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Subject and Object
By Theodor W. Adorno
To engage in reflections on subject and object poses the problem of stating what we are
to talk about. The terms are patently equivocal. "Subject," for instance, may refer to the
particular individual as well
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as to general attributes, to "consciousness in general" in the language of Kant's
_Prologomena_. The equivocation is not removable simply by terminological
clarification, for the two meanings have reciprocal need of each other; one is scarcely to
be grasped without the other. The element of individual humanity--what Schelling calls
"egoity"--cannot be thought apart from any concept of the subject; without any
remembrance of it, "subject" would lose all meaning. Conversely, as soon as we reflect
upon the human individual as an individual at all, in the form of a general concept--as
soon as we cease to mean only the present existence of some particular person--we have
already turned it into a universal similar to that which came to be explicit in the idealist
concept of the subject. The very term "particular person" requires a generic concept, lest
it be meaningless. Even in proper names, a reference to that universal is still implied.
They mean one who is called by that name, not by any other; and "one" stands
elliptically for "one human being."
If on the other hand we tried to define the two terms so as to avoid this type of
complication, we would land in an aporia that adds to the problematics of defining, as
modern philosophy since Kant has noted time and again, for in a way, the concepts of
subject and object--or rather, the things they intend--have priority before all definition.
Defining means that something objective, no matter what it may be in itself, is
subjectively captured by means of a fixed concept. Hence the resistance offered to
defining by subject and object. To determine their meanings takes reflection on the very
thing which definition cuts off for the sake of conceptual flexibility. Hence the
advisability, at the outset, of taking up the words "subject" and "object" as well-honed
philosophical language hands them to us as a historical sediment--not, of course, sticking
to such conventionalism but continuing with critical analysis. The starting point would
be the allegedly naive, though already mediated, view that a knowing subject, whatever
its kind, was confronting a known object, whatever its kind. The reflection, which in
philosophical terminology goes by the name of _intentio obliqua_, is then a re-relation
of that ambiguous concept of the object to a no less ambiguous concept of the subject.
The second reflection reflects the first, more closely determining those vague subject and
object concepts for their content's sake.
--The separation of subject and object is both real and illusory. True, because in the
cognitive realm it serves to express the real separation, the dichotomy of the human
condition, a coercive de498/499
velopment. False, because the resulting separation must not be hypostasized, not
magically transformed into an invariant. This contradiction in the separation of subject
and object is imparted to epistemology. Though they cannot be thought away, as
separated, the _pseudos_ of the separation is manifested in their being mutually
mediated--the object by the subject, and even more, in different ways, the subject by the
object. The separation is no sooner established directly, without mediation, than it
becomes ideology, which is indeed its normal form. The mind will then usurp the place
of something absolutely independent--which it is not; its claim of independence heralds
the claim of dominance. Once radically parted from the object, the subject reduces it to
its own measure; the subject swallows the object, forgetting how much it is an object
itself.
The picture of a temporal or extratemporal original state of happy identity between
subject and object is romantic, however--a wishful projection at times, but today no
more than a lie. The undifferentiated state before the subject's formation was the dread of
the blind web of nature, of myth; it was in protest against it that the greater religions had
their truth content. Besides, to be undifferentiated is not to be one; even in Platonic
dialectics, unity requires divers items of which it is the unity. For those who live to see
it, the new horror of separation will transfigure the old horror of chaos--both are eversame. The fear of yawning meaninglessness makes one forget a fear which once upon a
time was no less dreadful: that of the vengeful gods of which Epicurean materialism and
the Christian "fear not" wanted to relieve mankind. The only way to accomplish this is
through the subject. If it were liquidated rather than sublated in a higher form, the effect
would be regression--not just of consciousness, but a regression to real barbarism.
Fate, myth's bondage to nature, comes from total social tutelage, from an age in which
no eyes had yet been opened by self-reflection, an age in which subject did not yet exist.
Instead of a collective practice conjuring that age to return, the spell of the old
undifferentiatedness should be obliterated. Its prolongation is the sense of identity of a
mind that repressively shapes its Other in its own image. If speculation on the state of
reconciliation were permitted, neither the undistinguished unity of subject and object nor
their antithetical hostility would be conceivable in it; rather, the communication of what
was distinguished. Not until then would the concept of communication, as an objective
concept, come into its own. The present one is so infamous because the best there is, the
potential of an agreement
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subjectivity without an object. No matter how we define the subject, some entity cannot
be juggled out of it. If it is not something--and "something" indicates an irreducible
objective moment--the subject is nothing at all; even as _actus purus_, it still needs to
refer to something active. The object's primacy is the _intentio obliqua_ of the _intentio
obliqua_, not the warmed-over _intention recta_. It is the corrective of the subjective
reduction, not the denial of a subjective share. The object, too, is mediated; but
according to its own concept, it is not so thoroughly dependent on the subject as the
subject is on objectivity. Idealism has ignored such differences and has thus coarsened a
spiritualization that serves abstraction as a disguise. Yet this occasions a revision of the
stand toward the subject which prevails in traditional theory. That theory glorifies the
subject in ideology and slanders it in epistemological practice. If one wants to reach the
object, on the other hand, its subjective attributes or qualities are not to be eliminated,
for precisely that would run counter to the primacy of the object.
If the subject does have an objective core, the object's subjective qualities are so much
more an element of objectivity. For it is only as
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something definite that the object becomes anything at all. In the attributes that seem to
be attached to it by the subject alone, the subject's own objectivity comes to the fore: all
of them are borrowed from the objectivity of the _intentio recta_. Even according to
idealist doctrine, the subjective attributes are not mere attachments; they are always
called for by the _definiendum_ as well, and it is there that the object's primacy is
upheld. Conversely, the supposedly pure object lacking any admixture of thought and
visuality is the literal reflection of abstract subjectivity: nothing else but abstraction
makes the Other like itself. Unlike the undefined substrate of reductionism, the object of
undiminished experience is more objective than that substrate. The qualities which the
traditional critique of knowledge eliminates from the object and credits to the subject are
due, in subjective experience, to the object's primacy; this is what we were deceived
about by the ruling _intentio obliqua_. Its inheritance went to a critique of experience
that realized its historical conditionality, and eventually that of society. For society is
immanent in experience, not an _allo genos_. Nothing but the social self-reflection of
knowledge obtains for knowledge the objectivity that will escape it so long as it obeys
the social coercions that hold sway in it, and does not become aware of them. Social
critique is a critique of knowledge, and vice versa.
--Primacy of the object can be discussed legitimately only when that primacy--over the
subject in the broadest sense of the term--is somehow definable, when it is more than the
Kantian thing-in-itself as the unknown cause of the phenomenon. Despite Kant, of
course, even the thing-in-itself bears a minimum of attributes merely by being distinct
from the categorially predicated; one such attribute, a negative one, would be that of
acausality. It suffices to set up an antithesis to the conventional view that conforms with
subjectivism. The test of the object's primacy is its qualitative alteration of opinions held
by the reified consciousness, opinions that go frictionlessly with subjectivism.
Subjectivism does not touch the substance of naive realism; it only seeks to state formal
criteria of its validity, as confirmed by the Kantian formula of empirical realism. One
argument for primacy of the object is indeed incompatible with Kant's doctrine of
constitution: that in modern natural science, the ratio peers over the very wall it has built,
that it grabs a snippet of what differs with its well-honed categories. Such broadening of
the ratio shatters subjectivism. But what defines the prior object as distinct from its
subjective trappings is comprehensible in the conditionality of what conditions it, in that
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which in turn defines the categorical apparatus it is to be defined by, according to the
subjectivist pattern. The categorical attributes without which there is no objectivity as
yet, according to Kant, are posited also, and thus, if you will, they are really "merely
subjective." The _reductio ad hominem_ thus becomes the downfall of
anthropocentrism. That even man as a _constituens_ is man-made--this disenchants the
creativity of the mind. But since primacy of the object requires reflection on the subject
and subjective reflection, subjectivity--as distinct from primitive materialism, which
really does not permit dialectics--becomes a moment that lasts.
--Ever since the Copernican turn, what goes by the name of phenomenalism--that nothing
is known save by a knowing subject--has joined with the cult of the mind. Insight into
the primacy of the object revolutionizes both. What Hegel intended to place within
subjective brackets has the critical consequence of shattering them. The general
assurance that innervations, insights, cognitions are "merely subjective" ceases to
convince as soon as subjectivity is grasped as the object's form. Phenomenality is the
subject's magical transformation into the ground of its own definition, its positing as true
being. The subject itself is to be brought to objectivity; its stirrings are not to be banished
from cognition.
But the illusion of phenomenalism is a necessary one. It attests to the all but irresistibly
blinding context which the subject produces as a false consciousness, and whose
member it is at the same time. Such irresistibility is the foundation of the ideology of the
subject. Awareness of a defect--of the limits of knowledge--becomes a virtue, so as to
make the defect more bearable. A collective narcissism was at work. but it could not
have prevailed with such stringency, could not have brought forth the most potent
philosophies, if the fundament had not contained a kernel, albeit a distorted one, of truth.
What transcendentalism praised in creative subjectivity is the subject's unconscious
imprisionment in itself. Its every objective thought leaves the subject harnessed like an
armored beast in the shell it tries in vain to shed; the only difference is that to such
animals it did not occur to brag of their captivity as freedom.
We may well ask why human beings did so. Their mental imprisionment is exceedingly
real. That as cognitive beings they depend on space, on time, on thought forms, marks
their dependence on the species. Those constituents were its precipitation; they are no
less valid for that reason. The a priori and society are intertwined. The universality and
necessity of those forms, their Kantian glory, is none other than that which unites
mankind. It needed them to survive. Captivity was internalized; the individual is no less
imprisioned in himself than in the universal, in society. Hence the interest in the
reinterpretation of captivity as freedom. The categorical captivity of individual
consciousness repeats the real captivity of every individual.
The very glance that allows consciousness to see through that captivity is determined by
the forms it has implanted in the individual. Their imprisionment in themselves might
make people realize their social imprisionment; preventing this realization was and is a
capital interest of the status quo. It was for the sake of the status quo, something hardly
less necessary than the forms themselves, that philosophy was bound to lose its way.
Idealism was that ideological even before starting to glorify the world as an absolute
idea. The primal compensation already includes the notion that reality, exalted into a
product of the supposedly free subject, would vindicate itself as free.
--Identitarian thought, the covering image of the prevailing dichotomy, has ceased in our
era of subjective impotence to pose as absolutization of the subject. What is taking shape
instead is the type of seemingly antisubjectivist, scientifically objective identitarian
thought known as reductionism. (The early Russell used to be called a "neo-realist.") It is
at present the characteristic form of the reified consciousness--false, because of its latent
and thus much more fatal subjectivism. The residue is made to the measure of the
ordering principles of objective reason, and being abstract itself, it agrees with the
abstractness of that reason. The reified consciousness that mistakes itself for nature is
naive: having evolved, and being very much mediated in itself, it takes itself--to speak in
Husserl's terms--for a "sphere of Being of absolute origins" and the Other it has
equipped for the desired matter. The ideal of depersonalizing knowledge for objectivity's
sake keeps nothing but the _caput mortuum_ of objectivity.
Once we concede the object's dialectical primacy, the hypothesis of an unreflected
practical science of the object as residual after deducting the subject will collapse. The
subject is then no longer a deductible addendum to objectivity. By the elimination of one
of its essential elements, objectivity is falsified, not purified. And indeed, the notion that
guides objectivity's residual concept has its primal image in something posited and manmade--by no means in the idea of that in-itself for which it substitutes the cleansed
object. It is the
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model of profit, rather, that stays on the balance sheet after all costs of production have
been subtracted. Profit, however, is the subjective interest, limited and reduced to the
form of calculation. What counts for the sober realism of profit thinking is anything but
"the matter"; the matter is submerged in the yield. But cognition would have to be
guided by what exchange has not maimed, or--for nothing is left unmaimed--by what the
exchange processes are hiding. The object is no more a subjectless residuum than what
the subject posits. The two contradictory definitions fit into each other: the residue, with
which science can be put off as its truth, it the product of their subjectively organized
manipulative procedures.
Defining what the object is would in turn be part of such arrangements. The only way to
make out objectivity is to reflect, at each historic and each cognitive step, on what is
then presented as subject and object, as well as on the mediations. In that sense, the
object is indeed "infinitely given," as Neo-Kantianism taught. At times, the subject as
unlimited experience will come closer to the object than the filtered residuum shaped to
fit the requirements of subjective reason. According to its present polemical value in the
philosophy of history, unreduced subjectivity can function more objectively than
objectivistic reductions. Not the least respect in which all knowledge under the spell has
been hexed is that traditional epistemological theses put the case upside down: Fair is
foul, and foul is fair. The objective content of individual experience is not produced by
the method of comparative generalization; it is produced by dissolving what keeps that
experience, as being biased itself, from yielding to the object without reservations--as
Hegel put it: with the freedom that would relax the cognitive subject until it truly fades
into the object to which it is akin, on the strength of its own objective being.
The subject's key position in cognition is empirical, not formal; what Kant calls
formation is essentially deformation. The preponderant exertion of knowledge is
destruction of its usual exertion, that of using violence against the object. It can do this
only where, fearlessly passive, it entrusts itself to its own experience. In places where
subjective reason scents subjective contingency, the primacy of the object is shimmering
through--whatever in the object is not a subjective admixture. The subject is the object's
agent, not its constituent; this fact has consequences for the relation between theory and
practice
--Even after the second reflection of the Copernican turn, there remains some truth in
Kant's most questionable theorem: in the distinction between the transcendent thing in
itself and the constituted object. For then the object would be the nonidentical, free from
the subjective spell and comprehensible through its self-criticism--if it is there at all, if
indeed it is not what Kant outlined in his concept of the idea. Such nonidentity would
come close to Kant's thing in itself, even though he insisted on the vanishing point of its
coincidence with the subject. It would not be a relic of a disenchanted _mundus
intelligibilis_; rather, it would be more real than the _mundus sensibilis_ insofar as
Kant's Copernican turn abstracts from that nonidentity and therein finds its barrier.
But then the object, along Kantian lines, is what has been "posited" by the subject, the
web of subjective forms cast over the unqualified Something; and finally it is the law
that combines the phenomena, disintegrated by their subjective re-relation, into an
object. The attributes of necessity and generality that Kant attaches to the emphatic
concept of the law have the solidity of things and are impenetrably equal to that social
world with which the living collide. It is that law, according to Kant, which the subject
prescribes to nature; in his conception, it is the highest peak of objectivity, the perfect
expression of the subject as well as of its self-alienation: at the peak of its formative
pretension, the subject passes itself off as an object. Paradoxically, however, this is not
wrong at all: in fact, the subject is an object as well; it only forgets in its formal
hypostasis how and whereby it was constituted. Kant's Copernican turn hits the exact
objectification of the subject, the reality of reification. Its truth content is the by no
means ontological but historically amassed block between subject and object. The
subject erects that block by claiming supremacy over the object and thereby defrauding
itself of the object. As truly nonidentical, the object moves the farther from the subject
the more the subject "constitutes" the object.
The block on which Kantian philosophy racks its brain is at the same time a product of
that philosophy. And yet, due to the _chorismos_ of any material, the subject as pure
spontaneity and original apperception, seemingly the absolutely dynamic principle, is no
less reified than the world of things constituted after the model of natural science. For by
that _chorismos_ the claimed absolute spontaneity is brought to a halt--in itself, though
not for Kant; it is a form supposed to be the form of something, but one which due to its
own character cannot interact with any Something. Its abrupt divorcement from the
activity
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of individual subjects, an activity that has to be devalued as contingent-psychological,
destroys Kant's inmost principle, original apperception. His apriorism deprives pure
action of the very temporality without which simply nothing can be understood by
"dynamics." Action recoils into second-class Being--explicitly, as everyone knows, in
the late Fichte's turn away from the 1794 theory of science. Kant codifies such objective
ambiguities in the concept of the object, and no theorem about the object has the right to
ignore it. Strictly speaking, primacy of the object would mean that there is no object as
the subject's abstract opposite, but that as such it seems necessary. The necessity of that
illusion ought to be removed.
--No more, to be sure, "is there" really a subject. Its hypostasis in idealism leads to
absurdities. They may be summarized like this: that the definition of the subject involves
what it is posited against--and by no means only because as a _constituens_ it
presupposes a _constitutum_. The subject itself is an object insofar as existence is
implied by the idealist doctrine of constitution--there must be a subject so that it can
constitute anything at all--insofar as this had been borrowed in turn, from the sphere of
facticity. The concept of what "is there" means nothing but what exists, and the subject
as existent comes promptly under the heading of "object." As pure apperception,
however, the subject claims to be the downright Other of all existents. This, too, is the
negative appearance of a slice of truth: that the reification which the sovereign subject
has inflicted on everything, including itself, is mere illusion. The subject moves into the
chasm of itself whatever would be exempt from reification--with the absurd result, of
course, of thereby issuing a permit for all other reification.
By idealism, the idea of true life is wrongly projected inwards. The subject as productive
imagination, as pure apperception, finally as free action, encodes that activity in which
human life is really reproduced, and in that activity it logically anticipates freedom. This
is why so little of the subject will simply vanish in the object or in anything supposed to
be higher, in Being as it may be hypostasized. The self-positing subject is an illusion and
at the same time historically very real. It contains the potential of sublating its own rule.
--The difference between subject and object cuts through both the subject and the object. It
can no more be absolutized than it can be put out of mind. Actually, everything in the
subject is chargeable to the object; whatever part of it is not objective will semantically
burst the
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"is." According to its own concept, the pure subjective form of traditional epistemology
always exists only as a form of something objective, never without such objectivity;
without that, it is not even thinkable. The solidity of the epistemological I, the identity of
self-consciousness, is visibly modeled after the unreflected experience of the enduring
identical object; even Kant essentially relates it to that experience. He could not have
claimed the subjective forms as conditions of objectivity, had he not tacitly granted them
an objectivity borrowed from the one to which he opposes the subject. But in the
extreme into which subjectivity contracts, from the point of that extreme's synthetic
unity, what is combined is always only what goes together anyway. Otherwise, synthesis
would be nothing but arbitrary classification. True, without a subjectively performed
synthesis, such going together is equally inconceivable. Even the subjective a priori can
be called objectively valid only insofar as it has an objective side; without that side the
object constituted by the a priori would be a pure tautology for the subject. Finally, due
to its being insoluble, given, and extraneous to the subject, the object's content--to Kant,
the material for cognition--is also something objective in the subject.
It is accordingly easy to look on the subject as nothing--as was not so very far from
Hegel's mind--and on the object as absolute. Yet this is another transcendental illusion. A
subject is reduced to nothing by its hypostasis, by making a thing of what is not a thing.
It is discredited because it cannot meet the naively realistic innermost criterion of
existence. The idealist construction of the subject founders on its confusion with
something objective as inherently existent--the very thing it is not; by the standard of the
existent, the subject is condemned to nothingness. The subject is the more the less it is,
and it is the less the more it credits itself with objective being. As an element, however, it
is ineradicable. After an elimination of the subjective moment, the object would come
diffusely apart like the fleeting stirrings and instants of subjective life.
--The object, though enfeebled, cannot be without a subject either. If the object lacked the
moment of subjectivity, its own objectivity would become nonsensical. A flagrant