Adorno, Theodor Negative Dialectics 3b Models World spirit

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appropriate to this conception just as much as to absolute idealism, which can so little
resign itself to the separation of time and logic than Kant could to that of the intuition and
understanding. In this Hegel, the critic of Kant, was incidentally also his executor. If the
latter a priorized time, as a pure form of intuition and the condition of everything
temporal, this is for its part raised above time.*4* Subjective and objective idealism
thereby come to accord. For the fundament of both is the subject as concept, excluding its
temporal content. Once more the actus purus [Latin: pure act], as in Aristoteles, becomes
what does not move. The social partisanship of the idealists reaches all the way into the
constituents of their systems. They glorify time as non-temporal, history as eternal out of
the fear, that it would begin. The dialectic of time and the temporal consequently turns
for Hegel into one of an essence of time in itself.*5* It offers positivism a favorite point
of attack. In fact it would be badly scholastic, if dialectics were ascribed to the formal
concept of time, purged of every temporal content. The critical reflection on this however
dialectizes time as the unity of form and content, mediated in itself. The transcendental
aesthetic of Kant would have nothing to counter the objection, that the purely formal
character of time as a form of intuition , its emptiness , would itself correspond to no
intuition, however stylized. Kantian time rejects every possible conception and
imagination: in order to conceive it, something temporal must always be co-conceived
along with it, on which it can be read, a something, on which its course or its so-called
flow becomes experienceable. The conception of pure time requires precisely the
conceptual mediation the abstraction from all thinkable conceptions of time which
Kant, for the sake of the systematic, of the disjunction of sensuality and understanding,
wished and had to dispense from the forms of intuition. Absolute time as such, divested
of its lattermost factical substrate, which is in it and proceeds in it, would no longer be
what according to Kant time must inalienably be: dynamic. No dynamics without what it
takes place in. Conversely however no facticity is to be conceived, which would not
possess its positional value in the continuum of time. Dialectics carries this reciprocity
into even the most formal realm: none of the moments essential therein, and opposed to
each other, is without the other. It is motivated meanwhile not by the pure form in itself,
in which it unveils itself. A relationship of form and content has itself become form. It is
the inalienable form of content; the uttermost sublimation of the form-content dualism in
the severed and absolutized subjectivity. The moment of truth in Hegel s theory of time
could still be extracted, insofar as one does not permit the logic of time to produce itself
out of itself, as he does, but rather preserves it in the logic of congealed time-relations, as
it was indicated variously in the Critique of Pure Reason, especially in the schematism
chapter, though cryptically enough. The discursive Logic similarly preserves moments of
time unmistakably in the conclusions as detemporalized, rendered illusory, by means
of their objectification into pure nomothetism, performed by subjective thinking. Without
such detemporalization of time these latter would in turn never have been objectified. As
the cognition of a moment, the interpretation of the context between logic and time
through the recourse to what, according to the current, positivistic doctrine of science, is
pre-logical in logic, would be compatible with Hegel. For what he calls the synthesis, is
not simply the utterly new quality, which leaps out from the determinate negation, but
rather the return of what is negated; dialectical progress constantly also the recourse to
what fell victim to the progressing concept: its advancing concretion, its self-correction.
The transition of logic into time would like, insofar as the consciousness is able, to render
compensation to this latter, for what logic has done to it, without which however time
would not be. Under this aspect the Bergsonian doubling of the concept of time is a piece
of its own unconscious dialectic. He sought to theoretically reconstruct the living
experience of time in the concept of the temps dur�e [French: lived duration], of the lived
duration, and thereby its substantive moment, which had fallen victim to the abstraction
of philosophy and to the causal-mechanical natural sciences. Nevertheless he did not
reach the dialectical concept any more than this latter, more positivistically than his
polemic knew; he absolutized the dynamic moment, out of d�go�t [French: disgust] for
the dawning reification of consciousness, made it for its part into a form of
consciousness, as it were, into a particular and privileged mode of cognition, reifying it, if
you will, into a branch. Isolated, the subjective experience of time along with its content
becomes as accidental and mediated as its subject, and for that reason, in view of the
chronometric one, always at the same time wrong . To explain this, the triviality
suffices that the subjective experiences of time, measured by the clock, are subject to
illusion, although no clock-time would be without the subjective experience of time, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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