4.1 Predication, identification, and truth

Adorno makes a number of inter-related claims about artistic truth-content. At one level artistic truth-content is contrasted with discursive truth and identified with some form of non-discursive presentation. At another level, Adorno tries to integrate the notion of truth-content into a complex, dialectical account of negation: drawing on Hegel’s argument in the Science of Logic, truth-content results from the negation of semblance (Schein). At a third level, however, truth-content is epistemically determined as resistant to interpretation, indeed so resistant as to preclude comprehension. Finally, the conception of truth-content is made out to depend on a complex conception of form, and ultimately on a dialectics of form and content.

In the following I concentrate on the first claim – the one about artistic versus discursive truth. For experienced readers of Adorno it will not come as a surprise that he seeks to locate artistic truth-content at a non-discursive level. After all, a major claim of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is that the purported crisis of modernity is at least partially the result of forms of conceptual codification that prevent the acknowledgment of sensuous particularity. “Identity” is a key term in this regard. While an object of incessant reflection and critique, it figures in everything from his account of subjectivity and the commodity-form to his theory of the predominance of social totality over the individual, his critique of western metaphysics, including German idealism, and his interpretation of the subject–object relationship, as well as his reflections on language, rationality, and predication.Footnote ⁴ By contrast, the notion of non-identity serves as the negation of identity, generating a range of views concerning freedom, liberation, social change, happiness, and fulfillment.

“Identity” is a polysemantic term. At the de re level identity is a relational property – the property of X’s identity with Y – and one must distinguish between numerical identity – an entity’s identity with itself – and qualitative identity – an entity’s identity with a numerically different entity falling under the same concept or description. At the de dicto level, while equally a relational property, one speaks of identity holding between concepts, or between concepts having the same content or extension. Again, one must distinguish between numerical and qualitative identity – a concept’s identity with itself versus a concept’s identity with some other concept. Moreover, one often speaks of identity as that which individuates someone or something – whatever it is that essentially differentiates an entity from other entities. Persons, for example, are often viewed in terms of their identity.

In Negative Dialectics, however, Adorno defines identity in terms of predication.Footnote ⁵ In standard Fregean logic, concepts have an extension, comprising all the objects that purportedly fall under them. When concepts are used as predicates to assert something, they are said to “identify” or “classify” the object referred to by the subject under the higher-order content provided by the concept. Since thinking takes place via the making of judgments (rather than just possessing some sort of pre-judgmental content of the type exemplified, say, by Descartes’s “ideas”), to think is to identify. “X is green” asserts the existence of some particular state of affairs or fact. Thus, the judgment has a truth-value. However, it also, Adorno argues, functions to synthesize X, the particular, with its universal attribution, provided by the concept “green,” creating an identity between the two.

When referring to this synthesis, Adorno somewhat strangely does not seem to have in mind the subject (name, definite description, or concept) of the predication but, rather, the entity or state of affairs referred to by that subject. However “false,” a judgment creates an identity, he claims, between an entity or state of affairs and a concept. It thereby, he writes, does “violence to the object of its synthesis.”Footnote ⁶ That idea, however, seems to involve an elementary use/mention fallacy. Surely, it does not make sense to say that “water is identical with ‘H₂O’ or ‘water.’” An entity cannot be identical with some predicate term, designating a concept or class.

Should we then interpret Adorno differently? Is his point rather that predication – and the identity brought about by predication – somehow associates the particular with the conceptual content, such that the particular gets determined and viewed in terms of that content? Indeed, on this interpretation it becomes easier to approach Adorno’s complaints about identification. Identification then becomes an act whereby a particular – presumably a sensuous particular, presentable in intuition – is “subsumed under” some higher-order, universal content in relation to which it actually is “different” or “other,” possessing, as Adorno puts it, other definitions.Footnote ⁷ In some fairly intuitive sense it is possible to understand this worry: the tree, considered as a sensuous particular, always seems “richer,” more complex, unpredictable, inexhaustible, and so on, than the conceptual content designated by the term “tree” would seem able to track. The way in which language may seem incapable of responding adequately to the purported richness of experience (the fineness of grain) – is that what Adorno is considering?

In a passage in the Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein seems to respond to something like this issue by asking the reader to describe the aroma of coffee:

And, Wittgenstein continues:

Wittgenstein’s point, I take it, is that while the gesture towards non-identity seems deep, it is not clear in a case such as this what it would mean to ask for a different vocabulary (as though vocabularies are at our disposal to accept or reject), or even to say what it is that our concepts (the ones at our disposal at least) do not cover. In one fairly straightforward sense the object (the aroma) seems ineffable: we just cannot hope to provide successful descriptions of everything we experience. Yet why should the fact that words at times fail to capture the uniqueness of a particular reveal some sort of deep ontological gap between language and reality, and not just limits to what particular individuals in particular situations care or manage to describe? A good poet, employing a striking metaphor, might come up with a perfectly satisfactory description of the aroma of coffee.Footnote ⁹

A universal, if we find one that is suitable, successfully picks out a particular: a house is correctly characterized as “a house.” We can describe its details, the particulars of which the house is composed, but then we will need concepts. A door is correctly characterized as “a door.” The little patch beneath the first-floor window on the south wall is correctly characterized as “the little patch beneath the first-floor window on the south wall.” These are truisms. Yet Adorno seems to worry not only that we often fail to find the right concepts, but that as such universals falsify experience by failing adequately to pick out the particular. It is language itself that is “under the spell of identity.”

As already indicated, the root of this particular form of skeptical conundrum may seem to consist in Adorno’s failure to distinguish properly between predication and identification. Predications affirm or assent something of the subject of a proposition, thereby attributing properties to its referent. A judgment of the kind “X is green” attributes greenness to X. X, it is asserted, has the property of being green. This is not, however, the same as identifying X with the property of being green. The ball is green, yet that does not mean that we somehow identify the ball with greenness, whatever that means. It can be assumed that any rational speaker who utters the sentence “The ball is green” knows that greenness will only be one of its properties, and that greenness is not an essential property of the ball. In no way would such a speaker think that the assertion – “The ball is green” – identifies the particular with one of its (in this case contingent) properties. Whatever the ball is, it is not a heap of greenness.

That said, there is a certain historical precedence for thinking about predication in terms of identification. In Kant, for instance, judgments are supposed to create synthetic unity between various representations. A judgment is an act whereby consciousness is able to take up various representations and see them united such as to form a synthesis.Footnote ¹⁰ Since judgments are said to be objectively rule-governed (governed by a priori rules of synthesis), they are formally constitutive of a normative unity that is valid not only subjectively (or arbitrarily) but in the sense that I can rightly take myself as experiencing the unity objectively, that is, via judgments displaying objective truth-conditions. In his influential account, Hölderlin turns to the Kantian account of judgment as creating a discursively constituted unity, arguing that the very act of judging leaves us to experience the world via universal concepts that ultimately efface a more original but ineffable unity or identity.Footnote ¹¹ While the original unity remains an obscure presupposition of the very act of judging, it recedes from sight in and through the judging. In his early writings, Nietzsche, a more obvious source of inspiration for Adorno’s epistemology and philosophy of language, claims that in a world exclusively composed of sensuous particularity, concepts create false unities and continuities. On the early Nietzsche’s nominalist account, concepts mainly serve to streamline experience, making it more “manageable” and ultimately calculable.Footnote ¹²

Predication cuts both ways. It permits us to determine an object conceptually. The ball presented to me in intuition is no longer just a ball but a green ball, making rigorous individuation possible: I can distinguish it from the yellow and blue balls. By means of the predication, I obtain a conceptually mediated sense of what this particular ball is like – it thereby particularizes the ball for me. The more true descriptions I add, the more I will know about this particular ball, and the more unique it will appear. However, predication can only affect such particularization by employing concepts that are applicable in an indefinite number of other and potentially different circumstances. The ball is green, but so are my house and the maple leaf I looked at yesterday. Although these radically disparate objects do not display the same shade of green (available to me in intuition), my predications nonetheless focus on an abstract universal uniting them: on the basis of what I say, they are all to be viewed as green. Indeed, they are all green.

I could interpret this to mean that I have succeeded in classifying these entities by subsuming them under a higher-order universal that itself has a fixed content. I could say that greenness has an ideal or eidetic content that is independent of all empirically existing green objects. That would be a Platonic view, or at least the basis for formulating a realist view of concepts. Although he offers a social account of the genesis of such concepts, it may at times seem as though Adorno does hold such a view. In particular, when he associates predication with subsumption and classification, he seems to imply that experiencing an object as green is not only to judge that the object is green but, rather, to subsume the particular under a fixed, trans-temporal, and higher-order universal covering every green object. On such a view, I truly risk – especially when classification according to an easily available and simple criterion is my goal – reducing the manifold of green objects to just one, fixed determination.

Yet is a Platonist view of concepts really plausible? In the wake of Wittgenstein’s critique of conceptual Platonism, it seems that the odds are stacked against any view involving the idea that predication presupposes a grasp of Platonic essences. An essence of this kind is neither necessary nor sufficient for determining the correct application of a concept and determine meaning. It is not necessary because correct application does not require the presence of an essence before the mind; it is not sufficient because the essence itself, which is general, cannot specify how correct application takes place in particular cases.Footnote ¹³ According to Wittgenstein, a more adequate account must focus not on the idea that “acting according to a rule” is to interpret the rule but, instead, on action within the framework of an established practice – a practice in which there is training and supervision, hence also right and wrong.Footnote ¹⁴

Wittgenstein’s view of language may seem radically different from that of Adorno. Rather than taking the logical form of predication, and thus predicative judgment, as the basic semantic unity, Wittgenstein emphasizes the “countless kinds” of equally acceptable types of moves possible in language.Footnote ¹⁵ Unlike Adorno, moreover, Wittgenstein views language as an activity, embedded in forms of life. Finally, whereas Adorno seems to believe that concepts can have meaning independently of their use in judgments, Wittgenstein holds that concepts only have meaning in utterances, and that utterances only have meaning in a language, where language is the collective possession of a form of life. Indeed, as Habermas points out, Adorno has not conducted “the linguistic turn.”Footnote ¹⁶ Too much of his work remains indebted to the idealist tradition in which language plays a subsidiary role compared to that of consciousness.

However, in some of his lecture courses Adorno occasionally offers a different account of language, one not centered on an objectivist appeal to essence and mere “classification.” In Philosophische Terminologie, for example, he suggests that language must be viewed as an intersubjective practice, embedded historically in linguistic communities with shared horizons and background beliefs.Footnote ¹⁷ Like Wittgenstein, he emphasizes how agents do things with language, committing themselves in light of communally instituted rules of sense-making.

How, then, if something like this alternative reading of Adorno’s philosophy of language can be defended, are we supposed to interpret his critique of “classificatory” or “subsumptive” thinking? The most promising line, it seems, would be to focus on what Adorno, at least since the writing of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, views as an inherent tendency towards reification. Although no a priori “logics” dictates that such a tendency should emerge, modern agents are prone to use concepts in overly subsumptive ways, focusing on universality and generality while downplaying, and in some cases bracketing, the conceptualized particular. They do this not because the nature of language forces them to do so, but, rather, because social and economic pressures are such that quantification, orientation towards exchange value, commodification, calculation, and so forth, are being privileged (both epistemically and in cruder social and everyday terms) over attention to the particular (at least for its own sake).Footnote ¹⁸ The argument comes across as complex and includes reference to the Marxist theorem of commodity fetishism and Weber’s account of formal-instrumental reason, as well as Lukács’s investigation of reification.Footnote ¹⁹ For now my point is simply that discursive language, rather than inevitably forcing agents to prioritize “identity” over the “non-identical,” lends itself to reification and identification. Because of its unique role and importance in human life, and because of its ability to be used for purposes of conceptual codification, language is the major vehicle of “identity thinking.” Yet only contingently, and as the result of deep-seated social pressures and commitments, does language play this dubious role. Rather than some inherent logic of language itself, it is how we use language that causes distortion.

4.2 Non-discursive truth

In the brief but important 1956 essay “Music and Language: A Fragment,” Adorno asks whether – and, if so, how – works of art may be said to issue in judgments. The essay is particularly instructive insofar as it focuses on music, which together with architecture has traditionally been understood as the least representational of all the arts. Of course, with modernism’s challenging of all forms of representation, the very basis for viewing music as inherently non-representational in contrast to the other arts no longer makes sense the way it did to idealist aestheticians like Hegel and Schelling, who defined music as the temporally organized expression of emotion, more or less devoid of any cognitive dimension. However, regardless of modernism’s general suspicion of representation, it is evident that music does not use conceptual language, and even when, as in “program music” (the “1812” Overture, Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony, Siegfried’s Funeral March, and so on), it aims, say, to celebrate or memorialize particular events, it neither describes nor characterizes.

Adorno makes a number of key claims in this essay.Footnote ²⁰ He starts by suggesting that music “resembles” a language, providing quasi-judgments or assertions of some kind.Footnote ²¹ “Music resembles language in the sense that it is a temporal sequence of articulated sounds which are more than just sounds. They say something, often something human. The better the music, the more forcefully they say it. The succession of sounds is like logic: it can be right or wrong.”Footnote ²² Music is non-propositional: it does not make claims ushering in discursive judgments, capable of communicating meanings via conceptual attribution. How, then, if music only judges “non-discursively,” can Adorno suggest that music carries truth-value? A key concept in this regard is that of “intention” (Intention), which Adorno borrows from Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Tragic Drama, a source from which a number of elements of his theory of aesthetic truth are drawn. Adorno repeatedly states that aesthetic truth is without intention. “Music aspires to be a language without intention.”Footnote ²³ Since Adorno leaves the term “intention” unexplained, we need to turn for a moment to the original context from which it is drawn.

In Benjamin’s work, the question of intention is closely connected to the question whether the achievement of truth requires a form of unmediated awareness of the object. In the “Prologue” to the Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin seeks to dissassociate truth from Cartesian method and, indeed, any conception according to which truth is viewed as the successful possession of the object according to pre-given epistemic stipulations or rules. For Benjamin, such possession includes not only a Cartesian ordering in terms of the evident presence of clear and distinct ideas, but also the operations of transcendental consciousness in thinkers such as Kant and Husserl.Footnote ²⁴ In Kant, a judgment can only be objective insofar as the judging agent is freely able to take herself as epistemically responsible for the judgment by placing it in the “space of reasons”(Sellars) and committing herself to being able to justify the judgment with reference to universally shared rules (categories) for judgment-formation. Moreover, conceptual capacities are operative not only in judgments but already in the actualizations of receptivity; thus, a priori conceptualization is at work both at the level of the understanding and at the level of intuition, where it serves to create unity. Viewing himself as largely continuing the Kantian program of showing that a successful account of objective experience requires a theory of transcendental consciousness, Husserl considers transcendent or objective content as given within the immanence of consciousness itself, according to a priori rules of synthesis that determine the constitution of the object. By virtue of a synthesis of different conscious states, the flowing lived experience of subjective appearances of objects is united such that an identical object stands before consciousness. Following Brentano, Husserl further argues that consciousness is essentially intentional: by means of various noetic acts (perceiving, remembering, judging, doubting, anticipating, and so forth), consciousness directs itself towards the “noema,” or the object of cognition, and the empirical object is given in and through the noetic-noematic engagement we have with it. A perceived object, for example, is only directly presented through its Abschattungen; thus Husserl contrasts what is really given – reell – in an act from that which is transcendent, which includes the unseen sides as well as the various contexts within which the object is presented, and all of this within a temporal flow that holds together both protentions and retentions in a dynamic yet unitary now.

Adorno is inspired by Benjamin’s attempt to “rescue” truth from such forms of synthesis and mediation. For Benjamin, non-intentional truth is supposed to redeem the particular by permitting it to identify itself as what it is independently of all human strategies or procedures for identification. “Name” (Name) is both Benjamin’s and Adorno’s quasi-theological term for the non-reified particular – the particular that has not become transformed into a token or instance of conceptual generality – and hence truth is the particular experienced as itself only. Truth, moreover, is temporal – the experience of particulars as plural, each one existing uniquely, in the transient being of their irreducible haecceitas. At one point Adorno approvingly characterizes Benjamin’s theory of knowledge as a “metaphysical rescue of nominalism.”Footnote ²⁵ While Benjamin’s term “name” invokes a long-standing tradition of Jewish mysticism, Adorno associates “the name” with nomen in “nominalism,” thereby placing his reflection on this issue more squarely within philosophy rather than theology. In classical accounts of nominalism, such as in Locke or Hume, while universals are illusory yet pragmatically necessary products of induction, imagination, and habit-formation, only particulars exist. While views of this kind tend to see the particular as ineffable, what seems to preoccupy Adorno most is the problem of identification: in the absence of intention (or conceptually mediated representation in the form of discursive judgments), how can the particular be expressed (or “named”)? Indeed, what would “non-discursive, non-intentional judging” be? Can there be such a thing, or does judging necessarily introduce an order (of synthesis, say, or normatively structured subsumption or conceptualization) of appearing being compared to which the notion of unmediated objecthood will remain abstract and epistemically insignificant?

The problem Adorno is faced with is familiar to students of Hegel’s treatment of the configuration of “sense certainty” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In this opening section of the dialectic, Hegel investigates whether knowledge and truth can coherently be viewed as “immediate.” Interestingly, the configuration in question takes such knowledge (which it is claimed must be wholly receptive, not altering anything in the object as it presents itself) to be

Hegel’s dialectical argument is well known. In its barest outline it leads to the twofold realization that (a) such apparently rich content, since it lacks any determination, is in fact infinitely poor, and (b) as soon as the attempt is made to articulate or comprehend the “pure being” of the singular “This,” one will have to use language and thus introduce mediation by way of conceptual universality. Even the bare indexical pointing to the “This” requires spatiotemporal determination, generating a “Now” and a “Here,” which then respectively will have to be cashed out in terms of predicates (“night,” say, or “tree”), making description (“Now is night,” “Here is a tree”) possible. If consciousness restricts itself exclusively to using deictic expressions, it may be able to receive momentary sense impressions. What it will not be able to do is take itself as having established a referring relation to the object. For this to be possible, the Hegelian account makes reference to concepts, judgments, and ultimately self-consciousness.

This is not the place to reconstruct this whole, complex argument.Footnote ²⁷ Suffice it to say, though, that Kant and Hegel agree that while there may be forms of intentional awareness that function as mere episodes of conscious life but are non-cognitive (in the sense of lacking cognitive value, lacking objectivity), human subjects are capable of judging that thus-and-so is the case, thereby taking up a manifold and uniting it as a truth-functionally responsive, cognitive unit for which the knowing subject can take epistemic responsibility. Rather than merely undergoing an experience, in judging the subject actively takes itself to have an experience by judging accordingly, thus placing the experience within the space of reasons and normativity. Truth, moreover, is normative; if a representation is true, then every rational being ought to accept it. The same is true of justifications. They purport to be valid for all rational speakers. By contrast, experiential episodes simply occur at the level of causally interacting events under laws, and as such they do not have a normative structure. For Kant and Hegel, judgments are rationally generated actions, requiring spontaneity. When a judgment is made, the experiential episode is conceptually determined not because nature dictates the predication, but because the subject freely decides to take itself as being committed to the judgment. That is when a cognitive, intentional awareness becomes possible.

If something like this argument is correct, then notions such as “non-intentional truth” and “non-discursive judging,” suggesting that truth could arise from some kind of immediate encounter with the object and that judging could take place without the self-reflexive, rational action it is to determine conceptually a particular as something, seem deeply problematic, if not incoherent. Yet is this Adorno’s view? Is he really committed to the view that the mind is bifurcated into the conceptual powers – generating the illusion of generality in a world of particulars – and the intuitional or purely perceptual powers – being on their own able to open the subject to the world and, in lieu of conceptual capacities, establish a position from which it is possible legitimately to apply the predicate truth to its direct (and privileged) encounters with sensuous particularity? There is plenty of evidence that this was Benjamin’s view. “[Truth] is an intentionless state of being. The proper approach to it is not therefore one of intention and knowledge, but rather a total immersion and absorption in it. Truth is the death of intention.”Footnote ²⁸ There is, as already mentioned, also some evidence that Adorno occasionally entertained a view of this kind. For example, in some passages at the end of Minima moralia, he seems to contrast the space of epistemically knowable appearance, understood in idealist terms, with a metaphysically realist appeal to a transcendent reality, approachable ultimately in messianic terms.Footnote ²⁹ However, a number of other passages point in the direction of greater continuity between the conceptual and the intuitional order – a continuity that Adorno, for social reasons (to do with his account of the fate of reason in modernity), sees as being threatened. In Negative Dialectics, for example, he distances himself from appeals to the immediate or the given: “There is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within.”Footnote ³⁰ At the same time, however, the aim of dialectics, for Adorno, is to conduct a form of self-reflection whereby reason is supposed to turn against itself: “Dialectics is the self-consciousness of the objective context of delusion: it does not mean to have escaped from that context. Its objective goal is to break out of the context from within.”Footnote ³¹ What would count as experience outside of that context? This is not clear and, within the framework of Adorno’s theory, not properly explicated.

There is an important reason why Adorno never explains how this is supposed to be possible. In the absence of that context of delusion, however ideological, there could be no objective judging or experience. Something else, some other economy of taking up and experientially processing content, would have to take its place. The fact is that Adorno simultaneously seeks to entertain two radically diverging philosophical visions. One is the Kant/Hegel vision of experiential content as being necessarily conceptual, or conceptually laden. On the basis of Adorno’s interpretation of normal human judging and sense-making, issuing from the compulsion to create identity, reduce heterogeneity to conceptually mediated forms of unity, and the like, a project emerges of trying to criticize those forms of identification that are detrimental to a genuinely unobstructed view of, and response to, the particular. We have seen that such a critique, in order to make sense, cannot simply appeal to predication but must take a socially oriented form, disclosing socially constituted mechanisms responsible for creating reification. While questionable for Adorno, the Kant/Hegel vision is essentially an idealist one: there is an account of consciousness, of predication, of conceptual capacities entailing that no experience could count as objective unless it conforms to the rational requirements arising from this model.

If held to this view, Adorno would escape the charge of irrationalism. He would not think that a deeper, different, and “more real” reality can be apprehended once we open ourselves to a purportedly immediate encounter with things (as they are) independently of any predicative judging. Reality can be known insofar as determinations take place; thus, in the absence of judgment, while perceptual acts may occur, there can be no objectivity – no truth-apt representation. Along these lines, Adorno would be a true Kantian, for whom truth is a predicate of judgment, and for whom the very making of judgment presupposes spontaneity, the capacity to think on the basis of considerations arising exclusively from within the normatively regulated “space of reasons.”

However, as mentioned, Adorno is not fully satisfied with the Kant/Hegel vision, which he views as one of confinement and limitation. Following Benjamin, he also entertains a metaphysically realist vision of unrestricted transcendence.Footnote ³² For the reasons I have already rehearsed, that realist vision is incompatible with the idealist one. The Kantian/Hegelian idealist vision is essentially epistemic: it points to the conditions of objective knowledge (while – and this is Adorno’s challenging twist – arguing that the conditions that make knowledge possible are at the same time ideological, in need of critique). Benjamin’s realist vision is essentially metaphysical, postulating the possibility of an absolute view of the world, beyond the limiting confines of human knowledge, according to which – and here Adorno can only guess; he has no right to make knowledge claims – the world is composed of transient and unique particulars.

Adorno offers few clues in this regard. The closest one gets is perhaps his qualified defense, in the Negative Dialectics, of Kant’s notion of the thing in itself against Hegel’s absolute idealism.Footnote ³³ As will be discussed more extensively in Chapter 6, Adorno essentially praises Kant’s attempt to “rescue” the intelligible sphere, thereby allegedly demonstrating that “identity thinking” (for Adorno the Hegelian construal of the inseparability of understanding and intuition, and the equally Hegelian notion that conceptual capacities reach all the way out to the intuitions and determine those) is epistemically limiting or confining. Of course, in order to think of this view as limiting or confining, Adorno will have to side with the traditional view of Kant’s transcendental idealism as asserting, at least implicitly, an ontological doctrine, equating appearances with mere illusion and the thing in itself with objective reality. Resisting Hegel’s effort to bridge the gap between the order of appearances and the order of things in themselves, figures such as Schopenhauer and the late Schelling sought to combine an epistemological view of the ideal constitution of objecthood with a realist metaphysics of transcendent objecthood. They did this in part as a reaction against what they saw as the excessive commitment to reason in Hegel’s speculative system of dialectical logic. According to Schopenhauer, the human subject can know only its own representations (Vorstellungen), which in contrast to the thing in itself are illusory. What really exists is the will (Wille) – a completely irrational, non-teleological, endless drive or impulse, radically opposed to Hegel’s vision of reality as subject to a rational development, articulable in philosophical terms. Likewise, Schelling late in his career distinguishes between negative philosophy, or dialectics – allowing humans to disclose and self-reflectively respond to appearing reality (exploring the whatness, or essence of things) – and a positive philosophy of “the abyss” (Ab-Grund or Un-Grund) – circling around the thatness of ineffable, transcendent being, existing “before all thought.”Footnote ³⁴

In attempting to explain how metaphysical insight is possible, both Schopenhauer and Schelling appeal to privileged episodes of non-discursive knowing. In Schopenhauer such non-discursive knowing is primarily to be encountered in the aesthetic realm, while in Schelling one finds various shots at the mystical, the intuition of the absolute, or what he sometimes calls a “metaphysical empiricism.”Footnote ³⁵ At the end of his late Berlin lectures on the grounding of positive philosophy, Schelling (anticipating Benjamin) associates this pure existence, beyond conceptual determination, with the possession of a name: “For, of itself, the One is unknown, it has no concept through which it could be designated, but rather only a name – therefore, the importance placed on the name – in name He is himself, the singular being who has no equal.”Footnote ³⁶

While no doubt deeply familiar with their works, the extent to which Adorno was directly influenced by Schopenhauer and Schelling is not clear. What is clear, though, is that in the post-Kantian tradition there exists a long-standing and influential precedent for what is structurally the kind of view that we find in Adorno. All the components of a view that combines a skeptical account of idealism with a utopian vision of transcendent reality are present in Schopenhauer and Schelling, carried forward and reinterpreted by various post-Hegelian thinkers (including Marx and Kierkegaard), rather idiosyncratically appropriated by Benjamin, and made the basis for Adorno’s thinking.Footnote ³⁷ As in Schopenhauer and Schelling, it is precisely art and aesthetic intuition that hold open the promise of transcendence. And as in Schopenhauer and Schelling, transcendent reality resists human comprehension, representation, and truth: there is at this point a limit at which nothing more can be said or expressed. At this limit the self-preserving subject, with its powers of free and active judging, is challenged and possibly at the brink of some form of collapse, made manifest in the bodily responses that Adorno tends to evoke: weeping, shudder, and so on. Yet no direct experience of the absolute is involved. Rather, the work of art presents the absolute as Schein: “Intentional language wants to mediate the absolute, and the absolute escapes language for every specific intention, leaves each one behind because each is limited. Music finds the absolute immediately, but at the moment of discovery it becomes obscured, just as too powerful a light dazzles the eyes, preventing them from seeing things that are perfectly visible.”Footnote ³⁸ In the essay on music and language from Quasi una fantasia, he characterizes the non-intentional language of music as incapable of saying what it intends to say. All it can do, he ventures, is aspire to say it: “Its [the language of music’s] Idea is the divine Name which has been given shape. It is demythologized prayer, rid of efficacious magic. It is the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, not to communicate meanings.”Footnote ³⁹ In Aesthetic Theory, much in the same vein, he maintains that only philosophy (conceptually structured language) can interpret what art aims to say but cannot say: “whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it” (während es doch nur von Kunst gesagt werden kann, indem sie es nicht sagt).Footnote ⁴⁰ While philosophy can put forward judgments, it is limited by its conceptual approach. Aesthetic intuition, on the other hand, aims at absolute truth but can never reach and hold on to it.

In the essay on music and language Adorno further argues that while music is not making conceptual judgments, it does present its sensuous stimuli in an ordered, “logical” fashion, creating a structured or meaningful whole, as well as successions of such enclosed, structured wholes, that can be thought of as presenting an analogy to ordinary judgment. Rather than the purportedly pure expression of transitory and ultimately “adventitious” meanings, music exists in an ever unresolved tension between form and content, with both being transformed into a dynamic, self-negating unity; and form is “the thought process by which content is defined.”Footnote ⁴¹ It is no doubt hard to articulate this complex thought without undue abstraction or triviality. However, what Adorno certainly is claiming is that serious music presents us with something of supreme importance and profound meaning. The beginning, he writes, of the recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony seems to assert that “‘This is how it is,’ the decisive, even the magisterial confirmation of something that has not been explicitly stated. In the supreme moments of great music,” he continues, “this intention becomes eloquently unambiguous by virtue of the sheer power of its context.”Footnote ⁴²

Musical synthesis – its quasi-judgments, which Adorno thinks is brought about via aesthetic form – differs from standard, conceptual judging in certain key respects. One is that it is “nonviolent”: “It is the nonviolent synthesis of the diffuse that nevertheless preserves it as what it is in its divergences and contradictions, and for this reason form is actually an unfolding of truth.”Footnote ⁴³ A synthesis is an act of holding elements together such as to create a unity. One may therefore wonder how any act that preserves the elements in their divergences and contradictions can be called a synthesis. We already know that Adorno does not have in mind the Kantian definition of synthesis. Yet neither does he seem to suggest that art’s synthesis somehow (along Hegelian lines) cancels difference by dialectically overcoming it. Rather, what Adorno is articulating, and fits in with his commitment to the complex notion of reconciliation, is a form of unity that registers difference without cancelling it. Exactly what such a unity amounts to is not easy to determine. One clue, though (and this is another manner in which non-conceptual synthesis is peculiar), is that, in a work of art, the unity is precarious. It continually, Adorno writes, “suspends itself as such; essential to it is that it interrupts itself through its other just as the essence of its coherence is that it does not cohere.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Even for Adorno, whose negative dialectics often requires the appeal to such apparently intractable paradoxes, the notion of a coherence whose essence it is not to cohere may sound forbiddingly excessive. Yet what he seems to have in mind is that significant art is capable of letting the particular – configured as content – reverberate in the work without “subsuming” or otherwise controlling or dominating it. The particular is subjected to aesthetic form without being transformed by it. Since it resists form, however, its mode of appearing will be dissonant, expressive, as Adorno thinks advanced modernist works of art are, largely of pain.

As mentioned, Adorno views the work of art as fundamentally illusory (scheinhaft). Thus, any attempt to consider art in relation to a concept of truth will have to be faced with the considerable difficulty that art, in Adorno’s view, appears unable to present objective truth. But if art is illusory, why talk about truth in the first place? Doesn’t this entail that art is a source of deception of some kind? Adorno’s view, though, is that sophisticated works of art undermine their own Schein-Charakter. When aesthetic synthesis, in its sensitivity and openness to difference, admits the disparate and heterogeneous, it destroys the unity and harmony characterizing aesthetic semblance. Thus, for Adorno, aesthetic truth is made possible by a form of negation of semblance brought about by the internal logic of the work itself. Since that negation can never arrive at a stable resolution (involving an immediate, wholly non-intentional encounter with the sensuous particular), it can only aspire to truth.

Adorno has a number of ways by which to approach this experience. He compares it to the witnessing of fireworks – “illuminating and touching” – that instantaneously light up the night sky and then disappear. The “instant of expression” can be thought of as an apparition, “a heavenly vision,” impossible to pin down and define yet uniquely pregnant with meaning.Footnote ⁴⁵ In many of Adorno’s metaphors and characterizations, he precisely stresses the fleeting nature of this encounter. At their most expressive, works of art are, as I discussed in Chapter 2, more sublime than beautiful. Ultimately, however, thanks to the moment of spiritualization whereby the instant of expression is taken up and mediated by the work, the apparition attains to an image-like character, capable of expressing, while in an enigmatic way, a truth of universal or objective significance. While natural beauty, lacking the moment of spiritualization, does not allow for such a transformation, artistic beauty freezes, as it were, the suddenness and vitality of pure transcendence into an abiding “pregnant moment,” the moment of objectivity. This is not to say that such images are “real” in some straightforward sense – indeed, dependent on the activity of the imagination, their reality, Adorno claims, is “their historical content”Footnote ⁴⁶ – and, although they endure, they are not in any way conceptual or conceptually available (at least in any direct sense). Unsurprisingly, moreover, Adorno does not think that the transformation into the imago leaves the apparition unscathed. Art, in this way, both makes expression objective and occludes the immediate experience of the content. However, the full cognitive significance of a work of art is only available via the Kantian conjunction of intuition and concept. Since Adorno believes that both intuitive awareness and conceptual uptake are needed – and at the same time that we have no way of showing that conceptual understanding justifiably (or, as Adorno would have it, non-ideologically) permeates the operations of receptivity – we need to ask what it means to offer conceptual understanding of a work of art.

4.3 Truth, interpretation, critique

According to Adorno, arriving at the truth-content of works of art calls for active interpretation and discursively structured judgment. The task of the critic is conceptually to articulate the work’s truth-content. However, the disjunction between aesthetic and critical truth – between the truth-content momentarily displayed in the work of art and the truth-content discursively expressed in philosophically oriented criticism – is aporetic: in current social circumstances, it cannot be bridged. “Interpretive reason,” as Albrecht Wellmer calls it, cannot aspire to preserve aesthetic truth-content unchanged.Footnote ⁴⁷ In its sensuous mode of presentation, aesthetic truth-content is supposed to present itself in the form of transitory riddles; and what they state is resistant to analysis and conceptualization. Thus, the task of interpretive reason is, first, to make the aesthetic experience amenable to reflection, and, second, to use language to approximate or encircle aesthetic truth-content. While the first aim is fairly straightforward, involving the constitution of a reflective second-order level that will, as it were, make the truth being expressed in the work of art become aware of itself (just as the holding of beliefs, and hence also the attribution of belief, requires the self-reflective knowledge that the belief is being held), the second is difficult and unending, the work of making the “impossible” transition from non-discursive to discursive truth.

Adorno is skeptical of approaches to advanced art that, rather than respecting the specificity and uniqueness of its mode of presentation, seeks to walk away with some sort of message (“what p really means is X”). As opposed to such views, Adorno highlights what he calls the “enigmatic quality” of works of art, their character of being “hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost,” as well as their refusal to speak “intelligibly.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Adorno’s argument, however, is also targeting a related (though more complex) view, namely intentionalism, according to which the supposed message is identical with the artist’s intention. On a view of this kind, which Adorno detects in Dilthey’s hermeneutics, the work of art is essentially a vehicle for conveying or making manifest a set of meanings (intentions) that the artist consciously has sought to communicate via the making and distribution of the aesthetic product.Footnote ⁴⁹

However, a closer reading of Dilthey reveals that, according to him, the intentional act is always mediated by the historical circumstances of artistic production; thus, a work of art contains no simple message, if by that one means a content issuing directly from the artist’s mind to be arrived at independently of a consideration of the context in which the work was conceived and made. Indeed, according to Dilthey the only access we may have to what the artist can have intended is via the context: the intention, therefore, is only available insofar as it is made manifest in the forms and materials of the artist’s historical and cultural environment.Footnote ⁵⁰ It follows that Dilthey is resisting the identification of intended meaning with some sort of token content in the artist’s mind. Rather, the intended meaning will tend to be compatible with, or a function of, a variety of possible interpretations that themselves depend on the descriptions and accounts the interpreter is ready to offer of the context.

In the history of hermeneutics, there are views that, while differing from Dilthey’s historical contextualism, seem closer to the kind of intentionalism that Adorno associates with hermeneutics. Schleiermacher’s account of divinatory criticism is one such theory, yet even for him the empathetic projection required by the interpreter must always be mediated by a consideration of how language shapes thought, and indeed of the forms of symbolic representation available to the speaker at the time of making the relevant utterance.Footnote ⁵¹ Adorno is surely wrong in attributing to hermeneutics in general a model according to which the act of interpretation consists in grasping the author’s unmediated token thought-content.

But what about intention in general? Does Adorno dismiss the role of intention entirely? The answer, it seems, is complex. He certainly rejects the identification of aesthetic meaning (or “content,” Gehalt) with aesthetic intention, arguing that every advanced work of art generates an excess (Überschuss) of meaning that the artist could never have controlled or rationally intended.Footnote ⁵² A good illustration of this point emerges from Adorno’s personal encounter with Beckett. To Beckett’s dismay, Adorno is supposed to have insisted that the name “Hamm” in Endgame must be alluding to the character Hamlet in Shakespeare’s play. When Beckett denied that the character Hamm has anything to do with Hamlet, Adorno responded that no author can control all the meanings of a work of art.Footnote ⁵³

Two things should be noted about this claim. One is that from the fact that no artist can control all the relevant or possible meanings of a work of art, it does not follow that no meanings can be controlled or intended. While Beckett may not have intended the connection to Hamlet, he will have intended Hamm to be Clov’s master (even though the master/slave relation between them occasionally turns out to be reversible), a point no adequate interpretation can afford to ignore. Another point is that while an artist may not have had every meaningful feature of a work of art in mind at the time of creating the work, it is, as Stanley Cavell points out, always possible to ask in retrospect whether the artist is able to acknowledge given features of the work as her own.Footnote ⁵⁴ The question then is not about what went on in the mind of the artist during the execution of the work but, rather, the extent to which the artist is able and ready to take responsibility for it; and while in some cases such acknowledgment may take the form of rediscovering feelings and ideas that originally went into producing it, in others it may simply consist in seeing whether the artist can presently identify with the feature. If it speaks to how the artist has come to think of the work (or what she will realize must have been required in order to create it), then what we are identifying is an intention. Even when the artist is incapable of taking responsibility for elements of her work, the critic must proceed as if someone takes responsibility for them, i.e., underwrites and stands behind them; otherwise they will seem entirely arbitrary.

Adorno never really considers these points. When asked whose voice it is we hear (and here I obviously speak in a rather loose, metaphorical manner, including voices not only of the literary and musical but the plastic and painterly arts as well) in a work of art, his response is that it is the voice of history itself, in particular that of suffering as mediated by the individual artist and expressed in the work.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, to experience a truly great work of art is to expose oneself not primarily to an individual’s successfully communicated intention but to the unsatisfied needs – and, more generally, the sedimented experience – of a historical configuration at large, or what Adorno at the end of his 1958/9 lecture course on aesthetics calls “world feeling” (Weltgefühl).Footnote ⁵⁶ (The affinity with Schopenhauer is at this point particularly manifest. Like Adorno, Schopenhauer views the creator of a work as a mere instrument, as it were, of a force or movement that is prior to and enabling the empirical individual.Footnote ⁵⁷ Adorno also agrees, at least structurally, with Heidegger, for whom the artist is not in any way a communicator, making intentions manifest in materially present symbolic form, but someone who discloses a space of truth.Footnote ⁵⁸) A crucial dimension of Adorno’s notion of truth-content (Wahrheitsgehalt) is precisely that art is supposed to expose its audience to socially and historically mediated experiences that, rather than being arbitrary in the sense of representing particular perspectives on reality (the perspective, say, of the bourgeoisie during the reign of the restoration in Gustave Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimental, or of the early-twentieth-century German working class in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz), arrives at something like a sense of the essence of what it means to exist as a human being in a specific historical setting.

In the same lecture course, he further claims that “what speaks through the work” (aus dem Kunstwerk spricht) is “social spirit” (Geist der Gesellschaft).Footnote ⁵⁹ As I discussed in Chapter 1, Adorno at this point seems to invoke something like Hegel’s notion of (objective) spirit, incorporating commitments, needs, and values shared by a historically constituted community and made manifest in key events and symbolic structures with which its authoritative members identify. While spirit achieves a level of generality that can be symbolically unified and expressed, it is not some form of impersonal essence, shorn of connection with communally situated agents’ lives, aspirations, and sufferings. Thus, the emphasis on individual intention, Adorno argues, wrongly presupposes that the mind of the individual artist (which he views as “contingent” compared with the Geist der Gesellschaft) can be isolated or abstracted from her historical existence and circumstances, making the intention falsely seem like a property over which she exercises full and unrestricted control. From Adorno’s Marxist point of view, an act of abstraction of this kind is fundamentally bourgeois, involving a misguided commitment to the unrestricted autonomy of belief-formation. Works of art are valuable and meaningful on account not of artistic intention but, rather, of their aesthetic properties and capacity to convey truth-content.

One might think that the rejection of intentionalism with its implicit “bourgeois individualism” would make it impossible for Adorno to entertain a notion of artistic genius. However, Adorno disconnects the notion of genius from any association with the quality or nature of the artist’s intention, defining it in terms of the ability to be totally “under the sway of the work.” Great artists, he maintains, tend to be responsive to that which is foreign to the ego (das Ichfremde) and the domain of rational control. Echoing classical accounts of inspiration, the genius relinquishes such control, being solicited by the tasks presented by the material and the developing work itself. The genius, then, is best thought of as being subject to the demands of the work, able to follow through and actualize its inherent logic.Footnote ⁶⁰

The interpreter should not seek to identify aesthetic intention correctly. A hermeneutics geared towards the tracking of intentions will not generate true understanding. Yet if the hermeneutics of aesthetic intention is the only version of hermeneutics Adorno allows for, is he not being too restrictive? Is his justified resistance to subjectivism in aesthetics leading him to infer that hermeneutics is irrelevant to the understanding of aesthetic truth-claims? The question is especially pertinent when considering more contemporary developments of hermeneutics, in particular the work of Hans-Georg Gadamer, for whom interpretation is a direct engagement with truth-claims originating in the work of art itself.Footnote ⁶¹

Gadamer makes several interconnected claims that are relevant for the consideration of Adorno’s position. One is that interpretation is not optional. In every engagement with meaningful material, the interpreter, seeking understanding, will have to rely on an existing horizon of prejudices (Vor-Urteile) informed by knowledge, values, expectations, epistemic interests, and historical context; and interpretation takes place via the dialectic of the hermeneutic circle, the emerging coherence of the perceived work as a whole. Adorno never really considers these aspects of interpretation. It is true that the early Adorno assigned a central role to “interpretation” (Deutung).Footnote ⁶² However, a close reading reveals that what he once meant by “interpretation” has little or nothing to do with hermeneutics qua science of interpretation. Indeed, “interpretation” in the early work is essentially keyed to his attempt to inherit Benjamin’s notion of allegorical truth-content, requiring for its unfolding the redemptive interpretation of particular material content.

Can Adorno afford to ignore the insights of hermeneutics? Isn’t Gadamer right that works of art – indeed all meaningful, symbolic expressions – must be approached as objects of interpretation, and that understanding is always profoundly contextual, functioning to situate the work within ever widening circles of proposals and validations? Although Adorno resists such (in part phenomenological) language, there may in fact be resources in Aesthetic Theory for considering issues such as the historicity of interpretation, the historicity of the work itself, as well as the apparent need for interpretation, involving conceptually structured and piecemeal articulation of the truth-claims emerging in and through the work itself. While Adorno is profoundly skeptical of the idea, central to Gadamer’s work, that any particular element of the work is meaningful only as a function of its relation to the whole of which it is a part (on Adorno’s view this threatens to make the particular subservient to our conception of the whole, thus violating the principle of the integrity of the particular so central to his overall view of aesthetic rationality), he accepts that the particular (or individual) is forced – thanks to the form, the consistency that runs through a successful work – to speak “through the whole.”Footnote ⁶³ In Gadamer’s organicist view, emphasizing totality, this is unavoidable. In Adorno’s anti-organicist view, however, emphasizing the discontinuities of any purported wholeness, the dependence of the part on the whole constitutes a necessary injustice, the “melancholy of form.”Footnote ⁶⁴

Since the part is in some sense dependent on the whole, it seems evident that Adorno will have to allow for some version of the hermeneutic circle. He would, however, reject Gadamer’s practice of seeking coherence among all the parts of the work of art, instead highlighting the resistance of the particular to the whole. Adorno believes that works of art are to be treated on a par with organisms in which every organ serves and helps to articulate the whole. However, since he also believes that a proper approach to an accomplished work of art requires a recognition of the tension between part and whole, it follows that interpretation will be aimed not at producing coherence but at redeeming the particular as it reveals itself in those tensions within the structural organization of the work as a whole that are central to generating aesthetic negativity. The implications of this view for interpretive practice and aesthetic experience are of great consequence and constitute the central difference between Gadamer and Adorno.

An illustration of how this difference plays out is their highly revealing and different approaches to the modernist poetry of Paul Celan.Footnote ⁶⁵ Whereas Gadamer – surely recognizing the resistance of this poetry to interpretation – approaches Celan’s poems as semantically closed unities, demanding a patient but not impossible piecing of each word, each phrase, into some projected conception of unified, total meaning, expected to emerge at the end of the exercise of interpretation, Adorno highlights the poems’ fragmented, disjointed structure, evading the logical hierarchy of a subordinating syntax.Footnote ⁶⁶ For Adorno, no proper approach to Celan can afford to ignore the constitutive unintelligibility of his poetry: “The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Gadamer, however, makes another key claim – or set of key claims – that Adorno seems to accept. This is that aesthetic experience is only complete in the medium of conceptual expression. Again, however, there is disagreement over some crucial details. Adorno thinks of conceptual expression as the philosophical accounting of the work, the explication of the work’s meaning in discursive language. Yet although “interpretation, commentary and critique,” as Adorno calls it, “serve the truth contentof works,”Footnote ⁶⁸ and “art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say,”Footnote ⁶⁹ philosophy can never do more than intimate what the work says. Art needs philosophy, but its form of expression can never be reduced to, or translated into, the language of conceptual expression. The difference between Adorno and Gadamer at this point hinges on deep disagreements about the nature and ontology of language. Whereas Adorno, as we have seen, is profoundly ambivalent about discursive presentation, being prepared to criticize all forms of supposedly false identification, Gadamer, in the third part of Truth and Method, argues that our experience of the world, insofar as it can be understood, is without remainder linguistically mediated and structured.Footnote ⁷⁰ Artworks, then, including music and painting, can be said to speak, thereby lending themselves to epistemically satisfying procedures of interpretation (although Gadamer, because of his thesis of the perspectival nature of interpretation, does not believe in the possibility of a final interpretation of a work of art).

Moreover, both Gadamer and Adorno share a commitment to the historicity both of interpreter and of work of art, agreeing that while works of art are historical entities, produced in historically specific circumstances and for historically specific audiences, their truth-claims are able to transcend those circumstances and be taken up and acknowledged by interpreters. However, they profoundly disagree about how this transmission does and should take place, and what role tradition should play in informing adequate approaches to the work, as well as how contemporary historical circumstances influence interpretation. As Habermas later made clear in his debate with Gadamer, the Frankfurt School position (of which Adorno of course was a key representative) is extremely reluctant to accept the tradition at face value. According to Gadamer, by contrast, the truth or truth-claim of a work of art obtains concreteness and actuality via the mediation of “effective history” (Wirkungsgeschichte), the historical transmission and actualization of the work in serious and competent successive acts of interpretation. Rather than simply a historically distant object that, in order to be appropriated, calls for some sort of leap from one’s own historical position to that of the work, the work of art exists for us by virtue of having been exerted into a living tradition through which it has been handed over. Adorno’s objection, if we were to construct such a response, would be that Gadamer provides no compelling reason to think that historical transmission of this kind preserves or generates truth. On the contrary, interpretive traditions, it seems, are prone to encourage dogmatism and should be approached with the standard repertoire of Marxist tools for conducting ideology critique. In particular, Adorno would reject Gadamer’s account of asymmetrical epistemic authority. In Truth and Method and elsewhere, Gadamer argues that great or “eminent” works of art carry a claim to truth whose integrity is immune to serious critique; thus, rather than being disposed to adopt a critical attitude, the interpreter needs to approach the work with an attitude of reverence and acceptance of the truth being disclosed and presented.Footnote ⁷¹ While Adorno invokes passivity, the ability to be radically receptive to the aesthetic features of the work, he does not think that this rules out the possibility of reflection and critique. The accomplished critic, rather than, as in Gadamer, being a receptacle of the work’s autonomous “truth-event,” must be able to negotiate the inevitable tension between receptivity and critical activity.

The considerations I have brought to bear on Adorno’s dismissal of hermeneutics do, I hope, show that it can at best be viewed as only partly justified, and that some central tenets of Dilthey’s and, in particular, Gadamer’s hermeneutics – the hermeneutic circle, the linguistically structured nature of complete aesthetic experience, and the historicity of all symbolic production – are either consistent with Adorno’s position and could be accepted, or actually cohere with it. Stated more broadly, however, the differences are palpable, many hinging on deep disagreements regarding questions of modernity and what it means to experience works of art and be informed by them. A deeply conservative thinker, Gadamer views great canonical works as sources of unquestionable authority in matters to do with ethics and how to lead a good life. They tell us what it means to be human, how creatures such as ourselves should conduct their lives.Footnote ⁷² Available to us as tireless students of the tradition are deep insights that, while potentially at odds with the lives of modern, purportedly rootless, cosmopolitans, are continuous with the identities and commitments that ultimately (and in a deep sense) have come to shape who we are; thus studying the tradition is to arrive at a progressively more adequate self-understanding. While agreeing that art can be a purveyor of greater self-understanding, Adorno, by contrast, views art as disruptive of traditional certainties, a source of alienation from all that which he deems to be false, and therefore more in line with anti-conventional, modernist sensibilities than with the retroactively oriented and historically mediated model of self-reflection that one finds in Gadamer.Footnote ⁷³ The significance of such disruption and self-alienation is made particularly manifest in Adorno’s reading of Beckett, which is the topic of the next chapter.