Читать книгу Philosophy and Sociology: 1960 - Theodor W. Adorno - Страница 8

Ladies and gentlemen,

In the last lecture I took Kant as a starting point and model for exploring the traditional resistance and antagonism which some disciplines have displayed towards sociology and all forms of truth or knowledge that appeal to the factual domain. In terms of the central problem I have already indicated, I should now like to do the opposite and introduce you to the kind of resistance to philosophy that one typically encounters in the field of sociology. And here you may be surprised by two things in particular. The first is that such resistance has by no means always characterized our two disciplines – for we shall soon be exploring certain theoretical positions for which the distinction between philosophy and sociology did not yet exist at all. But secondly you will also see that the rejection of philosophy on the part of sociology goes back a very long way, and that ever since ‘sociology’ has expressly existed as such – since it became aware of itself as a specific discipline and adopted this elegant name cobbled together out of Latin and Greek – the anti-philosophical impulse has remained alive in the field of sociology. I shall shortly illustrate this with reference to Auguste Comte. But I shall also show you that the reasons for this resistance of sociology to philosophy are very different from those you may generally imagine when you try and understand the problematic relationship between these two fields – and this all recalls Benjamin’s observation that the quotations in his writings are like robbers that assault the reader on the open road and make off with his convictions.¹ What I mean is that sociology has not simply proved to be the more progressive or more enlightened discipline in comparison with the less enlightened or reactionary discipline of traditional philosophy; on the contrary, we shall see that sociology, at least in its specific Comtean sense, arose in a polemical reaction to philosophy which was seen as a destructive expression of Enlightenment. In other words, the sociologists of the Comtean period actually reproached philosophy for the same kind of things that our rustic and forest philosophers tend to reproach sociology with today. This may already give you some insight into something which I regard as of the utmost importance, and which I would like you to think about right here: there is no theoretical position, of whatever kind, whose function within society is entirely independent of the social and historical situation at the time. There is no truth that cannot be abused and turned into ideology, no theoretical position that cannot be brought to serve the opposite of what it undertakes to claim. And this alone should already suffice to make you sceptical in the face of the all too hasty identification of theory and praxis that is popular today.

But, to return to Comte and his struggle against philosophy, I should just like to remind you in brief that the concept of ‘progress’, which along with that of ‘order’ is one of the highest concepts in Comte’s sociology, found exemplary expression in his famous theory of stages.² He assumes three stages in human historical development: firstly, the theological-dogmatic stage; secondly, the metaphysical stage; and, thirdly, the stage which he calls the positive or scientific stage, the stage which in Comte’s eyes culminates in sociology. The really noticeable thing here, and this already reveals one of the remarkable analogies between the arch-positivist Comte and the arch-idealist Hegel, is that the real polemical thrust of this conception – and one never knows with Comte whether we should speak of a philosophy or a sociology here – is directed more against metaphysics, in other words against philosophy, than it is against theology, and this is precisely because in his own time Comte was concerned principally with speculative philosophy as a specifically critical force. You have to realize – and this is the only really essential difference between Comte’s theory and that of Saint-Simon, which Comte basically just devoured and simply expressed in different terms – that, while Saint-Simon still expressed the entire pathos of revolutionary eighteenth-century bourgeois culture, Comte already betrays anxiety in the face of the disintegrating tendencies of the bourgeois revolution. Throughout Comte we detect the fear that philosophical concepts, especially those of freedom, equality and fraternity – in other words, the Enlightenment ideas that in a certain sense lay behind the French Revolution – threaten to undermine every kind of social order and thus lead to anarchy. It is this position which motivates Comte’s general attack on philosophy, and this is very similar to a passage in Hegel – although one can also of course find many other passages in his work that would rather contradict this – where he says that speculative philosophy actually finds itself allied with religious faith in opposition to a merely rationalistic or merely reflective form of thinking.³ I might add here, since it is also part of my task to alert you to certain possible research projects in this field, that it would be extremely instructive, especially for those of you who are specifically interested in the relationship between philosophy and sociology, to consider undertaking a comparative analysis of Comte and Hegel, for, despite the flagrant differences that are undeniably evident here, you will also find some extraordinary similarities in both thinkers.⁴ In my own lectures, where the history of philosophy is concerned, I constantly have to point out that the divergences between officially quite opposed schools of thought, such as those of empiricism and rationalism, are actually much less striking, when we look at the specific content of the theories in question, than we might otherwise suppose. And this is one of the reasons why we always warn beginners in philosophy against over-emphasizing or immediately exaggerating the conflict between Locke and Leibniz, or Kant and Hume, for example, or between early empiricism and the early seventeenth-century rationalists, between Descartes and Hobbes. Or at least we must warn against taking these oppositions as if they were absolute, and indeed I think we shall have good opportunity in due course to see why these mutually antagonistic schools do not actually constitute such absolute oppositions as we might easily believe. What Comte calls the metaphysical stage, the second stage of human development, is characterized by the way in which it supposedly objectifies or ascribes independent existence to various intellectual essences or entities, as Comte puts it,⁵ over against the facts which are subsumed by means of them. This argument is simply that of a rigorous nominalism that rejects the objectification of any concept as mere dogma, and Comte regards such objectification of concepts over against the facts as nothing but a kind of semi-secularized theology. He tells us again and again that metaphysical concepts are actually nothing but theological notions that have been half-heartedly filtered through reason.

Let us just look at a couple of revealing passages to see how Comte uses sociology to argue against philosophy. I shall be quoting mainly from the little selection from the Cours de philosophie positive, which was published by Kröner in 1933 and edited by Friedrich Blaschke.⁶ It is of course no longer that easy to lay your hands on this edition today, but it is probably still easier to find than the huge Dorn-Waentigsche translation that was published by Gustav Fischer in Jena in 1923, which is incredibly unwieldy.⁷ If you want to familiarize yourselves seriously with Comte, as I certainly recommend that you do, I would just advise you, for humanitarian reasons as it were, to try and get hold of the little selection of texts that I have mentioned and take a good look at it. For the three-volume edition is truly monstrous and indescribably dogged, garrulous and repetitious; no human being could reasonably be expected to read it from beginning to end. In any case I am completely opposed to the mendacious academic practice that insists that one must have closely studied great tomes of this kind, even though we all know we will never read them from start to finish the moment we pick them up. And in Comte’s case this is simply impossible. On the other hand, you will certainly come across some extremely interesting and thought-provoking things in his work, and Blaschke’s edition, to the extent that I have perused it, is very useful in this regard. To read the material in French rather than in German translation would naturally be rather time-consuming here. Nonetheless, I would like to take this opportunity, since we are about to look more closely at a few things from Comte and then some things from Durkheim, just to say that I believe a good knowledge of French is quite indispensable for the study of sociology – and I say this specifically for the sociologists among you, and especially for those who are only just beginning your studies in this area. Sociology emerged in France, and it is only when you are capable of reading in the original certain French sociological texts which are either untranslated or have sometimes been translated very poorly indeed, and here I am thinking especially of things like the Années Sociologiques, the journal founded by Durkheim,⁸ that you will really be able to understand the origins of sociology, and thereby acquire a richer concept of sociology than you will if you do not enjoy immediate access to the French texts themselves. And, quite apart from that, I believe it is an extraordinarily serious matter that fewer and fewer people are familiar with French today and imagine that they should rush to study English instead, since France is no longer a great power. I would say that, for anyone who seriously claims to share in the heritage of Western culture, if I may put it this way, it is just as important to be able to read and speak French as it is to read and speak English. And if that has been denied to many of you by our rather rigid educational system, I can only honestly advise you in the strongest terms to try and remedy this situation however you can. For I believe this is an element of culture and education that you really cannot do without. The university itself cannot directly provide this for you, for if you wish to study the romance languages at university level a sufficient knowledge of the language in question is effectively already presupposed. But all this just in passing.

Let me come directly to some of the passages in Comte where he specifically criticizes philosophy, and here I would particularly like to draw your attention to the fact that the objections originally raised against philosophy by sociology were expressed in a distinctly authoritarian spirit, namely in the spirit of the existing order, rather than in the revolutionary spirit that one typically and naively expects to find here. In this connection you must remember that the entire Comtean system is based on the idea of an equilibrium between the two principles of order and progress, where Comte defends the principle of progress precisely insofar as he speaks for the bourgeois society that has become emancipated from the structures of feudal and absolutist authority but also on behalf of order, insofar as, just like Hegel, he not only sees the horrors of the French Revolution but also sees that the ruthless realization of bourgeois equality, i.e. of the exchange principle as the sole criterion of society, tends to deform and unhinge the structure of society itself; in other words, he sees that this naked exchange relation is ultimately all that remains, and that this deformation of society threatens to expose it to what might typically be described today as ‘atomization’ or ‘massification’ – to use popular expressions which in Comte’s time were just as superficial and inadequate for capturing the real historical dynamics involved as they are today.

So I shall now read you a passage which will reveal this connection between the philosophy that is criticized by Comte, namely metaphysics, and the politically restorationist tendencies of his own thought. And here I simply want to bring out one Comtean thought which will show you precisely how the bourgeois principles of progress and rationality are combined with the principle of order in Comte. For here you will discover a very ancient Platonic theme, although the good Comte himself would doubtless be turning in his grave if he could hear me, over a hundred years after his death, ultimately describing him as a Platonist. And this is the thought that the task of ruling society essentially falls to a kind of science, indeed specifically to sociology.⁹ For Comte envisages sociology as a scientific discipline, as a neutral and entirely objective authority that stands above the play of social forces and is capable both of directing human progress – where this is understood in Saint-Simon’s sense as the progressive unfolding of the technical forces of production¹⁰ – and also of somehow containing and neutralizing the disorganizing, destructive and anarchic forces that arise and develop within society itself, and this idea, once again, strongly recalls the role of the state in Hegel.¹¹ On this Comtean conception, therefore, sociology represents a kind of classless authority hovering above the play of social forces. And this anticipates a notion that we also encounter in the history of sociology in more recent times – in other words, something like the idea of the ‘free-floating intelligentsia’ in the work of my former colleague Mannheim.¹² This idea is already present in Comte’s doctrine, and ultimately in Saint-Simon’s doctrine as well.

What Comte says is basically as follows. He criticizes the principle regarding the freedom of conscience – namely the principle expressed with particular force by Fichte¹³ but already affirmed by Kant – which claims that every single human being is responsible only to his own conscience, a principle which, as Comte quite rightly sees, embodies one of the most fundamental impulses of the bourgeois metaphysics of freedom. And it is typical of the way Comte already links philosophical concepts to specific social developments when you find him coupling this concept of the freedom of conscience with the concept of national sovereignty. Thus he goes on to say, in a passage you can find on page 49 of Blaschke’s edition: ‘It is also quite easy to estimate the value of the principle of the sovereignty of the people. It is the second conclusion drawn from the principle of the freedom of conscience, one which has been transferred from the intellectual domain to the political domain. This new stage of metaphysical politics’ – in other words, a politics which is supposed to spring from pure principles rather than merely conforming to the given facts: the kind of politics espoused by Fichte in a rather extreme way¹⁴ – ‘was required in order to proclaim the downfall of the old regime and prepare the way for a new constitution.’ As you can see, you already have a kind of sociology of knowledge here. Comte continues: ‘The peoples had to award themselves the right to change the already existing arrangements at will; otherwise all restrictions could only proceed from the old regime itself, the existing authorities would have to be maintained, and the social revolution’ – in other words, the French Revolution – ‘would have failed. It was the dogmatic canonization of the sovereignty of the people alone that made new political experiments possible.’ And then you can see the trajectory of Comte’s thought when he immediately goes on to say:

Under any other procedure the political transformation, the element of utopian participation, would have required the very powers that it was supposed to destroy. Yet, despite the temporary assistance provided by this dogma, we cannot fail to recognize the tendency to anarchy it involves; for it generally opposes any kind of institution, condemns those higher up to a dependence on the mass of people below, and transfers the much censored divine right of kings to the peoples themselves. This metaphysical spirit finally manifests itself in a similar way as far as the relations between peoples are concerned.

And so on and so forth. He then goes on to speak, rather perceptively, about the anarchy which increasingly afflicts the relations between peoples and countries with the emergence of the modern nation state. This anarchy only encourages the possibility of utterly devastating wars, and that to greater extent than was the case under the Ancien Régime, where in the eighteenth century monarchs could sometimes wage war with one another for decades without these wars necessarily impinging that much on their respective populations, apart from the people involved in the armies themselves or connected with the regions immediately affected by such conflicts.

You can see that Comte here accuses philosophy, critical thinking itself, because it would tend, through its abstract reasoning as Hegel would say,¹⁵ to dissolve actually existing institutions. And from this he concludes without further ado, without providing any real justification for this view, that this critical effect would be synonymous with anarchy – in other words, that it would prove entirely destructive and ultimately undermine the self-preservation of society itself. The notion that a society of self-responsible individuals enjoying civic equality might lead to a more meaningful arrangement of things by virtue of its own internal dynamics and its own objective character, namely because all individuals share an interest in their own self-preservation – as Kant could still suggest in his Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent¹⁶ – this notion is something that has really already fallen away in Comte; instead we find him bestowing a right to exist on institutions as such, an idea that can be traced back to the older tradition of the French Enlightenment, and particularly to Montesquieu.¹⁷ The process of critique and the resulting dissolution of institutions is basically identified with anarchy. The deeper reason for this, of course, is that in the time of Comte and Hegel independent civil society had reached a critical point – in other words, a point where it had already begun to produce pauperization from within itself, where it was no longer possible to see how society could be preserved within civil society and the formal equality that came with it. The idea of the self-preservation of society in spite of these antagonisms or through these increasingly evident antagonisms was first really developed by the early socialists in opposition to the great bourgeois philosophers of the same period whose thought already betrayed a certain apologetic character; and insofar as Comte came to speak for a bourgeois class that already felt threatened by the emerging power of ‘third estate’, we find in his work that the concept of social institutions retrospectively assumes the very lustre that it had forfeited in the French Revolution. This lustre is no longer guaranteed simply by tradition, however, but now has to be renovated, or, to put it more exactly, has to be restored precisely by means of the science of sociology whose mission this is. I would like to supplement the passage I just read out to you with another one which you will not find in the little edition but only in the very large one I mentioned earlier. The passage runs as follows:

There is certainly no need for us to examine all the other central dogmas of revolutionary metaphysics in the same detail, which the attentive reader can now easily subject to an analogous assessment through a similar procedure; for in all other cases, as I have already shown with regard to the most important principle, the reader will soon easily recognize the following: the unconditional affirmation of a temporary manifestation of modern society, by appeal to a formula that is extraordinarily fruitful and indeed indispensable when applied in its proper historical context to the mere destruction of the old political system, ends up, when applied and transferred at an inappropriate time to the conception of a new social order, only by fundamentally obstructing the latter precisely because it leads to the unlimited repudiation of every genuine government.¹⁸

Now in these passages, however obvious their limited and reactionary character may be to you, you can actually detect a dialectical element which is certainly quite alien to Comte the arch-nominalist, and it is this: the same rational principles which once represented truth, insofar as they hastened the dissolution of an old social order that had become an unacceptable fetter on human development, may drive society towards destruction when we cling to them in a completely unreflective way, at the point, in other words, when society has become nothing but an unfettered exchange society.

I lay such importance on pointing out all this here because it helps you to see how some of the conceptions that are commonly ascribed only to speculative philosophy – such as the dialectical idea that the same things, here the same theoretical approaches, can assume entirely different and mutually contradictory functions – can sometimes be detected in a position which, in terms of its own self-understanding or its own apparent intentions, is utterly opposed to all dialectical speculation. I point this out precisely so you can see what I am trying to do here. I want to show you, in a whole variety of contexts, that the sources of dialectical thought do not lie in the speculative inclinations of the individual thinker, or in any merely intellectual processes as such; I want to show you how thinkers such as dear old Comte, who would never be suspected of harbouring such inclinations, nonetheless find themselves driven to dialectical conceptions simply by the force of the subject matter they engage with. Thus we find that Comte – and this is really a point where this positivist philosophy crucially differs from philosophy in the emphatic sense – sets social organization in dogmatic opposition to the idea of freedom of conscience on account of a hidden premise that is not really examined at all. This is the premise that it is better that something such as organized society should exist than that it should not exist. But this effectively ignores the fundamental question which preoccupied many schools of thought in the ancient Greek Enlightenment, such as the Cynics, that wondered whether organized society was not deeply problematic, and hardly something to be endorsed, in comparison with the state of nature. This philosophical question has already been decided in Comte, and the profound hostility to philosophy in this kind of sociology is ultimately sustained by the way in which a whole series of premises, which philosophy would reflect upon and specifically examine, are here simply assumed as something positive.

Now the term ‘positivism’ is actually ambiguous in a very deep sense, as you can see in an exemplary way if you study the work of Auguste Comte. Thus, on the one hand, the epithet ‘positive’ implies that the scientist, for example, should stick to the facts, to what is positively given, to what is really there, rather than getting lost in useless fictions or illusions. But at the same time ‘positive’ also always implies a certain theory of value, one that claims we should ascribe higher value to what is the case, to what one clutches as it were, than to what is merely possible rather than actual. Thus positivism always harbours the idea – rather like a moral maxim – that the bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. These two concepts of positivity play into each other. If Comte believed – although at first this appears highly paradoxical and barely credible in view of his ‘scientistic’ self-understanding – that he might ultimately be able to found a positivistic religion,¹⁹ this is intimately connected with the way he literally makes a cult of the facts; looked at more closely, this essentially involves the idea that those who administer the facts as facts, namely the representatives of organized science, also claim to be able to direct and control social reality completely. To put this another way: the decisive turn which this sociology adopts in contrast to the concept of critical philosophy, a concept which Comte expressly opposes, is that his own thought is one that moves in advance within the parameters of the rules, of the facts of society as it actually exists. Thus the laws and principles in accordance with which civil society is organized, such as the principle of exchange, are not themselves grasped as things that have a history, that have come to be, that are problematic in any way; on the contrary, all this is taken positively in the sense that we must hold to what is actually there – or, as I prefer to put it, that we must proceed in a purely system-immanent fashion. Instead of critically exploring the contradictions and internal problems of the system in which we move and find ourselves, instead of ultimately grasping the system itself as something historical and conditioned, as something that possibly may not be simply binding for all time. The decisive theoretical flaw we find here is that, since the exercise of self-possessed and autonomous thought is incapable of corroding institutions or undermining society, we must really call a halt to such thinking. Thus we demand that thought should not only orient itself to facts and respect facts in the general scientific sense, but that it should essentially accommodate itself to the facts – in other words, basically content itself with what can positively be observed here and now; it may be able to improve on this in some sense, but it should still accept or receive it as a datum rather than attempting to show how it has come to be something problematic, and possibly something riven by internal antagonism. You might say, if you like, that in Comte we may already make out that element which later became decisive for the positivist conception of social science, namely the doctrine of accommodation for which the task of social thought and its scientifically based claims is to encourage human beings to adapt to given social realities, and thus tacitly dispense with the question whether the given social realities are truly adapted to them, i.e. whether these social realities could really survive the judgement of a truly independent and self-possessed reason. Now there is another passage where this aspect, which I have just emphasized, is expressed even more clearly. You can find it on page 79 of the little Kröner edition, and perhaps I can read some of it out for you here. Once again Comte is basically trying to identify metaphysical ideas with theology, with the ultimate intention of eliminating both at a single stroke. He says: ‘Whether the processes in question are traced back to supernatural intervention, or are explained by the recourse to the existence of the corresponding essences’ – and this of course is the criticism he makes of philosophy, and especially the older medieval realist tradition of philosophy, although he throws early modern metaphysics in here too – ‘is certainly a distinction within approaches that are ultimately identical. It does not prevent the one from repeating the features of the other.’ In other words, theology and speculative metaphysics are essentially the same. They both spring from an excess of imagination over observation, and their content derives from a desire to discover absolute concepts.

For social science this simply permits arbitrary and indeterminate judgements with regard to these processes, since the latter are not regarded as something that is subject to natural laws. The spirit of all theological and metaphysical speculation is ultimately delusory, and, while it sees itself as unconditioned, its application to experience is arbitrary; and the entirety of social science today is basically the same. The distinctive method of positive philosophy, by contrast, consists in the subordination of imagination to observation.

And this is what he is after: the subjection of fantasy to observation. ‘The method provides a broad and fertile field for the imagination, but the latter’ – and this ‘but’ is the very dogma of positivist social science in our own day²⁰ – ‘is restricted here to discovering and perfecting the collation of observed facts, or to its role in facilitating new investigations in a fruitful manner. It is this approach, which subordinates our understanding to the facts, that must be introduced into social science.’

Nobody can fail to recognize the legitimate aspect of this critique of a purely speculative form of thought which has simply run wild or has evaded any serious engagement with the facts, but when you examine these Comtean formulations more closely they actually imply that the conceptual elements employed in the social sciences must be exempted from any kind of independent scrutiny if they are to represent truth, or, in other words, that the relevant concepts must accommodate themselves to the realm of empirical observations in advance. We ought to think just as the reality that we observe before us requires us to think. As for the element that Comte here calls fantasy, the features of spontaneity and independence – in other words, the element that allows us to envisage something that ought to be, something beyond the mere enactment of what already is – we find that this whole sphere of possible conceptualization must be relegated, in the best case, to the realm of auxiliary hypotheses formation.²¹ But Comte’s ideal is precisely this: as long as science functions in an orderly fashion, as long as we have a sufficient number of observations, there is no longer any need whatsoever for fantasy. This is a typical example of the rather patronizing attitude that later came to prevail in the social sciences, the attitude that says: ‘Well, of course, we can’t do without theories altogether, we’ve got to have some idea of what we’re talking about.’ First of all, that’s usually nothing but lip-service, for we clearly don’t take the theoretical issue seriously anyway, and just have the feeling: ‘Well, you know, once we have collected enough facts, the theories can simply disappear; the reality is, the task of the social sciences is to adapt to their material.’ In other words, we should proceed as we do in the natural sciences, even if this means ignoring the difference that human society is indeed a society of human beings, of free and rational subjects who do not relate to their society as to some alien nature that confronts them, for what essentially concerns them involves this nature. It is they who shape this nature and who must therefore try and ensure that it genuinely corresponds to their own practice of knowledge and freedom. In this context we might say that Comtean philosophy reflects back the ‘second nature’²² which our society has become once existing relations have come to prevail over actual individual subjects, reflects it back as if it were ‘first nature’, as if the same principles for knowing and the same modes of behaviour that are appropriate in the face of real and actual nature were just as appropriate in relation to society itself.

Since we do not have enough time today to go on and examine a further question in connection with Comte, let me just mention here that the arguments in the passages that I have been reading out actually derive from a period of specific political struggles,²³ and that the element of speculation, or, rather, anti-speculation, that you find here clearly sprang from the politics of the time. Napoleon had once issued certain edicts against the school of the Ideologists,²⁴ a philosophical school of the late Enlightenment that attempted to provide a kind of sociology of the ‘facts of consciousness’ and thus trace these facts back to their real functions. Now the kind of authoritarian argumentation which Napoleon mobilizes against unfettered or free-floating reason is precisely what you find in Comte here. We already glimpse here that the same social consciousness which once unfolded under the sign of the liberation of the subject would now once more restrict the freedom of the subject, and in essentially arbitrary ways, through the power of institutions – a tendency which eventually culminated and found its most consistent realization in the heteronomous politics of Fascism, in the total state.