope and complexity, with his contradictions and shortcomings as well as with his depth and often startling modernity’ (84). However, given that a number of scholars (Caysa Reference Caysa1992; Ottmann Reference Ottmann1977) have questioned the legitimacy of Bloch’s critique of Hegelian anamnesis, the question is worth posing again: to what extent is Bloch’s interpretation of Hegel, measured against Hegel himself, legitimate?

The same question can be put to Adorno, for whom Hegel’s weak point was not anamnesis but rather that his logic denied real difference, making it apt to justify violence against individuals. According to Stewart (Reference Stewart1996: 2), however, the association of Hegel with German fascism and, ultimately, totalitarianism is in fact a ‘myth’, one of the many ‘misconceptions’ and ‘caricatures’ whose cultivation has beset Hegel scholarship since the thinker’s own time. Given the work scholars have done to deconstruct the myths of Hegel as either a totalitarian thinker or an apologist for nationalism, there is room here, too, to ask whether the later Adorno makes too large a theoretical leap by construing Hegel’s ‘identity thinking’ as fertile philosophical ground for violent domination.

Bloch’s critique of Hegel can perhaps best be described in terms Martin Jay (Reference Jay1984: 220) has used to refer to Herbert Marcuse’s theory of memory: ‘anamnestic totalization’. As Bloch put it in an interview with Michael Landmann, the ‘doctrine of anamnesis claims that we have knowledge only because we formerly knew’ (Landmann Reference Landmann1975: 178). The problem is that this means there can ‘be no fundamentally new knowledge, no future knowledge. The soul merely meets in reality now what it always already knew as idea’ (178). This results in a ‘circle within a circle’, Bloch claims, the self-same circle within which, he argues, Hegel was trapped under the spell of anamnesis (178).

The key passage for Bloch’s critique seems to be Section 808 of The Phenomenology of Mind, in which Hegel discusses the goal of history, as ‘Absolute Knowledge or Spirit knowing itself as Spirit’ finding ‘its pathway in the recollection [Erinnerung] of spiritual forms [Geister] as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their spiritual kingdom’ (PhG 476). According to Bloch, Hegel’s conclusion that spirit becomes absolute knowledge in history through a process of recollection implies that the knowledge acquired at the end of the process was always already ‘known’ (Bloch Reference Bloch1962: 477). Accordingly, there is no room for truly new knowledge in Hegel. However, Bloch’s interpretation here is arguably one-sided. For is not Hegel here describing something rather like a sociology of knowledge, whereby the knowledge acquired by each successive generation is partially transmitted, and partially lost, and in this gap new knowledge acquired? Hegel speaks of the end of each epoch as ‘a state in which Spirit leaves its external existence behind and gives its embodiment’—knowledge recorded in material or technological form—‘over to Recollection [Erinnerung]’ (PhG 476). After the spirit of one particular age ‘is engulfed in the night of its own self-consciousness’, Hegel insists, ‘its vanished existence’ is ‘conserved’ through recollection, and this ‘superseded existence—the previous state, but born anew from the womb of knowledge—is the new stage of existence, a new world, and a new embodiment or mode of Spirit’ (476). He continues:

To be sure, one might object that there is nothing to guarantee that each successive generation must begin at a ‘higher level’ of knowledge than the one before. Surely knowledge can go missing forever rather than being preserved automatically for recollection by the next forms of spirit. From this perspective, Hegel’s theory of recollection seems to allow too little room for aleatory losses of knowledge through accident or catastrophe. However, on this reading it appears as if Bloch’s objection to Hegelian anamnesis is rather overstated. I agree with Remo Bodei in this respect, who has argued that, far from negating the future—or future knowledge—as Bloch would have it, Hegel rather claims ‘that every new emerging “epoch” … rises with a qualitative leap whose outcome is not predictable in advance and requires a new philosophy’ (Bodei Reference Bodei1975: 89).

Of course, the purpose of Bloch’s critique here was not only to highlight an aspect of Hegel’s thought that had, he believed, until then largely been overlooked. Rather, he was perhaps chiefly concerned to distinguish between Hegelian anamnesis and his own concept of anagnorisis, which as Jay recognizes meant that ‘one could recognize figural traces of the future in the past, but the past itself contained no archaic heritage of plenitude’ (Jay 1984: 238). According to Bloch, while anamnesis ‘provides the reassuring evidence of complete similarity’, anagnorisis ‘is linked with reality by only a thin thread’ (Landmann 1975). He continues: ‘Anamnesis has an element of attenuation about it, it makes everything a gigantic déjà vu, as if everything had already been, nihil novi sub anamnesi. But anagnorisis is a shock’ (178). I argue that Bloch’s distinction between his own philosophy, which transcends anamnesis, and the previous history of philosophy under its spell, must be read as the kind of rhetorical device deployed frequently in the history of thought. Anamnesis functions here as a sign under which Bloch presents a blind spot as common to all his predecessors, which he can then dismiss in order to distinguish himself historically from what went before. For Kant, ‘speculative metaphysics’ played such a role; for Heidegger it was ‘forgetfulness of Being’; for Adorno, ‘identity thinking’. By classifying Hegel as a thinker of anamnesis, Bloch effectively distinguished his own innovation, the ontological moment of the not-yet, from the tradition to which he was indebted.

If, as we have seen, both Bloch’s avowal and critique of Hegel contained potentially subversive aspects in the GDR context, Henning Ottmann’s assessment nevertheless indicates that Bloch’s Hegel interpretation was not entirely devoid of the trace of orthodoxy. Ottmann’s insight, according to which Bloch distinguishes between Hegel as dialectician who ‘writes a philosophy open to the future’, and as antiquarian who ‘reduces history to a “becomeness in becoming”’ (Ottmann 1977: 104), recalls the received distinction within Soviet Marxism between the progressive value of Hegel’s dialectical method and the regressive nature of his political philosophy. However, Adorno’s Hegel interpretation also brings him into unfortunate proximity with the perspective of a regime of which he was far more critical than Bloch. The connection Adorno makes between Hegel and fascism puts him in the unlikely company of—among others—Stalin, who, as we have seen above, peddled this particular myth about Hegel in the interest of his own political control in the Soviet Union.

Adorno’s critique of Hegelian identity thinking was also, at least in part, a key component in the development of his own philosophy of non-identity. As Weber Nicholsen and Shapiro have argued, Adorno ‘differentiates himself from Hegel most emphatically in relation to the concepts of identity and nonidentity’ (Adorno Reference Adorno1993: xiv). According to Adorno in Negative Dialectics, the ‘fundamental result of Hegel’s substantive philosophizing was the primacy of the subject, or—in the famous phrase from the Introduction to his Logic—the “identity of identity and non-identity”’ (Adorno Reference Adorno2004: 7). This was the speculative moment of Hegelian logic, the moment in which the real difference between particulars is reconciled in the concept. Seeing in this speculative moment of positive identification the logic of the ‘principle of equivalence’ that underlies both capitalist exploitation and industrialized mass murder, Adorno, as Gillian Rose has argued, sought to pedal back from speculative to dialectical thinking as the consistent sense of non-identity (Rose Reference Rose2017: 53–63). As Weber Nicholsen and Shapiro elaborate,

If Hegelian identity thinking really is imbued with a logic of domination that was ultimately implicated in the Nazi death camps, then Adorno’s intention here seems noble. However, two important questions present themselves: first, one might legitimately ask whether and to what extent it is reasonable to hold Hegel’s philosophy responsible for a genocide committed over a century after his death. What concrete historical connections can be drawn, for instance, between the mechanisms of Hegelian thought and the substance of Nazi ideology? Second, given that, for Adorno, while we might be able to ‘see through the identity principle’, we nevertheless ‘cannot think without identifying’, we might question to what degree it is in fact possible to reduce speculative to dialectical thinking.

On the first point, Hubert Kiesewetter (1974) has demonstrated how, beginning after the First World War, influential German academics and scholars appealed to Hegel’s metaphysics to attack the liberal democracy of the Weimar Republic, denigrate human rights, justify anti-Semitism, and promote an authoritarian state that glorified power, militarism and the cult of the strong leader. When such a state became reality in 1933, many of these same figures—people such as Julius Binder, Friedrich Bülow, Carl August Emge, Gerhard Dulckeit, Ernst Forsthoff, Hermann Glockner, Theodor Haering, Otto Koelreuter, Karl Larenz and Max Wundt—used Hegel’s political philosophy to defend dictatorship, Nazi colonialism and racist laws. Yvonne Sherratt (Reference Sherratt2012: 27) points out that Hitler himself had recourse to Hegelian arguments in some of his speeches, and reiterates the well-known fact that the promotion of German greatness in intellectual and cultural matters was a central aspect of both the ideology of Nazism and its practical educational policy.

Yet while Kiesewetter’s and Sherratt’s studies do highlight certain historical connections between right-Hegelianism and Nazism, they far from concusively prove that the identifying gesture of idealist philosophy was integral to the logic of Auschwitz. Arguably, however, such a proof is impossible, and it was certainly far from Adorno’s intention to try to provide one. Rather, he aimed to draw our attention critically to how the kind of thinking that ‘depreciates a thing’—or indeed a person—‘to a mere sample of its kind or species’ is easily allied with all sorts of violent oppression (Adorno Reference Adorno2004: 146). It is in this spirit that Adorno argues that attention to the non-identical, to that historical singularity of lived experience which escapes subsumption under the guise of identity precisely in its material uniqueness, is such a socially and politically important philosophical act.

Nevertheless, the question of its possibility remains. If all philosophy, ‘even that which intends freedom, carries in its inalienably general elements the unfreedom in which society prolongs its existence’, how can philosophy survive the identifying impulse (Adorno Reference Adorno2004: 48)? For Adorno the answer seems to have been: only with great fragility and effort, and with no guarantees that it will lead to what Hegel called ‘freedom to the object’ (48). According to Adorno, this goal ‘has yet to be achieved’, and until then ‘the divergence between dialectics as a method and substantial dialectics will go on’ (48). ‘The principle of dominion’, he argued,

Only when the principle of dominion has truly been overcome—not just at the level of thought—will the work of negative dialectics have been achieved. However—and here is the rub—this situation seems to demand a ‘transformation of the totality’ that does indeed require speculative, rather than merely dialectical, thinking in order to imagine its possibility and therefore motivate its pursuit (Bloch Reference Bloch1988: 13).

In a conversation between Adorno and Bloch in 1964, the pair agreed that it becomes necessary to think speculatively in the context of radical social transformation. Their agreement becomes clear at a moment in the discussion that touches on the possibility of proletarian revolution. Adorno finds himself assuming ‘the unexpected role of attorney for the positive’, for if the prospect of revolution, he concedes, cannot ‘appear within one’s grasp’, then ‘one basically does not know at all what the actual reason for the totality is, why the entire apparatus has been set in motion’ (Bloch Reference Bloch1988: 13). Here Adorno’s commitment to the aim of critical theory brings him up against the limits of his relentless negativity. He and Bloch agree that even Hegel fails to think possibility as more than just a ‘subjective–reflective category’ as Bloch puts it, which ultimately they both recognize is necessary in order for the ‘emancipation and alteration of society as a whole’ to be able to take place (Horkheimer Reference Horkheimer2002: 208).