Philip Walsh-Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory - Critical Theory in Philosophical Context (Renewing Philosophy) (2005)

Skepticism, Modernity
and Critical Theory
Philip Walsh
Renewing Philosophy
General Editor: Gary Banham

Titles include:
Kyriaki Goudeli
CHALLENGES TO GERMAN IDEALISM
Schelling, Fichte and Kant
Keekok Lee
PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTIONS IN GENETICS
Deep Science and Deep Technology
Jill Marsden
AFTER NIETZSCHE
Celine Surprenant
FREUD’S MASS PSYCHOLOGY
Jim Urpeth
FROM KANT TO DELEUZE
Philip Walsh
SKEPTICISM, MODERNITY AND CRITICAL THEORY
Martin Weatherston
HEIDEGGER’S INTERPRETATION OF KANT
Categories, Imagination and Temporality
Renewing Philosophy
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Also by Philip Walsh
(Co-ed. with Davis Schneiderman) RETAKING THE UNIVERSE: WILLIAM S.
BURROUGHS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION
Skepticism, Modernity
and Critical Theory
Philip Walsh
© Philip Walsh 2005
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Walsh, Philip, 1965–
Skepticism, modernity, and critical theory / by Philip Walsh.
p. cm.—(Renewing philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–4039–1814–7
1. Skepticism – History. 2. Criticism (Philosophy) – History. 3. Frankfurt
school of sociology – History. I. Title. II. Series.
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To my parents, Nigel and Ann Walsh
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Contents
Series Editor’s Preface ix
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction 1
Part I Skepticism and Modern Philosophy 11

1 Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 13
1.1. Hegel’s 1801 essay on skepticism: The
philosophical context 15
1.2. Ancient versus modern skepticism 17
1.3. Ancient skepticism and Hellenistic
philosophy: The historical context 21
1.4. Hegel and the evolution of ancient skepticism 28
1.5. Arch[ and telos 31
2 On the Origins of Modern Skepticism: Descartes,

Doubt and Certainty 35
2.1. Cartesianism as a modern problematic 36
2.2. Doubt and subjectivity 38
2.3. The Cartesian conception of worldhood 41
2.4. The stages of doubt and the Cogito 45
Part II Skepticism and Idealism 53

3 The Question of Legitimacy: Skepticism, Law and
Transcendental Idealism 55
3.1. The need for legitimacy 55
3.2. The demand for a deduction 58
3.3. Re-enter empiricism: The questions of fact and right 60
3.4. Critique and metacritique in the two deductions 64
3.5. Metacritique and reflection 66
3.6. Reflection, antinomy and the legitimation of
experience 72
vii
viii Contents
4 Hegel and Self-Completing Skepticism 76

4.1. Skepticism and the idea of a system 77
4.2. Completion and the absolute standpoint 82
4.3. Phenomenology against Science 88
4.4. Evading the Absolute 97
Part III Skepticism and the Critique of Modernity 101

5 Skepticism, Nihilism and the Crisis of Rationality 103
5.1. The critique of philosophy 104
5.2. Nietzsche, Weber and the antinomies of reason 107
5.3. Enlightenment as self-completing nihilism 116
5.4. Dialectic of Enlightenment as critical prelude
to Negative Dialectics 119
6 Negative Dialectics and the Fate of Critical Theory 127

6.1. Hegel and critical theory 127
6.2. Reading Lukács 128
6.3. Critical theory as negative dialectics: Methodological
reflections 134
6.4. Metacritique of systems 136
6.5. Against identity 141
6.6. Block and the mourning of metaphysics 143
Notes 146
Select Bibliography 170
Index 176
Series Editor’s Preface
For some time now the question of the philosophical understanding of

modernity has been a problem of pressing concern. From the inquiries
of Max Weber and Friedrich Nietzsche to the work of Theodor Adorno,
the nature and conception of modernity has been thought to pose
serious questions to understanding the place and role of philosophy in
relation to the experiences that come to occupy a central place within
this modernity. Once put in this form we see the ineluctable emergence
of reflexivity as a question that thought places before itself in its endeav-
our to comprehend its expression of an experience it appears both to
capture and to fail to render comprehensible.
The comprehension of a particular temporality as that which captures
a set of problems that philosophers can and do recognize as having a
long history poses for us the difficult problem of how to unite the
understanding of something specific within historical experience with
the linkage we can see it to have with the philosophies of previous ages.
This is another aspect of the problem of modernity.
In this work, Philip Walsh addresses the second question I have posed
by thinking modernity in relation to skepticism. By placing the ques-
tion of modernity as part of an account of the role of skepticism in the
history of thought’s attempt to grapple with its own conditions, Walsh
suggests one way of managing the first question above: that is, by show-
ing the linkage between the modern and its predecessors in terms of
how there is a unifying sceptical endeavour that nonetheless dirempts
in terms of its particular ostensible focus. This is an ambitious and
important approach to the questions thrown up in thinking modernity
as a philosophical category that enables the placement of this philo-
sophical category within the register of experience, a register central to
the notion of this category, since without it there would be no connec-
tion of the philosophical trajectory traced with the historical/temporal
form it alleges to be both formative of and formed by.
A central task of the series Renewing Philosophy is to demonstrate the
importance of specifically philosophical investigations for comprehen-
sion of the conditions of modernity, and hence this book squarely fits
within the remit of this series. In articulating an account of the tradi-
tions of skeptical thought from the ancient world to the post-Cartesian
realm of modernity, this work decisively outlines one of the important
ix
x Series Editor’s Preface
modes of active thought-experience required to comprehend the position

within which contemporary reflection is implicated. The particular
way in which this path through modernity is traced follows from the
grasping of the reflexive relation between thought and experience as
that which precisely marks modernity itself. In questioning the narra-
tive here outlined the reader must find the question of their own expe-
rience as part of what must both match and be matched by what is here
set forth if the claims contained within the work are to be evaluated in
a true spirit. This indicates that the path of reading this work is a nec-
essarily difficult one. However, if the difficulty in question is one which
is connected to the problem of what is meant by enlightenment in an
age of increased detachment and indifference to reflection, then the
experience of this difficulty is one that may yet enable the Owl of
Minerva to point the way towards a new light.
GARY BANHAM
Acknowledgements
Much of the background research for this book was carried out at the
University of Warwick in the 1990s and I would like to thank the faculty
of the Departments of Sociology and Philosophy for providing the
intellectual climate for this work to take place. The guidance of Gillian
Rose, Howard Caygill and Robert Fine was instrumental in bringing the
pieces of this project together and Marilyn Moskal and Kyriaki Goudeli
provided encouragement and support along the way. I am also grateful
to Gary Banham and Gilda Haines who helped see this work through
to its conclusion. The students who have attended my upper-level
sociological theory classes at Cortland College over the past three years
(often unbeknown to them) provided a forum for testing out many
of the ideas developed in this work, and I salute them. Finally, I am
indebted to Nicola East for her patience, strength, wisdom and heroic
help with editing.
xi
“Contradiction is the rule for truth, non-contradiction for
falsehood.” (Thesis from Hegel’s Habilitation, 1801)
Introduction
Among social theorists, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is

generally thought to be primarily Marxist in inspiration, and its con-
nection to philosophy is often presented as antagonistic, or at least
secondary.1 This perception was particularly strong in the 1960s and
70s, when critical theory was viewed as a primary inspiration behind the
rise of the worldwide radical social movements that came to be known
as the New Left, and Marx’s exhortation to unite theory and practice
came to occupy center stage in the reception and interpretation of the
writings of the critical theorists.
However, over the last two decades, the philosophical core of the most
influential themes developed within critical theory has become clear,
and has generated a significant quantity of what is customarily desig-
nated philosophical scholarship.2 The shift is also illustrated in the
increasing appreciation of the work of Theodor W. Adorno, who, among
the members of the first generation theorists, was the most overtly con-
cerned with philosophy, and especially with the philosophical program
inherited from the German idealist tradition that culminates in Hegel.
In this respect, Adorno’s work can be viewed as somewhat divergent
from the other prominent Frankfurt School theorists and – certainly
with respect to its consistent emphasis on the need for philosophy – it
has a problematic relationship not only with the work of the other
prominent first-generation members of the School, Herbert Marcuse and
Max Horkheimer, but also with that of Jurgen Habermas.3 Indeed, the
differences between Adorno and Habermas, and symbolically between the
first and second generation of critical theorists, have formed something
of a terrain marker in the landscape of critical theory commentary, with
Adorno often being framed as maintaining an allegiance to a tradition
of metaphysical and epistemological inquiry, and Habermas calling for
1
2 Skepticism, Modernity and Critical Theory
a ‘post-metaphysical thinking’. The real differences are no doubt more

complex and nuanced than this, but the shift in emphasis is real
enough.
This book is primarily concerned with the influence of philosophical
skepticism on the critical theory research paradigm. Therefore, it con-
cerns one element of an interdisciplinary and evolving research project,
the definition of which may be said to comprise three separate compo-
nents: (1) A conception of human beings and human society that is
strongly historicist; (2) a commitment, nevertheless, to an emancipatory
view of knowledge defined by the tradition of modern Marxist sociology;
(3) a conception of reason derived from the tradition of modern European
philosophy, and from Hegel’s philosophy in particular. The argument
that undergirds the book is that we cannot come to terms with this third
element of the critical theory project without a retrospective under-
standing of the question of skepticism, since the skeptical moment is an
indispensable theme within Hegel’s conception of reason.
Now, to claim that Hegel’s conception of skepticism is important for
critical theory seems, initially at least, an extraordinary claim to make,
particularly in the light of recent attempts to redefine the basic orienta-
tion of theory away from epistemological inquiry and towards the more
modest goals defined by the ‘mistrust of meta-narratives’. Indeed, the
claim seems to concern what has become, for some, an obsolescent, or
at least problematic, field of inquiry, both within critical theory and
within modern philosophy in general, that is, epistemology itself. Indeed,
to assert the importance of skepticism to critical theory is to risk being
convicted of lapsing from one of the founding premises that the critical
theorists took over from Hegel – the critique of the idea that the future
and fate of the sciences rests on the success of a ‘pure’ realm of a priori
inquiry into the nature of knowing, which would act to guarantee and
legitimate the special sciences. The success of Hegel’s critique of Kant’s
basic assumptions on the grounding role of a theory of knowledge is
thought to be seminal to the rise of social theory, and to the very idea
of critical theory.
This interpretation of Hegel’s significance is central to the sympa-
thetic re-working of Habermas’s project that has been put forward by
Garbis Kortian. According to Kortian, Marx’s critique of Hegelian ideal-
ism is the second stage in the development of a metacritical project that
begins with Hegel’s critique of Kant and culminates – or at least reaches
its current resting place – in the work of Habermas himself, who has self-
consciously presented his work as part of the same development. Each
member in this series subjects the previous one to a reflexive critique
Introduction 3
that has had the effect of problematizing the presuppositions and

self-conception of philosophy so-called.
A direct line of descent from the Phenomenology of Spirit to Critical

Theory may be established because it was Hegel himself who set out
the metacritical argument as part of his explication of the concept of
speculative experience. The argument was formulated as a radicalization
of the Kantian critique of knowledge and was to lead to the dissolution
of all epistemology.4
If the key result of this process has been the decay of epistemology, both
in its foundational role within academic philosophy and as a point of
reference for the methodology of the social sciences, insofar as skepti-
cism is concerned with the problems of the nature of the world and our
knowledge of it, it does not survive the demise of epistemology as a
genuine field of inquiry. Different versions of the argument against
epistemology, but issuing in the same conclusion, have been propagated
by, among others, Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor and Jean-Francois Lyotard.5
Needless to say, a major theme of this book is to take issue with both
the above line of argument and with its conclusion. Kortian’s and
Habermas’s historical accounts of the development of metacritique
simplify the role of key figures in the series and obscure the meaning of
the key concept of metacritique itself. In particular, Hegel’s role in this
series is problematic. The interpretation of Hegel as simply a critic of
Kant misconstrues Kant’s own role in the displacement of foundational
epistemology, together with the role played by Hume’s and Descartes’
legacies, as well as that of other key players within this debate, including
such post-Kantian figures as J.G. Hamman, G.E. Schulze and Fichte.
More importantly, perhaps, it ignores the roots of Hegel’s own critique
of the critical project, which need to be distinguished from what Kortian
and Habermas have come to identify as metacritique. In terms of the
conclusions of those who question the relevance of epistemology, there
can be no question of reverting to some illusion of philosophical
suzerainty over the notion of a theory of knowledge. Nevertheless, post-
structuralist, pragmatic and sociological farewells to that notion in the
name of ‘anti-foundationalism’ have proved to be premature and, in a
variety of ways, ineffectual.
An initial important step in the argument here is to disrupt conven-
tional understandings of the meaning of skepticism, which tend to limit
it to a narrow set of goals and functions. An overview of the role of
skepticism in the epistemological disputes within modern European
philosophy, together with an indication of the fault lines along which

various conceptions of skepticism fracture, is rehearsed here. This
approach will also allow us to set in place the philosophical dramatis
personae of the book, together with an overview of its structure.
In modern philosophy, skepticism is associated strongly with the
account of knowledge and the moral philosophy presented by Hume.
Hume’s skeptical empiricism is generally acknowledged as materialist
and progressive, in tune with the overall thrust of Enlightenment values
and of liberalism as a political and moral philosophy. It is hard-nosed,
opposed to metaphysical system-building and directs attention to the
empirical limits and constraints on knowledge. Hume’s skepticism is
intent on dispelling metaphysical falsehoods for the purpose of achieving
those few, certain empirically grounded factual truths that are available
to rational beings. Kant appears to have a similar view of the role and
function of skepticism. In the section of the Critique of Pure Reason,
entitled “The Antinomy of Pure Reason,” Kant distinguishes a ‘skeptical
method’ which is directed against false controversies – against the ten-
dency to pursue questions that cannot, in principle be resolved – from
another species of skepticism: “a principle of technical and scientific
ignorance, which undermines the foundations of all knowledge, and
strives in all possible ways to destroy its reliability and steadfastness.”6
An appropriate Enlightened skepticism, then, according to both Hume
and Kant – and as will be spelled out in Chapters 1 and 3 of this book –
is one that takes metaphysics and speculation as its object, and advances
the claims of experience against them. Yet the skeptic’s claims to the
priority of experience have also to be weighed against the rationalist
version of skepticism, that is, Cartesian doubt. Descartes’ deployment of
doubt against the senses and the claims of experience, as will be shown
in Chapter 2, has been quite as influential as a model of skepticism, and
as a check against what might be thought of as the latent imperialism
of empiricism.
Yet these models of skepticism retain a deep faith in reason. For ratio-
nalists, empiricists and Kantians, skepticism is really the handmaid of
rationality; its true purpose, whether deployed against metaphysics, sen-
sation or the excesses of either, is to uncover falsehood and illusion, to
unify reason and to resolve disagreement. This modern conception of
both reason and skepticism, as I argue in Chapter 1, is quite different
from skepticism as it originally appeared as a mature philosophical
doctrine in the tradition of the Ancient Hellenistic skeptics. The Ancient
conception of skepticism will also be shown to be central to Hegel’s
initial argument in the Phenomenology, which represents a quite different
Introduction 5
and radical path. For Hegel here demands that we take seriously the
skepticism towards the epistemological circle that must confound any
attempt at a critique of reason. He contrasts the manner in which the
knowledge relation has come to be conceived, either in its use as an
‘instrument’ or as the ‘medium’ by which the object is brought into
contact with a subject. These constructions approximate to two forms
within which Kant had posed the critical problematic, but also antici-
pate models which have been pursued in various forms within twentieth
century philosophy and social theory. If the conception of knowledge
as instrument is privileged, the object is potentially distorted into what
it is ‘for us’, leading towards a subjective idealism. This side of the
dilemma has been taken up by analytical philosophers in the form of
positivism, but also by post-positivists influenced by the linguistic turn.
It tends to retain a Kantian residue by taking language as a faculty which
fixes meaning, in the same sense in which Kant understands the activity
of the understanding. On the other hand, if, in Hegel’s terms, the recep-
tivity of the subject is emphasized, the medium assumes ascendancy
over the object, resulting in variants of objective idealism or realism.
This horn of the dilemma has been taken up wherever the determining
power of culture, ideology or society has been emphasized, or where the
‘myth of the given’ is propagated. Either approach is fraught with prob-
lems, the recognition of which Hegel accurately foresaw would lead to
a radical disconnection between philosophy and the emerging social
(and natural) sciences.
This disconnection expresses itself, according to Hegel, in the conclusion
that epistemology is itself a mistake, in which
the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science (Wissenschaft),

which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself,
and actually cognizes something, [implying that] it is hard to see why
we should not turn around and mistrust this very mistrust.7
This step in Hegel’s argument, in the Introduction to the Phenomenology,

is usually taken to be the metacritical moment, when the standpoint of
critique turns back against itself. Hence his remark that
this fear takes something – a great deal in fact for granted as truth,
supporting its scruples and inferences on what is itself in need of prior
scrutiny to see if it is true. To be specific, it takes for granted certain
ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes
that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition.8
This suspension of the problem at the level not of the relationship

between the knower and the object, but between the knower and its
own knowing, is then seen as a precursor to the ‘solution’ implied by
the Absolute, that is, that the non-identity of subject and object on
which the impasse is premised may be unproblematically replaced by an
assumption of their identity. This interpretation, therefore, takes Hegel’s
apparently metacritical approach to be in the service of an absolute
system of knowledge,9 which transcends a relation to the faculties, and
is “with us, in and for itself, all along, and of its own volition.”10
But if Hegel here assumes the Absolute, and thus substitutes transcen-
dence for both critique and metacritique, this seems to contradict many
of his other pronouncements made in the Introduction and Preface to
the Phenomenology. For, as I argue in Chapter 4, Hegel specifically rejects
such an approach, claiming instead that a consistent critical stance must
evolve out of what it criticizes. Hegel expresses this movement not, in
fact, in terms of critique or metacritique at all, but – as English readers of
Miller’s translation of the Phenomenology are apt to miss – as what he calls
self-completing skepticism (sich vollbringende Skeptizimus), a device which is
presented as the ‘method’ of the Phenomenology.11
Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology, if it is taken seriously then,
represents a radicalization of skepticism that takes it beyond the ‘hand-
maid’ role that it had previously assumed in modern philosophy. But it
also opens a Pandora’s box; for it offers no guarantee that reason can
revert to its hard-won role as the legal guarantor of truth, freedom and
universal ethics that it had attained in Kant’s critical philosophy. A true
Hegelian skepticism, indeed, as I argue in Chapter 5, has affinities with
Nietzsche’s perspective on Kantian critique – and contains seeds that
may germinate in surprising and self-destructive ways. This argument
culminates in Chapter 6 in a reading of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics,
understood as an attempt to carry through Hegel’s skeptical program
consistently, but in a manner that ultimately convicts Hegel of violat-
ing his own strictures. Adorno’s commitment to a ‘negative dialectics’
will be shown to derive from the relationship to Hegel’s self-completing
skepticism.
That relationship provides an anchor for the book as a whole. However,
while its appropriate presentation requires significant theoretical priming
and historical groundwork, it will be seen that the issue of skepticism,
once understood in appropriate context, raises issues that fall outside
the purview of strictly philosophical inquiry. It instantiates prob-
lems concerning the nature of modernity in general, and the critical
theory approach to a critique of modernity, understood philosophically,
Introduction 7
historically and sociologically. Infused throughout the book, therefore,

is a narrative of the entwinement of modernity and skepticism, an
entwinement, however, that resists any linear interpretation.
Modern skepticism, thought of historically, is sometimes presented as
an outgrowth of the Enlightenment’s undermining of traditional theol-
ogy and scholasticism,12 and therefore, as having a purely negative func-
tion. By coupling skepticism with its assumed opposites – faith, dogma,
certitude – it is easy to hang on it a narrative of modernity and enlight-
enment, understood as the retreat from tradition, anthropomorphization
and irrationalism. Such narratives have a perennial appeal as large-
scale frameworks and descriptions of processes (e.g., de-divinization, de-
traditionalization, etc.) that are thought to be useful in coming to terms
with the concept of modernity itself. Since skepticism is often understood
as simply the power of negation (as the motor force encountered in the
‘de-’ of the above formulations), it is then simple enough to slot it into a
linear narrative of the overcoming of fear, myth and authority associated
with the Enlightenment. In contrast, this book takes seriously the central
argument of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, that
the self-conception of modernity-as-Enlightenment hangs on deluded
notions of the meanings of myth and rationality. Hence, any attempt to
construct easy oppositions of modernity to pre- or post-modernity should
be resisted. Yet this does not negate the need for an understanding that
situates modernity as a project bounded by certain spatio-temporal, struc-
tural and cultural presuppositions, together with specific moral, political
and civilizational ideals. A secondary theme of the book is therefore, to
situate the meaning of skepticism within such a framework.
Thus, the structure of the book breaks down into three linked projects.
First, the meaning and significance of skepticism has to be reconstructed
and, to some extent, rehabilitated through historicizing it. The break in
the history of skepticism between its ancient and modern forms is given
special attention in Part 1 of the book. The key differences between the
two traditions and their significance for an understanding of modern
philosophy and of modernity are here reconstructed. In Chapter 1,
I expound on the important elements of ancient skepticism in the con-
text of Hegel’s early essay on skepticism, and his critique of Hume’s
perspective as the basis for the self-completing skepticism promised
in the Phenomenology. In Chapter 2, I explore the rationalist thread of
modern skepticism by tracing the emergence of the concept of doubt in
Descartes’ major writings.
Part II of the book is concerned with skepticism as a principal theme
within the development of German idealism. This section consists of
two chapters that together trace the course of that development. In

Chapter 3, I show that Kant’s understanding of Hume leads him to
associate the problem of skepticism with the problem of legitimating
experience. I then interpret Kant’s transcendental deduction of the
categories of the understanding in terms that involve a radicalization of
Hume’s skepticism. The convergence of skepticism with the problem of
legitimacy inaugurates a significant shift in its meaning, which I show
to be central to understanding the development of post-Kantian philos-
ophy. Fichte’s elaboration of Kant’s reflexive epistemology leads to Hegel’s
own conception of a self-completing skepticism as the proposed method
in the Phenomenology, which I discuss in detail in Chapter 4.
Part III of the book is concerned with the view held by the principal
members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School that of those
who sorted through the implications of Kant’s critical defense of reason,
it was Hegel and Nietzsche who saw most clearly both its vulnerabilities
and its future emancipatory possibilities. In Chapter 5, I turn initially to
Nietzsche’s relationship to Kant, and discuss his diagnosis of the crisis
of modernity, not as one of skepticism, but of nihilism. Nevertheless, the
two problems are shown to be related, and to be bound up with the key
concerns of the critical theory research program, as it emerged from
Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Chapter 6 is concerned with Adorno’s notion of a negative dialectics.
The continuity with Hegel’s skepticism will be shown to be relevant to
a number of important issues addressed within Adorno’s Negative
Dialectics, including his relationship to Lukacs’ work, the problem of
philosophical systems, the problem of identity-thinking and the future
of philosophy.
A note on the methodology of the work is also relevant here.
Throughout, I maintain both a separation and elision of history and
philosophy – an equivocation that we owe to the insights of Hegel’s
historical perspective: that philosophy does not exist as a timeless set of
fundamental questions to which there is a single answer, but exists as
culture or ‘spirit’, and therefore reflects fundamental qualities of the
social reality within which it arises. Nevertheless, it is able, as philosophy,
to grasp its own self-relation to that reality. This is the essence of Hegel’s
famous remark, the materialist implications of which have been often
under-appreciated, that
[P]hilosophy …, as the thought of the world, appears only at a time

when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained
its complete state. The lesson of the concept is necessarily also apparent
Introduction 9
from history, namely that it is only when actuality has reached maturity
that the ideal appears opposite the real and reconstructs this real
world, which it has grasped in its substance, in the shape of an intel-
lectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey on grey, a shape of life
has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized by
the grey in grey of philosophy.13
Part I
Skepticism and Modern
Philosophy
1
Idealism, Metacritique and
Ancient Skepticism
Scholarly interest in ancient skepticism has been resurgent in recent

years. What had previously been dismissed as an obscure and eccentric
offshoot of Stoic teachings has now come to be accepted as a subtle and
challenging set of doctrines that has exerted a considerable, if somewhat
hidden, influence on the course of modern philosophy.1 This general
revival of interest in the three main schools of Hellenistic philoso-
phy, Stoicism, Epicureanism and Skepticism reveals, perhaps, as much
of the character of our own age as it does of the Hellenistic age itself.2
Nevertheless, and in spite of the revived attention, ancient skepticism
still remains resistant to our historical and philosophical understanding,3
due to several factors, not the least being that contemporary skepticism
as a philosophical topic is generally considered to be the theoretical
province of the analytic tradition, and this tradition is not renowned for
its historicist or hermeneutic sensitivities. The key doctrines of ancient
skepticism have often been presented with an inadequate respect for the
historical context within which they arose and evolved; sins of inter-
pretation already identified by Hegel in 1801 in his own investigation
and interpretation of ancient skepticism.
The purpose of this chapter is not to intervene in disputes between
specialist scholars in this area, but to place the tradition of ancient skep-
ticism into the historical context of skepticism in general. This will
allow a greater understanding of the range and types of skepticism,
of how skepticism became important to German idealism and how
Hegel both applied and altered the meanings of skepticism that he
inherited.
Three themes provide the guiding threads for this chapter. First, there
is the contrast between ancient on the one hand, and modern empiricist
skepticism on the other. This contrast is propounded through a reading
13
of the dispute between Hegel and his contemporary, G.E. Schulze, as this
is staged in Hegel’s 1801 essay on skepticism. The dispute captures the
key elements of both what Hegel believes is important in ancient skep-
ticism, and what is problematic about its modern form. A second theme
concerns the influence of both ancient and modern skepticism on
Hegel’s development of the ‘method’ of the Phenomenology of Spirit. This
argument will be fully developed in Part II, but key elements, including
such issues as the importance of the motivation of skepticism, the
meaning and role of belief, and the question of the ends of skepticism,
will be explored here. A third theme concerns the distinctive nature of
modern empiricist skepticism, and its complicity in the crisis of reason
that became central to the Frankfurt School critique of modernity. Again,
this theme is only initiated here, and pursued in full in Part III. The gen-
eral argument of this chapter also provides a bridgehead to the discus-
sion of doubt in Chapter 2.
Hegel’s interest in ancient skepticism was strong enough for him
to explore its significance within three works that conscribe the three
major phases of his thought: In an early essay written for the Critical
Journal of Philosophy in 1801, entitled “On the Relationship of Skepticism
to Philosophy, Exposition of its Different Modifications and Comparison
of the Latest Form with the Ancient One”; in a key chapter in the 1807
Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled “Stoicism, Skepticism and the Unhappy
Consciousness”; and in the later Lectures on the History of Philosophy, first
presented in 1816. Some of his comments concerning skepticism in the
introductions to both the Phenomenology and the Encyclopedia Logic
must also be understood in connection to ancient skepticism, as must
some elements within the Science of Logic.
Of these works the Lectures are of least interest.4 They present ancient
skepticism in the context of Hellenistic philosophy in general, and,
contrary to Hegel’s earlier discussions, merely as a subordinate offshoot
of Stoicism. The description of ancient skepticism offered in the
Phenomenology presents a cultural interpretation, taking the movement
as coeval with Stoicism and analyzing the relationship between Hellenistic
philosophy in general and early Christianity.5 The 1801 essay is more
strictly philosophical; it is presented as a critique of a major strand of
post-Kantian philosophy, the empiricism of G.E. Schulze, and contains
important reflections on the differences between ancient and modern
skepticism, as well as several observations on the nature of skepticism
in general that were to become important to the method used in the
Phenomenology. These themes from the early essay will form the basis for
the discussion in this chapter.
Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism 15
1.1. Hegel’s 1801 essay on skepticism: The

philosophical context
The 1801 essay must be understood as operating within two fairly

complex frames: (1) A long-term dispute, that still persists, over the
correct interpretation of the significance of the ancient skeptical tradi-
tion and (2) the intricate argument over the interpretation of Kant’s
epistemology that dominated the German philosophical scene in the
first decade of the nineteenth century, and which is also still a topic of
vigorous dispute. Both a background to and an overview of the 1801
essay are therefore necessary in order to understand its significance.
G.E. Schulze’s Aenesidemus was published anonymously in 1792. Titled
after the ancient skeptic of that name, Aenesidemus was the first
sustained empiricist attack on Kant’s critical philosophy. Schulze refined
his argument in a supplementary work, Critique of Theoretical Philosophy,
published in 1801. Although it is ostensibly directed against Karl
Reinhold – a central figure in the early reception of the Critique of Pure
Reason – Schulze’s work raises a number of key objections to Kant’s
system that have subsequently been reiterated in various forms, and
bear the marks of the modern skeptical tradition that derives from
Hume. In addition to the central issue concerning the vulnerability of
Kant’s system to skeptical attack, Schulze – somewhat unintentionally –
opened a subordinate area of controversy through his interpretation of
the key doctrines of ancient skepticism. He titles his work after the
ancient skeptic Aenesidemus, and presents the argument in terms of an
exchange between him and an enthusiast of Kant’s system (“Hermias”).
As Aenesidemus, a self-anointed renegade who opposed the purportedly
‘dogmatic skepticism’ of the later Academy, had invigorated ancient
skepticism by appealing to the doctrines of its founder Pyrrho, so Schulze
raises the spectre of Hume against the perceived dogmatism inherent in
Kantian critique. Schulze criticizes Kant not for his initial resolution of
submitting all our beliefs to a free and open examination of reason,6 but
for not following through on the implications of this resolution. If rea-
son is to be consistent with its own principles, it must subject its own
practice to the same rigorous procedure: it must freely and openly exam-
ine the instrument with which it intends to proceed freely and openly.
Therefore, the critique of reason must become a critique of critique, or
a metacritique.
Schulze’s originality lies in the direction in which he takes this argu-
ment, which, he claims, leads back to Hume’s skeptical dictum not to
carry the use of reason beyond the limits of experience in attempting to
explain the grounds of experience. Therefore, the reversion to Hume’s

skepticism towards anything that is not a ‘matter of fact’, immediately
apprehended in consciousness, or a ‘relation of ideas’, that is necessary,
a priori but only analytically true, is presented as the only rational
standpoint to occupy if one wishes to take the ambitions of a critique
of reason seriously. As Frederick Beiser expresses it, in his characteriza-
tion of Schulze’s argument, “[i]f there is indeed a single central thesis
of Aenesidemus, then it is that … if all criticism must become meta-
criticism, then all meta-criticism must become skepticism.”7 In other
words, when critique turns reflexively back upon itself and questions its
own premises, it discovers that it can have no justification for its own
mode of proceeding other than to merely assert the principles of
critique. Since such an assertion is dogmatic, the critical philosophy
founders on its own foundationlessness. This metacritical objection
does not originate with Schulze. It was first lodged by J.G. Hamann,
whose influential, mystical response to Kant has been viewed as the first
stroke of the Counter-Enlightenment.8 It became the basis of both
Herder’s historicism and F.H. Jacobi’s claim, later developed by Nietzsche,
that the inner impulse of Kantian critique points towards nihilism.9
Schulze’s distinctive perspective derives from his claim that this meta-
critical argument against Kant is modeled on the form of ancient
skepticism presented by Aenesidemus. On Schulze’s understanding,
Aenesidemus’s position is a result of his criticism of the Academic skep-
tics, who claim that ‘everything is uncertain’. This proposition must
itself be understood as uncertain, and therefore is self-canceling, since it
includes itself in its own pronouncement. As a result, Aenesidemus –
again, according to Schulze – attacks any claim that goes beyond imme-
diate consciousness, and thereby attributes certainty only to the facts of
appearances. Kant’s mistake is parallel to the ancient Academics’, and
therefore Aenesidemus’s skepticism – an affirmation of bare appearances
and a suspicion of all attempts to go beyond those appearances – is the
only rational response to Kant’s critical philosophy.10
How are we to understand Schulze’s skepticism in relation to Hegel’s
own development? There is no question that Hegel was deeply influ-
enced by aspects of Schulze’s argument, despite the scorn he appears
to pour on its key elements in the 1801 essay. First, Schulze’s metacriti-
cal claim against Kant is reproduced in the opening gambit of the
Phenomenology, in which the very idea of a critique of reason is shown
to be internally incoherent for precisely the same reasons.11 Second,
Schulze’s appeal to ancient skepticism forced Hegel to examine the whole
question of the relationship of previous philosophies to contemporary
ones, and to conceptualize the history of philosophy, perhaps for the

first time, both as a single unity, and as a series of distinct shapes.
Both these elements are apparent in the form of Hegel’s indictment of
Schulze in the 1801 essay, which involves not simply an attack on the
logical basis of Schulze’s metacritical skepticism, but also on his inter-
pretation of the tradition of ancient skepticism,12 together with a
lengthy presentation of his own interpretation. This latter exercise is
particularly notable, since Hegel’s interpretation of ancient skepti-
cism raises absolutely fundamental questions which become crucial
for understanding his mature philosophy concerning the nature of
reason, belief, doubt and other key concepts associated with both the
empiricist/idealist dispute and with the nature of modern epistemology
in general. I trace the details of Hegel’s argument in the order in which
they appear in the 1801 essay, emphasizing both the historicist dimen-
sion of Hegel’s argument and the connecting lines between the concerns
of the essay and the skeptical method of the Phenomenology: I discuss
first Hegel’s critique of Schulze’s interpretation of the ancient skeptical
tradition, second his discussion of the correct interpretation of that
tradition and third, his analysis of the relationship between skepticism
and the history of philosophy.
1.2. Ancient versus modern skepticism
By the time Hegel published the 1801 essay on skepticism, Aenesidemus

had already come under serious attack from Fichte, who published a
review of it in 1797.13 Fichte’s central criticism was that the work willfully
misconstrued Kant’s first Critique as transcendental psychology. It then
made illegitimate use of Hume’s skepticism as a means to eliminate the
transcendental element, culminating in a dogmatic realism. Hegel’s criti-
cisms of Schulze are more sophisticated than Fichte’s, and emphasize the
differences between ancient and modern skepticism.14 At the beginning
of his essay Hegel promises to “deal with the relationship of skepticism in
general, and of this form in particular [the skepticism of Schulze], to phi-
losophy; the different modifications of skepticism will define themselves
automatically according to this relationship.”15 This unusual way of
expressing his purpose anticipates a key element of Hegel’s approach in
the Phenomenology, where the different shapes of spirit are intended to
present themselves only as they appear, and define themselves in relation
to each other,16 without reference to any external authorial intent.
Hegel also lays emphasis on the relationship between philosophy and
natural consciousness in the 1801 essay. This too anticipates an aspect
of the Phenomenology, which has a double-layered structure in which the

claims of natural consciousness – Hegel’s term for experience – are exam-
ined at each stage in relation to the kinds of philosophical reflection
that derive from those claims. But Hegel’s concern in the 1801 essay is
to contrast the manner in which ancient and modern empiricist skepti-
cism each conceive of the relationship between reflection and experience.
There is an overarching historical narrative to this contrast, for Hegel
presents the historical evolution of skepticism in terms of a decline –
from its ancient ‘noble’ roots, in which skepticism is turned against the
dogmas of ordinary experience, to the modern empiricism of Schulze,
in which experience is turned against philosophical skepticism.17 This
narrative, however, also bears on more general issues, indeed on “the
communal degeneration of philosophy and of the world in general,”18
by which Hegel registers the altered nature of both modern philos-
ophy and modern experience. The shift, or decline, exemplifies the
process by which skepticism, which originally formed a fundamental
unity with philosophy, becomes separated from it, and gradually turns
against it.
Hegel’s key criticism of modern empiricist skepticism, is its lack of self-
consciousness with respect to the appeal to immediate experience. Both
Schulze and Hume base their skepticism on that appeal, and direct it
against speculation and reflection. They are correspondingly dismissive
of what Hume dubs the “excesses” of Academic skepticism,19 which is
premised on a rejection of the veridical status of immediate experience.
Hegel’s indictment of Hume and Schulze is not simply that they play
experience off against reflection, but that in so doing, they distort the
actual nature and meaning of experience itself, by assuming it to be
immediate. Therefore, the purported humility of empiricism in its appeals
to immediacy is really a cloak for an underlying dogmatism, in which
‘immediacy’ is constructed and subordinated in accordance with a pre-
conceived agenda or plan. As Adorno points out, in his study of Hegel’s
conception of experience
[i]n schools of philosophy that make emphatic use of the concept of

experience, in the tradition of Hume, the character of immediacy –
immediacy in relation to the subject – is itself the criterion of that
concept. Experience is supposed to be something immediately present,
immediately given, free, as it were, of any admixture of thought
and therefore indubitable. Hegel’s philosophy, however, challenges
this concept of immediacy, and with it the customary concept of
experience.20
Hegel issues this challenge in various places and in various ways. In the
Introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel notes that empiricism, in
common with other modes of philosophy, proceeds with an instru-
mental model of the relationship between reflection and experience.
When reflection takes experience as its object, its action “does not let
[its object] be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter
it.”21 In the 1801 essay, this same criticism is made directly in relation
to Schulze’s claim in Aenesidemus, that
the existence of what is given within the compass of our consciousness

has undeniable certainty; for since it is present in consciousness, we can
doubt the certainty of it no more than we can doubt consciousness … .
[W]hat is given in and with consciousness we call an actual fact
[Tatasche] of consciousness; it follows that the facts of consciousness
are what is undeniably actual, what all philosophical speculations
must be related to.22
Hegel points out that these notions of ‘certainty’, ‘doubt’, ‘actuality’ and
indeed the ‘facts of consciousness’ themselves are not concepts embedded
within ordinary experience, but only become available once we begin to
reflect on experience. Hence, they are concepts of reflection, and are
mediated by the reflective consciousness that presents them. Therefore,
they cannot be ‘immediate’ in the sense that Schulze claims. Moreover,
the presentation of certainty, doubt, actuality and so forth as universal
forms of experience is problematic. Hegel believes that such concepts of
reflection are neither necessary nor invariant, but both contingent and
historically specific. Schulze and Hume, in attributing such concepts to
an assumed universal ‘natural consciousness’, therefore distort both the
historicity of ordinary experience and of philosophical concepts of
reflection. Indeed, according to Hegel, the relationship between skeptical
empiricism and natural consciousness as one of straightforward subject
and object, is itself specific to modern philosophy. Ancient skepticism,
by contrast, had a highly developed sense of its own fallibility and a
quite different relationship with what it took to be ‘natural conscious-
ness’. For ancient skepticism, and in sharp contrast to modern skeptical
empiricism, the form and content of experience, in common with the
skeptic’s own pronouncements on experience, are all equally uncertain.
Another set of differences between ancient and modern skepticism
emerges from Hegel’s critique of Schulze’s interpretation of Aenesidemus.
Aenesidemus’s ‘renegade’ status turns on an apparent break with the
Academic skeptics, and Schulze’s account of that break is, as Hegel
points out, historically inaccurate. Schulze attributes to Aenesidemus

the view that the standpoint of Academic skepticism becomes reflex-
ively self-canceling. In fact, Hegel points out, Aenesidemus criticizes the
Academics for not being reflexive enough, since they formulated their
skepticism as propositions per se, and therefore as affirmative expres-
sions. Both Aenesidemus and the Academic skeptics insist on the self-
referential character of their pronouncements, and the fact that this
is demanded by reason. Indeed, a distinguishing characteristic of all
ancient skepticism is its self-consciously reflexive nature, which is the
basis of Schulze’s claim that it is ‘self-canceling’. According to Hegel,
however, it is precisely the relentlessly reflexive character of ancient skep-
ticism that saves it from the kinds of self-contradiction that arise from the
fixed standpoint of modern instrumental philosophizing, and which con-
stitutes the ‘freedom’ of ancient skepticism. Hegel traces Schulze’s false
presentation of this stance as self-canceling to a characteristically modern
understanding of the nature of belief and doubt, which reveals both an
insufficiently historicist perspective, and a dogmatic refusal to examine its
own presuppositions.
Indeed, belief and doubt are the terms of modern, but not ancient,
skepticism. While we have come to associate doubt and skepticism to
the point where they are practically synonymous, it is worth noting that
the original Greek meaning of skepsis is associated with ‘inquiring’ or
searching; the etymological origins of ‘doubt’ are associated with hesi-
tation and fear. Sextus Empiricus, whose writings, Outlines of Pyrrhonism,
are the main source of our knowledge of ancient skepticism, uses the
term skepsis most often in opposition to dogmatism. The term dogma is
usually translated as ‘belief’; but ancient skepticism understands by this
term not so much an individual mental state, to which might or might
not be attached a reason or a cause, nor does it understand it as a univer-
sal mental operation, embedded in human consciousness by nature in the
same manner as physiological desires such as hunger and thirst. Rather,
it takes belief to constitute an evolved attitude of consciousness towards
the world, and it opposes such an attitude as unhealthy, or not in accor-
dance with Nature, and liable to induce disquietude and disturbance.23
By contrast, modern skepticism is generally taken, as is the case with
Schulze, to be raising questions with respect to knowledge, truth or
certainty and, since belief is considered (either implicitly or explicitly)
merely the ‘vehicle’ for such concepts, it is usually understood as unprob-
lematic as a concept per se. For this reason, the opposition between belief
and doubt does not occur in ancient skepticism. Hegel makes this point in
several places. In the 1801 essay, he remarks that “the German term
Zweifel [or the English ‘doubt’] used about ancient skepticism is always
awkward and inappropriate”;24 in the introduction to the Phenomenology,
he characterizes doubt as a modern concept of reflection, derived from
Cartesianism25 and in the Encyclopedia Logic, he remarks that:
[h]e who only doubts still clings to the hope that his doubt may be
resolved, and that one or other of the definite views, between which
he wavers, will turn out solid and true. Skepticism properly so called
is a very different thing; it is complete hopelessness about all which
understanding counts stable, and the feeling to which it gives birth
is one of unbroken calmness and inward repose Such at least is the
noble Skepticism of antiquity.26
A final general difference between ancient and modern skepticism has

been brought out by Leo Strauss. He remarks, although in a different
context, “skepticism has always seen itself as, in principle, coeval with
human thought. … For the skeptic all assertions are uncertain and
therefore essentially arbitrary.” It is therefore opposed to “that modern
tradition which tried to define the limits of human knowledge and
which therefore admitted that, within certain limits, genuine knowl-
edge is possible.”27 This universalism, as will be shown, is a consequence
of a certain mode of reasoning among the Ancients, and not, as Strauss
implies, simply arbitrary.
Now, these general comparisons clearly point to some fundamen-
tal reorientation in the meaning of skepticism and its relationship to
thought in general. We can now pick out four general themes within
which this reorientation can be discerned: (1) the relationship between
reflection and experience; (2) the implications of reflexivity; (3) the
relationship between belief and doubt; (4) the tendency towards uni-
versality. These themes will reappear in later chapters as points of
orientation in considering the nature of modern skepticism. In order to
sharpen these themes, I here examine their development within the
ancient skeptical tradition, first providing an overview of the ancient
skeptical tradition as a whole before examining the context within
which it arose in the first place, as a reaction to both Epicureanism and
especially Stoicism, and then discussing its-own independent evolution.
1.3. Ancient skepticism and Hellenistic Philosophy: The

historical context
Ancient skepticism, as a tradition, exhibits a greater differentiation

in terms of its evolution than either Stoicism or Epicureanism. The
evolution of the tradition can be encapsulated within the ideas of the

five main thinkers; from Pyrrho, its founder, through Arcesilaus and
Carneades – the Academic skeptics – to Aenesidemus, who turned against
the Academy in the name of a return to Pyrrhonism, and Sextus, the
recorder of the tradition, who associates himself with Aenesidemus’
‘return to Pyrrho’. Each of these skeptics adapt their philosophies both
to their predecessors and to key elements of the two earlier Hellenistic
schools, Stoicism and Epicureanism.
It is worth noting that Hegel’s dispute with Schulze concerning the
interpretation of ancient skepticism is not an isolated case, since the key
tenets of ancient skepticism have been, and still are, a source of major
disagreement between scholars. A principal reason for this disagreement
is that the sources of ancient skepticism are both indirect and unreliable.
Sextus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism contains information on the skeptical
thinkers of the academy, and on Pyrrho himself, but are principally the
work of a disciple and conflict in some respects with other sources,
such as Cicero’s Academica and Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of rominent
Philosophers.28 However, no writings of Pyrrho, of Arcesilaus, Carneades
or of Aenesidemus exist, for the simple reason that they wrote nothing
themselves, considering the act of recording their teachings to be in
conflict with those teachings. The obscurity of the tradition has led to
confusion with respect to the content of the ancient skeptical teachings,
their significance and their evolution.
It is not surprising then that Hegel’s own interpretation of ancient
skepticism is problematic in places. What little commentary there is on
the scholarship underlying Hegel’s 1801 essay on ancient skepticism
is somewhat contradictory. H.S. Harris takes Hegel’s reference to the
decline of the tradition to be a simple comparison between the ancient
‘noble’ form of skepticism and its degraded modern counterpart.29 But
this seems too simplistic since Hegel is at pains to distinguish the indi-
vidual ancient skeptics from each other, especially on the question of
the relationship between academic skepticism and Aenesidemus’s later
‘Pyrrhonism’. Michael Forster, in his study of Hegel and skepticism, on
the other hand, argues that the issue can be reduced to Hegel’s under-
standing of the evolution of the 17 skeptical ‘tropes’ recorded by Sextus,
the first ten of which are said to have been formulated by Aenesidemus,
and the later seven by his disciple, Agrippa.30 However, Hegel’s general
remarks on the decline of ancient skepticism, and his discussion of how
the tropes fit into this general framework, exhibit a more complex under-
standing of its significance for the confrontation with Schulze. In fact,
Hegel classifies skepticism into three phases. First, there is a skepticism that
is “one with philosophy.” Second there is a
skepticism that is self-sundered from it [which] can be divided into

two forms, according to whether it is or is not directed against
Reason. The genuine ancient skepticism sets itself into striking con-
trast with the shape in which Sextus presents to us the skepticism
that is cut off from philosophy and turned against it. To be sure, the
authentic skepticism does not have a positive side, as philosophy
does, but maintains a pure negativity in relation to knowledge, but it
was just as little directed against philosophy as for it; and the hostile
attitude that it adopted later against philosophy on the one hand and
against dogmatism on the other, is quite separate.31
Apart from the criticism of Sextus offered here, suggesting a more complex
view of how ancient skepticism evolved than a simple ancient/modern
opposition, Hegel thinks that the decline is to be identified with skepti-
cism gradually tending towards the form of metacritique that Schulze
presents, at least with respect to its antagonistic attitude towards phi-
losophy. The development of this tendency is associated with the evolu-
tion of the tropes, but Hegel appears to think that the earlier tropes were
developed by the Academics, and the later ones by Aenesidemus or his
disciples. Hegel then, understands the tradition he is considering to
begin with Pyrrho himself in the latter’s deployment of Socratic dialectic
in a novel direction. Its middle period, representing a break, is domi-
nated by the Academics, Arcesilaus and Carneades, and its later form,
also marked by a break, is represented by Aenesidemus and Sextus.
Ancient skepticism is closely associated with the two other Hellenistic
schools, Stoicism and Epicureanism. All three schools have, of course,
exerted profound influence over the modern philosophical tradition;
however, and remarkably, as Martha Nussbaum has noted, they are vir-
tually absent from the works of all major innovative twentieth-century
thinkers.32 Only recently, in the wake of a revival of interest in Greek
ethics, have they received renewed attention. Given the anti-metaphysical
thrust of twentieth-century philosophy in general, this is surprising,
since, from its beginnings, Hellenistic philosophy was ‘worldly’, in the
sense of grappling with complications in human life, and not as disen-
gaged academic contemplation, or as a Platonic seeking for Truth outside
the realm of human affairs. This gives the Hellenistic schools an original
emancipatory content and a primary interest in eudaimonia that is
distinct from both Plato and Aristotle. Eudaimonia is often translated as
‘happiness’, but this does not capture the complex overtones of the
term. Most informed accounts associate it strongly with health, which

leads Nussbaum to characterize the Hellenistic schools’ teachings in
general as ‘therapeutic philosophy’.33 Under this metaphor, as medicine
treats the body, so philosophy, as the Epicureans, Stoics and Skeptics
conceive it, treats the soul. As medicine, in contrast to the inert sciences
of nature, is an “engaged, immersed art, an art that works in pragmatic
partnership with those it treats”,34 so Hellenistic philosophy understands
eudaimonia as contextualized within the contingencies of human inter-
action, and human welfare to consist in the relationship of the individual
to her environment and to others. The role of the Hellenistic philoso-
pher is to enter into discourse with the patient, working with, rather
than simply instructing, her.
All three schools attracted followers in the period from the middle of
the fourth century until the first century BC. Although influenced in
varying ways by Plato and Aristotle, they were also responding to the
increasing cosmopolitanism of the age. The rise of Alexandrian imperi-
alism in the East, the decline of the Athenian city-state and the rise of
Rome produced the elements of what has been characterized as the first
‘world system’, centered on the Mediterranean. Such a system injected
alterity into all it encompassed. Emergent ideological, economic and
cultural flows impacted local religions and customs, dispersing preser-
vationist, progressive and, in time, reactionary attitudes towards social
and political institutions in complex ways.35
Epicureanism may be understood, in certain respects, to be a reac-
tionary movement.36 Its ethics are directed against the confusion, stress
and disturbance of luxury and urban life, and teach the need to divest
oneself of worldly ties associated with possessions, social striving and
externally originating desires. The means to virtue and a life of eudaimonia
is to seek tranquility (ataraxia) and freedom from corrupting forms of
social convention. Epicureanism, therefore, seeks to adjust those facul-
ties that lend themselves to invasion from without, namely desire and
belief. In their practical lives, individuals may, through therapeutic
teaching and self-cultivation, come to distinguish healthy, internally
oriented from unhealthy invasive desires, thus augmenting their pow-
ers of choice and self-direction. Such a faculty of ‘distinguishing’ entails
a corresponding distinction (which anticipates Rousseau in important
ways) between those beliefs that are natural and intrinsic, from those
that are distorting and socially derived. The path that Epicurus, and later
Lucretius, recommends in order to develop this faculty is one that
begins from the perspective of the child or the healthy animal; those
who wish to cultivate healthy beliefs and desires unimpeded by social
prejudices and pressures must first seek this perspective. However, the
attainment of such a beginning does not involve the self-divestment of
beliefs, prejudices and desires, in the Cartesian manner. Rather, Epicurus
suggests that it requires the careful, rational monitoring and anticipa-
tion of certain bodily states that are conducive to its cultivation.
Epicureanism is the forerunner of both Stoicism and skepticism, and
its relative simplicity stands in counterpoint to the ambivalence of the
later philosophies. This ambivalence is germinal to Stoic ethics. As
Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, Stoicism both valorizes the individual by
“interiorizing moral life with its stress on will and law”37 at the same
time as it potentially diminishes him by detaching him from those moral
and political environments that traditionally fostered the recognition of
individuality. For, according to Stoic ethics, the
the good man is a citizen of the universe; his relation to all other col-
lectivities, to city, Kingdom or empire is secondary and accidental.
Stoicism thus invites us to stand against the world of physical and
political circumstance at the very same time that it requires us to act
in conformity with nature. There are symptoms of paradox here and
they are not misleading.38
This dialectic of individuality and cosmopolitanism has constituted the

philosophical undertow of modern Republicanism in its influence from
Machiavelli to Arendt. Its presence in imperial Rome, above all, testifies
to its appeal as a philosophy aimed not only at a patrician elite – but to
all private citizens.39 This is no doubt the crux of Hegel’s point when
he characterizes Stoicism, “whether on the throne or in chains,” as a
“universal form of the World Spirit [that] could only appear in a time
of universal fear and bondage, but also a time of universal culture.”40
The Stoic position on ethics and politics stems quite directly from its
epistemological commitments, which form the bridge to the skeptic
reaction.
Ancient skepticism may be understood to have arisen in response
to the dogmatism of the Stoics’ epistemology, and this is reflected in
a common vocabulary and interests.41 Stoics, in common with the
Epicureans, emphasize the need for distinctions to be made between cer-
tain kinds of belief and desire, which are states of mind that human
beings acquire from their perceptions of their environments and activi-
ties. Certain beliefs and desires are ‘true’ or ‘real’, but many others are
brought about through the influence of social custom, prejudice or
opinion. Therefore, for Stoics, distinctions must be made about ‘that
which appears’ (to phainomenon) to us. Perceptions of the true and the
real are guaranteed by a certain type of informed assent to appearances
that is known as katalepsis. This assent is distinguished from another
type that is formed through opinion (doxa) and which, as in Epicureanism,
is associated with social conformity. Katalepsis is a ‘performative’ assent,
performed out of a free will unmotivated by external factors and which
arises as a kind of intellectual intuition. The wisdom that Stoic phil-
osophy brings is the ability to surrender one’s subjective convictions,
prejudices and particularly emotions in order to withhold or admit
assent accordingly. The purpose of this wisdom – and in this Stoicism
follows Epicurus – is that it brings about a state of the mind free from
disturbance, a state described as ataraxia.
While Skepticism grew out of a critique of the abstract and subjective
nature of the Stoic criterion of katalepsis, its early inspiration rested
on strong appeal to the character of Pyrrho of Elis (c.365–c.270 BC).
Although Pyrrho is credited as the founder of the tradition of ancient
skepticism, he developed his ideas from the Democritean philoso-
pher, Metrodorus.42 Metrodorus represents the link in the relationship
between the skeptical tradition and Socratic dialectic. His key pro-
nouncement, according to Cicero’s Academica, is that “none of us knows
anything, not even whether we know anything or not.”43 This pro-
nouncement is an extrapolation of the attitude of the Socrates of Plato’s
early dialogues, but may be distinguished from it in two senses. First, it
has none of the ironic nuance with which Socrates deployed it; it is
meant seriously as a basic dictum.44 Second, it is deployed as a principle
for following a certain agoge, or way of life. This is intended to distin-
guish it from polemics, or an haeresis,45 a concept which, in denoting
strong opinion (the term is the Greek root of ‘heresy’), implies a school
or a sect. Haeresis is also translated as ‘doctrinal rule’, and agoge as a line
of reasoning or an education. The opposition became increasingly
important during the course of the development of ancient skepticism,
culminating in the break between Aenesidemus and the Academy.
Pyrrho, in adopting and following this agoge therefore, lived ‘a life
without belief’. He did not take disciples or formalize his teaching as a
set of rules. His outlook was expressed in pithy phrases, such as ‘no more
one than another’, or ‘I decide nothing’, or ‘everything is incompre-
hensible’, which may be understood as early formulations of the skep-
tical technique of epoch[ by which, in direct opposition to the Stoic idea
of katalepsis, one ‘withholds assent’ from all appearances. The meaning
and practice of epoch[ is subject to different interpretation by modern
scholars; however, its distinction from the concepts of doubt and certainty
must here be emphasized, since this forms another principal site of the
difference between ancient and modern skepticism.
The distinction between epoch[ and doubt is central to the dispute
between Hegel and Schulze. The latter interprets epoch[ as intended to
establish certainty with respect to the facts of bare appearances, but also
to cut off further reflection on the nature of both the underlying reality
and the mind that reflects on its apprehensions. Hence, Schulze notes
that “they [the ancient skeptics] admit that there is cognition through
the senses and a conviction thereby of the existence and of certain
properties of things subsisting on their own account.”46 Hegel argues (cor-
rectly) that this interpretation rests on an apparent distinction between
appearance and reality that is simply not acknowledged by ancient skep-
ticism. While modern empiricist skepticism “always brings with
it … the concept of a thing that lies behind and beneath the phenomenal
facts …, ancient skepticism holds back altogether from expressing any
certainty or any being.”47 Appearances are not to be identified with exis-
tence, since such identification may only occur once assent is granted
to an impression, and it is this assent that the skeptics withhold through
the act of epoch[. Therefore, there is no cognition (Erkenntis) through the
senses as such, according to Hegel’s understanding of ancient skepticism;
only an involuntarily ‘being affected’, and this, so far from attributing
certainty to that effect, rather is “designed as the smallest possible trib-
ute that could be paid to the necessity of an objective determining
[world].”48
For Hegel, then, epoch[ is to be distinguished from doubt insofar as the
process of doubt involves the disturbance of already deeply held con-
victions about the way the world actually is; in other words, doubt is
deployed against belief and certainty, and makes sense only in that con-
text. But the practice of epoch[ is intended to suspend our questions
about appearances, without going beyond them; it is therefore to be
understood as a kind of check on the activity of belief, a block to seek-
ing what underlies appearances, or rather of the distinction between
appearance and existence. The Ancients’ attitude towards appearances
is therefore that of azetetos – that which is not in question, not that which
is not in doubt.
Both epoch[ and azetetos are therefore keys to distinguishing ancient
skepticism from the two main modern forms of skepticism. On the one
hand, the empiricism of Schulze and Hume conforms to the modern
tradition that Strauss identifies as primarily concerned with establishing
limits – both on knowledge and on skepticism. On the other hand, Cartesian
skepticism, through the activity of doubt, as I shall argue in Chapter 2,
involves ‘losing the world’, which implies both its earlier possession and
a complex machinery of gain and loss that is entirely alien to ancient
skepticism.
1.4. Hegel and the evolution of ancient skepticism
Hegel’s account of the core concepts of ancient skepticism in the 1801

essay is followed by his explanation of its evolution beyond the ‘life-
philosophy’ of Pyrrho and gradual decline into what he takes to be the
scholasticism of Sextus’ skepticism.49 The first step in this process was
the formalization of Pyrrho’s aphorisms into a coherent, though wholly
negative doctrine. The single most important figure in this process was
Arcesilaus, a younger contemporary of Pyrrho, who became head of the
Middle Academy around 273 BC, and established the first ten ‘tropes’ of
skepticism. Arcesilaus’ tropes form the core of a skeptical doctrine that
consistently stresses cultural differences over the nature of truth, justice
and the good, pointing to divergences among geographically and his-
torically separated peoples as the basis for maintaining a skeptical
perspective. This perspective is characterized, above all, by a consistent
rejection of beliefs as such. Cicero says of Arcesilaus: “it is possible for a
man to hold no beliefs, and not just possible but actually essential to
the wise man. To Arcesilaus this view seemed true, as well as honourable
and worthy of the wise man.”50
Arcesilaus’ teachings are also distinguished by the method of equipol-
lence or isosthenia, the practice of placing arguments and counter-
arguments into contact with each other in order to show the impotence
of both. The method itself was not unique to Arcesilaus’ school; Plato’s
Parmenides represents, perhaps, the most famous variant on the tech-
nique, and the Peripatetics and Protagoras advertised similar approaches
in their exercises in rhetoric and polemic.51 However, Arcesilaus’ origi-
nality lay in his attaching a teleological element to this method: The
value of deploying equipollence as a method lay in its capacity to
produce epoch[, understood as the absence of belief, which was to be
viewed as an end in itself. Arcesilaus then argued that the universaliza-
tion of epoch[, the resignation to the fact of the undecidability of every-
thing, leads to the state of ataraxia, which, in common with other
Hellenistic philosophies, remains as a telos representing the highest
good. However, Arcesilaus’ stance, as distinct from Pyrrho’s, opens
up the problem of reflexivity in a manner which was quickly seized
upon by opponents, and which becomes another key element in the
debate between Hegel and Schulze. For Arcesilaus’ doctrine of the
undecidability of everything, as his Stoic opponents pointed out, had a

hidden dogma – a covert decision; namely its resolve about that very
undecidability. The problem sets the stage for the later developments
within the tradition.
The most successful set of responses to the accusation of dogmatism
against the skeptics is set forth by Carneades, Arcesilaus’ successor as
head of the Middle Academy in the mid-second century BC. Carneades
represents a compromise between the formalism of Arcesilaus and the
aphoristic form in which Pyrrho presented his ideas. According to
Diogenes Laertius’s account, Carneades demonstrated the practice of
isosthenia without making clear its ultimate purpose, and thus evading
the charge of setting up dogmas. Carneades’ consistency and brilliance,
for example in a famous sojourn in Rome in 155 BC, where he spoke one
day presenting a convincing argument in favour of justice, and on the
next, shocking his audience by arguing convincingly against it, attested
to the viability of the goal of achieving universal epoch[. At the same
time, Carneades’ refusal to ground his practice in overt dogmas, or to
clear up contradictory assertions, deflected the charge of dogmatism.
According to Cicero (although accounts of Carneades’ teachings conflict),
Clitomachus, Carneades’ successor and closest follower, himself had
never been able to find out what Carneades believed.52
We encounter an ambiguity here. For Carneades, it appears that isos-
thenia is the sole interest and end of skepticism, while for Arcesilaus it is
a means by which one achieves epoch[. For Carneades, however, the prac-
tice of isosthenia is not a techne, that is, an art or science organized into a
body of knowledge pursued for concrete ends. It is simply an ability to
bring appearances and thoughts into opposition53 with each other. It is
not a special skill, and it is not pursued to achieve ataraxia per se. Indeed,
if it were aligned with the pursuit of ataraxia, this would require a defense
of the desirability or inexorability of that goal, in the manner of that put
forward by Arcesilaus. Nevertheless, the consistent practice of isosthenia
points towards epoch[ even if that goal is not consciously aimed at.
Therefore, it seems reasonable to suppose, as David Sedley has argued,
that Carneades’ oblique attempts to bring all assertions into opposition
with each other without overtly preaching epoch[, was only possible in
fact because Arcesilaus had already established epoch[ as an end.54
The problem of ends in general, and the relationship between the
ancient skeptical method (isosthenia) and the goal (epoch[), comes more
explicitly to the center of skeptical concerns in the third stage of its
development, in the ideas of Aenesidemus and his disciple, Sextus. This
stage is marked by the fact that the Stoic retort that the skeptics had an
implicit dogma in their practice of non-assent was treated as a threat

that required an explicit defense, a defense taken up by Aenesidemus.
Aenesidemus, whom Schulze takes as the model for his own brand of
skepticism, is credited with formulating the later seven tropes, and pre-
senting his philosophy as a new version of Pyrrhonism.55 The later
tropes are formal guides to practicing isosthenia. The first ten tropes are
prescriptions for the wisdom of epoch[ based on reflections on the diver-
sity of the organization of the senses, of situations, distances and places,
of educations, customs, faith and of prejudices. The later seven tropes,
however, present the argument for epoch[ through logical constructions
directed against certain chains of reasoning, such as the aporiae of infi-
nite regress and circularity. They are, therefore, metacritical tropes, and
in this respect are representative of the manner in which skepticism
turns away from its original object, experience, and towards reflection.
The later tropes are therefore not representative of the ancient tradition
as a whole, and, indeed, Aenesidemus may be interpreted not as defus-
ing but exacerbating the power of the Stoic retort to the skeptics. For by
meeting the Stoics on their own battlefield, so to speak, and asserting
certain reasons as the basis for pursuing a skeptical line of thought,
Aenesidmemus entangles the skeptical perspective in the problems of its
own beginning or foundation. Aenesidemus restates the Stoic objection
to Arcesilaus’ teachings and then distinguishes ‘Pyrrhonism’ from those
teachings, since “the Academy is distinct from the Pyrrhonist logoi … just
in this one particular, that they formulate the incomprehensibility [of
everything] as an assertion.”56 Aenesidemus, in refusing to assert his
skeptical conclusions per se, thereby tries to evade the charge of self-
contradiction. But according to Hegel, this metacritical attack on the aca-
demics is unjustified:
This formal [ formell ] semblance of an assertion it is, which the

[academic] skeptics are regularly teased about; it is thrown back
at them, that if they doubt everything, then this ‘I doubt’, ‘it seems
to me’ etc., is certain; so that the reality and objectivity of the think-
ing activity is held against them, since they hold firm to the form
of positing in every positing by thought, and in this way show
up expressed activity as involving dogmatism. … At this rate, it must
even befall Pyrrho to be given out as a dogmatist by someone. … [T]he
skeptics made clear that their phonai ‘all is false’, ‘nothing is true’
‘neither more than the other’ were self-referential; and that the
skeptics, in the utterance of their slogans … were affected, not giving an
opinion, or making an assertion about an objective being.57
Aenesidemus’ attack on the Academics then, parallels Schulze’s attack

on Kant, by requiring that ‘thinking activity’ give an account of its own
subjectivity before that of which it thinks can be taken as a legitimate
object of inquiry. This returns us to the dilemma presented in the intro-
duction to the Phenomenology concerning the motivations or purpose
of inquiry, to which two further concepts that emerged from ancient
skepticism are important.
1.5. Arch[ and telos
In the same way that Carneades’ silence concerning the ends of his skep-
ticism reveals a recognition of the problem of motivation, the later
Pyrrhonists deploy an unusual form of equivocation in response to the
same difficulty. For Sextus and Aenesidemus, ataraxia is presented as the
end of skepticism, and epoch[ as the means by which this is accom-
plished. This appears to commit the skeptic to a dogmatic method of
deciding in advance to operate in accordance with a principle (arch[58)
which will bring about a particular foreseen end (telos). Yet this com-
mitment is not what it seems because of both the unusual nature of the
telos that the skeptic aims for, and the arch[ according to which this aim-
ing occurs.
According to Sextus, ataraxia is indeed the end that the skeptic aims
for, but it arises ‘naturally’, in a manner that is not foreseen from the
practice of epoch[, but occurs, as it were, quite by accident. Sextus char-
acterizes ataraxia as following from epoch[ “as the shadow follows the
body.”59 As an example, he cites the experience of the painter, Apelles,
who, having been unable to properly render the appearance of foam on
a painting of a horse, threw his sponge at the canvas in frustration, and
marked the canvas in precisely the desired way, thereby unintentionally
achieving his aim. The movement from epoch[ to ataraxia is supposed to
happen in the same way; when one gives up the desire to achieve eudai-
monia through knowing, one accidentally achieves it. Nussbaum
describes the process as follows:
Ataraxia just comes by chance, tuchikos, as a result of a process [the

skeptic] is following out of some non-dogmatic motivation – say,
because it is his trade. He does not seek it out, he does not believe in
it: it just happens to him. Since it happens as an unexpected result,
we do not have to attribute any commitment to him in order to
explain his actions. Apelles did not have a desire to make a certain sort
of effect by tossing the sponge. He just threw it out of frustration, and
the effect came by lucky coincidence. Just so, ataraxia comes to the
Skeptic; it is like a shadow that follows the suspension of belief. He
is passive to it.60
The serendipitous and hidden manner in which this transformation

takes place involves the recognition of the problem of the skeptic’s telos.
Any concrete determination of the relationship between procedure and
purpose would incorporate commitment to and belief in a telos, which
is what, on pain of relapsing into dogmatism, the skeptic seeks to avoid.
But is the skeptic’s practice possible? Can an activity, a thought, or a
system of thinking occur without a predetermined goal in mind? And
does not the idea of removing a telos itself incorporate a telos?
Nussbaum argues that the skeptic’s practice is indeed tenable: “To
have a telos or goal in the usual way – to strain the bow of one’s life
towards it as a target – is a recipe for disturbance. What the Skeptic has
done is not so much to introduce a rival account of the telos as to under-
mine the whole notion of reaching for a telos.”61 Thus the skeptic, by
practicing epoch[ not according to a strict principle or arch[ but as an
agoge, arrives at a state that was not foreseen, but which just happens to
conform to the Hellenistic conception of the good life. By contrast,
Hume explicitly denies the possibility of the Ancient skeptical epoch[:
Man must act, reason and believe. … For all discourse, all action
would cease and men remain in a state of total lethargy were [the
Pyrrhonist’s] principles to be universally adopted. … When he wakes
from his dream he will be the first to join in the laughter against him-
self and to confess that all his objections are mere amusement.62
As Burnyeat points out, however, Hume offers no real argument to

counteract the Ancient skeptical epoch[, but simply asserts the necessity
of living according to the need for action, reason and belief.63
However, the question of whether or not the ancient skeptic’s equiv-
ocations over his arch[ and telos are successful or not is less to the point
than is the insight that lies behind it: the realization that the motiva-
tions of the philosopher are a key component of any doctrine. This
highlights again the reflexivity that is at the core of ancient skepticism,
and which distinguishes it (according to Hegel) from its modern coun-
terpart. Understood in a broader context, the problems of arch[ and telos
press also on more fundamental matters. With respect to the issue of
Hegel’s method in the Phenomenology, it can be seen that the question
is in fact crucial to the whole design and purpose of the work. For the
claim that Hegel makes for the work is that it is driven not by the
attempt to comprehend experience through reflection as such, but is
generated, in some sense, by the concept of experience itself. This, as I
shall argue in Chapter 4, is presented as a critique of the subjectivism of
Kant’s starting point, the arch[, from which he imposes his own order
and harmony on experience and reflection. For Hegel, an externally
imposed arch[ – “the concern with aim and results”64 – introduces a flaw
at the site of entry into a system which will then affect the arrange-
ment of all elements of that system. Philosophy can only apprehend
the true structure of experience, in both its historically situated and
invariant forms, if it surrenders its ambition to impose concepts of
reflection upon experience, and allows reflection and experience to be
apprehended together as a symbiotic form; this apprehension is the
speculative idea.
The device that Hegel uses to disengage the notion of an external
arch[, linked to a specific telos, from the structure of the Phenomenology
is self-completing skepticism. The need for such a device arises from the
same considerations that are present in the ancient skeptics’ attempted
disengagement of their skeptical practice from the notions of arch[ and
telos. Hegel is therefore also claiming that the devices typical of modern
skepticism are in fact less able to encounter these problems than are the
attitudes of the Ancients. This is particularly the case with respect to
the attitude of doubt, in its deployment by Descartes and by Hume, and
this is the basis on which Hegel’s criticisms of the shortcomings of the
concept of doubt are constructed. As I shall argue, it is characteristic of
modern skepticism that its anxieties and dissatisfactions are not gen-
uine; that it targets objects (knowledge or existence) in order to arrive at
the ‘truth’, the ‘certainty’ or the ‘legitimacy’ either of objects them-
selves or of our knowledge of them. As such, modern skepticism typi-
cally approaches its object with a specific arch[ and telos, from which it
cannot then detach itself.
Nevertheless, as I argue in Chapter 6, Hegel’s attempt to employ a
consistent, non-dogmatic skepticism cannot be maintained, and this is
the basis of Adorno’s rejection of the Hegelian speculative idea. In this
respect, Hegel’s own remarks on the failures of ancient skepticism can
also be turned against his own skeptical method:
In this extreme … [which] grew into a subjectivity of knowledge,

which directed itself against knowledge, skepticism was strictly
bound to become inconsistent; for the extreme cannot maintain
itself without the opposite; so pure negativity or subjectivity, is either
nothing at all, because it nullifies itself at the extreme, or else it must

at the same time be supremely objective.65
Hegel’s view of the significance of ancient skepticism is therefore to be

understood in terms of its association with the concepts of contradic-
tion and reflexivity, with its dissociation from the concept of doubt and
in the equivocation involved in understanding the relationship between
arch[ and telos. The stage is therefore set for exploring the way in which
these insights impact modern skepticism.
2
On the Origins of Modern
Skepticism: Descartes, Doubt
and Certainty
The fundamental difference in orientation between ancient and modern

skepticism, drawn by Hegel in terms of the superiority of the former, is not
restricted to modern empiricism, but includes its antipode, rationalism.
Indeed, modern empiricist skepticism, while it is opposed to the con-
clusions and approach typical of rationalism, nevertheless is concerned
with the same framework of problems, of which the constitution of
the external world provides the central pillar for the modern philo-
sophical problems of freedom, rationality and God. That framework has
its origins in Cartesian doubt. But doubt does not give rise to modern
‘solutions’ to the problems raised by ancient skepticism; rather, it is
concerned with quite different questions, which are, to a great degree,
incommensurable with the framework within which ancient skepticism
arose.
The acknowledgment of such incommensurability is part of the
basis and rationale for the historical method of Hegel’s Phenomenology,
in its attention to the context in which the main problems within
philosophical traditions arise, as well as with the different respective
answers to those problems. In this chapter, I am concerned neither to
reduce the problem of Cartesian doubt to a simple historical account –
either as a genealogy or as part of a social phenomenology of modernity;
nor, by the same token, shall I take Cartesian doubt as an invariant prob-
lem that arises inevitably from the natural exercise of an ahistorical
form of reason – an example of what might be called the ‘myth of
the given’ in the generation of philosophical problems. Rather, as the
original form of a distinctively modern problematic, Cartesian doubt
will be analyzed here as an index of modern skepticism and modern
consciousness.
35
2.1. Cartesianism as a modern problematic
‘Modern philosophy’ begins with Descartes, and with Cartesian doubt,

as the difficulty that sets the scene for the most fundamental epistemo-
logical and ontological problems of the modern age. The fact that the
problem posed by Cartesian doubt – the existence of the external world –
is a distinctively modern one has often been noted, but the implications
and significance of this for an understanding of modernity in general are
subject to widely divergent interpretations. While even a partial exposi-
tion of such an understanding is beyond the scope of concern here, we
can identify some important currents that shed light on the critical theory
interpretation of modern rationalism, and the role of Cartesian doubt in
that interpretation.
Miles Burnyeat has noted that ancient Greek skepticism, and indeed
Greek philosophy in general, does not know the problem of proving the
existence of the external world. Rather,
[t]he problem which typifies ancient philosophical enquiry in a way

that the external world problem has come to typify philosophical
enquiry in modern times is quite the opposite. It is the problem of
understanding how it is possible to be nothing or what is not, how
our minds can be exercised on falsehood, fictions and illusions. The
characteristic worry, from Parmenides onwards, is not how the mind
can be in touch with anything at all, but how it can fail to be.1
For ancient skepticism, this worry narrows down to the problem of error,
and how to develop the appropriate means of avoiding it. The fact that
Cartesian doubt, unlike ancient skepticism, poses the external world as a
problem registers the fact that world has to be explicitly objectified.
Such a heightened sense of ‘worldhood’ can be understood to be
co-originary with the emerging awareness of ‘space’ and ‘place’ that
accompanied the scientific discoveries of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.2 However, it can also be understood to point in the opposite
direction, toward the increasing loss of the experience of the world, the
problem of alienation as this was later made explicit by Hegel and Marx,
and the concomitant sense, explored by Heidegger, that subjectivity
has supervened over the priority of being. Indeed, twentieth century
ontology has identified Cartesian rationalism as the nodal point of the
subjectivization of philosophy, indicative of the loss of access to the
immediate experience of being. The first generation of critical theorists
also, while rejecting both the ontological language of Heidegger, together
On the Origins of Modern Skepticism 37
with the inherently conservative and (for Adorno) foundationalist, ori-

entation of his philosophy, nevertheless identify the rise of modern
rationalism with the polarization of subject and object, and as coinciding
with the modern experience of reification.3
Descartes’ thought is both a symptom and an agent of these changes.
For, in the judgment of both Heidegger’s ontology and critical theory,
Descartes’ rationalist metaphysics is primarily mathematical in orientation
and inspiration, and the Cartesian ‘ideal’ constitutes the reduction of
the content of experience to abstract forms. While Adorno takes up this
issue in the context of the problems of alienation and reification, as they
had been formulated by Hegel and Marx, he inherits this perspective
from Georg Lukács, who, like Heidegger, was influenced by the distinctive
neo-Kantianism of German philosophy in the 1920s.4 In the central essay
of History and Class Consciousness, “Reification and the Consciousness of
the Proletariat,” Lukács traces the distinguishing characteristic of the
correlation between the emergence of the modern commodity economy
and the rise of abstract mathematical reason as a philosophical ideal.
From systematic doubt and the Cogito Ergo Sum of Descartes, … there
is a direct line of development whose central strand, rich in variations,
is the idea that the object of cognition can be known by us for the rea-
son that, and to the degree to which, it has been created by ourselves.
And with this, the methods of mathematics and geometry … become
the guide and the touchstone of philosophy, the knowledge of the
world as a totality. … The question why and with what justification
human reason should elect to regard just these systems as constitutive
of its own essence (as opposed to the ‘given’, alien, unknowable
nature of the content of those systems) never arises. It is assumed to
be self-evident.5
Apart from its implications for understanding the relationship between

mathematical form and the content of the world, Lukács’ critical remark
also suggests a further important distinction between ancient skepticism
and modern Cartesian doubt While Cartesian doubt is ‘radical’ in its
systematicity, and therefore in a sense more far-reaching than ancient
skepticism, it is also more dogmatic, inasmuch as it fails to examine its
own motivations to doubt in the first place, assuming that these are self-
evident. Therefore, the interrogative, suspicious and defensive tenor
of Cartesian doubt may be, as Hegel suggests in the Introduction to
the Phenomenology, merely a ruse, a sleight of hand used to manufacture
the grounds for a dogma already clearly foreseen and embraced prior to
the skeptical ruse being introduced.6 By contrast, the problem of

motivation, as this is expressed in terms of the tension between arch[
and telos, renders ancient skepticism less radically subjective and more
authentically self-interrogating than modern Cartesian doubt, which is
based on a private, preformed resolution that prejudges its own result.
The contrast may be heightened by considering the form of Cartesian
doubt as a method, as a means to a particular end, which, as seen in
Chapter 1, was regarded as susceptible to the charge of dogmatism by
the Ancient skeptics. The suspicion of an externally imposed method
replicates the problem of subjectivity at the level of reflection, and it is
an integral part of Descartes’ method that doubt is not viewed as a gener-
ally applicable practice, but as a method undertaken by a particular
individual subject. Therefore, the method of doubt itself, and not simply
the certainty that it ‘produces’, is tied up with the emergence of the
Western philosophical and cultural definition of the atomistic self and
its defining qualities – self-awareness, self-direction of the will and the
other qualities that have come to express the idea of the ‘I’ as a ‘special
subject’. The method of doubt, and not simply the concept of doubt
itself, therefore, marks a definitive shift in the evolution and meaning
of skepticism.
The nexus of this shift can be located in Descartes’ Meditations on First
Philosophy. Here I will first be concerned to expound on some aspects of
the use of the concept of doubt in this work, with particular reference
to its motivations. This will shed light on the meaning and significance of
Cartesian doubt as a distinctively modern thought-form. This objective,
however, cannot be abstracted from the emergence of the methodological
and dialectical counterpart of doubt, the idea of certainty. The discussion
here will first elucidate the meaning of doubt and certainty and the
dialectical relationship between them in the Meditations. This will preface
an analysis of the method of doubt that is presented, and the role of
the concepts of performativity and self-evidence in the formula that
Descartes uses to overcome his radical doubt, the Cogito ergo Sum. I shall
then draw some conclusions regarding the specific character of Cartesian
doubt, and its general significance for the evolution of skepticism.
2.2. Doubt and subjectivity
The establishment of the ‘I’ as a special subject is as important to

Descartes’ decision to doubt as it is to the specific consequences of that
doubt. The Discourse on Method and Meditations both present this decision
in the context of the importance of the mathematical, and of the contrast
between mathematics and other disciplines. In the Discourse, Descartes

initially considers the virtues of the various studies he had undertaken
at his Jesuit college, and expresses his dissatisfaction with many of them
on the basis of their impracticality or incompleteness. He remarks, how-
ever, that “[a]bove all I enjoyed mathematics, because of the certainty
and self-evidence of its reasonings” and that “I was astonished that on
such firm and solid foundations nothing more exalted had been built.”7
The “certainty and self-evidence of its reasonings” therefore, together
with its capacity to act as a foundation for the other sciences, privilege
mathematics as a special case of the application of reason.
Self-evidence and certainty themselves are not initially subjected to
evaluation, but in the Meditations, Descartes introduces his desire for
certainty as a highly personalized goal. Similarly, in the Discourse, having
introduced the method of doubt as the process by which he hopes to
arrive at certainty, Descartes notes that the “mere resolve to divest oneself
of all of one’s former opinions is not an example to be followed by every-
one”8 and that it should be done, if at all, only once in a lifetime. It is
therefore a pure project of the self, the value of which is contextualized
strictly within the horizon of individual existence.9
As a consequence, Descartes’ inaugural decision to doubt takes the
form of meditation – a written interrogation of the self by the self, and
in which the relationship between author, text and reader takes an
unusual form. The actual experience to which the textual recounting
refers is one to which the reader is not merely invited to listen, or to
be instructed, for the meditation is not, as Harry Frankfurt points out,
a narrative, but an exercise in which the reader must engage.10 Thus
Descartes insists in the Preface that no-one should read the work
“except those who are willing to meditate seriously with me”.11 The
reader is thereby drawn into an apparent de-subjectivization of the
textual form that disperses the authority of the author, and invests
the reader in a community of inquiry. Descartes therefore defines
the beginning of his inquiry as an intentional act – the subjectively
willed desire to give up previous opinions in order to achieve specific
ends. The act is undertaken privately and uniquely, as a special project
confined within a certain context. The decision is taken not on the basis
of any considerations of differing opinions, or indeed on any explicitly
reasoned basis, but as a point of entry into a system of reasoning;
it may therefore be understood as an arch[, inaugurating a particular
realm within which a particular inquiring attitude is legitimate –
a realm defined in terms of the private musings of the philosophizing
subject.
This arch[ points to the fact that the goal is not in fact a community
of inquiry, but the dissolution of such a community. J.M. Bernstein
develops this point to argue that, in the Meditations, “the authoritative
‘we’ has been dissolved into many ‘I’s’, each now responsible for
itself …, rehearsing [a] dissolution of personal authority necessary to
establish the transcendental authority of the self,” and that this is accom-
plished for the purpose of “transferring the place of authority outside any
community and into the now unsure hands of the individual reader.”12
The programmatic form of Descartes’ initial skepticism therefore privatizes
the concerns of the skeptical subject by decree, setting them within a
designated, subjective boundary. The emphasis on the concepts of self-
evidence and certainty, together with the inauguration of the individual
subject as the locus of a transcendental inquiry, turn the initial threads
of the spiraling course of the modern ‘philosophy of the subject’.13
Certainty and self-evidence are obviously not equivalent concepts,
and in fact play quite different roles within Descartes’ investigations.
The desire for certainty is what initiates the transcendental inquiry,
while self-evidence becomes the goal to which that desire is oriented.
The concept of certainty requires an initial elucidation beyond its
conventional meaning. A contemporary instrumentalist conception of
knowledge would define the concept of certainty as follows: certainty
has no direct reference to objects. Its use as a concept modifies the form
which our knowledge of objects takes, and therefore certainty may be
understood as only a species within the broader genus of justification,
understood as the basis on which a belief is held. In other words, since
knowledge is a conjunction between subject and object, we can never
have certainty of an object, although we might have certain knowledge
of an object. The ascription of certainty as a species of justification is
what allows the transition from belief to a particular type of knowledge,14
and its use in relation to knowledge therefore refers only to the manner
in which the knowledge has been obtained.15
This way of conceiving of knowledge as derivative from belief, and of
justification and certainty as determinations of belief, depends on the
worldview that Descartes created to challenge the elements that defined
the horizons of the Ancient and Scholastic-Medieval worldview. This
challenge may be said to comprise three elements: First, in raising
the issue of certainty as a problem, Descartes does not attempt to regain
the ontological security of Scholasticism but, by redefining it in subjective
terms, introduces a rupture into the meaning of worldhood itself.
Second, Descartes re-situates the meaning of skepticism not by opposing
it to belief, as in ancient skepticism, but within a dialectical relationship
to certainty, through which it takes the form of doubt. Third, through the
techniques deployed in his methodical doubting, Descartes poses the
problem of truth in terms of the problem of the subject. Aspects of
these elements, which do not exhaust the meaning of certainty but are
key components for understanding its role in modern philosophy, have
been explored in relation to the emergence of modernity by various
theorists. I here rehearse three interpretations of the meaning of the turn
toward certainty that Descartes inaugurates. Each of these interpretations,
by Peter Sloterdijk, Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt, accentuate
distinct elements of that turn which adumbrate themes taken up by the
critical theorists in their understanding of both rationalism and modern
philosophy in general. These respective perspectives also allow some
further differentiation of the relationship between Cartesian doubt,
certainty and self-evidence.16
2.3. The Cartesian conception of worldhood
In The Order of Things, Foucault examines the role of Cartesian doubt in

bringing about the shift from a Medieval-Scholastic ‘logic of resemblance’
to that of a modern ‘logic of representation’.17 The four principle categories
of resemblance distinctive of the scholastic worldview – convenience,
emulation, analogy and sympathy – are constitutive of relationships of
closeness that inhere within a world in which the objects are primary,
and the subject secondary. The world is understood essentially as a
system of relationships, involving spatial juxtaposition, emulation,
imaging, mirroring and sympathy. The mind that interacts with these
relationships is engaged in a process of “drawing things together, in
setting out on a quest for everything that might reveal some sort of
kinship attraction, or secretly shared nature within them.”18
The categories of resemblance depend on a conception of the being and
qualities of things as marked or signed on their surfaces, and through
which their affinity with one another may be discerned. This signature
of things means that the world must be already given as a finite totality,
and the task that remains to she who wishes to know it, is to decipher,
to uncover, the connection of a thing with that totality. With the shift
from resemblance to representation, the forms of relating are replaced
by categories that operate through identity and difference, which are
the ordering terms of the faculty of comparison. Foucault notes that
Descartes’ critique of resemblance is carried out “not by excluding the
act of comparison from rational thought, nor even by seeking to limit
it, but on the contrary by universalizing it and thereby giving it its
purest form.”19 Universalizing the act of comparison, both centralizes the

system of knowledge around the subject, and allows its containment, and
therefore the complete enumeration of its contents.20 Foucault notes that
the old system of similitudes, never complete and always open to

fresh possibilities, could, it is true, through successive confirmations,
achieve steadily increasing probability; but it was never certain.
Complete enumeration, and the possibility of assigning at each point
the necessary connection with the next, permit an absolutely certain
knowledge of identities and differences.21
The emergence of the category of certainty, then, coincides with a

priority of the subject to the object, and the process of universal com-
parison brings about the possibility of certainty by redefining the world
in terms of our knowledge of it. As such, universal comparison also
underpins the idea of a system, as an internally generated, self-supporting
structure. Scholastic-Aristotelian metaphysics seeks for truths that hold
for all things generally, of beings qua beings; Cartesian metaphysics, on
the other hand, seeks, through identification and analysis, for truths
that hold for all possible objects of knowledge. Worldhood then
becomes secondary to its own conceptualization within the subject;
hence the replacement of relationships that draw things together with
those which hold them in suspension around the subject.
This forms a point of origin from which we can also trace the idea, as
Lukács expresses it, that only what has been created by the human subject
(either as individual or as social) can be known by the subject. This, as
Vico had pointed out, is what lends both mathematics and history the
special quality of allowing certainty because their object is one that is
created rather than discovered, and created by the same impulse that
now seeks to know. Thus, the subjectivization of the medium within
which things can be brought into the realm of knowledge, brings with
it a claim to certainty based on the identity of production and producer.
A more overtly materialist explanation for Descartes’ concern with
certainty emerges from Sloterdijk’s account of rationalism in the context
of the history of cynicism that he traces from its Greek origins to the
Enlightenment in the Critique of Cynical Reason. Within this framework,
the social content of Descartes’ motivation to doubt and desire for
certainty is simply as an excrescence of the decline of the feudal order:
Rationalism and mistrust are related impulses, both bound tightly to

the social dynamic of the rising bourgeoisie and the modern state. In
the struggle of hostile and competing subjects and states for self-
preservation and hegemony, a new form of realism bursts forth, a
form that is driven by the fear of becoming deceived or overpowered.
Everything that ‘appears’ to us could be a deceptive maneuver of an
overpowering evil enemy. In his proof through doubt Descartes goes
so far as the monstrous consideration that perhaps the entire world
of appearance is only the work of the genius malignus, calculated to
deceive us. The emergence of the enlightening, insightful perspective
on reality cannot be comprehended … without the deep penetration
of suspicion and fear about self-preservation to the very roots of the
modern will to know. An overpowering concern with certainty and
an equally irresistable expectation to be deceived drive modern
epistemology on to search at any price for absolute and unshakeably
secure sources of certainty.22
Sloterdijk’s account poses the problem of motivation historically, as

incomprehensible outside the context of the political insecurity of
Descartes’ time.23 However, the interstices of that connection are rather
reductively absorbed to a generalized social phenomenology.
A more satisfactory explanation, though with a similar materialist
orientation, emerges from Arendt’s discussion of the significance of
Cartesian doubt in The Human Condition. Arendt characterizes Descartes’
concern with certainty as a response to the crisis of faith within
seventeenth-century European culture. This crisis was not driven primarily
by religious factors, and its scope was not restricted to the religious sphere
alone.24 Rather, as Arendt presents it, the crisis derived from a double
process of alienation – from the earth and from the world.
Earth alienation stems from the challenge to the testimony of the
senses and of reason presented by Galileo’s use of the telescope.25 But,
during the same period, a world alienation ensued, in the form of the
radical changes in individual consciousness brought about by the
Reformation, and which Max Weber, in his essay on the Protestant Ethic,
diagnoses under the aspect of ‘this-worldly asceticism’.26 While Arendt
(rather unconvincingly) maintains that the convergence of the two
trends is coincidental, assuming that denial of this would implicate it as
“one of the many coincidences that make it so difficult for the historian
not to believe in ghosts, demons and Zeitgeists,”27 she nevertheless
points to the mutual inter-formation of the two processes.
Arendt’s account of the importance of the telescope goes beyond what
is usually cited, that is, the challenge to the geocentric universe and the
laying of the foundations of universal natural law through abolition of
the division of the world into the spheres of the heavens and the earth.28
Rather, what became possible through this instrument, “at once adjusted
to human senses and destined to uncover what definitely and forever
must lie beyond them,”29 is its application to the possibility of mentally
adopting an Archimedean point outside the earth. From this point,
nature can be viewed not as it is ‘given’, but “under conditions won
from a universal, astrophysical viewpoint, a cosmic standpoint outside
nature itself.”30 The surveying capacity of the human mind that only
then became possible, is able to both shrink locale, or earth-space, to the
same extent that it can expand the human universalizing ability, to
“think in terms of the universe while remaining on earth.”31 A parallel
process of alienation takes place in the social world, as the ethic of
innerworldly asceticism, together with the economic changes that fol-
lowed the expropriation of church and common property in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, shifted the gravitational centers of life away
from their traditional bases, in kinship, land and work, and replaced
them with the alienated social forms of nation-state, propertylessness
and wage-labor.32
The Cartesian innovation that followed the discovery of the
Archimedean point (a discovery that paradoxically diminishes humanity
in terms of its cosmological significance, but augments its terrestrial
power) was to place this vantage point inside the subject, as the special
universalizing ability that allows humanity to free itself from given real-
ity,33 and thus open up the possibility of a universal doubt encompassing
the ‘loss of the world’.34 The dramatic manner in which this universal-
ization is, as it were, captured in motion, through Descartes’ graduated
descent into the three stages of doubt, should not obscure its motivating
springs. Thus while it is true that, as Arendt notes, “the outstanding
characteristic of Cartesian doubt is its universality, that nothing, no
thought and no experience, can escape it,”35 this inclusivity is precisely
what allows certainty to emerge as the necessary outcome of radical
doubt. It is also what decisively separates Cartesian doubt from ancient
skepticism, for it destroys the assumption that that which appears can
evade the test of being subject to investigation as a possible object. In
other words, the doctrine of universal doubt is fatal to the idea of azetetos.
What is substituted is the idea that truth can only be won through the
aggressive application of the individual will to the dissolution of appear-
ances, and their incorporation into the subject under the supervision of
the sensus communis,36 capable of organizing experience, time and space
from the point of view of the individual subject, which is at the same
time a universal subject.
In a perceptive discussion, highlighting the novelty of this component

of Cartesian doubt, John McDowell points out that:
In ancient skepticism, … how things seem to us is not envisaged as

something there might be truth about, and the question whether we
know it simply does not arise … whereas Descartes extends the range
of truth and knowability to the appearances on the basis of which we
naively think we know about the ordinary world. In effect Descartes
recognizes how things seem to a subject as a case of how things are;
and the ancient skeptics’ concession that appearances are not open
to question is transmuted into the idea of a range of facts infallibly
knowable by the subject involved in them.37
It is only through the opening up of appearances to doubt that the dis-

tinctively modern nightmare of possibly ‘losing the world’ – a possibility
broached by Descartes in the three graduated stages of doubt presented
in the Meditations – emerges. The nightmare of losing the world is not a
projection of the fear of death, or the fear of the loss of salvation, but
involves obliteration of the continuum within which both life and
death and immanence and transcendence had previously coexisted.
While the Medieval worldview devalues the world of Man, subordinating
it to heaven, neither the Scholastics not the Ancients conceive of its
being ‘nothing’. But perhaps it is only the emergence of the world as an
object-that-we-could-come-to-lose that is responsible for the modern
experience of its apparent certainty. For doubt and certainty seem to be
related in an intimate way that secures their special status as determinants
of a distinctively modern orientation to the world. This can be seen in
the second dimension of Descartes’ Meditations, the proposed solution
to the problem of the external world through the notion of self-evidence
in the Cogito ergo Sum.
2.4. The stages of doubt and the Cogito
Descartes famously descends through three stages of doubt in order to

arrive at a situation where he is confident of the single certainty of his own
existence. I shall here frame the universalizing process that accompanies
this descent before drawing out three alternative readings which situate
the roles of reason and self-evidence in this process.
Descartes’ application of his radical method consists of universalizing
doubt by entertaining the possibilities of, respectively, error, illusion
and deception. These possibilities are present to consciousness qua
philosophizing subject. Descartes first considers the fact that his senses
have failed him in the past,38 and infers from this that he cannot therefore
place his faith in them in this specific circumstance. However ubiquitous
though, the errors of the senses are not generalizable; it does not follow
from the fact that under certain circumstances in the past where my
senses have failed me that they are now at present failing me. This is
because error is eminently correctable through reflection, or it is imma-
nent to the meaning of being in error that it can be recognized as such
by the intellect, which is not involved in the process of perception per se.
The second stage of Descartes’ doubt, entertaining the possibility that
he is dreaming from the fact that he has had dreams which represent to
him a state of affairs taken as true which turn out not to be so, corresponds
to the notion of illusion. The experience of this stage constitutes a more
systematic process than simply being in error. This stage of doubt is
directed towards the process of representation itself – it is internal to the
subject. The senses, while not the immediate object of this stage of
doubt, are included in it, since it doubts their products – the evidence
that Descartes is himself sitting by the fire, wearing a dressing-gown,
and so on. This stage of doubt is therefore formal; it problematizes the
veridical status of any possibly experienced state of affairs of the world
or relations to the world. It is in this sense that it is to be understood as
illusion rather than error. The potential for correction becomes likewise
problematic since dreaming is a case where not only the senses, but the
whole intellect is involved in the illusion, and there is therefore no
space in which reflection on the situation and consequent correction of
belief could inhere. It does not, however, entail losing the world, for, as
Descartes goes on to point out, only specific states of affairs of the world
and relations to the world are thereby called into question, not the
presence of the world itself, or indeed certain general characteristics of
it, the so-called simple universals – colour, number, and other such.
In introducing the genius malignus as the third stage of doubt,
Descartes engages in a far more radical suspicion; for if he is being
universally and systematically deceived, then he can no longer be assured
of the concepts through which the scope of error and illusion could
be limited. The potential for correction is correspondingly restricted.
The argument from dreaming leaves the subject still free to be aware of
the possibility of error, even if it does not allow correction. Universal
deception closes that loophole. The intervention of the genius malignus
extends the scope of the loss because it invades and occupies the sub-
ject’s consciousness. The genius malignus does not act on the subject
from outside, but enters into consciousness and makes use of the
subject’s conceptual capacity to distinguish the difference between reality

and illusion in order to undermine the conditions of the possibility of
believing anything. The genius malignus constitutes the original form of
the concept of ideology.
What unites the entertainment of each of these three dubious possi-
bilities is their affecting the means by which indubitable beliefs might
be obtained.39 Thus the doubts made possible by consideration of the
failings of the senses impact upon the process by which sensory knowl-
edge is obtained. Similarly, those derived from the possibility of dream-
ing impact upon the process by which knowledge of reality is gained,
namely, the formal elements of experience; and doubts derived from the
genius malignus upon logic and the conditions of the possibility of
knowledge. In drawing up these possibilities, therefore, Descartes prob-
lematizes the very notion that indubitability can arise from a process or
a means in general.
Once again, it is worth comparing Descartes’ treatment of the problem
with the ancient skeptical approach. The tendency for the impulse to
correction of error to shift towards self-envelopment is also encountered
in ancient skepticism. Sextus presents it as an antinomy striking for its
anticipation of the implications of the modern form of the problem:
[I]f the mind apprehends itself, either it as a whole will apprehend

itself, or it will do so not as a whole but employing for the purpose a
part of itself. Now it will not be able as a whole to apprehend itself.
For if as a whole it apprehends itself, it will be as a whole apprehension
and apprehending, and, the apprehending subject being the whole,
the apprehended object will no longer be anything. … Nor, in fact,
can the mind employ for this purpose a part of itself. For how does
the part itself apprehend itself? If as a whole, the object thought will
be nothing; while if with a part, how will that part in turn discern
itself? And so on to infinity.40
Sextus does not propose a resolution to this antinomy; it is itself to be

merely apprehended, and added to the arsenal of techniques to be
deployed against dogma. For Descartes, the resolution of the antinomy
leads to the notion of self-evidence in the Cogito ergo Sum.
The conventional interpretation of Descartes’ Cogito ergo Sum argument
divides it into two steps. First, the method of doubt functions as a process
of elimination, yielding the ‘I think’: whatever remains indubitable after
the process is complete is immune from doubt, and the only thing remain-
ing is the medium within which the process is itself carried out; this can
then be called certain. Second, the ‘I think’ then functions as a premise

in a deduction that then reveals the consequent, sum, as also certain.
This interpretation gives the formula cogito ergo sum the status of an
inference – the premise yielded through the process of elimination then
renders the consequent certain.
The problem with this reading, as has often been pointed out, is that
the inference is not a syllogism, and indeed Descartes is quite aware of
this potential misunderstanding. In the Replies, he notes that “when
someone says ‘I think therefore I am or I exist’, he does not deduce
existence from thought by syllogism but, by a simple act of mental vision,
recognizes it as something self-evident.”41 This ‘simple act of mental
vision’ is a term that corresponds to the word ergo, and is not to be
understood as a conventional logical expression. Its function in the
formula is subject to several interpretations.
For Heidegger, the Cogito ergo Sum expresses neither an inference nor
a process or means per se, but an assertion of the primacy of existenz to
thinking. In the essay “Modern Science, Mathematics and Metaphysics,”
Heidegger inverts the inferential interpretation of Descartes’ formula:
“The formula which the proposition sometimes has, ‘cogito ergo sum’,
suggests the misunderstanding that it is here a question of inference.
That is not the case and cannot be so. … The sum is not the consequence
of the thinking, but vice versa; it is the ground of thinking, the funda-
mentum.”42 Hence, for Heidegger, Cartesian rationalism, the supposed
origin of the subjectivization of western metaphysics, can be reclaimed
for the project of fundamental ontology.43
But Heidegger’s reading depends on inserting the quite unclear notion
of ground, the fundamentum, into the formula. What relationships are
produced by giving priority to this notion of ground? It might be said
that sum is the ground for any arbitrary activity of the self. Thus
Descartes’ Epicurean contemporary, Pierre Gassendi criticizes Descartes
for failing to explain why ‘I am walking’, ambulo, could not be substituted
for Cogito, thus calling into question the special relationship between
thinking and being that is presumed in the formula.44 Descartes
responds to Gassendi that it is not walking as such that would deliver
any consequent relevant to existence, but only the utterance, or the
representation ‘I am walking’, and the dubitability of such an experience
had already been called into doubt through the argument from
dreaming.45 But Descartes’ response then suggests that it is not the
relationship between the activity of the self and the existence of the self
that is the primary site of indubitability, but the nature of the activity,
which, when it truly is indubitable, then yields indubitability to ‘I am’
when thought. On the understanding suggested by Heidegger, the indu-

bitability of Sum is what gives truth to Cogito. Hence, “the I as the positer
is co- and pre-posited as that which is already present, as the being.”46
But then the specificity of the fact that Descartes doubts in the first place
loses its significance, and the relationship of ground that sum is supposed
to fulfill (on Heidegger’s reading) has no special relationship with ‘I think’.
Heidegger’s understanding of the meaning of the logical concept of
ground is also difficult to square with the form of argument offered
either in the Discourse, where Cogito ergo Sum is first enunciated, or the
Meditations, where, although the formula never actually appears, it is
still the activity of thinking that allows the utterance ‘I am’.
In an influential interpretation of Descartes’ formula, Jaatko Hintikka
claims that it presents not an inference, or a reference to an underlying
set of ontological relationships, but is only meaningful as an enactment
of that which it expresses. This he calls the performative aspect of the
Cogito ergo Sum.
The function of the word cogito in Descartes’ dictum is to refer to the

thought-act through which the existential self-verifiability of ‘I exist’
manifests itself. Hence the indubitability of this sentence is not
strictly speaking perceived by means of thinking (in the way the
indubitability of a demonstrable truth may be said to be); rather, it is
indubitable because and in so far as it is actively thought of.47
Hintikka’s interpretation denies that the ergo involves a logical connection

of propositions per se or, more generally, refers to the quality of being a
means to an end. The separation of means and ends runs contrary to the
meaning of self-evidence. According to Hintikka, if the cogito ergo sum is
construed as inference, its validity rests on the ‘existential inconsistency’
of the denial of its consequent, namely, ‘I don’t exist’. Existential incon-
sistency cannot be treated within the form of logical declarative sentences
since it “automatically destroys one of the major purposes which the act
of uttering a declarative sentence has.”48 Therefore, the cogito ergo sum
should be understood ‘performatively’, as being true by virtue of actually
being thought, rather than by virtue of the process by which conventional
knowledge is obtained.49
The performative interpretation of the Cogito ergo Sum highlights the
problematic meaning of ergo. If ergo is conceived merely as a means –
logical or otherwise – by which sum is obtained, then it becomes subject
to the threat posed by the third stage of hyperbolic doubt. In other
words, ergo is intended to express the immediacy of the relationship
between thinking and being that obtains in the particular case of the
Cogito ergo Sum. The hyperbolic stage of doubt consists in the genius
malignus’ total possession of the faculties of the thinking subject. It
therefore intervenes not only in the relationship between self and
world, but also in that of the self to itself. This latter relationship,
the notice that the mind takes of its own activity is itself an activity,
or rather a founding/grounding act of self-envelopment – pure activity –
which opens up the possibility of complete knowledge of the world. It
is therefore a subjective arch[ that allows the possibility of a system of
knowledge.
If this way of understanding the Cogito ergo Sum points towards pure
activity, another interpretation points in the opposite direction. Descartes’
reference to a ‘simple act of mental vision’ through which the transition
from Cogito to sum is completed is invoked in the third Meditation, in
which Descartes introduces the distinction between what I am led to
believe through the ‘natural light’ (lumens naturale) and what “Nature
taught me to think … [through] a spontaneous impulse.” He goes on to
note that
whatever is revealed to me by the natural light – for example that

from the fact that I am doubting it follows that I exist, and so on –
cannot in any way be open to doubt. This is because there cannot be
another faculty both as trustworthy as the natural light and also
capable of showing me that such things are not true. But as for my
natural impulses, I have often judged in the past that they were
pushing me in the wrong direction when it was a question of choosing
the good, and I do not see why I should place any greater confidence
in them in other matters.50
What Nature leads one to believe is here associated with an active power,
an impulse similar to bodily instinct. The natural light, in contrast, has
no power to conceive or to construct representations in itself; it only
recognizes the validity of those links in a chain of reasoning to which
the need for certainty is attributed, the recognition of the truth of the
existence of God and of the validity of the Cogito ergo Sum. As such, the
natural light is the vehicle that delivers certainty rather than truth.
In another influential reading of the Meditations, John Morris contrasts
the function of the natural light to the other faculties by pointing to its
passive orientation.51 In the Regulae, Descartes distinguishes between a
number of different powers of the mind, including reason, understanding,
intuition, imagining and judgment. What these have in common is
their character as a ‘grasping’ or active movement. Morris describes the

passive function of the natural light as that which “simply gives a click
of recognition when a truth is brought before it.”52 Whatever the status
of the judgment that leads one to adduce truth on the basis of deduc-
tive reasoning, of mathematical intuition or of natural reason, these
judgments must themselves be subordinate to the truth-revealing pas-
sage from ‘I think’ to ‘I am’, and this passage cannot be a function of a
faculty per se. The natural light therefore takes on a special significance
that distinguishes it in kind from any other capacity of the mind, and
consists instead in a mysterious other force, reminiscent of the Platonic
logos that impresses upon the subject–object relationship in such a way
that the most extreme imaginings are unable to resist it. The author of
the Meditations can conceive of the possibility of a genius malignus who
could be in control of mathematical reason, but not of one who has
power over the natural light. In other words, we should understand the
Cartesian subject to be passive with respect to the natural light, and in this
respect it becomes something supremely objective, presented as a ‘faculty’,
but experienced as an alien force.
The interpretation of the Cogito ergo Sum as pure activity anticipates
Fichte’s attempt to construct a presuppositionless system, while the
concept of the natural light points toward an objective idealism, that
‘produces’ the relationship of subject and object, anticipating elements
of Hegel’s system. The interpretations presented by Hintikka and Morris,
then, clarify themes which are present, but latent, in Descartes’ Meditations,
and which come to the fore in the elaborations on the problem of the
subject within German idealism.
A concluding perspective on the contrast between ancient skepticism
and Cartesian doubt is revealed in Rousseau’s remarks in Émile, in the
“Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar.” Rousseau here recounts
the experience of the Vicar’s expulsion from the priesthood, a trauma
that leads him to see
the ideas that I had of the just, the decent and all the duties of man
overturned by gloomy observations. I lost each day one of the opinions
I had received. … [Finally] I was in that frame of mind of uncertainty
and doubt that Descartes demands for the quest for truth.53
The experience of doubt is here given a wholly different cast. It is arrived

at not, as Descartes recommends, through explicit strategy, but tuchikos –
through accident. But the experience yields neither tranquility nor a
pathway to certainty, but chaos and pain. Rousseau goes on to express his
disillusionment with the dogmatic and mutually mocking arguments of

supposedly skeptical philosophers, and concludes that “the only thing we
do not know is how to be ignorant of what we cannot know.”54 Rousseau
thereby demands the presence of a ‘block’ to the reflexive impulse of
knowing, a block that reappears, as I argue in Chapter 6, in Adorno’s
attempt to revert behind the idealistic orientation of Cartesian philoso-
phy. That reversion can only be carried out, however, by encountering
the contradictions of skepticism as they reappear within post-Kantian
idealism.
Part II
Skepticism and Idealism
3
The Question of Legitimacy:
Skepticism, Law and
Transcendental Idealism
If the concept of certainty forms the axis around which Descartes’

thought revolves, the notion of law lies at the center of Kant’s concep-
tion of critique. As Descartes’ chosen form of philosophical presentation
in the Meditations is intimately connected with his conclusions, so the
inquisitorial form of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in which reason is
subjected to a legal examination of its titles, is not simply a contingency
of style or method – one technique among others equally well suited to
Kant’s purposes. Kant considers the form of his own work to be the
activity of reason criticizing itself, or of reason bringing its claims before
its own tribunal in order to be assured of their legality.1 This legal
metaphor registers that the standpoint of reason – the subject that is
examining its own claims – is a public persona. That is to say that we are
no longer presented with the resolutions of the ‘I’ as a special subject
that characterized Descartes’ investigations, but with a type of collective
rationality which draws its example from the law practiced within the
modern state and civil society. This law is universally binding on all
rational individuals and treats of the characteristics that are common to
all rational individuals. This relocation of the rational subject within the
field of law is central to Kant’s reformation of philosophical method in
accordance with the ‘Copernican revolution’. The reformation centers
on the question of legitimacy and reaches its decisive point in the demand
for a transcendental deduction of the concepts of the understanding.
3.1. The need for legitimacy
The Copernican revolution is sometimes taken to refer to the reassertion

of the role of the subject in Kant’s theory of experience. Strictly speaking,
55
however, it refers to his revamping of philosophical method, by proceeding

not on the assumption “that all our cognition must conform to the
objects,” but “[making] trial whether we may not have more success in
the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our
cognition.”2 According to Kant, it was Hume’s skeptical challenge to the
doctrine of natural necessity that awoke him from his ‘dogmatic slumber’,
and forced him to reconsider his entire approach to the problems of
metaphysics.
However, Kant’s response to Hume did not involve an argument to
the effect that Hume had misunderstood the implications of his own
empiricism, that “although all our cognition commences with experi-
ence, yet it does not on that account all arise from experience.”3 Rather,
as I shall demonstrate here, it is at least a key component of Kant’s
response that it consists in showing how the empiricist method is inad-
equate in explaining the possibility of human understanding once it is
brought before the tribunal of reason. This critique of method appears
in the introduction to the transcendental deduction in the first Critique,
where Kant defines the opposition between a method based on the ques-
tion of fact (quid facti), the physiological derivation of the sources of
human knowledge provided by Hume, and the quaestio quid juris – a
juridical method. Kant argues that the quid facti method is inadequate to
its task on the basis of certain unexamined assumptions about the
nature of our faculties, that these assumptions are themselves traceable
to the unexamined standpoint from which the question issues, and
which are not so much invalid as illegitimate. In other words, Kant’s objec-
tion to the quid facti method is made on the basis of a reflexive step – a
step which, I shall argue, is reproduced within the trajectory of German
idealism that runs through Fichte to Hegel. I first rehearse some general
reflections on the connection between legitimacy and reflexivity before
discussing Kant’s juridical method directly.
Legitimacy usually expresses one form of the relation between an
authority and what it authorizes. It does not constitute such a relation,
for illegitimate authority is possible, but describes one particular form
of this relationship – one which, of course, given the political events of
the time, had recently come under intense scrutiny. Kant’s general
ambivalence toward the events of the French Revolution was tempered
by his deep admiration for Rousseau’s political theory, and the prepon-
derance of legal metaphors throughout the first Critique bear this
imprint.4 Rousseau’s concept of the general will, as this is expounded in
the Social Contract, provides the foil for Kant’s conception of the link
Skepticism, Law and Transcendental Idealism 57
between legitimacy and reflexivity:
When the whole people decrees for the whole people, it is considering
only itself; and if a relation is then formed, it is between two aspects
of the entire object, without there being any division of the whole.
In that case the matter about which the decree is made is, like the
decreeing will, general. This act is what I call a law. … On this view
we at once see that it can no longer be asked whose business it is to
make laws, since they are acts of the general will.5
The reflexivity of the general will is the touchstone from which Kant takes
his bearings in the transcendental deduction in the first Critique. For the
deduction is an attempt to establish the universal human right to posses-
sion of the objectivity of the concepts of the understanding – a right
bestowed by law rather than by force or decree. As with Rousseau, how-
ever, the relationship must be guaranteed for ‘us’ by ‘us’, or it is not a ‘true’
law. In other words, at the very root of Kant’s thinking in the first Critique
there is a notion of ‘we’, an implicit challenge to the subjectivization of
knowledge inaugurated by Descartes. At the same time, however – and this
concern goes to the heart of the relationship of critical theory to German
idealism – the ‘we’ must be considered problematic, as potentially ideo-
logical. As Adorno points out, in his study of Kant’s first Critique,
Kant’s use of the word ‘we’, which constantly recurs whenever he

talks about the faculty of cognition … obviously refers to something
that is already constituted; that is to say the faculty of cognition we
are discussing here is tacitly ascribed to already-existing, actual real
human subjects, individual persons. It may be said then that Kant has
already anticipated, has already presupposed, the very thing that
ought to emerge from the Critique of Pure Reason.6
The vexed question of the subject in the transcendental deduction will

be encountered here and further taken up in the Chapter 4, where
Hegel’s treatment of it in the context of skepticism becomes the model
for the critical theory perspective on the notion of the constituting
activity of the subject.
We should also note that the meaning of legitimacy is tied up with
the idea of a deduction per se. The literal meaning of the term ‘deduc-
tion’, as Kant uses it, is not, as might be assumed, logical, but legal.
Dieter Henrich calls attention to this aspect. “The literal meaning of
‘to deduce’ (in Latin) is: ‘to carry something forth to something else.’
In this very general sense it is not restricted to derivations within a

discourse, for one ‘deduces’ a river by digging a new riverbed.”7 In Kant’s
time, the term ‘deduction’ had both a logical and a legal usage, though
the latter was by far the more common. A legal deduction writing
(Deduktionsschriften) was intended to justify controversial legal claims,
on the basis of the way in which a claim had originated, and it was
always published under the auspices of government, that is, publicly,
not those of publishing houses. Thus, according to Henrich, “The
process through which a possession or a usage is accounted for by
explaining its origin, such that the rightfulness of the possession or the
usage becomes apparent, defines the deduction.”8 In late- eighteenth-
century Konigsberg, most deduction writings involved claims to inher-
itance of territories or titles and their style would have been familiar to
Kant.9 One way of understanding the purpose of the transcendental
deduction, which will be central to the account provided here, is there-
fore as a legal inquiry into the origin of the legal title to objectivity
possessed by the concepts of the understanding as human capacities.
3.2. The demand for a deduction
The question of legitimacy is made explicit in the well-known passage

that introduces the justification for the transcendental deduction. Here
Kant remarks
Jurists, when speaking of rights and claims, distinguish in a legal action

the question of right (quid juris) from the question of fact (quid facti);
and they demand that both be proved. Proof of the former, which
has to state the right or the legal claim, they entitle the deduction. …
[There are] usurpatory concepts, such as fortune, fate, which, though
allowed to circulate by almost universal indulgence, are yet from time
to time challenged by the question quid juris. This demand for a
deduction involves us in considerable perplexity, no clear legal title,
sufficient to justify their employment, being obtainable either from
experience or from reason.10
The last sentence of this passage is ambiguous, for the perplexity could
be understood in two ways. On the one hand, as a methodological
problem regarding the appropriate faculty to be employed in offering a
possible proof of subjectively deployed concepts, be they either usurpa-
tory or pure a priori. On this understanding – the conventional one – the
passage is a reformulation of Hume’s skepticism towards either empiri-
cist or rationalist explanations of the objectivity of the causal relation.
Neither experience nor reason offers us satisfactory proofs of its validity,

so it must be taken as (on a par with the usurpatory concepts) “a mere
fantasy of the brain.”11 On the other hand, the perplexity could equally
well refer to the strangeness of the demand for a deduction de jure. Why
should anyone demand a legal proof of our possession of these concepts?
Such a question had never been posed before Kant, let alone offered as a
means to securing a defense of the form of certainty associated with
inferential judgment. It is this species of perplexity, which, it should be
noted, is prior to any specific judgment on the success or otherwise of
the transcendental deduction, that is of interest here.
In the section following the introduction of the question of legiti-
macy, Kant presents his argument for the necessity of a transcendental
deduction. He notes that the pure a priori employment of the concepts
of the understanding is to be distinguished in kind from the employ-
ment of empirical concepts. While the latter are dependent, in their
acquisition and use, on the objects of experience, the former relate to
objects in general, independently of all experience. The difference in
kind between these two sets of concepts also has this further conse-
quence: that a proof of the objective validity of the latter must also be
of a different form from the proof of the former. Indeed, Kant remarks
that a proof of the objective validity of empirical concepts does not
really demand a deduction, since “we always have experience ready at
hand to prove their objective reality,”12 and such immediate relation to
objective reality renders the question of their objective validity redun-
dant. In this sense, empirical concepts do not require a deduction as such,
but only a derivation – an explanation of their source, rather than of our
possession of them in conjunction with their source. The fact of the differ-
ence between the two sets of concepts then, necessitates a difference in
the form of proof demanded.
The difference does not however, at least initially and in itself, accord-
ing to Kant, necessitate the demand. Thus he says, “but now even if the
sole manner of a possible deduction of pure a priori cognition is conceded,
namely that which takes the transcendental path, it is still not obvious
that it is unavoidably necessary.”13 Kant then goes on to explain how such
a demand does arise, which turns out to be on the basis of two rather
obscure sets of considerations. The first is expressed by drawing a com-
parison of the a priori form of external intuition, space – which grounds
the legitimacy of knowledge of geometry – with the pure a priori concepts
of the understanding. These latter are “not grounded in experience and
cannot exhibit any object in a priori intuition on which to ground their
synthesis.”14 The second consideration, which is derived from the first, is
that their lack of immediate grounding in experience means that a priori
concepts might overstep their applicability to the object, making them

prey to ‘merely subjective’ employment beyond the conditions of sensi-
bility. The fact of this possibility is what generates the demand for a proof
that the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience are at the
same time the conditions of the possibility of the experience of objects.
It is on these bases alone that the “reader must be convinced of the
unavoidable necessity of such a transcendental deduction.”15
How are ‘we’, as readers, to understand Kant’s attempt to persuade us
that such a deduction is necessary? If we consider Kant’s ostensible argu-
ment, as recounted above, and extrapolate it in accord with strands
expressed elsewhere in the deduction, we can see that the basis for a
demand for a deduction rests on a certain skeptical perspective. This
skepticism concerns the legitimacy of the realm of experience itself, and
not our right to conceptually possess specific objects of experience. In
other words, the lack of an object given through intuition, on which we
could ground the synthetic activity of the pure concepts of the under-
standing, means not only that their objective validity is called into ques-
tion, but that key constitutive elements of objective reality also become
problematic.16 While it is not properly explained in this section, Kant
clearly has this broader skeptical problem in mind when he notes that
with the possibility of a merely subjective employment of the concepts
of the understanding, the concept of space is also thereby “rendered
ambiguous,”17 and this is borne out in the course followed by the deduc-
tion itself. For here Kant attempts to show (amongst other things) both
that and how unity – a basic constituent of what objective reality could
be for us – can be conferred on the forms of space and time through the
synthetic self-relating function of the transcendental unity of appercep-
tion.18 This broader question concerning the issue of objective reality
stems from a universalization of Hume’s skepticism, but this universal-
ization affects both the objective and the subjective sides of the form in
which Hume expresses his doubts. We shall see that the demand for a
transcendental deduction arises from the same source as the justifica-
tion offered by the course of the deduction itself, namely, the identity
of the subject. In arguing for this we have to take a detour through the
question of Kant’s relationship to Hume.
3.3. Re-enter empiricism: The questions

of fact and right
In an article concerning the relationship between Kant and Hume,

Manfred Kuehn quotes Lewis White Beck’s remark that “it is a scandal
of philosophical scholarship that after nearly two centuries the question

must still be debated: What was Kant’s reply to Hume’s ‘question.’ ”19
However, Kuehn goes on, “[i]t is perhaps even a greater scandal that the
true extent of Hume’s ‘question’ for Kant has never been investigated
satisfactorily, and that Kant’s conception of Hume’s problem has never
been formulated in its entirety. For, only after it has been decided
what the question for Kant was, can we hope to evaluate the answer or
solution.”20 ‘Scandals’ of this kind rarely match in true gravity the
outrage of their reporting. This is partly because they are not properly
amenable to resolution and the substance of the scandal tends to reflect
the interests of the age in which it appears rather than the presentation
of the problem itself ‘in its entirety’.
It is true, however, that commentators’ focus on the relationship has
generally been far too narrow.21 Kuehn gives some fresh legs to the
problem when he notes that “Kant clearly felt that he was the executor
of Hume’s philosophical will. This means, however, that Kant was not
primarily concerned with ‘answering’ Hume or refuting skepticism. His
critical philosophy is in a fundamental sense a justification of Hume’s
principle,”22 where Hume’s principle is understood as the dictum “not
to carry the use of reason dogmatically beyond the field of possible
experience.”23 It is the sense in which the basic tenets of the first Critique
express the continuation of Hume’s skepticism that is of interest here.
Besides exposing the intentional substructure underlying the transcen-
dental deduction, the exposition of this continuity will shed light on
the more general orientation of modern skepticism. This theme emerges
from the broader context of the relationship between Hume and Kant
suggested by Kuehn.
According to Kant, the doubts which Hume raised concerning the
objectivity of causality are merely a special case of the more general
difficulty of justifying our experience of the world in all its most fun-
damental forms. The universalization of Hume’s mitigated skepticism at
the level of the objects of experience is, however, only the first stage of
a process by which Kant initiates a radical questioning of philosophical
method, thereby extending the force and range of Hume’s skepticism.
In the Prolegomena Kant relates the course of his thinking that leads from
Hume’s initial doubts. He remarks:
I therefore first tried whether Hume’s objection could not be put into
a general form, and soon found that the concept of the connexion of
cause and effect was by no means the only idea by which the under-
standing thinks the connexion of things a priori, but rather that
metaphysics consists altogether of such connexions. I sought to

ascertain their number, and when I had satisfactorily succeeded in
this by starting from a single principle, I proceeded to a deduction of
these concepts, which I was now certain were not deduced from
experience, as Hume had apprehended, but sprang from the pure
understanding.24
The ‘single principle’ mentioned here is not expounded on. However,

the line of Kant’s thinking, read into the format of the first Critique,
implies that he means the derivation of the table of categories from the
table of judgments. This strategy is exemplative of a more general
approach, which has been characterized as ‘regressive’ or as an ‘analytic’
(as opposed to a synthetic) method.25 The validity and a priori status of
the categories is assumed and the form that the transcendental deduc-
tion must take derived from this assumption.
There are, however, well-known problems with the attempt to deduce
the categories from an analysis of the structure of our knowledge of
objects through the forms of judgment.26 Put simply (and apart from the
fact that Kant simply takes the table of judgments as read from Aristotle)
the attempt is inadequate because it reduces the central aim of
the deduction to being merely an attempt to justify the objective valid-
ity of the categories, ignoring the broader skeptical thrust of the impli-
cations drawn out above, namely, the issue of objective reality. The
course of this argument is pursued more consistently in the Prolegomena,
where the certainty associated with mathematical judgments is assumed
and transcendental grounds are then constructed for it. If such a proof
is construed as successful then the ground is thereby laid for proving the
objective validity of the pure concepts of the understanding associated
with perception and natural science, since their synthetic character does
not differ in kind from the connections made between objects through
mathematics. Seen in this light, we can say that the explanation of the
role of the categories offered in the Prolegomena generalizes Hume’s
problem only on the objective side, extending the range of objects to
which Hume’s skepticism is applicable.
This extension takes place through adopting the transcendental
standpoint – asking after the conditions of the possibility of a mode of
knowledge or its object. In altering the form of inquiry thus, Kant
subjects mathematical judgments to Humean skepticism, and there is a
line of thinking in the first Critique that suggests that he thinks that in
so doing he has refuted Hume, and successfully established the grounds
for transcendental idealism. Thus he says “if he [Hume] had had our
problem in its generality before his eyes, he would have comprehended

that according to his argument there could also be no pure mathematics,
since this certainly contains synthetic a priori propositions, an asser-
tion from which his sound understanding would surely have protected
him.”27 However, as the argument in the introduction to the transcen-
dental deduction, as recounted above, makes clear, the role of the
categories in the formation of knowledge renders all such convic-
tions problematic, since the forms of intuition themselves, necessary
constituents of mathematical knowledge, become potentially subject to
misuse. As such, the argument in the Prolegomena does not materially
change the form of the problem as Hume expressed it; it merely gener-
alizes it. Henrich summarizes the difficulty as follows:
[Kant must show first] what the nature of a category actually is, given
that it is always at the same time related to a synthesis of intuition.
And [second] it must then be shown that such categories must exer-
cise synthetic functions in intuition itself. … It is easily shown that
the proof of the validity of the categories must enter into the expla-
nation of the possibility of their relation to intuition. At the only
place where Kant separates the two investigations from each other [in
section 20 of the transcendental deduction], he was compelled to
propose a proof of validity which fails to satisfy strict demands: he
has to proceed at this point from the assumption that we are in posses-
sion of synthetic a priori judgments concerning all objects of sensi-
bility and that these judgments stand beyond all doubt in virtue of
their employment in mathematical natural sciences. But this was the
very presupposition which Hume called into question.28
Therefore, any attempt on Kant’s part to prove the need for a transcen-
dental deduction from a consideration of the status of the categories in
general will be less than satisfactory, because it will always rely on a
preconceived notion of their transcendental and a priori status. In other
words, the argument in the Prologemona is based on the quaestio quid
facti, and the question of legitimacy remains not only unanswered but
unasked.
For Kant to address the question of their legitimacy, and for us to
extract the source of the demand for legitimacy, the proof must issue
from an analysis of the subject.29 For the question of right is not about
what degree of conferred objectivity is warranted of the categories (the
issue of their validity), but by what right do the categories define what is
to be an object (for us) at all (the issue of objective reality). Once the
understanding is considered in the context of its status as lawgiver – as

ascribing objective rules to the formation of Nature and not merely
operating in conformity with laws already given – the task of the tran-
scendental deduction becomes decisively oriented towards the ‘synthetic
authority’ of the subject; and this includes both the subject of experi-
ence and the subject who reflects on experience. In Kant’s attempts to
do this in the first Critique we find a more satisfactory extension of
Hume’s problem.
3.4. Critique and metacritique in

the two deductions
It is the emphasis accorded to the transcendental unity of apperception –

the basic reflexive constituting principle of experience – in the second
edition deduction that is of paramount importance for the inquiry here;
for the shift from the question of fact to the question of right is a reflex-
ive constitutive step. Hume, on Kant’s understanding, had shown con-
clusively that no derivation of the objectivity of causality could be
obtained via the quid facti method – by showing its descent from expe-
rience. But he delivered this verdict on the basis of the question of fact
itself. In demanding a justification for Hume’s method, therefore, I
take Kant to be extending Hume’s skepticism rather than charging him
with being hyper-skeptical and attempting to ‘refute’ him.30 We can
therefore express this demand as a skeptical objection to the quid facti
method of deriving the title from experience, since such a method takes
no account of the standpoint from which experience is called upon as
witness to the issue. The emphasis on reflexivity in Kant’s objection to
Hume identifies a genuine problem in Hume, and does so from a skep-
tical perspective. In this context it is worth returning briefly to Schulze’s
attack on Kant.
Schulze expresses his objections in the form: ‘All criticism must
become meta-criticism; all meta-criticism must become skepticism.’
Schulze’s meta-criticism is therefore directed against Kant’s standpoint in
the first Critique. The key point of weakness, as he and also Schopenhauer
understand it, is the status of the causal relation and the relation to the
thing-in-itself. For if the causal relation is merely a category imposed
by the subject on the manifold of intuition, then the relationship
between the manifold and the thing-in-itself cannot itself be causal.
Kant attempts various strategies to solve this problem, principally in the
A deduction, including the notion of the ‘affinity’ of intuitions to their
object and the reformulation of the thing-in-itself as the ‘transcendental
object ⫽ x’. These, however, are ad hoc measures, accommodations to

Kant’s fear of being branded a subjective idealist. The central difficulty,
of which the problem of uncaused effect is in fact only one aspect, is the
claim of the subject – the standpoint of the method in the Critique – to
know that which the content of the work claims cannot be known. The way
out of this difficulty, taken, incidentally, by both Schulze and
Schopenhauer, was to reinstate the notion of causality as the fundamen-
tal determinant of order in the world and in the subject, culminating in,
in Schulze’s case, a return to empirical realism, and, in the case of
Schopenhauer, an objective idealism of the will.31 Neither thinker, in
this respect, is interested in the problem of reflexivity beyond using it
as a tool to prise off the stopgap lid that Kant unsuccessfully attempted
to place on the critical philosophy. Unsurprisingly, both Schulze and
Schopenhauer are dismissive of the second edition of the deduction, in
which the issue of reflexivity comes to the fore.
In the second edition of the transcendental deduction, the problem of
the uncaused affectation of the senses is effectively ignored, and Kant
focuses almost exclusively on deducing the categories from the original
synthetic unity of apperception. However, the second edition also
reveals, albeit dimly, Kant’s awareness of the methodological problematic
that his critics raised. In a letter to a colleague in 1793, Kant remarks
that the deduction in the second edition utilizes a ‘synthetic method’,
in conjunction with the exposition of the function of apperception, as
opposed to the ‘analytic’ method in the A version. However, he accords
no further significance to the synthetic method other than its advantage
in “clarity and facility.”32 This latter remark is inconsistent with the
weight of significance that hangs on the notion of synthesis throughout
both deductions, but Kant was unable, or unwilling, to remark further
on the meaning of a synthetic method. It goes beyond my intention
here to provide a detailed exposition of the manifold meanings of the
concept of synthesis as Kant employs it.33 However, in the second edition,
deduction, synthesis and apperception are shown to be essentially
inseparable. Thus Kant says: “I am therefore conscious of the identical
self in regard to the manifold of the representations that are given to me
in an intuition because I call them all together my representations,
which constitute one. But that is as much as to say that I am conscious
a priori of their necessary synthesis, which is called the original synthetic
unity of apperception.”34 A method that utilizes synthesis must there-
fore make appeal to a similar subjective organizing principle, one which
is not subject to the same problems of self-reference endemic to Hume’s
standpoint.
3.5. Metacritique and reflection
Kant’s inauguration of the question of right is intended to supplant the

question of fact. It is not simply a metacritique of empiricism, but rather
implies the necessity of a deduction of the subject who reflects on expe-
rience; who initiates the process of deduction itself by posing the ques-
tion quid juris. The question of right is, therefore, a response to the lack
of self-consciousness operating in Hume’s empiricist method. But here
we encounter the underlying problematic of the question of right that
was raised by the later German idealists – that the tribunal of reason
itself lacks legitimacy.
The sense in which the legal deduction in the first Critique culminates
in a crisis of reason itself in the form of an irresolvable antinomy in the
concept of law has been explored by Gillian Rose in her Dialectic of
Nihilism.35 She discusses the extent to which Kant’s legal language actu-
ally corresponds to jurisprudential categories and the manner in which
these categories express existing legal and structural contradictions
within civil society. There is an affinity between the structure of the
Kantian rational subject and the process of law, as it is administered
within the modern courtroom. “Cross examination reveals the purport-
edly impersonal authority of Reason to be an ensemble of the three
fictitious persons of the law: the judge, the witness and the clerk of the
court.”36 This situation is demonstrative of the general form of Kantian
critique, with ordinary experience, or ‘natural consciousness’ appearing
as a witness who is interrogated by reason, who also takes up the posi-
tion of the judge. Natural consciousness is not the initiator of these
proceedings; they are brought by reason within the court of reason,
although it is the possessions of natural consciousness that are being
questioned. The issue then becomes whether reason is a legitimate rep-
resentative of natural consciousness. In other words, from where does
the challenge against the claims of experience derive?
Rose then considers the underlying problem that Kant tried to resolve:
the litigant who appeals to reason as judge is reason itself, a contradic-
tion that expresses the aporetic nature of this situation or what Rose
calls the antinomy of law:
The recourse to justice has revealed an antinomy in the idea of jus-

tice itself: between the claim to justice – the universal meaning of
deduction and justification – first called on, and the justice claimed,
the demand that this case – the case of justice itself – be treated as a
particular case.37
From this perspective, it can be seen that the question of why a deduc-
tion should be demanded resolves into the question of the authority of
the questioner – in other words who is demanding the deduction.38 Two
perspectives may be said to emerge from these considerations. The first,
which I shall encounter in Chapter 5, leads in the direction of a post-
Kantian nihilism, and is summed up in Nietzsche’s comment in Beyond
Good and Evil, that
[i]t is high time to replace the Kantian question “how are synthetic
judgments a priori possible?” with another question: “why is belief
in such judgments necessary?” – that is to say, it is time to grasp that,
for the purpose of preserving beings such as ourselves, such judg-
ments must be believed to be true; although they might of course still
be false judgments!39
From this perspective, the demand for a transcendental deduction can

be understood to be itself misconceived and should be jettisoned. A
second perspective recognizes that the demand for a deduction has a
certain unexamined arch[, but seeks to uncover it and to show that arch[
is itself legitimate. This second perspective evolves out of an attempt to
ground the standpoint of the subject involved in producing the deduc-
tion. In other words, it attempts to deduce the legitimacy of the thought-
form underlying, or the methodology involved in, the transcendental
deduction. This perspective originates in Fichte’s epistemology.
Schopenhauer criticizes Kant for allowing his taste for symmetry to
overwhelm his logical sense.40 This symmetry is evident everywhere in
the first Critique, and not least in the idea of an Architectonic, the “art
of constructing systems … since systematic unity is [that] which first
makes ordinary cognition into science”;41 It appears in the duplication
of the table of judgments in the table of categories, the derivation of the
principles of the understanding from the headings in the tables, the
derivation of the Ideas of Reason from the logical functions of syllogism,
and so forth. These elements all combine to give the impression of a
lacuna that arises in conjunction with the considerations above. This is,
essentially, why did Kant not provide a transcendental deduction of method?
Or more precisely, a transcendental deduction of the concepts he uses
in his method, namely the concepts of reflection.
This is basically the way in which Fichte saw the problem, and the
project of the Science of Knowledge of 180242 is, essentially, to provide a
legitimation for the demand for a legitimation of the subject’s right to
possession of experience. In this sense, Fichte’s project is (as he claimed)
the logical completion of Kant’s double task, of both posing the ques-
tion of right, and attempting to show that the question is necessary.
The perspective of the Science of Knowledge can therefore be seen to be
continuous with the same skeptical theme that arises out of Kant’s
objection to Hume. This can be seen if we pursue the issue starting from
Kant’s comments on reflection that appear in the first Critique.
The concepts of reflection are introduced abruptly at the end of the
Transcendental Analytic, in the rather obscure form of an appendix,
entitled “The Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection.” The section is
introduced with the following remark:
Reflection does not have to do with objects themselves, in order to

acquire concepts directly from them, but is rather the state of mind in
which we first prepare ourselves to find out the subjective conditions
under which we can arrive at concepts.43
The state of reflecting requires a conscious act by which we turn our

attention away from the objects of experience and towards that state of
mind within which objects of experience are presented. Kant also
suggests in the Amphiboly that reflection is implicit or an involuntary
process that enters into thinking before ‘thinking’ – and especially the
process of philosophical thinking – takes place.
There is a sense here, that is never satisfactorily explained in the corpus
of Kant’s writings, that the act of reflection is not merely the preserve of
the philosopher, comprising a methodological tenet, but actually under-
lies the faculty of understanding itself.44 In Kant’s Logic, reflection is
explained as that process by which concepts are derived, but only with
respect to their form.45 This process necessarily involves the activities of
comparison and abstraction. Hence reflection is here understood as part
of the process by which representations are converted into concepts.
In the Amphiboly, this is given a more concrete explanation: “All judg-
ments, indeed all comparisons require reflection, i.e., a distinction of the
cognitive power to which the given concepts belong.”46
The concepts which in turn allow for such distinctions comprise iden-
tity and difference, agreement and opposition, inner and outer and
matter and form. These concepts are not concepts of the understanding;
on the contrary, they underlie the categories of the understanding as
grounds for their employment. They are distinguished further by the fact
that they operate conjunctively as opposed pairs, comprising identity
and difference, agreement and opposition and so forth. This entails that
the basic medium of their function is in the act of comparison, and that
this act is prior to “constructing an objective judgment”; therefore,

“[o]n this ground it would seem that we ought to call these concepts,
concepts of comparison.”47
However, as Kant then makes clear, the ‘mere act of comparison’ is
only a logical reflection. The form of reflection that allows it to prefig-
ure the understanding, is, by contrast, transcendental reflection: “The
action through which I make the comparison of representations in
general with the cognitive power in which they are situated, and
through which I distinguish whether they are to be compared to one
another as belonging to the pure understanding or to pure intuition,
I call transcendental reflection.”48 Kant then goes on to apparently con-
tradict his contention that reflection does not concern itself with
objects themselves when he says that
Transcendental reflection, however, (which goes to the objects them-

selves) contains the ground of the possibility of the objective
comparison of the representations to each other, and is therefore very
different from the other, since the cognitive power to which the
representations belong is not precisely the same.49
This is because the primary function of transcendental reflection is to

“assign to a concept either in sensibility or in pure understanding, its
transcendental place.”50
The principal significance of Kant’s elusive remarks on reflection for
the discussion here is the tendency for transcendental reflection to over-
step the opposition between having a merely ‘methodological’ and a
properly functional role – actually determining the sphere within which
representations become determined as representations, thus becoming
what they are for-a-self. But for Kant, reflection is still constrained by
the presence of the thing-in-itself as the ultimate source of our repre-
sentations. Thus, when Fichte disposes of Kant’s prevarications on the
ultimate source of a sensuous intuition, by declaring it too to be a con-
cept, generated out of the philosopher’s stance towards experience, tran-
scendental reflection becomes not only the ‘common root’51 of our
faculties of understanding and intuition, but also of their objects.
Without entering into a full scale discussion of the role of reflection
in Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, it is worth drawing attention to the con-
sistency of Fichte’s extrapolation of Kant’s basic position on reflection.
Fichte recognizes that the ambivalent role of reflection, as it is expressed
in the Amphiboly, has serious consequences for the attempts to limit the
realm of knowledge, and especially Kant’s attempt to demonstrate that
the self as it is in itself is unknowable. If the function of reflection is

to provide the transcendental location of the various representations
that are given to us by assigning them to their appropriate faculty, then
all representations – intuitions, concepts and the ‘I-think’ that virtually
accompanies the synthesis of concepts with intuitions – are determined
through the intervention of this more fundamental faculty, that of tran-
scendental reflection. Thus reflection is the tool of objectification by
which a field of inquiry is established.52 But how are we to determine
whether the concepts of reflection are subjective or objective? Is there
not the same difficulty here that was encountered in the question of
the need for a transcendental deduction of the categories, namely, of
the concepts of reflection being prone to ‘merely subjective’ employment
and overreaching their remit?
For Kant, the activity of experience is made the object, through reflec-
tion, which the Critique attempts to account for. Experience as activity is
the product which the unity of consciousness and the activity of judging
and synthesis brings about. Similarly, the concepts of reflection are
activities that bring about the identification of synthesis, judging and
apperception as objects for inquiry for ‘the philosopher’. Thus, as Fichte
expresses it, we have a ‘double series’ of representations: There is, first,
the consciousness the philosopher is observing, and, second, the
philosopher’s own observations.53 If the legitimacy of the philosopher’s
standpoint can be established, he can then proceed to establish the legit-
imacy of experience. The basic thrust of Fichte’s thinking is that the
concepts of reflection are products of the self, conceived of as a causa
sui, thus requiring no further grounding element, and no distinction
between subjective and objective on which the skeptical concern about
subjective concepts overreaching their remit could gain purchase.
Reflection, the act of self-reverting, by which the self makes itself its
object, is therefore, for Fichte, an act of intellectual intuition, “the
immediate consciousness that I act, and what I enact; it is that whereby
I know something because I do it.”54 Intellectual intuition is therefore
an intrinsically performative notion.
It is only in this coming to be aware of the self as simultaneously both
subject and object that, according to Fichte, transcendental idealism can
be ultimately grounded. The intellectual intuition of the self, or the
‘absolute positing of the ego’, as Fichte expresses it, thus functions as
the nodal point from which the legitimation of experience issues.
“Intellectual intuition is the only firm stand-point for all philosophy.
From thence we can explain everything that occurs in consciousness;
and moreover, only from thence.”55 Once the act of intellectual intuition
has been performed, the second series of representations – the activity

of experience – can be legitimately objectified and, indeed, can be
grounded in the same act of self-reversion. The difference between the
two series is that apperception is not itself an object for experience, and
only becomes so on the basis of Fichte’s ‘first postulate’: “Think of your-
self, frame the concept of yourself; and notice how you do it.”56
Fichte’s ensuing ‘deduction’ of the legitimacy of experience depends
on the necessity of apperception as synthetic – as positing a non-ego in
the act of positing the ego. I am here only concerned with the extent
to which Fichte manages to escape the problem raised regarding the
necessity of the demand for a deduction. Fichte thinks that success-
fully establishing the absolute foundations of philosophical form in
transcendental reflection allows a deduction from an identical subject-
object, which, as such, is immune to questions regarding its ‘merely
subjective’ status. However, the skeptical problem of the necessity of the
demand for a deduction concerns the site of entry into reflection, and
hence the motivation for the ‘act of self-reverting’ by which the tran-
scendental standpoint is achieved. Fichte attempted in various ways to
encounter this problematic, including presenting his thought in a suc-
cession of ‘popular’ treatises in which he attempted to ‘compel the reader
to understand’. In the Science of Knowledge, the problem is expressed as
follows:
Now to me, at least, this whole procedure of the philosopher appears

very possible, very easy, very natural, and I can scarcely conceive how
it should appear otherwise to my readers, or how they should find
anything strange or mysterious therein. Everybody, one hopes, will
be able to think of himself. He will become aware, one hopes, that, in
that he is summoned to think thus, he is summoned to something
dependent on his self-activity, to an inward action, and that if he does
what he is asked, and really affects himself through self-activity, he
is, in consequence, acting.57
But what if the subject cannot, or will not, submit to the authority here
invoked; will not respond to this summons? This indeed instantiates
Fichte’s paradoxical contribution to the evolution of skepticism as we are
considering it. The extrapolation of Kant’s aims in the transcendental
deduction in accord with his underlying agenda leads ultimately to a
perfectly consistent but, from Kant’s Rousseauian perspective, fatal con-
clusion: That only she who reflects on experience – who performs the
required act of self-reversion to which she is summoned by authority, or
however we understand the identity of ‘the philosopher’ in the second

introduction to the Science of Knowledge – can legitimately (or ‘truly’)
experience.
The hypostatization of reflection constitutes a key theme in Hegel’s
critique of Fichte. But Hegel frames that critique in terms that recall a
principal theme of the ancient skeptical tradition, namely, the question
of the relation between philosophical consciousness – understood as
reflection – and experience, or natural consciousness. This topic bears
some further investigation and enters into the roots of the Kantian
antinomies, and consequently into Hegel’s dialectic.
3.6. Reflection, antinomy and the

legitimation of experience
The relationship between reflection and experience in the first Critique is

governed by the format of the tribunal proceedings. Natural conscious-
ness is called as witness to its own inquisition. This is apparent in the
aims of the deduction where, as Henrich has argued, it is one criteria of
its success that it justify
the ordinary person in claiming the right to have experiences in a

well-founded way at any time. It does not establish any claims to
exclusive knowledge on the part of a few. … The knowledge and use
of the categories as a priori concepts presupposes neither philosophical
analysis nor even the conscious pursuit of scientific knowledge.58
Henrich appropriately dubs this the ‘Rousseauian criterion’, in an

acknowledgment of the democratic ambitions of the first Critique. Fichte
too may be understood as centrally concerned with the legitimacy of
the experience of the ordinary person (what Hegel refers to in the
Phenomenology as ‘natural consciousness’). Yet Fichte’s insistence that
natural consciousness (in a manner not dissimilar from the reader of
Descartes’ Meditations) has to be ‘enrolled’ into the process of legitimating
its own experience, carries specifically modern authoritarian implica-
tions, the details of which I will discuss in Chapter 4.59 As a preface to
this discussion I return to the Kant–Hume relationship, which again
contains the germ of this problematic as it unfolded during the course
of German idealism.
In both the Treatise of Human Nature and the Inquiry Concerning Human
Understanding, Hume is at pains to distinguish his point of view from skep-
tical idealism. He never denies the existence of constant conjunctions of
events, or of external objects generally. What is doubtful, rather, is the

abstraction made from experience through which universality and neces-
sity are attributed to events and series of events. But Hume did not
then affirm the irreducibility of experience to reflection. Rather, in the
Inquiry, he expresses the problem in terms of an antinomy between
‘reason’ and ‘natural consciousness’:
Do you follow the instincts and propensities of nature, may [the

skeptics] say, in assenting to the veracity of sense? But these lead you
to believe that the very perception or sensible image is the external
object. Do you disclaim this principle, in order to embrace a more
rational opinion, that the perceptions are only representations of
something external? You here depart from your natural propensities
and more obvious sentiments; and yet are not able to satisfy your
reason, which can never find any convincing argument from experi-
ence to prove, that the perceptions are connected with any external
objects.60
The significant aspect of this remark is the antinomian form in which

Hume expresses it. The opposition between ‘natural’ and ‘rational’
opinion is here understood as fundamental and irresolvable in itself.
Natural consciousness is inadequate in the face of the demands of rea-
son, but reason departs from its ‘natural propensity’ at the high cost of
then finding itself divided against itself, that is, embedded in a further
antinomy.
This antinomy is not, however, Hume’s final position on this issue.
Instead, he invokes the faculty of habit to explain not only the subjec-
tive origin of the concept of causality, but also the origin of the tendency
to ascribe universality and necessity to what is in fact only a pattern of
repetition. The faculty of habit or custom is, therefore, deployed to
explain how both natural consciousness and reason are equally unable
to discern the ‘true’ state of affairs. I argued above that the standpoint
from which Hume was able to recognize the subjective faculty of habit
as the origin of such delusion remains entirely unexamined. His skepti-
cism, therefore, is mitigated by the dogmatic belief in the legitimacy of
the quid facti method. For, in line with this method, it is the interpreta-
tion of the above antinomy – attributing the derivation of objective
causality to the faculty of habit – that is dogmatic. The original antin-
omy as it stands, however, closely resembles the Ancients’ method of
isosthenia. It does not decide on the matter at issue, but expresses the fun-
damental conflict between consciousness and its abstraction in thought.
Hume’s motivation, in utilizing the antinomian form, of course, is not

innocent. By way of contrast with the inference that the causal relation
is based on habit, Hume affirms his dogmatic commitment to the nec-
essary truths of both mathematics and natural science.
In the “Antinomy of Pure Reason” in the first Critique, Kant derives
the four antinomies directly from natural consciousness, that is, the four
groups of categories of the understanding. The antinomies constitute
the necessary illusions into which the understanding falls in its attempt
to deploy the categories beyond the realm of experience. In demon-
strating their illusory status, Kant makes use of what he identifies as a
skeptical method, a “method of watching, or rather provoking, a conflict
of assertions, not for the purpose of deciding in favour of one or the
other side, but of investigating whether the object of controversy [itself]
is not in fact a deceptive appearance.”61 The skepticism that is operative
in the antinomies is therefore both active and passive; it is responsible
for activating the assertions of the understanding to bring them into the
realm of reason, sets them in conflict with each other, and then
contemplates their mutual destruction.
The active moment of this skeptical subject, from which is derived
Kant’s insight that an object beyond the realm of experience is ‘empty’,
therefore constitutes an arch[. It takes the four groups of categories that
constitute the structure of experience as given, and inserts them into
predetermined oppositions. Therefore it makes use of the assumption
that the categories of the understanding exhaust the range of concep-
tual forms under which experience can occur. The result is a drastically
diminished field of what could count as legitimate experience, and
the regulation of contradiction under the authority of the table of judg-
ments. Hence, the antinomies are based on an unquestioned and
abstract assumption as to the conceptual structure of experience. As
such, the attempt to legitimate the claims of ordinary experience is
accompanied by a prescribed limit on any claim to exceed the cate-
gories, a prescription that cannot itself be legitimated. Indeed, the skep-
ticism of Hume’s antinomy (taken by itself without the overlaid
interpretation) anticipates Hegel’s critique of the Kantian antinomies,
which leads him to the claim that all experience is in itself contradictory.
This chapter has been concerned with Kant’s attempt to justify the
objectivity of knowledge through an investigation into its legitimacy. We
examined Kant’s development of Hume’s skepticism in terms of the uni-
versalization of its objective and subjective sides and saw how this bears
on issues of philosophical method and of the realm of experience in
general. Kant’s extrapolation of Hume’s skepticism leads him to engage
with the problem of the necessity of the demand for a deduction, and
this culminates in the question of the identity of the subject who is
demanding it. This formulation of the issue, which I elaborated on in rela-
tion to Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, forms the starting point for grasping
Hegel’s own development of skepticism through his relationship to Kant
and Fichte.
4
Hegel and Self-Completing
Skepticism
In the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel states that
Philosophy includes the skeptical principle as a subordinate function

of its own, in the shape of Dialectic. In contradistinction to mere skep-
ticism, however, philosophy does not remain content with the purely
negative result of Dialectic. The skeptic mistakes the true value of his
result, when he supposes it to be no more than a negation pure and
simple. For the negative which emerges as a result of dialectics is,
because a result, at the same time the positive: it contains what it
results from, absorbed into itself, and made part of its own nature.
Thus conceived, however, the dialectical stage has the features char-
acterizing the third grade of logical truth, the speculative form, or
form of positive reason.1
Since skepticism has at least three separate meanings throughout Hegel’s

oeuvre, it is important to be clear about the meaning of this remark, a
product of his later thinking. Hegel is certainly here thinking of Ancient
skepticism, which he, of course, regards as an important movement, and
as a prototype for elements of his own epistemological approach. But
Hegel dismisses the circular, non-constructive ‘negativity’ that appears
within the interplay between arch[ and telos. Instead, the skeptical
impulse must be redirected towards the positive, which is carried out as
the ‘negation of the negation’. Such an outcome can only be understood
in terms of Hegel’s relationship to Kant, and as a transformation of the
negative component of ancient skepticism into a speculative dialectics.
Hegel remarks in the introduction to the Phenomenology that the
method of the work is to be understood as a self-completing skepticism
[sich vollbringende Skeptizimus]. The meaning of this device has been
76
Hegel and Self-Completing Skepticism 77
noted and analyzed in contrasting contexts by Gillian Rose and Werner

Marx. Rose translates sich vollbringende Skeptizimus as ‘self-perficient
skepticism’, Marx as ‘self-realizing skepticism’.2 I shall here render it ‘self
completing skepticism’, as this captures both the reflexive element, and
the sense of closure that Hegel is intent to press his readership towards.
The following analysis proceeds by a division of the above formulation
into its component parts. First, I take up the issue of completion, which
raises the question of Hegel’s system, and to what extent this issues from
criticisms of Kant and Fichte, and his attempt to complete the program
of German idealism. I argue that the process by which Hegel attempts
to turn transcendental – or as he expresses it, ‘merely subjective’ – idealism
into speculative idealism replicates the same reflexive skeptical move-
ment which Kant originally turned against Hume, in the form of the
question of right. The completing moment will also be shown to be an
element in Fichte’s notion of an absolute standpoint, and I discuss this
in the context of Hegel’s critique of Fichte’s system in the Science of Logic.
The second element of the above formulation will be shown to lead back
to the key issues at stake in the structure of the Phenomenology, and I
here lay out in full the meaning of skepticism that is operative in that
work. I then address the reflexive element of self-completing skepticism.
Finally, taking ‘self-completing skepticism’ as a whole, I show how
Hegel’s idea of a phenomenology relates to ancient skepticism and
anticipates later significant developments in critical theory.
4.1. Skepticism and the idea of a system
In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines a system as follows:
By a system I understand the unity of the manifold modes of knowl-

edge under one idea. This idea is the concept provided by reason – of
the form as a whole – in so far as the concept determines a priori not
only the scope of its manifold content, but also the positions which
the parts occupy relative to one another.3
On the one hand, for Kant, a system replicates the actual structure of
experience. Its function is parallel to the transcendental unity of apper-
ception, which determines the scope of the manifold content of experi-
ence through the figurative synthesis of intuition. On the other hand,
a system follows the form of reflection. For the role (or one of the
roles) of the concepts of reflection is to determine the placement, or
transcendental location, of concepts in relation to each other through
comparison and distinction.4 But, as a system, it has to accomplish both

sides of this equation together, that is, as dialectic, not through the
subordination of one to the other. If we are not to reduce this idea
to being simply a product of Kant’s predilection for symmetry (as
Schopenhauer argues), we should take note of the ambition. A philo-
sophical system, according to that ambition, must unify both its objects
and itself – in Fichte’s terms, both the series of representations presented
in experience and the series presented by the philosopher who reflects on
experience – within the movement of objectification per se. The objectifi-
cation and examination of experience must take place in a non-reducible
conjunction with its objectification and examination of itself, and the
two elements cannot be abstracted from the conjunction without losing
the elements of systematicity and completion.
This conjunction is the result of the reflexive skepticism inherent in
posing the question of right. We have seen how this conjunction, which
replicates the function of the transcendental unity of apperception at
the level of both reflection and experience, was developed by both Kant
and Fichte. However, Kant never properly dealt with the role of apper-
ception in reflection, let alone its role in the system. Fichte, by over-
privileging it, subjugated experience to reflection, thus reducing the
conjunction to an abstract identity. In the terms set by the discussion in
Chapter 3, we can express this problem as a dilemma: Either Science
(Wissenschaft), proceeds to an unexamined standpoint, thereby assuming
an authority over its object that has not been legitimated, or it attempts
to ground that authority before proceeding, in which case the original
object, for which it sought authority for proceeding against, that is,
experience, is no longer its object, but its product. Hence, the two parts
of the conjunction that are supposed to be brought into a unity through
the idea of the system are perpetually in danger of falling apart from
each other.
It was this problem, coiled at the heart of both Kant’s and Fichte’s sys-
tems, that Hegel sought to remedy – or at least address – through the
idea of a phenomenology. The way I have expressed it above, however,
in terms of a dilemma within the idea of a system, is merely its most
general manifestation. The problem recurs in various forms in the parts
as much as in the whole, and I explored this with respect to the hidden
agenda of legality and authority operating ‘behind the back’ of critical
reflection in Chapter 3. While this difficulty is endemic to both Kant
and Fichte, there is an important difference between the two thinkers
that reflects a similar difference in the meaning of a completion of a
system. We can see this as follows.
There are two senses in which a system might be understood as

necessary. The first, on which Kant and Fichte agree, is that Science – or
rather the form which Science takes in their thought, that of reflection –
is necessary in itself. I shall call this the arch[-necessity of the system, in
that it arises from the very motivation to philosophize itself. The second
sense, on which Kant and Fichte diverge, is the idea that once a certain
mode of philosophizing ‘gets going’, through a successful justification
of its ground, its progression and results are necessary. This is the inter-
nal necessity of the system. In Fichte, this latter idea emerges through
the appeal to intellectual intuition or, more generally, through the idea
that the content of knowledge can be extracted from its form. Once the
basic principle of identity has been established through the absolute
positing of the ego, the content of the world unfolds inexorably from
the self-identical subject. So, Fichte’s argument goes, the positing of the
ego as a synthetic a priori act contains within itself the positing of
the non-ego, and these opposites together, again by virtue of their
synthetic a priori nature, yield the principle of the identity of self and
world. Thus he says:
In the third principle [identity of ego and non-ego] we have estab-

lished a synthesis between the two opposites, self and not-self. …
[T]here can be no further question as to the possibility of this, nor
can any ground for it be given; it is absolutely possible, and we are
entitled to it without further grounds of any kind. All other syntheses,
if they are to be valid, must be rooted in this one, and must have
been established in and along with it. And once this has been demon-
strated, we have the most convincing proof that they are valid
as well.5
Kant remained suspicious, in principle, of this idea of the inner neces-

sity of the system, seeing in it not only the vestiges of the ontological
proof, to which he was so fundamentally opposed, but also the denial
of his distinction between constitutive and regulative principles. The
doctrine of the regulative principles derives ultimately from a combina-
tion of Kant’s formalism with his refusal to fully extend the principle of
apperception into the idea of the system. The outcome is that the pro-
gressive uncovering of the series of conditions underlying knowledge
remains an essentially contingent matter. More concretely, or nega-
tively, formulated, the doctrine demands that critique must remain
suspicious of the interests of reason in its investigations and not succumb
to the illusion that the series of conditions which it uncovers is complete.
Hence Kant remarks:
The only conclusion we are justified in drawing from these consider-

ations is that the systematic unity of the manifold knowledge of
understanding, as prescribed by reason, is a logical principle. … But to
say that the constitution of objects or the nature of the understand-
ing that knows them as such, is in itself determined by systematic
unity, and that we can in a certain measure postulate this unity a pri-
ori, without reference to any special interest of reason … – that would
be to assert a transcendental principle of reason, and would make the
systematic unity necessary, not only subjectively and logically as
method, but objectively also.6
Although Kant here presents the issue in terms of a rather disingenuous

opposition between logic and metaphysics, the basic idea is that the for-
mal nature of reason forbids any completion in regard to content through
the inner necessity of the system. Similarly, in the Paralogisms, Kant
argues that the ego has form but no content, and that therefore reason as
subject has no power of synthesis. Kant is extremely consistent in his
denial of inner necessity, and the same line of thinking also underlies his
ethics.7 In Fichte’s hands, the interest of reason no longer acts against sys-
tematic unity because not only is it capable of, but in fact consists in, the
act of intellectual intuition. This might be expressed in another way by
noting the similarity between Descartes and Fichte on the notion of
certainty. In both cases, certainty – which is originally only an internal
subjective relation to what one knows to be true – becomes identical with
truth. In Fichte’s case, because the distinction between form and content
is supposedly overcome through attaining the absolute standpoint, the
content of the system can then unfold with an inner necessity.
The second sense of necessity attaching to a system involves the point
of entry, the founding/grounding or arch[-necessity. This is a theme that
we have pursued, in various forms, in relation to ancient skepticism, in
Descartes, Kant and Fichte. In Kant, it was expounded in terms of
the necessity of the demand for a deduction. The idea also emerges in
Kant’s rejection of Hume’s antinomy between natural and ‘rational’
consciousness – that reason is indeed continuous with ordinary experi-
ence, and that the self-contradictions of reason are already embedded in
ordinary experience. This leads to Kant’s insight that self-contradiction
and illusions are necessary. Hence Kant’s remark at the beginning of the
Critique, that the disparity between questions and answers that appears
throughout human experience “is not due to any fault of its own.” The
innocence of ordinary experience is itself necessary to Kant’s belief in its

issuing in the necessity of the demand for a deduction. This, in combi-
nation with the rejection of Hume’s antinomy between experience and
the abstraction of experience in reflection, means that it is a matter
of the highest importance for the transcendental deduction itself that
the demand for a deduction is self-generating, not imposed by the
philosopher.8
In Fichte, the relation between reflection and ordinary experience is
both rigidified and inverted. In the second introduction to the Science of
Knowledge, Fichte makes the following remark:
The part played by the philosopher in this … is to engage this living

subject in purposeful activity, to observe this activity, to apprehend it,
and to comprehend it as a single unified activity … It is up to him to
place what is to be investigated in a position which will allow him to
make precisely the observations he wishes to make. It is also up to him
to attend to these appearances, to survey them accurately and to con-
nect them with one another. But it is not up to him to decide how
the object should manifest itself. This is something determined by
the object itself; and he would be working directly counter to his own
goal were he not to subordinate himself to this object, and were he
instead to take an active role in the development of what appears.9
But how can thought fix the object, that is, experience, for its own
investigation while at the same time not assuming that object as already
fixed, and thus subject to the constraints on its manifestation implied
in such an act? How can the philosopher work for his own goal by sub-
ordinating himself to the object? These prolixities have been explored
in terms of the ‘circle of reflection’ that Henrich credits Fichte with rec-
ognizing. However, Fichte’s appeal to the philosopher’s subordination of
himself to the object cannot ultimately be accepted as authentic. This is
further evidenced in the dogmatic conviction of his famous remark
from the first Introduction to the Science of Knowledge, that “what kind
of philosophy one chooses, therefore depends, in the end, on what sort
of man one is.”10 In other words, in taking up the perspective of
philosophy we are not really subordinating ourselves to the object at all,
but following our own already solid convictions, and it is in this
conviction – a position not dissimilar from Descartes – that the ground
of Fichte’s system ultimately consists. This also constitutes a rejection of
the Rousseauian educationalist bent to Kant’s thought. For, presumably,
an interest in the educational potential of philosophizing intimates the
possibility of the reverse relation, that what kind of person one is can
depend on what kind of philosophy one ascribes to.11 Fichte’s attempt
to prove the necessity of the demand for a deduction as an arch[ truth
thus constitutes a quasi-completion of Kant’s system, but a completion
by dogmatic decree.
These considerations on the two aspects of the necessity of a system
instantiate three skeptical themes which I have pursued throughout this
study, and which are important for understanding the relationship
between critical theory and German idealism. First, the notion of self-
conscious reflexivity that is operative within skepticism, although in vary-
ing degrees and with different results. Second, the structural problem of a
subjective bias that invades a system of thought at its point of entry, and
which therefore manifests itself as a problem of a philosophical system.
Third, the centrality of the relationship between natural consciousness, or
ordinary experience, and reflection. We now turn to Hegel in order to
show how he frames his criticisms of Kant and Fichte in these terms.
4.2. Completion and the absolute standpoint
In the 1802 essay, Faith and Knowledge, Hegel states that:
the Kantian philosophy expresses the authentic Idea of Reason in

the formula “how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” Kant
reproaches Hume for thinking of this task of philosophy with far too
little definiteness and universality. This is exactly what happened to
Kant himself; and like Hume he stopped at the subjective and external
meaning of this question and believed he had established that
rational cognition is impossible.12
The question then arises of what more objective form this question
could take. Hegel’s criticism that Kant understands this question purely
in subjective terms opens up a field of quite technical problems. It
involves, to name just two contentious issues, the claim that the burden
of explanation of the deduction in the first Critique rests on the assumed
form of the table of judgments – and therefore, Kant’s idealism is merely
‘psychological’13 – and that Kant continually oversteps his own princi-
ples of rigorously distinguishing the paired functions of concepts and
intuitions, reason and understanding, nature and freedom, and so forth.
However we understand these criticisms, they are themselves depend-
ent on Hegel’s critique of Kant’s ‘subjective idealism’. I am concerned
to show here that this critique is fundamentally consistent with the
reflexive skepticism that Kant himself brought against Hume. This will
allow a perspective, keeping in mind Hegel’s remarks in the above
passage, on the sense in which the ‘completion’ of Kant’s system is to
be understood in skeptical terms.
Kant’s criticisms of Hume can be summarized as follows: The process
which transforms (dogmatic) skeptical empiricism into critical idealism
involves an alteration in the status of both the object and the subject
in question. In the Prolegomena, Kant universalizes Hume’s problem by
taking the ascription of objective causality to an event or series of events
as merely one instance of the activity of the understanding in its appre-
hending of objects. The key step in Kant’s reasoning here is the insight
that mathematical judgments are themselves synthetic, and thus subject
to the potential problem of their validity being ascribed to custom or
habit. This step provides the impetus for the more universal form of the
objective side of Hume’s problem, namely ‘how are synthetic a priori
judgments possible?’ As Kant conceives the question, the key problem
in providing an answer to it is the potential for the understanding – a
potential concomitant with the power Kant accords to it through its
universal role in judgment – to overwhelm the apparently objective
limitations imposed on judgment by intuition.
However, I showed in Chapter 3 that this problem is, in fact, repre-
sentative of a larger issue, that is, the legitimacy of the realm of human
experience in general, and, consequently, its objective reality. I also
argued that in framing the question of right, Kant is extending the
subjective side of Hume’s skepticism, asking after the standpoint of the
subject involved in shedding doubt on the objectivity of experience. It
is only at this point in Kant’s thinking that the problem and its solution
begins to assume a form necessitating a deduction, and the complica-
tions associated with the role of intuition, both in its relation to the
understanding and in relation to the affective role of the thing-in-itself,
implies the necessity of a deduction from the subject. This process is
coextensive with Kant’s transformation of philosophical method, and
culminates in the view that Hume’s skepticism is inadequate in the face
of a more fundamental skepticism that has its origin in the question of
the identity of the skeptical subject involved in formulating the prob-
lem in the first place; hence Kant’s ‘reply’ to Hume is that the latter’s
denial of the objectivity of human experience is itself subjectively and
dogmatically grounded in experience. This extrapolation of the problem
of method ultimately issues in the necessity of a demand for a deduc-
tion. While Kant recognizes this necessity, he is unable to provide a sat-
isfactory solution to it, and it is left to Fichte to provide a transcendental
deduction of method in his attempted derivation of the concepts of

reflection from the pure ego.
The manner in which Hegel presents the charge of dogmatism against
Kant follows the same contours as the above argument. Hegel’s argument
replicates Kant’s by highlighting the problem on both the objective and
subjective sides. The former can be seen in Hegel’s focusing, like Fichte,
on the concepts of reflection, and specifically on Kant’s use of the con-
cepts of identity and difference.14 These concepts – the most funda-
mental categories of thinking – do not apprehend their object, which in
the special case of reflection is experience in general, as it is in itself, but
bring their own determinations to bear on it in the act of apprehension.
Thus, the critical or reflective deployment of the concepts of identity
and difference fix their object, that is, experience in general, in terms of
a dualistic opposition. This dualism of identity and difference, being
therefore constitutive of the process of reflective critique as such, then
pervades the form in which all the insights of critique appear to it.
Hence the opposition between identity and difference is responsible for
all the Kantian fixed dualisms between something and other, concept
and intuition, infinite and finite and between subject and object.
Hegel’s insight that Kant’s theory of experience takes the form that it
does because of the duplication of the opposition between identity and
difference throughout his system, including the systemic incorporation
of subject and object, is what allows him, in his discussion in Faith and
Knowledge, to replace the language of concept and intuition with that of
identity and difference. Thus, he states that intuition “is the unity that
is blind, i.e., immersed in the difference and not detaching itself from
it,” and that the understanding is “the unity that posits the difference
as identical but distinguishes itself from the different.”15 In calling
attention to the determinative nature of the concepts of identity and
difference in the process of experience, the constitution of ‘the world’
per se then, Hegel is extending the objective side of Kant’s idealism. For,
given that the deployment of these categories in conjunction with the
transcendental unity of apperception, is at the same time the condition
of the possibility of the experience of objects and that of the objects of
experience, all representation of objects, and the ‘objects’ themselves
carry within themselves both identity and difference. Thus, Hegel is
claiming that all experience per se consists in contradiction.
Hegel’s criticism with respect to the subjective side of the critical
philosophy is similar to Fichte’s; that the appropriate standpoint from
which the critique of reason is to take place is never properly estab-
lished, and it therefore proceeds dogmatically without reflection on the
categories that it is bringing to its object. Hegel pursues this criticism in

different forms throughout the corpus of his writings.16 For our pur-
poses, it is enough to note that Kant’s theoretical distinction between
concepts and intuitions founders on the self-referential problem of
method which Fichte initially identified. According to Fichte, since the
Kantian synthesis by which an intuition is unified with a concept is just
what it is for that unity to be a possible object for us; a ‘mere’ impres-
sion or pure unsynthesized intuition is inaccessible to us, and ‘us’ must
include the philosophizing subject. Kant’s division of concept and intu-
ition therefore demands intellectual intuition at the level of the philos-
ophizing subject, since only through the use of such a faculty would he
be able to isolate concepts from intuitions in the first place. As such, the
same problem of the standpoint from which Hume is able to shed doubt
on the objectivity of experience which is raised by Kant against him, is
to be turned against Kant himself. How can we know that and what we
cannot know? Or, as Fichte conceived it, what special form must this
knowledge take? This problem is not confined to the issue of pure intu-
ition, of course, but extends throughout the various places in the first
Critique where Kant imposes limits on knowledge.
While Hegel agrees with Fichte with respect to the necessity of turning
the skeptical problem of reflexivity back against Kant, he is also, as we
have seen, highly critical of Fichte’s solution. The key element of this
divergence involves Hegel’s idea of a ‘self-completion’ of Kant’s system.
According to Hegel, Fichte reduces the ultimate task of philosophy to
the attempt to ground philosophical form absolutely – to achieve an
absolute standpoint. But the identity of subject and object, conceived as
a standpoint, cannot break out of its own circle except by an immedi-
ate appeal to intellectual intuition – through a demand or a summons.
Thus, the identical subject–object as a standpoint is not an Absolute, but
something both abstract and finite, a mere intellectual vantage point.
To complete Kant’s subjective idealism, the identical subject–object
must therefore arise from within the system, not externally, as from an
absolute standpoint. This is the burden of the argument in Hegel’s
extremely abstract discussion of Fichte’s solution in the “Doctrine of
Essence” in the Science of Logic. The point is more clearly brought out in
Faith and Knowledge, where Hegel states that
[Fichte’s system] is able to establish the identity of the antithetic

opposites (i.e., to achieve intellectual intuition) only in the infinite; or
in other words it turns the abstractive thinking, the pure activity that
is opposed to being, into the Absolute. So it does not truly nullify
the antitheses. Like the idealism of his system Fichte’s intellectual

intuition is a merely formal affair. Thought is confronted by reality,
the identity of the intellectual intuition is confronted by the antithe-
ses. The only identity here is the relative identity of the causal nexus
in the mutual determination of one opposite by the other.17
This interpretation is given a more concrete form in the essay, at the

beginning of the Science of Logic, “With What Must Science Begin?”
Here, Hegel remarks on Fichte’s attempt to achieve the two forms of the
necessity of his system which I recounted above:
[We must mention] an original beginning of philosophy which has

recently become famous, the beginning with the ego. It came partly
from the reflection that from the first truth the entire sequel must be
derived, and partly from the requirement that the first truth must be
something with which we are acquainted, and still more something
of which we are immediately certain.18
For Fichte, this ‘being acquainted’ or, as Hegel then expresses it, this
‘familiarity’, of the ego with itself is assumed to be unproblematic, and
a mere ‘summons’ is all that is necessary to induce the self-reverting act
by which the absolute standpoint is achieved. I noted in Chapter 3 that
this summons is not innocent, and that it reintroduces the problem of
authority into transcendental idealism. Hegel makes the same point
when he states that “as thus immediately demanded, this elevation [to
the standpoint of absolute knowing] is a subjective postulate; to prove
itself a genuine demand, the progression of the concrete ego from
immediate consciousness to pure knowing must have been indicated
and exhibited through the necessity of the ego itself.”19 In other words,
the legitimate demand for an absolute standpoint, which would then be
in a position to legitimately demand a deduction of the objectivity of
the categories, must arise from natural consciousness itself, not from its
abstraction in reflective thought. Indeed, as Hegel goes on to note, in
making natural consciousness the object of a summons, reflection is no
longer dealing with natural consciousness at all, but with its own
abstraction, its own product. Thus he says,
Before the ego, this concrete Being, can be made the beginning and
ground of philosophy, it must be disrupted – this is the absolute act
through which the ego purges itself of its content and becomes aware
of itself as an abstract ego. Only this pure ego now is not immediate,
is not the familiar, ordinary ego of our consciousness to which

the science of logic could be directly linked for everyone. … When
pure knowing is characterized as ego, it acts as a perpetual reminder
of the subjective ego whose limitations should be forgotten, and it
fosters the idea that the propositions and relations resulting from the
further development of the ego are present and can already be found
in the ordinary consciousness – for in fact it is this of which they are
asserted.20
The ‘immediacy’ employed in the summons to a self-reverting act

therefore distorts natural consciousness, but is not self-conscious of its
so doing. Therefore, the completion is not self-generated, and reflec-
tion’s subjective agenda enters into the process of thought at the very
moment of ‘disruption’ which was supposed to expel it.
Hegel’s solution to the problem of completion which is bequeathed
to him by Kant and Fichte, must involve, then, a dissolution of any
‘external’ subject involved in the system. In other words, it requires an
internal or self-completion of a system. In order to make clear the notion
of self-completing skepticism, we have to bring these insights to bear on
the structure of the Phenomenology. Given the abstract nature of the
above discussion I here summarize the key points made thus far.
First, Hegel’s critique of Kant is continuous with the reflexive skepti-
cal argument that Kant himself brought against Hume. As Kant’s objec-
tion to Hume is that he did not universalize his skepticism towards
causality, and hence did not apprehend the synthetic nature of all judg-
ments, so Hegel’s objection to Kant is that he did not universalize his
skepticism towards the role of identity and non-identity in merely
assigning representations to their transcendental location, and recog-
nize their fundamental role in the configuration of experience itself.
Second, Hegel’s critique of the ‘subjectivity’ inherent in Kant’s and
Fichte’s systems recognizes the presence of an arch[ in their thought.
Correspondingly, the idea of a self-completion of a system is intended
to extirpate this arch[. If the system ‘completes itself’ it is immune to the
interests of the system-builder who presents it, and evades the potential
for an arch[ to enter into the content of the system. Third, Hegel’s objec-
tions to Fichte’s notion of intellectual intuition are based on an aware-
ness of the problematic relationship between reflection and natural
consciousness. If natural consciousness is merely objectified as a given,
it becomes subject to the categories of reflection, and when these cate-
gories are unexamined or merely decreed, natural consciousness is
dogmatically distorted. Moreover, the idea, endemic to grasping the
arch[-necessity of the site of entry into a system, that natural

consciousness is continuous with reflective philosophy, is revealed to be
merely an imposition on the part of the subject involved in expounding
natural consciousness.
4.3. Phenomenology against Science
The structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is a significant point of

dispute in the development of critical theory. Even between Adorno and
Horkheimer there are quite significant divisions, and between the first
and second generations of critical theory the disagreements are more
fundamental. The aim in this section is not to deliberate on the various
alternative ‘readings’ of the work, but to identify and trace the skeptical
impulse that is operative within it, to connect this with the notion of
self-completion and develop a perspective on the meaning of self-
completing skepticism. This will allow greater insight into Hegel’s relation
to both ancient and modern skepticism. Nevertheless, some anticipa-
tion of the relevant disagreements will set the stage for broaching the
critical theory reception of the work in Part III.
Habermas characterizes the totalizing character of Hegel’s system as
the “infinite processing of the relation-to-self that swallows up every-
thing finite within itself.”21 On the other hand, he is sympathetic to
Hegel’s critique of the autonomy of the Kantian rational subject, as long
as this is understood as critique, or rather as metacritique. Kortian, from
a Habermasian perspective, expresses this understanding as follows:
“Examination of Hegel’s argumentation shows it to contain a metacriti-
cal moment which holds against all critical interrogation of knowledge,
even though this metacritique is placed unilaterally in the service of
absolute knowledge.”22 Hence, Kortian is concerned to separate the neg-
ative moment of Hegel’s philosophy, the critique of critique – or of
the conception of knowledge as an instrument – from its apparently
dogmatic one, the presumptive demands of absolute knowledge. This
notion of metacritique is to be distinguished from that with which
Adorno is operating, and which he views as germinating within Hegel’s
phenomenological method.
If Hegel’s attack on instrumental reason is construed merely as sub-
jective metacritique, as Kortian suggests, then he reproduces the same
basic subject–object structure which he is supposed to be criticizing.
Metacritique, as intimated in Chapter 1, with respect to Hegel’s critique
of Schulze, does not complete critique, it merely duplicates it at a more
abstract level.
Any attempt to engage properly with the implications of the negative

side of Hegel’s thought must take this into account, and in so doing it
has to at least encounter the question of completion, and the ‘social’
side of Hegel’s approach. In this section, I shall argue that Hegel’s
‘critique’ of critique is not metacritical, but an attempt to assert an alter-
native conception of skepticism; that is, I shall argue that the program
or ‘path’ that is presented in the Preface and Introduction to the
Phenomenology has to be understood as going beyond metacritique with-
out relapsing into a precritical attitude. I shall proceed first by looking
at the general structure of the Phenomenology, before dealing in more
detail with the concept of self-completing skepticism.
The notion of completion is constitutive of the idea of a system, and
Hegel’s arguments against Kant and Fichte are intended to show that
their ‘systems’ are incomplete. But this claim, for Hegel, means that their
systems are dogmatic; they operate in accordance with a certain arch[,
or are not properly self-conscious of the assumptions and presuppositions
concealed within their method. There is therefore a shortfall between
the ambition of systematic critique – its supposedly skeptical method –
to examine its object in irreducible conjunction with an examination of
itself, and its execution. The question of whether this economy can be
made good therefore involves, initially, the issue of the general program
of the Phenomenology: What is its purpose, or what problems outstand-
ing from the critical philosophy is it designed to surmount? Clearly, the
first aspect of this issue is the meaning of a system as this is presented
in the Phenomenology.
The Preface and Introduction to Hegel’s Phenomenology are of course
full of claims and exhortations for philosophy to become ‘scientific’ and
‘systematic’. Nevertheless, the case for a systematic Phenomenology is
highly problematic. To begin with, to treat the matter purely from a
factual standpoint, it is well known that Hegel wrote his Preface and
changed the title of the work at the last minute, while the proofs of the
text were already being printed. It was only, therefore, in retrospect that
he was able to gain a perspective on what was happening in his own
work; how its initial conception differed from its execution and how its
development took it away from the conventional notion of Science
propagated by the earlier German idealists. This highlights the element
of discontinuity operating in the general structure of the work, suggest-
ing that the book Hegel set out to write was not the one that he man-
aged to produce. The intended work was a “Science of the Experience of
Consciousness”;23 the result was a phenomenology. The issue of dis-
continuity, however, is not confined to the relationship between the
Preface and the main text. It appears throughout the work in the shape
of idiosyncratic transitions, massively inconsistent terminology and an
extremely assymmetrical structure. This latter point has been brought
out by Kaufmann, in his discussion of the relation of the contents page
to the published work.
The table of contents obviously represents an attempt to impose upon

the book an order that Hegel had not had in mind when writing it.
Not only does it contain all sorts of subdivisions that are not marked
in the text, but more significantly, the text is divided into eight parts,
each headed by a Roman number and title, beginning with ‘I. Sense
Certainty; or This and Opinion’, and ending with ‘VIII. Absolute
Knowledge’. But the table of contents lumps together I, II and III
under ‘(A) Consciousness’, then inserts ‘(B) Self-consciousness’ before
IV, and finally lumps together V, VI, VII and VIII under ‘(C)’ without
any title. This last part, which has no title to parallel ‘consciousness’
and ‘self-consciousness’, comprises pages 162–765!24
The contrast with the symmetry of Kant’s first Critique exacerbates the
sense that the work cannot – as Hegel insists (in the Science of Logic and
elsewhere) – be read systematically. The idea that it presents a series of
shapes of consciousness inexorably moving towards a preconceived
notion of absolute knowing is therefore absurd. The easy alternative to
such a view which Kaufmann then defends, is that the Phenomenology is
merely a series of generalizations.25
The fact of this dichotomy within the interpretation of the Pheno-
menology, which is still pervasive within Hegelian scholarship, consti-
tutes one target towards which Adorno aims his own studies of Hegel:
“[Hegel’s] system is not an overarching scientific system any more than
it is an agglomeration of witty observations.”26 But the dichotomous
character of the various interpretations of the work is not confined to
the contrast between ‘science’ and ‘generalization’. Polarized positions
also exist as to whether the work is to be understood ‘anthropologically’,
as a cumulative account of the development of spirit, or ‘culturally’, as
an episodic narrative of development; whether it is a dialectical narra-
tive of experience or a proto-phenomenology, in the sense given that
term by twentieth century ontology; and whether it is to be understood
‘ontogenetically’, as the education of the reader’s consciousness, or ‘phy-
logenetically’ as the educative ascent of the species. The Phenomenology
itself fits none of these descriptions accurately enough to allow resolu-
tion of these disputes.27 However, consideration of what is at stake
allows some confrontation with the how they are affected by the issue
of skepticism.
I consider first the issue of the subject involved in the experience of
the work itself. In Descartes’ Meditations, the object and subject of the
investigation are encountered purely in terms of a singular individual,
the ‘I’ as a special subject. Although the ‘I’ appears to be immune from
all other determinations through the form in which the Meditations are
presented, this in fact prefigures collusion between author and reader,
leading to a ‘performative’ meaning to the work. In contrast, Hume’s cri-
tique of the Cartesian problematic simply evades the problem of the
subject. Thus, in his response to Descartes, the subject is referred to as
‘I’ and the object as ‘myself’ without apparently, any grasp of the con-
tradictions to which this usage leads. “[For] my part, when I enter most
intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble upon some particu-
lar perception or other. … I never can catch myself at any time without
a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.”28 In
Kant, this determinate subject and object is qualified as ‘the I’ or ‘the
self’, manifesting the objectification deemed necessary to both grasp the
problem in its proper universality and to establish the standpoint from
which the transcendental deduction is to be carried out. However, Kant
also makes use of ‘we’, though inconsistently, and this has consequences
which will be discussed in Chapter 6, as to how to understand the subject
of the text. With Fichte, as with Descartes, there is an intimate – though,
somewhat paradoxically, solipsistic – relationship between author and
reader. The act of abstraction that Fichte appeals to, by which the self is
supposed to become an object to itself, is only grasped as possible if the
reader conforms to the author’s exhortation to act on it rather than
merely perceive its operating in the text. Hence the ‘act of reading’ is
performative; for intellectual intuition is supposed to be itself an activity,
not an ‘experience’ as such.
In the Phenomenology, and most consistently in the first three chapters,
the subject of the text is referred to ambiguously as ‘we’. The identity of
this ‘we’ is given conflicting expression in the Introduction and in the
main text. In both cases it appears as a mode of consciousness, and is pre-
sented in association with natural consciousness. The conventional inter-
pretation of its meaning in the text is that natural consciousness is the
object and ‘we’ are the subject investigating it.29 This interpretation derives
from the remark Hegel makes in the very first sentence of the main text:
The knowledge or knowing which is at the start or is immediately our

object cannot be anything else but immediate knowledge itself, a
knowledge of the immediate or what simply is. Our approach to the

object must also be immediate or receptive; we must alter nothing in
the object as it presents itself. In apprehending it, we must refrain
from trying to comprehend it.30
This abstract appeal to the act of abstraction is of course as problematic

as it is for Kant and Fichte. How can ‘immediate knowing’ be known to
be immediate, or what kind of abstraction must be performed for ‘us’ to
enter into immediate knowing? Similarly, what is the status of the rela-
tionship between apprehension and comprehension? Is comprehension
something that can be dismissed from our categorial mental apparatus
at will – perhaps by a pure act of primary will? This appeal results in the
same dilemma that was previously located at the core of both Kant’s and
Fichte’s idealism. It places the ‘we’ either in an unexamined standpoint,
thereby assuming an authority that has not been legitimated, or in some
special privileged position similar to Fichte’s philosophical subject,
construing all representations from a standpoint established by decree.
But Hegel is fully aware of the contradictions inherent in both these
positions. As was shown earlier, Hegel was in agreement with Fichte that
Kant had ignored the standpoint of the concepts of reflection, but sim-
ilarly critical of Fichte’s solution because of the way it subjugated expe-
rience to reflection. Hegel’s appeal to ‘mere apprehension’, then, has to
be understood as ultimately ambiguous. Although the appeal appears as
a starting point for the main text, it is of course prefaced by the quali-
fications regarding the method of the work that appear in the intro-
duction and preface, which challenge the conventional status of the
relationships between author, reader and text.
In Werner Marx’s interpretation of the Introduction and Preface to the
Phenomenology, he addresses the meaning of a science of the experience
of consciousness as follows:
The first question to arise is whether, in the title “Science of the

Experience of Consciousness”, we are dealing with a subjective
genitive – whether it points to a science which is itself carried out as
an experience. To all appearance the answer is ‘no’. Paragraph 15 of
the Introduction makes a clear separation of science from conscious-
ness, which is in the grip of experience itself.31
For a ‘Science of the Experience of Consciousness’, this separation of

Science from consciousness is necessary in order to gain access reflec-
tively to its object. But this very separation, as was shown above, is
central to Hegel’s skeptical critique of Kant and Fichte. If it is to be taken

as the site of entry into his own system, then all the familiar difficul-
ties associated with the domination of the object by the subject recur.
Marx’s interpretation may be said to ignore the historical dimension of
Hegel’s Phenomenology, the fact that consciousness is in the ‘grip of expe-
rience’ itself inasmuch as it is conscious of the historically generated
form of modern experience, both natural and philosophical. In other
words, experience refers to the history of experience, and skepticism
to the consciousness of that history. This is the meaning of Heidegger’s
reading in the essay, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” in which he
identifies the key connection between skepticism and the historicity of
experience:
Skepticism, in the appearance of phenomena, brings the shapes of

consciousness forth and transforms one into another. Conscious-
ness is consciousness in the mode of self-producing skepticism (sich-
vollbringende Skeptizimus). Skepticism is the history of consciousness
in itself which is neither mere natural consciousness in itself nor
mere real knowledge for itself, but first and foremost, in and for itself,
the original unity of these two.32
If the ‘we’ is understood as modern philosophical consciousness, it is

both subject and object of that which it observes. It therefore does not
stand above natural consciousness, or the shapes of reflective con-
sciousness that have preceded it, but itself is a product of those shapes.
Heidegger’s reading takes note of the importance of skepticism in
Hegel’s introduction to the work, but invokes an ‘original unity’ of
philosophical and natural consciousness, which lays the groundwork
for the appropriation of Hegel for the project of fundamental ontology.
Indeed, Heidegger’s interpretation suggests a picture of ‘Skepticism as
Subject’, in which consciousness is driven by its own negativity towards
the progressive uncovering of its illusions. Such an account is shot through
with both an epistemological and historical teleology.33 In one of several
encounters with Heidegger’s reading of Hegel, Adorno provides an alter-
native account of the role of experience as this is laid out in the introduc-
tion to the Phenomenology in the second of his three studies of Hegel. Here,
Adorno points not to the unity but to the fundamentally conflicted nature
of the relationship between philosophical and natural consciousness:
In Kant, philosophy was engaged in the critique of reason; a some-

what naïve scientific consciousness … was applied to consciousness
as a condition of knowledge. In Hegel the relationship between the

two, between the philosophical, critical consciousness and the con-
sciousness engaged in direct knowledge of its object, the conscious-
ness that is the object of criticism, a relationship that Kant did not
consider, becomes thematic, the object of reflection. … Kant’s delim-
itation of consciousness as scientific consciousness that makes
straightforward judgments returns in Hegel as the negativity of con-
sciousness, as something that needs to be criticized. … [T]he reflec-
tion of reflection, the doubling of philosophical consciousness, is no
mere play of thought unleashed and, as it were, divested of its material;
it is sound. In that consciousness recalls, through self-reflection, how
it has failed to capture reality.34
In other words, Adorno takes the relationship between the ‘we’ and
natural consciousness to be put into question through the form in which
the Phenomenology is presented. It challenges the authority of reason as
a tribunal that interrogates the claims to the possession of the experi-
ence of natural consciousness; therefore, the question of right is itself
put into question.
This provides a definitive clue to grasping the meaning of a self-
completing skepticism from the standpoint of, and for, critical theory.
From the narrative of Hegel’s 1801 essay on skepticism, we know that
the form that modern skepticism typically takes, that is, doubt, is to be
distinguished from a ‘true’ or genuine form of skepticism. The distinc-
tion between doubt and some other form of skepticism appears in
paragraph 78, where Hegel discusses what he calls the ‘road’ of the
Phenomenology. The idea of a road is central to the method of the work,
and involves the idea that there are three layers to each ‘stage’ in the
work. There is, first of all, ‘natural consciousness’, which refers to the
form of subjective experience of the world as this occurs within different
cultures across historical time, and within different groups within those
cultures. Hence the form and not simply the content of experience is
different for the master and for the slave (as the famous chapter on self-
consciousness argues), and for the ancient relative to the modern.
Second, there is philosophical consciousness or ‘reflection’, which is
able to observe the contradictions and insufficiencies of ‘natural con-
sciousness’, and to express these as philosophical systems. But philo-
sophical systems must be understood as both in harmony and in conflict
with natural consciousness. They are in harmony inasmuch as systems
represent codifications or ‘shapes of spirit’ of natural consciousness and
its contradictions, and hence express in philosophical form the character

of those contradictions. On the other hand, systems are in conflict with
natural consciousness because that consciousness must be initially
dispelled in order for philosophizing to begin, and this is the earliest
form of skepticism, one that has its own history, as recounted in the
1801 essay.
In its earliest manifestations, in ancient skepticism, that dispelling is
taken as unproblematic. As the history of thought unfolds, this skepti-
cism turns against itself, yielding the false sensationalist form of mod-
ern empiricism represented by Schulze and Hume. A second form of
false skepticism develops within modern idealism, when it also dispels
natural consciousness, but in a form intended to reconstitute it as the
subject, and this takes the form of Cartesian doubt. These false forms,
then, are both instruments and expressions; their internally contradic-
tory motivations and operations express contradictory forms of natural
consciousness.
The forms of these false skepticisms are traced in the first part of para-
graph 78, where they are used to initially define self-completing skepti-
cism negatively by means of contrast:
Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the Notion of knowl-

edge, or in other words, not to be real knowledge. But since it directly
takes itself to be real knowledge, this path has a negative significance
for it, and what is in fact the realization of the Notion, counts for it
rather as the loss of its own self; for it does lose its truth on this path.
The road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more
precisely as the way of despair. For what happens on it is not what is
ordinarily understood when the word ‘doubt’ is used: shilly-shallying
about this or that presumed truth, followed by a return to that truth
again, after the doubt has been appropriately dispelled – so that at the
end of the process the matter is taken to be what it was in the first
place. On the contrary, this path is the conscious insight into the
untruth of phenomenal knowledge. … Therefore this thoroughgoing
skepticism [sich vollbringende Skeptizimus] is also not a skepticism with
which an earnest zeal for truth and science fancies it has prepared
and equipped itself in their service: the resolve, in Science, not to give
oneself over to the thoughts of others, upon mere authority, but to
examine everything for oneself and follow one’s own conviction, or
better still, to produce everything oneself, and accept only one’s own
deed as true.35
Hegel then proceeds to his positive understanding of self-completing

skepticism:
The skepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal

consciousness, on the other hand, renders the Spirit for the first time
competent to examine what truth is. For it brings about a state of
despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions
regardless of whether they are called one’s own or someone else’s,
ideas with which the consciousness [of truth] straight away is still
filled and hampered, so that it is, in fact, incapable of carrying out
what it wants to undertake 36
Here Hegel, in contesting the possibility of a clear ‘beginning’ to philos-

ophizing (of beginning as a ‘shot from a pistol’) anticipates the argument
in the Science of Logic, that the success of the self-completing skepticism
of the Phenomenology is the necessary prelude to the standpoint of the
Logic.
This points to a different interpretation of the multiple levels of the
Phenomenology – it is, in fact, an historico-transcendental deduction of the
standpoint of the Logic. This issue can be clarified partly with respect to
Hegel’s understanding of ancient skepticism. As was noted in Chapter 1,
Hegel criticizes the use of terms like ‘subjective’, ‘objective’, ‘absolute’
and so forth as abstractions, whose relationship to experience, which is
supposed to be what is to be explained by such terms, remains incom-
prehensible.37 Hegel’s critique of Schulze is framed in these terms, and
can be understood as a generalized critique of method per se, of a
method that comes before what it is to be applied to. The implications
of understanding the Phenomenology in this way include a decisive rejec-
tion of metacritique as a skeptical impulse. Metacritique, and indeed cri-
tique, as Kant conceived it, are based on the conception of Science as a
canon38 or a method. ‘Method’ is derived from the Greek ‘meta’, mean-
ing ‘with’ or ‘after’, and ‘hodos’, meaning ‘way’. The references Hegel
makes to method in the Introduction, through the use of terms
like examination (Untersuchungen), investigation (Forschung) and inquiry
(Erkundigung), are used in the context of the apprehensions of reflection
and the understanding. Hegel therefore attempts to avoid the connota-
tions of these terms because they abstract from experience, and turn it
into a product rather than an object. Equally, he attempts to avoid the
idea of the Phenomenology as prescribing a ‘pathway’, with the ineradica-
ble association of such a term with Fichte’s notion of absolute method as
an ‘ought’. Indeed, the difficulties that Hegel encounters in proscribing
a predetermined abstract principle of method, and then introducing his

own ‘method’ are attempts to encounter the dilemmas of arch[ and telos
that arose within Ancient skepticism. Rose brings out the problem of
method and the relation to natural consciousness as follows:
The Phenomenology is not a teleological development towards the rec-

onciliation of all oppositions between consciousness and its objects,
to the abolition of ‘natural’ consciousness as such. The Phenomenology
is the education of our abstract philosophical consciousness. … The
Preface and Introduction are not simply abstract statements denounc-
ing abstract statement. The abstract rejection of abstraction is the
only way to induce abstract consciousness to begin to think non-
abstractly. This consistency is the Hegelian system.39
The problem of the separation of method and content is bound up with

the problem of the constitution of the subject in the Phenomenology. But
if the education of ‘our’ abstract consciousness is not to be abstract, but
concrete, then it must at the same time be radically open, historically
contingent and ‘we’ construed as a social subject.40 Moreover, if Hegel’s
system is the attempt to produce dialectically the conjunction of the
objectification and examination of experience with its objectification
and examination of itself, without reducing one to the other, then this
would seem to contradict the ambition to produce a system per se.
Therefore, the reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology that takes it to be a pro-
gressive uncovering of the illusions of natural consciousness misses the
point of the work. A reading in terms of the work’s self-completing skep-
ticism takes it to be also undermining its own manner of presentation
as it is presented, thus intimating that any project oriented towards
dissolving illusion will relapse into illusion itself.
4.4. Evading the Absolute
Given this perspective, the question arises as to whether Hegel believes

that his evasion of the traps of presupposing an ‘absolute standpoint’ is
sufficient to escape the skeptical reflexivity that he turns against Kant
and Fichte: In other words, can a system that denies systemics be main-
tained? Returning to the bipartite definition of what is involved in a sys-
tem, it can be seen that it is a central insight of Hegelian skepticism that
the necessity attaching to the site of entry into a system – the arch[
necessity – is dogmatic, and that this is the case on the basis not of exter-
nal importation of criteria for the success of a deduction, but immanently
contradictory. Hegel’s attitude to the second notion of a system – its

internal structure and necessary development – is highly ambiguous. On
the one hand, there are the numerous exhortations as to the necessity
of ‘completion’. On the other hand, the idea of the Phenomenology
attempts to dismantle that necessity from within. Rose’s notion that this
ambiguity – the unresolved internal conflict of the Phenomenology – can
be construed as the system, re-writes the meaning of Hegelian skepticism,
its relation to any notion of completion and, ultimately to the question
of Hegel’s Absolute.
The analysis of Hegel’s extrapolation of the objective side of Kant’s
theory of experience can be said to bring together two skeptical themes
that have been encountered previously. In Chapter 1, I outlined Hegel’s
appreciation for the universality of ancient skepticism, the fact that it
did not impose limits upon the contradictions and incomprehensibility
of experience. In Chapter 3, I drew attention to the function of Kant’s
antinomies and their relation to ordinary experience. Hegel’s objection
to the form in which the Kantian antinomies are expressed is a conse-
quence of the extrapolation of the objective side of Kant’s subjective
idealism. In the Science of Logic, Hegel expresses this as follows:
Kant wanted to give his four cosmological antinomies a show of com-

pleteness by the principle of classification which he took from his
schema of the categories. But profounder insight into the antinomial,
or more truly into the dialectical nature of reason demonstrates
any Notion whatever to be a unity of opposed moments to which,
therefore, the form of antinomial assertions could be given41
Following this remark, Hegel states that “Ancient skepticism did not
spare itself the pains of demonstrating this contradiction or antinomy
in every notion which confronted it in the sciences.”42 The difference
between ancient and Hegelian skepticism in this respect is of course
that the Ancients did not express the opposed moments in any thing or
concept of a thing as a unity at all, but precisely a lack of any such unity.
In other words, the Ancients’ universal skepticism coincided with a self-
conscious refusal of a unifying moment. Hegel’s intimation of the unity
of the opposed moments in any notion whatever leads ultimately to the
issue of the meaning of the Absolute. The ultimate incompatibility of
a consistent skepticism with Absolute idealism will be addressed in
Chapter 6. Here, however, we can mark out Hegel’s divergence from
Ancient skepticism in terms of what he calls “the most abstract expression
of the Absolute … the identity of identity and non-identity.”43
In Faith and Knowledge, Hegel attempts to formulate the Absolute as a

self-completing moment within the system itself, and hence as ‘objective’,
rather than imposed by the subjectivity of the system-builder. The ‘defini-
tion’ of the Absolute that appears here and in the other early writings,
when Hegel was still strongly under the influence of Schelling, is the
idea of a ‘higher’ identity within which identity and difference are
themselves suspended. In Faith and Knowledge, this higher identity is
presented as an extrapolation of the productive power of imagination
which “should not be taken as the middle term that gets inserted
between an existing absolute subject and an absolute existing world.
The productive imagination must be recognized as primary and origi-
nal, as that out of which subjective ego and objective world first sunder
themselves into the bipartite appearance and product.”44
In Hegel’s later writings, including the Phenomenology, in which the
expression of the Absolute in terms of the faculty of imagination is effec-
tively dropped, we still find the appeal to a final synthesis, or sublation,
through which the Absolute is ultimately attained. The moment of sub-
lation, expressed in the speculative identity of identity and non-identity
constitutes something of a fault-line that runs through the interpreta-
tion of Hegel. For some, the moment of sublation is simply a movement
of dogmatic closure that must be resisted. Thus Jacques Derrida distin-
guishes his theory of différance as the method of unbalancing opposi-
tions “without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room
for a solution in the form of a speculative dialectics.”45 For the critical
theorists, and in particular Adorno, a speculative dialectics cannot be
simply rejected, but confronted with its own implications. Any predeter-
mined refusal to entertain the speculative moment goes against dialectics,
which must encounter and then subject the notion of the identity of
identity and non-identity to immanent critique.
The nature of this fault-line, I shall argue in Part III of this work,
relates to the manner in which a speculative dialectics is to be avoided.
However, the issue of whether Hegelian dialectics is to be simply refused,
as a “stopping short” at an “external and subjective” version of the ques-
tion, will be shown to involve, for Adorno, what he perceives as the dan-
gers of returning to Kant on the one hand or towards Nietzsche on the
other. It is in these terms that I shall address the relationship between
critical theory, Hegelian dialectics and Nietzsche’s preemption of the
German idealist path, and show how these relationships again raise the
problem of skepticism.
Part III
Skepticism and the Critique
of Modernity
5
Skepticism, Nihilism and
the Crisis of Rationality
If the question of skepticism is crucial to understanding the key

epistemological problems affecting the development of German idealism,
it must also affect our understanding of the project of critical theory.
For critical theory is, in key respects, an adaptation of the concerns of
German idealism to the crises of rationality that came to light in the
twentieth century, but which could then no longer be contained within
strictly philosophical discourse. In Part III of this book, I am concerned
with the implications of the interpretation of the problem of skepticism
within German idealism for the critique of modernity carried out by the
Frankfurt School of critical theory. However this requires an initial sig-
nificant clarification of the concerns of critical theory in general, includ-
ing its conception of reason and its crises, and the role of the critique of
philosophy within the critical theory of modernity. That is the purpose
of this chapter.
As I have argued previously, the history of skepticism cannot be traced
in terms of a single narrative. However, Hegel’s notion of self-completing
skepticism is defined in opposition to two other stances, which may be
taken as representative of the general skeptical perspectives available to
modern philosophy. From the standpoint of critical theory, however,
perspectives are never simply philosophical, but are expressions of the
experiential and reflective categories available within the culture in
general, and therefore are also social forces with particular historical
consequences.1 As such, skeptical empiricism is associated with the devel-
opment of the ‘instrumental rationality’ that Adorno and Horkheimer
analyze in the most far-reaching and influential statement of the con-
cerns of the first generation of critical theorists, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The conception of reason addressed in that work conforms closely to
the ‘pure heteronomy’ of facts2 that Hegel encounters in Schulze’s
103
development of Hume’s skepticism. However, understood in its social

context, the important qualities and associations of that conception are
those of disenchantment, domination and nihilism, which Adorno and
Horkheimer take to be intrinsic to modern reason and modern society.
Dialectic of Enlightenment does not advance a specific definition of
either instrumental rationality or skepticism, but the former concept is
taken up from the work of Weber, whose distinctive characterization of
modern rationality as ‘instrumental’ (Zweckrationalität)3 first presented
the problem of modern rationality in a form that clarified the crisis at its
core. That crisis involves not simply the ascendance of instrumentalism
but also of nihilism, which Weber generalizes into a problem of moder-
nity.4 But Weber himself takes up these issues in the context in which
they were originally framed by Nietzsche’s objections to Kant’s critical
philosophy. To understand this problem in its appropriate scope and
context requires, then, a hermeneutic detour through both Nietzsche’s
and Weber’s accounts of the origins of modern instrumentalism. For both
thinkers, that origin can be traced to skeptical empiricism. But, while for
Weber, instrumentalism leads to the ascendance of formal rationality
and modern disenchantment, for Nietzsche it leads – via the impetus
gained through Kantian critique – to modern nihilism. Both accounts are
important for understanding the diagnosis of the crisis of reason devel-
oped by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, while the
perspective of that work has to be understood in relation to the alternative
notion of skepticism offered by Hegel’s Phenomenology.
The argument in this chapter will be developed in three stages. First,
I present an account of the most general features of the stance of criti-
cal theory in relation to the conception of reason associated with the
Enlightenment and modernity, and how this underwrites the justifica-
tion for a Hegelian-inspired critique of modern philosophy. This section
also establishes a framework for the argument to be developed in
Chapter 6, which concerns the relationship between Hegel’s notion of a
‘genuine’ skepticism and Adorno’s conception of a negative dialectics.
Second, the meanings of instrumentalism and nihilism are clarified and
discussed with reference to the specific cast given to them by Weber and
Nietzsche. Third, I will show how these diagnoses of nihilism and the
crisis of reason affect the specific stance of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
5.1. The critique of philosophy
A central thesis of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is

that the Enlightenment conception of skepticism has entered into a
Skepticism, Nihilism and the Crisis of Rationality 105
symbiotic and mutually catalytic relationship with the economic forces

and social and political institutions of global capitalism.5 Together, these
produce a ‘system’ that is progressively totalizing and increasingly
refractory to critical knowledge, evaluation and control by the sub-
ject by and for whom that system is produced. Correlatively, the
Enlightenment notion of the subject undergoes transformation from
the abstract aggregate ‘we’ of Kantian rational beings to the collective
‘we’ of Hegelian historically educated national communities, to the idea
of a universal class,6 and is eventually eclipsed as a possible object of
knowledge and entity per se. The outcome is a social system and a way
of thinking that resembles, more than anything, a philosophical system
infected, as it were, with an idealist arch[, in which subject and object
are unknowable in themselves and the system has attained an inde-
pendent developmental dynamic that inoculates it against any attempt
to intervene in that development.
The first generation of critical theorists took over many of the concepts
honed by the founders of sociology to describe these processes. Adorno,
Marcuse and Horkheimer all agree that rationalization and differentiation –
the evolutionary dynamics emphasized respectively by Weber and
Durkheim – are objective processes that are operative in the development
of modern society, but which are subordinate to the demands of capital-
ist accumulation, as expressed in Marx’s law of value.7 For Adorno,
rationalization involves the institutionalization of identity-thinking
within routinized social practices subordinate to uncritical acceptance of
the law of value.8 Differentiation refers to the complementary tendency
for social forms to become progressively more diffuse, and for society as
a whole to qualitatively expand in accordance with the ever-increasing
division of labor.9 They agree with Weber that rationalization is accom-
panied by disenchantment of the world, and disagree with Durkheim that
differentiation could provide the basis for new forms of solidarity; on the
contrary, under the rule of the law of value, differentiation tends towards
increasing alienation and social atomization.
Both rationalization and differentiation, understood as social
processes, are accompanied by alterations in the basic categories of
experience and knowledge. Those alterations lead towards reductive,
mathematized, qualitatively impoverished forms of consciousness and
an uncritical acceptance of the legitimacy of positivistic science. Since
modern philosophy underwrites the claims of both experience and
knowledge, the critique of philosophy is a crucial component of the
critical theory program (although the weight given to its centrality to
the overall project of a critical theory of society varies.10)
For Adorno, twentieth-century philosophy remains entrenched

within the modern skeptical antinomy that Hegel expresses in the intro-
duction to the Phenomenology. The conception of knowing as an instru-
ment, in which the object is subjectively overdetermined, together with
the refusal of reflection on the nature of the instrument in favor of a
dogmatic conformity to the ‘facts of consciousness’, has become the
dominant model within epistemology. The presuppositions of skeptical
empiricism, in other words, guide contemporary paradigms, issuing in
a philosophical positivism on the one hand, and human sciences based
on such abstract characterizations as ‘individual’ and ‘society’ on the
other.11 The contemporary philosophical resistance to that dominance,
in the form of phenomenology and ontology, simply pursues the other
arm of Hegel’s antinomy, conceiving knowledge as a medium in which
the object gains an ascendency over its representation, generally becom-
ing mystified as a transcendent entity or as objective idealism.12 Under
either description, the philosophy that arises is a form of idealism,
although one that does not recognize itself as such. This is why Adorno
conceives of the central purpose of Negative Dialectics as a ‘liquidation
of idealism’.13
To this diagnostic picture of the crises affecting modern epistemology,
critical theory erects an array of alternatives. The starting point for all
of them, however, as Horkheimer argues in his seminal 1937 essay,
“Traditional and Critical Theory,” is the refusal to separate from each
other areas of inquiry that the dominant theoretical paradigms within
the sciences, as a matter of course – and in line with the contemporary
understanding of the meaning of epistemology per se – treat as discrete
and distinct areas: (1) The inquiry into facts, in accordance with a
method invoked prior to the inquiry; (2) the theory of knowledge
underlying that method; and (3) the historical processes that condition
all three of these elements (the facts, the method and the theory).14 In
addition, the historicism that infuses all the claims of critical against
traditional theory disallows (4) the separation of theoretical and practical
reason, or, as the dominant paradigms currently express that separation,
questions of fact from those of value.
The refusal to partition these questions from each other invokes
Hegel’s demand, in the Phenomenology, that the blocks and limits that
Kant’s system erects against the interpenetration of parts – transcendental
with empirical logic, experience with reflection and method with
inquiry – be subjected to a dialectical dissolution. However, in the
form in which this refusal is intimated in Dialectic of Enlightenment, it
is inspired by Nietzsche’s quite different approach to the problem of
rationality. In particular, while the notion of instrumentalism is

undoubtedly central to Hegel’s relationship to both skeptical empiricism
and to Kant’s notion of critique, its crucial position within the critical
theory conceptual armory is inextricable from the problem of nihilism,
as Nietzsche expresses it. An account of this co-origin and subsequent
development of the concept of instrumental reason is therefore crucial
to understanding the argument developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
5.2. Nietzsche, Weber and the antinomies of reason
Nietzsche’s importance is often presented simply in terms of his critique

of the rationality of the post-Enlightenment culture of nineteenth-
century Europe, and his proposed alternatives to that culture. In this
context, Nietzsche is often painted as an irrationalist. But those elements
of Nietzsche’s thought that became influential to critical theory are con-
nected less with his antagonisms to what he saw as a culture of bad faith
and self-delusion masquerading as enlightened rationality, or with his
mythic appeal to some notion of overcoming western metaphysics, than
with his diagnosis of liberal modernity’s ills in terms of nihilism. The
consequences of this diagnosis have been taken up by a range of
thinkers, including, but not limited to the critical theorists.15 The mean-
ing of Nietzsche’s nihilism itself, however, is subject to widely divergent
interpretations.16
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno divides nihilism into four general forms,
each of which involves a misrecognition of its object. The first, termed
‘abstract nihilism’, is associated with ‘emptiness’ and ‘senselessness’,
and involves the exhaustion of meaning from life when it is framed
purely in terms of profit and loss. This notion is associated with the
ascendancy of formal rationality. Formal rationality can have no
response to the problem of meaning other than “to calculate the net
profit of life,” which is “precisely the death which the so-called question
of meaning wished to escape.”17 This form of nihilism is closely associ-
ated with the degradation of the notion of truth, since the universal
reduction of meaning to cost–benefit analysis involves a convergence
of the principle of exchange with the correspondence theory of truth.18
A second species of nihilism is associated with value – not as a trans-
valuation of values, as Nietzsche foresaw – but as the emptying out of
any content from the value-orientations of European culture. A third form
of nihilism, also bound up with meaning, consists in a Schopenhauerian
confrontation with the will to live, which Adorno convicts of individu-
alistic hubris.19 A final form, associated with existentialism, involves the
belief in or desire for nothingness. This last form, Adorno points out, is
inauthentic, by virtue of the “meaning, the ‘something’ which, legiti-
mately or not, we mean by the word believing,”20 but both these latter
forms of nihilism are self-deluded, inasmuch as they involve a belief
that negation is possible without a determinate remainder. As such they
regress behind Hegel’s dialectical logic, and even behind Kant’s notion
of critique, which recognizes, in the “Amphiboly of the Concepts of
Reflection,” the determinate outcome of the attempts to think nothing.21
In contrast, the entwined meanings of nihilism, understood as the
exhaustion of the concepts of truth and value as benchmarks of meaning
within modern societies, represent, for critical theory, real manifestations
of the crisis of reason.
Nietzsche’s insights into the coming of nihilism are premised on his
conviction that this exhaustion is a result of the internal, self-undermining
dynamic intrinsic to the negative side of Enlightenment thinking,
which Hegel conceptualized in terms of a species of false skepticism. The
internality and inevitability of that dynamic mutually entail each
other – hence Nietzsche’s intention to “relate the history of the next two
centuries … [to] describe what is coming, what can no longer come
differently: the advent of nihilism.”22 In Book One of The Will to Power,
Nietzsche identifies the root causes of European nihilism in the with-
drawal of commitment from three interrelated ideals: those of ends,
unity and truth.23 The ends that Nietzsche discusses are associated with
an ultimate-value orientation towards universal happiness, the growth
of love or a primary ethical canon. The withdrawal of commitment from
unity involves withdrawal from the ideal of order or systematization.24
Third, and most important, nihilism follows from the liquidation of the
concept of truth, understood as oriented to a ‘world’ as it is independent
of some beings’ conception of it.
Nietzsche draws two immediate conclusions regarding the conse-
quences of these withdrawals for the future of European culture. First,
“the faith in the categories of reason is the cause of nihilism. We have
measured the value of the world according to categories that refer to a
purely fictitious world.”25 Second,
All the values by means of which we have tried so far to render the
world estimable for ourselves and which then proved inapplicable and
therefore devaluated the world – all these values are, psychologically
considered, the results of certain perspectives of utility, designed to
maintain and increase human constructs of domination – and they
have been falsely projected into the essence of things.26
This claim – that behind the withdrawal from these separate ideal
complexes there lies a single tendentious, ascendant perspective associ-
ated with utility and domination – is the primary point of common
concern between critical theory and Nietzsche’s perspectives on German
idealism. For, of course, the three ideals that Nietzsche cites constitute
the anchoring ideals of Kant’s critical philosophy: the commitment to
an absolute ethical canon, to the legitimation of true experience and to
the systematic unity of reason that undergird the first two aims.27
Nietzsche’s argument, that the preoccupation with utility undermines
faith in such ideals, is pursued in various forms throughout his writings,
but it is clear that his proclamation of nihilism does not rest on separate
claims about the exhaustion of meaning in the domains of value, truth
and their systematic justification, but implies a pre-existing common
condition that affects each of those domains equally. This precondition
is the radical separation of the meanings of truth and value in the first
place, which was followed by Kant’s (and Fichte’s) attempts to re-conjoin
them, and in so doing to establish their systematic foundation.
Nietzsche’s distinctive insight is therefore that the precondition for
nihilism is the acceptance of the Enlightenment world-view that
detaches the meanings of truth and value from each other. In other words,
the disuniting of reason is the precondition for the exhaustion of mean-
ing from the concepts of truth and value.28 That world-view derives
primarily from the eighteenth century, and finds its most important
expression in the skepticism of Hume.29
As I have noted previously, Hume’s skepticism has two edges to it. First,
he challenges the concepts of causality, of self and thinghood per se,30
and thus, as Isaiah Berlin describes it, does away with the “metaphysical
cement that had hitherto held the objective world together as a system
of logically linked relations within and between facts and events.”31 This
is the outcome of his separation of relations of ideas and matters of fact,
a distinction sometimes known as Hume’s Fork. Second, Hume was the
first to make explicit the disconnection between claims about truth,
which he redescribes in terms of the capacity to reason, and claims about
morals, which he redescribes in terms of sentiments. Hume’s often-
quoted manner of expressing his moral skepticism, “that in every system
of morality that I have met with …, instead of the usual copulations of
propositions, is and is not, I met with no proposition that is not con-
nected with an ought or ought not”32 is often known as the is/ought
distinction or the fact/value distinction, or simply as ‘Hume’s Law’. What
is less often acknowledged is that Hume’s Fork is in fact the basis of
Hume’s Law, and it is the separation of the realms of truth and value from
each other that inspired both Kant’s redescription of the moral basis for
action in terms of practical reason, and his search for the common root
of theoretical and practical reason. As Marcuse expresses it,
the idealistic counterattack was provoked not by the empiricist

approaches of Locke and Hume, but by their refutation of general
ideas … [R]eason’s right to shape reality depended upon man’s ability
to hold generally valid truths … . For Hume, general ideas are abstracted
from the particular, and ‘represent’ the particular and the particular
only. They can never provide universal rules or principles.33
This undermines the rationalist belief that “reason could lead beyond the
brute fact of what is, to the realization of what ought to be.”34 Hume’s
Fork, although it appears initially as a purely ‘negative’ doctrine (simply,
as Kant himself was wont to interpret it, as a check on the ambitions of
reason) emerges, in Kant’s formalization of Hume’s Law, in the separa-
tion of pure and practical reason (and in a manner that neither Kant not
Hume could have anticipated) as the precondition for rationalization,35
that is, its formalization as a doctrine of pure facts and pure means.36
The consequences of the disuniting of reason for critical theory – and
in this they depart from Nietzsche’s stance – have to be understood as
entwined with social processes such as atomization and desacralization
that accompany it. No single framework can do justice to all the social
processes engendered by that disuniting, but certain ones provide key
indices of the relevant changes. Horkheimer, for example, traces the polit-
ical expression of rationalization in the principle of universal tolerance.37
[T]he bourgeois idea of tolerance … is ambivalent. On the one hand,

tolerance means freedom from the rule of dogmatic authority; on the
other, it furthers an attitude of neutrality towards all spiritual con-
tent, which is thus surrendered to relativism. Each cultural domain
preserves its ‘sovereignty’ with regard to universal truth. The pattern
of the social division of labor is automatically transferred to the life
of the spirit, and this division of the realm of culture is a corollary to
the replacement of universal objective truth by formalized inherently
relativist reason.38
Horkheimer indicts this insulation of each domain from the other (the
moral, the political, the cultural, the economic and the scientific) for
its unsustainability, and therefore for its irrationality,39 which is due
to the “intellectual imperialism of the abstract principle of self-interest –
the core of the official ideology of liberalism [indicating] the growing
schism between this ideology and social conditions within the industri-
alized nations.”40 Such a schism leaves liberalism vulnerable to the
extremisms of fanaticism on the one hand,41 and to total economic
rationalization on the other.42
For Horkheimer and Adorno at least, it is economic rationalization –
understood as the universal inflation of the principle of utility – that truly
expresses the spirit of nihilism, and Dialectic of Enlightenment is devoted to
grasping the world-historical implications of the ascendance of that prin-
ciple. But the precondition of such an ascendance is the Enlightenment
distinction between the realms of pure reason on the one hand and of
pure sentiments on the other. This distinction sets in motion the interplay
of disintegrative social processes and rational reflection on a new ‘ethical
a priori’, an interplay that accelerates the process of rationalization.43
The is/ought distinction is not equivalent to, but the foundation for,
the separation of facts and values, the formalization of which modern
social theory (and social science) owes to Weber. An initial sense of how
Weber develops the distinction and its implications is enabled by a
review of the renewed scrutiny of the historical separation of reason and
sentiment that has followed Alasdair MacIntyre’s highly influential
account, in After Virtue, of the moral consequences of what he calls ‘the
Enlightenment project of attempting to justify morality’. The diagnostic
narrative that MacIntyre wants to tell concerning the disintegration of
morality in liberal modernity closely resembles Nietzsche’s (and indeed
Hegel’s), and derives from similar considerations.44 MacIntyre credits
Nietzsche with being the first to realize that the breakdown of modern
moral vocabulary stemmed from the Enlightenment separation of the
spheres of truth and value, and gives rise to the ascendance of instru-
mental rationality. MacIntyre’s account also connects that narrative
explicitly with Weber’s perspective, and provides a gateway to under-
standing Weber’s distinctive contribution to grasping the problem of
instrumentalism as it was later taken up by the critical theorists.45
MacIntyre points out that the discourse of morality as we know it and
experience it today consists of
fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those con-

texts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simu-
lacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions but
we have – very largely – if not entirely – lost our comprehension, both
theoretical and practical, of morality.46
This loss is visible not simply in the incommensurability of the

languages within which many rival moral claims today are made, for
example the language of rights versus the language of utility, but also in
the vocabulary of our institutional practices, including those concerned
with the production of and reflection on knowledge. Hence, MacIntyre
includes in his diagnostic investigation, an account of the substance of
contemporary philosophical and sociological inquiry into morality.
Contemporary analytic moral philosophy is underwritten by the
emotivist theory of morals, the idea – sometimes traceable to
C.L. Stevenson – that moral statements are merely subjective expres-
sions of preference. They cannot be cast into the language of truth and
rationality and are, therefore, ultimately without meaning. The origins
of emotivism, both as a philosophical and an everyday view of morals,
stem, however, not from some ‘fall’ or degradation, but from the objec-
tification of the language of morality as a distinct and discrete sphere:
The history of the word ‘moral’ cannot be told adequately apart from
an account of the attempts to provide a rational justification for
morality in that historical period – say from 1630 to 1850 – when it
acquired a sense at once general and specific. In that period, ‘morality’
became the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct
which are neither theological not legal nor aesthetic are allowed a
cultural space of their own. It is only in the later seventeenth century
and eighteenth century, when this distinguishing of the moral from
the theological, the legal and the aesthetic has become a received
doctrine, that the project of an independent rational justification of
morality becomes not merely the concern of individual thinkers, but
central to Northern European culture.47
Once the term had been abstracted from, and acquired an existence
independently of, the institutionalized practices of shared social life, and
thus rationalized as an independent object of inquiry, it became possi-
ble to conceive of ‘justifying’ morality, a project that is inseparable from
the attempt to centralize and control its meaning.48 But, as MacIntyre
argues, that very process of abstraction constitutes a rending of the
relations within which ‘moral’ language can authentically consist. Thus,
the Enlightenment project of justifying morality “had to fail” on its own
terms and as a consequence of its own actions.49 The objectification of
morality is thus a self-undermining endeavor.
The objectification of morality is also the premise of the value-free
approach to sociology, which owes its origins and most sophisticated
expression to Weber.50 Weber, however, also recognized the momen-
tousness of that objectification once it is raised to the level of a civilizational
principle in the ascendance of instrumental reason and its correlate,

homo oeconomicus. MacIntyre and the critical theorists both develop
Weber’s primarily economic account of the growth of instrumental rea-
son by applying it to culture, and both recognize – as Weber arguably
did not – that it is in the realm of culture that the ascendancy of instru-
mental reason is truly totalizing, since culture increasingly saturates
social life to a degree not available to the merely political. Thus, accord-
ing to MacIntyre, the culture is infused with a drastic weakening of
the moral vocabulary available to the denizens of the modern liberal state.
The moral outlook of the dominant social characters, “the rich aesthete,
the therapist and the manager,”51 and their contemporary vision of the
world, do not simply consist in the internalization of the Weberian dis-
tinction between instrumental and substantive rationality – between the
belief that values are important for their role as the means to achieve
rational goals as effectively and efficiently as possible and the belief that
values are binding on action for their own sake – but have passed beyond
the recognition that such an opposition exists in the first place. In other
words, modern liberal culture has absorbed the lesson but not the
dilemma that Weber presents, in his famous essay, “Science as a
Vocation,” that “we need new reasons to think that what is produced by
scientific work is important in the sense of ‘worth being known’. And it
is obvious that all our problems lie here, for this presupposition cannot
be proved by scientific means.”52 As a result, in moral terms, the dis-
tinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations is
obliterated.53 Politically, liberalism becomes publicly defined in terms of
the ends-indifference, that is, the separation of value from truth, of its
political practices. As politics, as in culture, rationalization codifies the
taken-for-granted commitment in modern industrialized societies to
viewing the questions of the ends of human life as in principle unsett-
lable, and therefore meaningless, as loci of orientations for shared life.
MacIntyre’s understanding has the advantage of placing Weber’s
theory of rationality center-stage. Yet his rendering, in common with
other accounts, fails to recognize certain key distinctions within Weber’s
theory. The conventional account of Weber’s position is roughly as
follows: Unlike positivism, Weber recognizes the value-laden nature of
scientific rationality per se. But Weber’s view of science rests on a
distinction, made explicit by later philosophy of science, between two
types of value judgment, one hypothetical, the other categorical, these
corresponding to the distinction between instrumental and intrinsic
values.54 Instrumental values are sought for their role as the means to
achieve intrinsically valuable ends. The choice of instrumental values
takes place according to objectively rational criteria, namely, how effec-

tively they are in bringing about intrinsic values. As regards intrinsic
values, however, science is silent – there is no scientific way to resolve
disputes over them. Since the values held by individuals, cultures or
subcultures must be accepted as ‘givens’, yet are all equally subjective,
moral and political conflict takes the form of a power struggle among
the various values and interests, with the right solution being deter-
mined by whoever has the most power or persuasive force, often itself
determined by purely instrumental considerations. Thus, Weber’s politics
may be viewed as an unmasking of democracy as simply the extension
of power politics into all realms of life.
A closer look at Weber’s nuanced account of the general nature of
rationality in Economy and Society, however, reveals not a single opposi-
tion between instrumental and intrinsic values, but a double antinomy,
between, on the one hand, instrumentally rational (Zweckrational)
versus value-rational (Wertrational) action, and, on the other, between
formal and substantive rationality. Instrumentally rational action “is
determined by expectations as to the behavior of objects in the envi-
ronment and of other human beings; these expectations are used as
‘conditions’ or ‘means’ for the attainment of the actor’s own rationally
pursued and calculated ends,”55 while value-rational action “is deter-
mined by a conscious belief in the value for its own sake of some ethical,
aesthetic, religious or other form of behavior, independently of its
prospects for success.”56 The antinomy between formal and substantive
rationality, on the other hand, is presented as a category within modes
of economic behavior. Formally rational economic activity exists “to
the degree to which the provision for needs … is capable of being
expressed in numerical, calculable terms and is so expressed.”57
Substantive rationality, by contrast,
conveys only one element common to all substantive analyses:

namely, that they do not restrict themselves to note the purely
formal and (relatively) unambiguous fact that action is based on goal-
oriented rational calculation … but apply certain criteria of ultimate
ends … and measure the results of the economic action, however
formally rational in the sense of correct calculation they may be,
against the scales of ‘value rationality’.58
The two antinomies are generally conflated into a single one,59 regis-
tering the fact that the formal/substantive antinomy is to be viewed as
simply the application of the instrumental/value-rational antinomy to
the realm of economic life. But this conflation then misses Weber’s point
that the language of economics is precisely and uniquely suited to
express the antinomy between the instrumentally rational and value-
rational as an antinomy – in the form of formal versus substantive ration-
ality. But formal rationality in fact does not simply stand in for
instrumental rationality within the realm of economics, but contains
specific value-rational commitments of its own – that of taking “given
subjective wants and arranging them in a scale of consciously assessed
relative urgency,”60 that is, of following the principle of marginal utility.
This means that formal rationality, inasmuch as it acknowledges the prin-
ciple of utility, is shot through with specific value commitments, namely
those of establishing scales of value. As Immanuel Wallerstein expresses
it, in commenting on the two Weberian antinomies, “to decide what is
marginally useful, one must design a scale. He who designs the scale
determines the outcome.”61 In other words, the fact of the second antin-
omy within the decision-making procedures of everyday life increasingly
obscures the existence of the first, and formal rationality comes to occupy
the position of the value-rational orientation itself. In this respect, the dis-
tinction between the instrumentally rational and value-rational is oblit-
erated, or becomes merely a distinction of points on a single scale.
The insight that the ideal of value-free social science privileges a
particular perspective, which is shot through with value-rational commit-
ments, but which appears as formal rationality, is merely a subordinate
part of Weber’s more general thesis; that we must understand the devel-
opment of capitalist modernity not as the negation of aristocratic ideals
and feudal structures by an objective rationality that incorporates a
‘view from nowhere’, but as expressing the outcome of positively for-
mulated value-orientations that are driving modern civilization towards
an economic form.62 In this respect, Weber correctly diagnoses the ideol-
ogy of liberal modernity as resting on a conflict between substantive and
formal rationality, which issues in the domination of the latter over the
former. The institutionalization of both the distinction and the domina-
tion, according to Horkheimer and Adorno, leads to the ascendancy of
the logic of endless capital accumulation and universal commodifica-
tion, which then becomes progressively dissolvent, and – in contradis-
tinction to liberalism’s own ideological justification, that it can
maintain the quarantining of its distinct domains – tends towards the
purely economic colonization of other forms of social life, that is,
culture and politics, but also experience and inner life.63
What Weber’s analysis does not provide, however, is an adequate
account of the philosophical background that brought the conflict
between instrumentalism/formalism and other kinds of reason to the

foreground in the first place. For Weber – who at least publicly kept faith
with value-free rationality, ostensibly in the name of intellectual
honesty64 – ‘rationality’ in general refers to one historically situated
form of cognitive orientation that only exists within actualized social
relations, and there is little meaning to an Idea of reason, beyond what
gets practiced and institutionalized through the play of power relations.
The critical theorists reject Weber’s value-free stance not simply because
of its abrogation of substantive rationality, but also because – as Weber’s
own arguments, as presented above, indicate – it is self-contradictory. If
‘value-free’ rationality is truly shot through with the value commitments
of formal rationality, then one cannot simply present this as a social
fact from a value-free perspective. Weber’s insight is therefore self-
undermining from the standpoint from which he presents it. This
criticism, crucially, hinges on the notion of the self-conception of enlight-
ened rationality, which, as will be seen, constitutes a central argument
within Dialectic of Enlightenment. However, that argument is also
dependent on the conception of nihilism that Nietzsche develops most
clearly in The Genealogy of Morals.
5.3. Enlightenment as self-completing nihilism
Another way of grasping Weber’s account of science is presented by

Raymond Aron:
Science reveals to us what we desire and what we can attain, but not
that which we ought to strive for; it leads us to self-knowledge and to
knowledge of the world. Beyond that is the sphere of desire and will.65
Weber’s conclusions in “Science as a Vocation” may therefore be under-

stood as an attempt to cut off reflection on the ‘beyond’ that underlies
the objectivity of modern science, and therefore an attempt to contain
Nietzsche’s confrontation with that realm.
In the Preface to The Will to Power, in which he cites the necessary
succession of nihilism, understood as the withdrawal of faith in the
three value-complexes constitutive of the culture of Enlightenment
rationality, Nietzsche intimates a further stage in the evolution of that
culture, which he presents as self-completing nihilism (sich-vollendenden
Nihilismus).66 Nietzsche’s self-completing nihilism, may be understood
as parallel to Hegel’s self-completing skepticism. Both respond to a skep-
ticism they view as corrosive, not through resistance but, as it were, by
turning the negativity of skepticism against itself. For Nietzsche, the

detachment of the meanings of truth and value from each other is the
necessary precondition of nihilism, but it is not sufficient. The utilitarian
perspective – which issues in the dominance of formal rationality – with
which Nietzsche is concerned, is not, in the skeptical form given it by
Hume, sufficient to generate the withdrawal from those three ideals that
together constitute the pillars of the modern value system, and this is
so because, in its empiricist form, that skepticism is not sufficiently
reflexive (as I argued in Chapter 3). From Nietzsche’s perspective, self-
completing nihilism arises as a consequence of the reflexive dynamic
that Kant sets in motion through the idea of critique. The contours of
Nietzsche’s argument on this point can be reconstructed as follows.
In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche points to the inadequacy of the
fundamental question of the first Critique, on which resistance to
Hume’s skepticism is thought to hinge, ‘how are synthetic judgments a
priori possible?’: “Synthetic judgments a priori should not ‘be possible’ at
all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false
judgments. Only, of course, the belief in their truth is necessary, as a
foreground belief and visual evidence belonging to the perspective
optics of life.”67 Nietzsche’s position is not, of course, that we should
therefore retreat to a pre-Kantian skepticism, but that the particular
questions that have been asked by modern philosophy, and which
culminate in Kantian critique should be interrogated critically as to their
origin. In other words, when Nietzsche interrogates the impetus behind
the will to truth, he is not merely reducing the question of the will to
truth to the quaestio quid facti of the drives and instincts that underlie
it; this would be to reduce genealogy to psychology.68 Rather, he is
asking why philosophy attempts to engage with precisely the questions
it does, and therefore he brings reason before a new tribunal, one that
espouses the new law tables of Zarathustra.
The outcome of such an interrogation is insight into the meaning of
the will to truth, which, in the third essay of the Genealogy of Morals, is
revealed as a form of the ascetic ideal – itself a sublimated form of the
will to power. The ascetic ideal consists in an abhorrence, as Nietzsche
expresses it, of “life … [that is] nature, world, the whole sphere of
becoming and transitoriness,”69 and a corresponding need to transcend
sensuous becoming, and to withdraw into an idealized abstract realm.
In other words, it is a determination to locate the value and the meaning
of life in an ahistorical ‘beyond’.70 In addition, asceticism has two over-
arching formal characteristics. First, it is reflexive, that is, intrinsically
self-directed; hence Nietzsche’s reflections that “[r]ead from a distant
star, the majuscule script of our earthly existence would perhaps lead to
the conclusion that the earth was the distinctively ascetic planet, a nook
of disgruntled arrogant and offensive creatures filled with a profound
disgust at themselves, at the earth, at all life.”71 Second, the ascetic ideal
is totalizing, it “permits no other goal, submits to no power” but con-
sists within a single “closed system of will, goal and interpretation.” 72
The ascetic ideal is, as it were, a single ‘package’ of values, whether
expressed as Platonism, Christianity or Kantianism. In Kant’s critical phi-
losophy, the knowing subject – a “pure, will-less, painless, timeless, know-
ing subject”73 – is characterized by an aspiration to apprehend the world
as pure immediacy, at the same time as it affirms the impossibility of that
task. Therefore, the will to truth expressed in the Kantian knowing sub-
ject is the same ascetic determination to locate the value and the mean-
ing of life in a transcendent ‘beyond’. It is, in short, an attempt to make
room for a metaphysical faith in truth to underpin the other two ideal
value-complexes of European culture – “faith in a metaphysical value, the
absolute value of truth [is] sanctioned and guaranteed by the [ascetic] ideal
alone.” 74 The self-completing moment appears in Nietzsche’s observation
that the will to truth embodied in Kant’s critical philosophy occupies a
special position within the spectrum of ideologies generated by the asce-
tic ideal. For once the critical philosophy, understood as “Christian truth-
fulness, has drawn one inference after another, it must end by drawing its
most striking inference, its inference against itself; this will happen, however,
when it poses the question ‘what is the meaning of all will to truth.’ ” 75
Nietzsche’s answer to that question has been variously interpreted.
One view, that it issues in relatively benign or emancipatory ‘perspec-
tivism’, which devalues truth as an end by making it relative to other
ends, and does not claim itself to represent Truth, has been defended by,
among others, Rorty and Foucault. Perspectivism consists in the claim
that the self-conception that emerges reflexively from the will to truth
is one that establishes a multiplicity of perspectives, from each of which
truth-from-a-point-of-view may be asserted. For Foucault, Nietzsche does
away with the notion of a unified rationality, and this leaves only strate-
gies of insight and strategies of subversion.76 For Rorty, and other prag-
matists, Nietzsche’s charge against Kant is underpinned by a relativist
epistemology: All knowing consists in mediation within systems of pur-
poses. To attempt to suspend that mediation is to attempt “to eliminate
the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect, supposing we were
capable of this – what would that mean but to castrate the intellect?”77
Therefore, if one values the notion of truth, one should respect “the lie
involved in the belief in Truth.” 78
For Horkheimer and Adorno, neither of these options are likely

outcomes of self-completing nihilism. Rather, they are closer to Weber’s
suspicion that the will to truth, while it undermines the ascetic faith in
a ‘beyond’, does not touch the other formal components of the ascetic
ideal – its reflexive orientation and its totalizing tendency towards the
colonization of other forms of life (as a “closed system of will, purpose
and interpretation”). As a result, the will to truth assumes the form of a
dissolvent rationality that is both skeptical, in its refusal to countenance
the claims of experience or knowledge that exceed the limits laid down
by formal rationality, and nihilistic, in the sense that it liquidates the
context in which the ideal value-complexes, in particular the faith in
truth, make sense. It is this convergence of dogmatic skepticism with
nihilism, and both as modern consequences of Enlightenment thinking
that is traced by Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment.
5.4. Dialectic of Enlightenment as critical prelude

to Negative Dialectics
If Dialectic of Enlightenment is primarily concerned with grasping and,

presumably in some sense, resisting the self-completing nihilism of
Enlightenment negativity, its own ‘standpoint’ becomes problematic.
The work cannot be simply a critique of Enlightenment thinking as self-
negating, without becoming part of that which it is intending to resist.
Dialectic of Enlightenment may be said to have suffered from misunder-
standings on this score inasmuch as it has been conceived as wholly
negative, and in this respect Adorno’s insistence that “dialectics is not a
stand-point” has often been taken too literally (and undialectically).79
Here, I am concerned with the work as highlighting the social forms
taken by the self-conception of Enlightenment, understood (1) as the
outcome of the skeptical empiricism which Hegel opposes in both the
1801 essay and the Phenomenology, and (2) as a response to Nietzsche’s
diagnosis of the self-completing nihilism to which that skepticism leads.
In these terms, it can be taken as a critical prelude to Negative Dialectics.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s argument appears to center on the claim
that the Enlightenment ideal of rationality has become collusive in the
erosion and appropriation of the emancipatory forces which it originally
engendered. The substance of that claim is captured in the aphorism
that forms its core thesis regarding the inherent reversibility of myth
and enlightenment: “[j]ust as the myths already realize enlightenment,
so enlightenment, with every step becomes more deeply engulfed
in mythology”,80 or as it is rendered elsewhere, “myth is already
enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.” 81 However,

the meaning of that cryptic opposition as a point of entry into the
critical theory conception of the vicissitudes of rationality and modernity
has been a matter of considerable dispute. I want to here distinguish
both a general level of understanding of the work, which is relatively
uncontroversial within contemporary conceptions of the critical theory
project, and a secondary level, characterized by significant fractures
within the work which point in a different direction as regards the main
tenets and future of critical theory.
Clearly, it is part of the intention of Dialectic of Enlightenment to
provide an antidote to any linear historical conception of the succession
of rational to pre-rational modes of thinking and of organizing society.
Therefore, at this level, the work is directed not only against the historical
conceptions of reason that proliferated in the Enlightenment, but also
Hegelianism, in the form in which it came to be influential in traditions
(such as organicism and pragmatism, but also Marxism) that give prior-
ity to Hegel’s philosophy of history, and the neo-Kantian historicism
implicit in the foundations of modern sociology.82 All these traditions
make use, implicitly or explicitly, of the concept of historical necessity or,
less prejudicially, of the ‘evolution of society’, in charting the transition
from premodern to modern, ‘enlightenment’ thinking. Adorno’s main
critique of Hegel’s philosophy of history, in Negative Dialectics, convicts
it, in the abstractive concept of the ‘world spirit’, of anticipating the con-
cept of ‘society’, and of harboring a prescriptive ambition towards “the
unity of the totally socialized society, the closest kin of the philosophical
idea of absolute identity, in that it tolerates nothing outside of itself.”83
The first half of the equation (‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’)
then, must be understood as directed against this broad range of
historicist renderings. From this position, it then seeks to undercut the
false dichotomy of a materialist versus idealist historicism, that is usu-
ally thought to differentiate those traditions. Adorno and Horkheimer’s
view that the domination of enlightenment over myth does not presage
emancipation, but the perpetuation of domination and unreason
within new forms, which recall and replay previous ones, has to be
understood both from the standpoint of consciousness and of actual
social and economic relationships. As they claim, in a significant passage
from the essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment,”
[m]ankind, whose versatility and knowledge become differentiated

with the division of labor, is at the same time forced back to anthro-
pologically more primitive stages, for with the technical easing of life
the persistence of domination brings about a fixation of the instincts

by means of a heavier repression … [A]daptation to the power of
progress involves the progress of power, and each time anew brings
about those degenerations which show not unsuccessful but success-
ful progress to be its contrary. The curse of irresistible progress is
irresistible regression.84
At this level, Adorno and Horkheimer are arguing that mass repression
and the fixing of the work ethic of industrialism result in a new set of
socially produced ‘instincts’, which are indistinguishable from the
drives that dominate the life of oppressive premodern societies, in
which social differentiation, individuality and the possibility of a critical
relationship to existing forms of authority and coercion had not
emerged. As a result, they continue, “men are once again made to be
that against which the evolutionary law of society, the principle of self,
had turned: mere species beings, exactly like one another through
isolation in the forcibly united collectivity.”85 The corollary of this is
that the concept of rationality as ideology is a paramount category in
the critique of modernity. Dialectic of Enlightenment is devoted to the
articulation of this critique through examination of the process of
transition from the pre-modern world view, based on mythology, to the
modern world view, based on formal rationality.
But this articulation, together with that which it articulates, has social
and economic moorings, which cannot be treated outside a Marxist
framework. Thus,
Enlightenment dissolves the old inequality – unmediated lordship

and mastery – but at the same time perpetuates it in universal medi-
ation, in relation of any one existent to another. It … excises the
incommensurable. Not only are qualities dissolved in thought, but
men are brought to actual conformity. The blessing that the market
does not inquire after one’s birth is paid for by the barterer, in that he
models the potentialities that are his by birth on the production of
commodities that can be bought in the market.86
So Adorno and Horkheimer claim that historical materialist categories

are an abstraction from the reality of consciousness to the same degree
that historical idealism abstracts from material conditions. Indeed, for
Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘enlightenment’ is not an abstract equivalent
of ‘reason’, but refers to rationally evolved rules that are institutional-
ized in real social and economic practices, within which the internal
contradictions of formal rationality become visible.
While this reading captures the core components of the second part
of Adorno and Horkheimer’s equation, it implies little about the first
part – the claim that ‘myth is already enlightenment’. A second level of
analysis emerges once we consider some of the interpretations that may
be said to flow from taking a one-sided interpretation of the main dialec-
tical thesis. To understand this, it is worth looking at three influential
accounts of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
A straightforward example of a one-sided reading is to take the work
as an attempt to show simply that modern civilization has betrayed the
ideals that lie at its basis. This is the interpretation of, for example,
Rorty, who claims that the purpose of Dialectic of Enlightenment is to
show that
the forces unleashed by the Enlightenment have undermined the

Enlightenment’s own convictions. What [Adorno and Horkheimer]
called the ‘dissolvent rationality’ of Enlightenment has, in the course
of the triumph of Enlightenment ideas during the last two centuries
undercut the idea of ‘rationality’ and ‘human nature’ which the
18th century took for granted. They drew the conclusion that liberal-
ism was intellectually bankrupt, bereft of philosophical foundations,
and that liberal society was morally bankrupt, bereft of social glue.87
This reading attributes to Adorno and Horkheimer the view that, at one
time, Enlightenment served as a progressive emancipatory force but has
become destructive of its own emancipatory momentum. Rorty goes on
to argue against the conclusion that Adorno and Horkheimer apparently
draw, as based on the mistake of assuming that the aims of a norma-
tively oriented social or intellectual movement will remain consistant
as that movement evolves. From here, he argues that the dissolvent
rationality of the Enlightenment has been successful in not simply
undermining the philosophical and normative foundations of tradi-
tional social life, but of showing us how to live without foundations.
‘De-divinization’ of the world, as he terms it, gives rise to re-enchantment
in the recognition of contingency. Rorty’s reading, while it correctly
emphasizes the anti-foundationalist orientation of critical theory,
ignores the second half of the equation, and focuses on the supposed
claim to regression.
A more complex interpretation is that the purpose of the work, given
not only its maze of metaphor, narrative and dialectic, but also its ‘total-
izing’ character is not seriously intended as a critique of modernity in
any productive sense. Habermas claims that “If [Horkheimer and
Adorno] want to … continue with critique, they will have to leave at least
one rational criterion intact for their explanation of the corruption of
all rational criteria. In the face of this paradox, self-referential critique
loses its orientation.”88 Thus, Dialectic of Enlightenment commits Hegel’s
original sin of attempting to achieve a total description of modernity,
which issues in total negativity. Habermas’s interpretation, by high-
lighting the problematic level of generality at which Dialectic of
Enlightenment is pitched, points towards an understanding of the work
that takes it as a ‘social myth’, a narrative in the tradition of the
eighteenth century notion of a ‘State of Nature’,89 which is not intended
as a serious argument or set of factual claims that could lay the basis for
a research program. On this view, it is in fact a counter-narrative to
oppose to progressive philosophies of history, oriented to offset under-
lying assumptions about western civilization, and so perhaps inculcate
a critical attitude that could then be harnessed to a research program.
This reading therefore implies that Adorno and Horkheimer are engaged
in a kind of regressive philosophy of history.
A third interpretation, which we might call ‘Foucauldian’, is that
Dialectic of Enlightenment is an elaborate exercise in ‘unmasking’ enlight-
enment rationality as merely a form of power. On this understanding,
enlightenment is part of an ideology of Western cultural hegemony. By
interchanging the terms of myth and enlightenment, the purpose is to
intimate the cultural relativity of ‘reason’, showing it to be simply
another social practice, thereby limiting its claims to sovereignty and
making space for the authorization of other forms of thinking organ-
ized around alternative types of social life. This line of thinking, influ-
enced by Nietzsche, adumbrates a discursive analytical shift from a
vocabulary of reason to that of power. It then takes Adorno and
Horkheimer to be concerned with the way mythic and rationalized
forms of thinking are both equally infused with power and both equally
unable to become conscious of that fact. Enlightenment substitutes
materialism and universality for particularity and spiritualism, but does not
succeed in destroying myth. This is because both represent two sides of
the same will to domination: “It is not merely that domination is paid
for by the alienation of men from the objects dominated” (this is Marx’s
basic thesis on commodity fetishism). Rather, “the objectification of
consciousness, the very relations of men – even those of the individual
to himself – were bewitched. The individual is reduced to the nodal
point of the conventional responses and modes of operation expected
of him. Animism spiritualized the object, whereas industrialism objecti-
fies the spirits of men.”90 Therefore, Marx’s account of commodity
fettishism must be supplemented with a sustained treatment of the

will to domination. This reading is an attempt to explain rationality in
terms of power, and takes Dialectic of Enlightenment to be a complement
to Nietzsche’s arguments in The Genealogy of Morals and The Will
to Power.
While each of these three readings have their virtues, they each
rest on a one-sided view of the equation that Adorno and Horkheimer
present in the work. If we follow the logic of each of these three readings
of the thesis that ‘enlightenment reverts to mythology’, then how
are we to understand the converse claim? By implication, these readings
take Adorno and Horkheimer’s use of the Homeric myth of Odysseus
as a source of examples of how aspects of ancient societies prefigure
the present. To cite one example, Adorno and Horkheimer note the
fact that Homer’s Odysseus is both solitary and a wanderer, and
thus exemplifies the individualistic and rootless qualities that mark
Robinson Crusoe, the modern homo oeconomicus.91 “Both Odysseus and
Crusoe … make their weakness (that of the individual who parts from
the collectivity) their social strength … their isolation forces them to
pursue an atomistic interest.”92 Odysseus therefore apparently antici-
pates the social conditions that allowed the emergence of homo
oeconomicus in the crisis of propertylessness and alienation that emerged
in the original centers of capitalism in Europe. But if we interpret it
in this way, as a response to Weber and Marx, it implies that the
supposedly unique qualities that brought about the ‘spirit of capitalism’
in fact were not unique, but can be understood as lying latent within
western society at the very roots of its consciousness. But such an inter-
pretation would simply reinforce the view of modernity as historical
necessity.
The misconstrual of the terms ‘enlightenment’ and ‘myth’ is at the
heart of the difficulty here. For Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘enlightenment’
does not refer to a specific intellectual movement of the eighteenth century
but – as Simon Jarvis and J.M. Bernstein have both argued – as the
thought-movement that derives from the ‘principle of immanence’, an
“ever-increasing skepticism about any claims for access to a transcen-
dent content or meaning, that is, to a content or meaning lying outside
thought itself.”93 The principle of immanence, in other words, involves
the combination of two elements that Nietzsche identifies: on the one
hand, the movement towards pure heteronomy intrinsic to skeptical
empiricism; on the other, the reflexivity of Kantian critique. Myth, on
the other hand, may be said to consist in the attribution of subjectivity
to an object. Originally, in animism, that object was Nature, which came
to be called the Fates, then God, then various philosophical versions of

an Absolute subject.
In this context, the proposition “myth is already enlightenment,” has
to be understood not in addition to but as part of the converse claim that
“enlightenment reverts to mythology.” If we understand the two propo-
sitions as operating together, it can be seen that the main purpose of the
argument is not to claim either that mythology inexorably produces
instrumental reason, or that reason inevitably brings about social regres-
sion, but that the very opposition between myth and enlightenment on
which the self-conception of the enlightened world stands is mistaken.94
In this respect, it is the opposition between myth and enlightenment
that must be brought into question, not one or the other proposition. This
leads, then, to the underlying claim of Dialectic of Enlightenment, that
the opposition between myth and enlightenment, which appears at
the foundation of the meaning of both concepts (and the various inter-
pretations cited above), becomes increasingly difficult to maintain as
Enlightenment undergoes self-critique. The same point is played out in
the conceptions of morality, culture and identity developed in later
chapters of the work.
Dialectic of Enlightenment therefore operates as a critique, not of
modernity per se, but of modernity’s self-conception, as based on the
conceptual dualism of myth and enlightenment. As such, it reworks the
project of establishing a perspective from which to grasp the vicissitudes
of rationality and modernity that is carried out in the Introduction to
Hegel’s Phenomenology. Therefore, it is best understood as a further
development of the skeptical impulse that was traced through German
idealism in Part II, and which culminates in Hegel’s self-completing
skepticism. However, given the critical theory rejection of the idea of
self-completion – not least because of its convergence with the totalizing
claims of the world spirit – it is best understood as a self-undermining
skepticism.
This is also why Dialectic of Enlightenment can be understood as an
argument against the presuppositions of the dominant contemporary
theoretical paradigms within the social sciences, and why it has to be
understood in the context of Hegel’s Phenomenology. For, to take the
route offered by either of the three readings discussed above, would
be to return to an implicit first, either through re-establishment of a
transcendental standpoint or through some mythic claim to an ‘over-
coming’ of the tradition of the enlightenment which has been sedi-
mented in both the critical tradition and in the material conditions of
that tradition. Therefore, a generalized response to these readings of
Dialectic of Enlightenment (at least in its operative position as an

intervention in an historical dialogue) is to view them as misunder-
standing the immanent dialectical mode in which the work is operating.
To gain a picture of the notion of dialectics as it was developed by
Adorno specifically will be the main purpose of the final chapter,
in which the connection with Hegel’s skepticism will return to the
foreground.
6
Negative Dialectics and
the Fate of Critical Theory
The conceptions of skepticism that emerge from the nineteenth-century

play into the debates surrounding the significance of critical theory in
two primary ways: First, in the epistemological concerns with the pos-
sibilities of philosophy, which arise from German idealism; second in
connection between skepticism and nihilism developed by Nietzsche.
While Dialectic of Enlightenment pursues the Nietzschean track out of
Kant’s critical philosophy, Adorno’s Negative Dialectics returns to the
epistemological nexus of Hegel’s critique of Kant. In this chapter, I am
concerned primarily with the relationship between Adorno and the
German idealists. The terms of this focus on Adorno’s Hegelianism will
be situated relative to two other themes: first, the relationship of the
whole first generation of critical theorists to Hegel’s philosophy; second,
the mediation of their interpretation of Hegel by Lukács, whose revamping
of Marxism through the application of key Hegelian categories was pivotal
to the development of critical theory.
6.1. Hegel and critical theory
An initial avenue into the complex relationship between critical theory

and Hegel’s philosophy can be established by considering Horkheimer’s
contrast, in the postscript to “Traditional and Critical Theory,” between
the German idealists, for whom reason was “the activity of a meta-
empirical consciousness-in-itself, an absolute ego, the spirit,” and critical
theory, for which “the intervention of reason in the processes whereby
knowledge and its object are constituted, or the subordination of these
processes to conscious control, does not take place in a purely intellec-
tual world, but coincides with the struggle for certain real ways of life.”1
Horkheimer brackets Hegel’s with Kant’s and Fichte’s systems, while also
127
acknowledging the important elements of his critique of Kant and Fichte

that lead towards the critical theory perspective. Hegel’s ‘solution’ when
“confronted with the persisting contradictions in human existence and
with the impotence of individuals in the face of situations they have
themselves brought about … seems a purely private assertion, a personal
peace treaty between the philosopher and an inhuman world.”2 If the
argument of Part II of this book is correct, Hegel’s ‘method’ of self-
completing skepticism, does more than simply reproduce the idea of
an absolute subject from the tangle of Kant’s and Fichte’s reflections
on the unity of apperception. Understood as a response to the problem
of the deduction of the modern philosophical consciousness, Hegel’s
skepticism is an attempt not to resolve, but to re-centre the problem of the
‘private assertions’ of the philosopher, and to pose the difficulty that
besets a self-consciously historically situated account of the nature of
reason and of society within the project of modernity.
This, at least, is the view of Adorno. Horkheimer thought it possible
to acknowledge the importance of Hegel’s dialectical method, while
consigning his system, together with the systemic ambitions of Kant
and Fichte, to a lumber room of philosophies that needed to be
bypassed. Adorno and Marcuse, by contrast, both develop a stronger
sense of the importance of German idealism in their respective and, to
a certain degree, convergent conceptions of the critical theory project.3
For Adorno, indeed, Hegel’s perspective alone is capable of confronting
(though not resolving) the crisis of reason typifying much of twentieth-
century thought, which for Adorno breaks down into a dilemma
between the false objectivity of the positive sciences on the one hand
and an inherently subjectivized notion of ontology on the other.
Indeed, only a perspective that has undergone the historically ‘educa-
tive’ stages of the skepticism in the Phenomenology can be adequate to
the problem of rationality as the struggle for real ‘ways of life’ which
Horkheimer demands. That adequacy is expressed in Adorno’s idea of a
negative dialectics.
6.2. Reading Lukács
Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of culture in Dialectic of Enlightenment

obviously draws on their Marxist roots. However, it does not simply
generalize Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, but depends cru-
cially on the notion of ‘reification’ (Verdinglichung), as this is developed
by Lukács in the central essay from History and Class Consciousness, enti-
tled “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat”. Lukács here
Negative Dialectics and the Fate of Critical Theory 129
synthesizes the theories of rationalization propounded by Simmel and

Weber into a re-Hegelianized Marxism that gives priority to the concept
of consciousness. Nevertheless, Lukács regards the essay’s core premises
as materialist, inasmuch as consciousness is regarded primarily as a cultural
product, its forms being traceable to the structure of specific social
(productive) relations.4 Lukács develops Marx’s argument in the first
chapter of Capital to argue that modern monopoly capitalism is main-
tained through a system of self-expanding value, the vehicle for which is
the commodity form.5
The commodity form tends to invade and pervade not only relations
of production, but also the categories of experience and categories of
human action, thus transforming both the knowledge and societal
forms available to modern societies. In its vision of the colonizing ten-
dencies of the commodity form, Lukács’s essay redefines what for Marx
was essentially an economic issue – and had therefore to be understood
from an economic (materialist) perspective – as a generalized social and
existential problematic.
What is at issue here is the question: how far is commodity exchange

together with its structural consequences able to influence the total
outer and inner life of society? … The distinction between a society
where this form is dominant … and one in which it only makes an
episodic appearance is essentially one of quality. For, depending on
which is the case, all the subjective and objective phenomena in the
societies concerned are objectified in qualitatively different ways.6
Objectification within the commodity form allows phenomena to become

increasingly permeable to processes that turn human beings and their
qualities into things (de re), and to subject them to the domination of
those things.
Lukács’s account of reification has been subject to a wide and confusing
array of interpretations,7 partly due to the fact that the concept lacks the
robustness and clarity required for the work it is supposed to fulfill in
the essay. The concept of reification implies a whole set of other processes
associated with the development of capitalist society. To name the most
important ones: The transformation of all qualities into equally compa-
rable quantities, the domination of exchange-value over use-value, ration-
alization and disenchantment, the deformation of individuality, the
de-differentiation of the cultural, political and aesthetic spheres into the
economic and the construction of society as a ‘second nature’ through
transforming natural or historically given social relations, things and
institutions into commodified, formally rational forms. Lukács’s account

of these processes lays the groundwork for the general perspective of
critical theory, although each of the principal critical theorists reject
Lukács’s original framework.
For Adorno, it is the epistemological underpinning of Lukács’s project
that is perhaps most influential for the idea of a negative dialectics. The
continuities between Lukács’s essay on reification and Negative Dialectics
can be laid out under three headings or main themes: (1) The critique
of the systems that define the course of German idealism, which Lukács
and Adorno take as both a symptom of, and a potential means to over-
come, reification. Lukács’s analysis of that problematic lays the frame-
work for both Adorno’s approach to the problem of Hegel’s system, and
for his more general understanding of the relationship between philos-
ophy and social theory. (2) Lukács’s suggestive account of the nature of
the subject as it is developed through the course of German idealism,
which anticipates elements of the problem of the crisis of reason that
Adorno addresses in terms of ‘identity thinking’. (3) Lukács’s attention
to the problem and meaning of Kant’s thing-in-itself as a limit, a barrier,
and therefore, potentially, as a ‘block’ to the self-totalizing tendency of
idealism, which anticipates some essential elements of Adorno’s critique
of idealism in Negative Dialectics. I here reconstruct Lukács’s sketches of
these three problems as a prelude to Adorno’s development of them in
terms that return the discussion to the problematic of skepticism.
Both Lukács and the critical theorists work with the Hegelian notion
that philosophy consists in an aspect of ‘spirit’, that it ‘expresses’ or
‘reflects’ the dominant components of a social structure, both as they
objectively appear as institutions and productive forces, and as they are
experienced by individual subjects.8 However, there are important
differences between the critical theorists in the way they understand the
relationship between philosophy and social theory in general. For
Lukács, idealism is a subjective form of the objective social processes
captured under the rubric of reification, and therefore has a surplus
truth-content beyond its own self-conception. He presents the signifi-
cance of that truth-content within the framework of the traditional
Marxist conception of ideology, as arising from, or expressing, social rela-
tions. In places, that framework is simply reductive, as in the conclusion
to the second section of the reification essay. Here Lukács develops
Marx’s argument against Hegel’s conception of the world-spirit as a
“demiurge [that] only seems to make history,” but in fact represents
only an intellectual reflection of antagonistic class relations, into the
full-fledged claim that German idealism is ideological through and
through, inasmuch as it “provides a complete intellectual copy and a

priori deduction of bourgeois society.”9 In other places, Lukács’s theory
tends towards mystification, as in his account of the correspondence
between, on the one hand, the progressively self-totalizing character of
capitalist society and, on the other, the tendency demonstrated during
the course of rationalist philosophy (and especially German idealism)
towards self-completion. In fact, Lukács takes the problem of the subject,
as this grew out of the development of German idealism, and simply
transposes it into the realm of the social. For “the problem of knowledge
as the problem of what ‘we’ have created”10 is simply the irresolvable
contradictions that beset Kant’s and Fichte’s systems, and which Hegel
attempts to resolve through the device of a self-completing skepticism.
The contradiction that appears here between subjectivity and objec-

tivity in modern rationalist formal systems, the entanglements and
equivocations hidden in their concepts of subject and object, the con-
flict between their nature as systems created by ‘us’ and their fatalistic
necessity distant from and alien to man is nothing but the logical and
systematic formulation of the modern state of society.11
For Lukács, the development of modern philosophy represents, as it does

for Hegel, the graduated universalization of the principle of a subject-
centred reason. As substance becomes subject, however, what counts as
‘the world’ comes to be construed – against Hegel’s own strictures –
entirely in terms of the categories of the understanding, issuing in a
subjective mathematized idealism. The last remaining barrier to that
idealism, the Kantian thing-in-itself, is dissolved in the Hegelian system.
Hegel, in opposing an ideal of reason (Vernunft) to understanding
(Verstand) does not deviate from the self-totalizing tendency of modern
idealism; he merely attempts to make it consistent in a way that Kant’s
antinomianism could not. Lukács sees this tendency as both inevitable
and contradictory, for
the attempt to universalize rationalism necessarily issues in the demand

for a system but, at the same time, as soon as one reflects upon the
conditions in which a universal system is possible, i.e., as soon as the
question of the system is consciously posed, it is seen that such a
demand is incapable of fulfillment.12
It is incapable of fulfillment, however, not because of the inherently

aporetic notion of necessity invoked here (in the demand for a system),
but because, for Lukács, the medium within which such a demand
occurs is thought, the abstraction of knowing from the living social
medium of which it is an expression. Once the problem comes to be
seen in its proper medium, as a problem of social reality, not its abstrac-
tion in thought, the contradiction disappears. Lukács invokes here a
mysterious connection between philosophical systems and the actually
existing sum total of social relations, which, like the notion of a system
itself, reaches a point where reflexivity, that is, self-conscious knowl-
edge, drives it to total transparency. He then proceeds to transpose the
problem of from what stand-point the question of the system is to be
posed, into the question of the stand-point from which a totally reified
society can be challenged, a stand-point (notoriously) occupied by the
political situation of the proletariat.
Lukács’s thought has been called Fichtean in inspiration and tendency,
and the notion of the proletariat as both question and answer, problem
and solution to the riddle of history, points in the same direction as
Fichte’s dogmatism. Fichte’s absolute ego, as a unity of acting and know-
ing, transposed into the realm of the social, becomes the ‘unique’ position
of the proletariat:
When the worker knows himself as a commodity his knowledge is

practical. That is to say, this knowledge brings about an objective
structural change in the object of knowledge. In this consciousness
and through it the special objective character of labour as a com-
modity, its ‘use-value’ (i.e., its ability to yield surplus produce) … now
awakens and becomes social reality.13
Leaving aside the problems of Lukács’s interpretation of Marx’s theory

of value, the idea of the unity of act and fact as the objective self-
understanding of the proletariat depends (and still depends) on the
notion of class, and since Lukács and other Marxists were never able to
understand the concept in anything more than economic terms, or at
best – as Horkheimer points out – as social psychology,14 it could never
function in anything more than an economic, or narrowly political,
sense. Similarly, the historical determinism of the appeal to the prole-
tariat as the internally generated subject of history replays the mythology
of the Fichtean arch[-necessity in an historical (and messianic) form.
But this does not obscure Lukács’s insight into the importance of
understanding the course of German idealism in terms of its struc-
tural features. Above all, Lukács’s understanding of the problem of the
relationship between subject and object in Kant’s transcendentalism
anticipates Adorno’s understanding of the importance of the critique of

idealism. Lukács points out that,
[t]he attempt has often been made to prove that the thing-in-itself has
a number of quite disparate functions within Kant’s system. What they
all have in common is the fact that they represent a limit, a barrier, to
the abstract, formal, rationalistic ‘human’ faculty of cognition.15
In terms of the subsequent development of German idealism, two bar-

riers in particular prove to be the most contentious and important. The
first is that between form and content, between the forms of intuition
and the categories of the understanding on the one hand, and the thing-
in-itself (what Adorno will call the ontological moment) on the other.
The second barrier that Kant erects is between the objects of the under-
standing as these are taken up by the special sciences, and the ‘ultimate’
objects pursued in the Ideas of reason, the comprehension of which,
according to Lukács, “are needed to round off the partial systems into
a totality, a system of the perfectly understood world.”16 This second
barrier is what Adorno calls the Kantian ‘block’.
Modernity, understood as the outcome of the Enlightenment ‘proj-
ect’, represents, in a sense, the failure of both limits. Reification and
modern positivistic science represent respectively the objective and
subjective sides of the failure to acknowledge the first limit. The insti-
tutions of modern science and the universalization of the market both
involve the transformation of phenomena into objects which embody
exchange-value and quantifiability. They increasingly tend towards an
unreflective idealism, inasmuch as it becomes progressively more diffi-
cult to conceive of phenomena either nonquantitatively or not in terms
of exchange-value. At the same time, the second limit is breached not
in the sense that Kant feared – in the unlicensed intervention of phi-
losophy into the realms of the special sciences – but in the collapse of
the meaning of the Idea of totality in the fragmentation and specializa-
tion of the sciences. Lukács expresses the consequences of this breach as
follows:
The more intricate a modern science becomes and the better it under-
stands itself methodologically, the more … it will become a formally
closed system of partial laws. It will then find the world lying beyond
its confines, and in particular the material base which is its task to
understand, its own concrete underlying reality, lies, methodologically
and in principle, beyond its grasp.17
Lukács’s rather undeveloped insight that positivism threatens to become

‘idealist’ as it breaches both of Kant’s limits becomes the foundation of
both Adorno’s notion of the ontological moment and of the idea of
block, which he deploys against the ‘identitarian’ tendencies of moder-
nity. While Adorno develops these concerns from Lukácsian bases, their
epistemological significance for critical theory has to be understood in
relation to the problem of skepticism as Adorno takes it up from German
idealism.
6.3. Critical theory as negative dialectics:

Methodological reflections
Like Lukács, Adorno takes the problem of the fixed opposition between
subject and object as originating in the polarization of Kant’s system
into, on the one hand, an absolute unknowable, the thing-in-itself, and,
on the other, the subject, unified as formal or potential self-production
(apperception). Adorno is concerned to understand the German idealist
development of this problem primarily in philosophical terms, through
the ‘method’ of a negative dialectics. However, his account cannot
ignore raising issues of the social, and I take up here, though in general
terms, Adorno’s account of the relationship between social forms and
epistemology. I then proceed to sketch the relationship between skepti-
cism and negative dialectics around three points of intersection, each of
which may be understood as extensions of themes initially advanced by
Lukács: (1) Adorno’s critique of systems in general, the framework of
which he lays out in three sequential sections in the Introduction to
Negative Dialectics; (2) the concept and critique of identity-thinking, a
concern that is infused throughout Negative Dialectics, but which is
addressed in terms of the issues that relate most directly to Hegel’s
skepticism in part two of the work, entitled “Concepts and Categories”;
(3) the set of devices and techniques that Adorno erects to prevent his
own reflexive elaboration of the critical elements of Hegel’s method
from collapsing back into idealism. The use of the notion of ‘block’,
which is adumbrated in Negative Dialectics, but given a much clearer and
fuller exposition in Adorno’s lectures on Kant’s first Critique, will be
shown to define the particular manner in which the concept of skepti-
cism can be deployed for the future of critical theory.
Lukács’s transposition of the epistemological categories of German
idealism into the social categories of a praxial Marxism has been criti-
cized from a variety of different perspectives. The attitude of the leading
members of the first generation of critical theorists goes beyond the
standard accusations of it being either a mystification,18 on the one

hand, or an overweening cultural Marxism on the other. Adorno’s own
understanding of the social and political significance of the critique of
German idealism may be distinguished from that of both Marcuse and
Horkheimer. In Reason and Revolution, Marcuse interprets Hegel’s system
as a social ontology.19 The historically evolving opposition between sub-
ject and object (the object of epistemology) is to be understood in terms
of social categories such as language, labor and property (the object of
social theory). For Marcuse, the ‘crystallization’20 of abstract epistemo-
logical categories into social ones, reveals the fact that Hegel’s system is
to be understood anthropologically, as the social evolution of the species.
Epistemological and logical forms are expressions of an underlying
progression of society towards more self-consistent forms, as the princi-
ples of freedom and rationality unfold. Hence, in the Introduction to
Reason and Revolution, Marcuse frames his own project as a “process of
referring [Hegel’s] philosophical conclusions to the context of social
and political reality,”21 emphasizing the systematic unity of his philo-
sophical with his political writings. Horkheimer also regards philosophy
and other cultural forms as expressions, but of an “underlying supra-
individual order” that attempts to preserve itself through the social
solidarity that these forms produce.22 Therefore, Horkheimer comes clos-
est, among the principal critical theorists, to espousing a sociology of
knowledge.23
Adorno’s understanding of the relationship between epistemology and
social forms is more extensively worked out than that of either Marcuse
or Horkheimer. This is partly due to the ‘groundwork’ carried out by
Walter Benjamin, to whose perspective on the nature of immanent
critique Adorno is heavily indebted.24 It also registers the privileged
position that the critique of philosophy holds within Adorno’s thought
as a whole.25 Significantly, Adorno is much more wary of the dangers of
positing a model of the relationship between epistemology and social
forms that makes use of the metaphors of ‘underlying’ and ‘expression’,
since these tend to collapse back easily into a uncritical distinction of
essence and appearance – a distinction he takes Hegel’s dialectic, properly
understood, to have undermined. The relationship is to be conceived
more along the lines of the notion of ‘reflection’, which can be elabo-
rated by considering Adorno’s conception of the dialectical relationship
between sociology and philosophy, as this has become historically
sedimented within the modern intellectual division of labor.
On the one hand, Adorno argues against reflective philosophies that
refuse to encounter the social element within their own content. Thus
he remarks:
People who wish to criticize our dialectical attempts to operate with

the concept of society as a constitutive concept of epistemology really
never have more than the one argument. This is that our efforts are
illegitimate because philosophy has absolute priority over all social
considerations and that, on the contrary, such social questions have
first to be grounded in the theory of knowledge.26
But to ‘operate with the concept of society’ does not imply the reduc-
tion of philosophy to a sociology of knowledge. As Rose has argued, a
neo-Kantian paradigm at the root of twentieth-century sociology, has
persistently driven social theory in this direction,27 towards the ambition
to reconstruct sociology in the image of first philosophy. Thus Adorno
also warns against ‘sociologism’ as vulnerable to positing society as both
an essential and a subject:
The aspects of that tradition that philosophy needs to rethink

radically – is located in this search for the ideal of an absolute first
principle. And we should take note that to give society absolute primacy
and hypostasize that is just as much an act of naturalistic hyposta-
sization as to give absolute priority of the spirit.28
The key to Adorno’s distinctive approach to the interpretation of German

idealism is his concern not to detach method from content – a concern
that he takes over from Hegel, even though Hegel had himself violated
his own strictures on this.
The farewell to Hegel becomes tangible in a contradiction that con-

cerns the whole, in one that cannot be resolved according to plan, as
a particular contradiction. Hegel, the critic of the Kantian separation
of form and substance, wanted a philosophy without detachable
form, without a method to be employed independently of the matter,
and yet he proceeded methodically.29
It is through this prism that we have to understand Adorno’s development

of the themes laid out in Lukács’s essay, at the perimeter of a negotiation
around epistemology and sociologism as ‘first philosophies’.
6.4. Metacritique of systems
The relationship between Negative Dialectics and the self-completing

skepticism of Hegel’s Phenomenology may be reconstructed by returning
initially to the concept of metacritique.
Simon Jarvis argues that the perspective of Negative Dialectics simply

is metacritique, inasmuch as it “performs a further critique on critical
inquiry itself. It asks not only ‘what are the conditions of the possibility
of experience?’, but ‘what are such a transcendental inquiry’s own con-
ditions of possibility?’.”30 But to understand Negative Dialectics simply as
metacritique is misleading. The term, as I showed in Chapter 1, derives
from the post-Kantian reaction and leads potentially to Schulzean skep-
ticism. As I argued in Chapter 4, Hegel’s skepticism is directed against
metacritique as such, since it leads to the intractable dilemma between
experience and reflection that is laid out in the Introduction to the
Phenomenology: To contest reflection from the immediacy of experience
is to lapse into dogmatic empiricism, while to subordinate experience to
reflection leads to subjective idealism. Adorno’s method within Negative
Dialectics accepts Hegel’s argument against metacritique, but denies
Hegel’s own claim to have ‘solved’ the problem of metacritique through
the self-completing skepticism of the Phenomenology. This is because there
is an internal contradiction between its negative element, the skeptical
method, and its positive outcome as self-completion. It is a contradic-
tion, however, that itself emerges only as a result of its reaching an out-
come, and its failure is itself an outcome of the system. Therefore,
Adorno’s perspective is only ‘metacritical’ insofar as inquiry into inquiry
is an indissoluble element of dialectics; but this takes place from the
stand-point of having moved through the permutations of Hegel’s
system (“the contradiction that concerns the whole”), and accepted
his skeptical dissolution of metacritique. A key component of Adorno’s
perspective, then, is the rejection of systems, which is present as a form
of metacritique, although this does not exhaust the ‘method’ of Negative
Dialectics.
There is no single argument in Negative Dialectics ‘against’ systems –
no pistol bullet that can be delivered decisively against the systemic
impulse, and indeed, such a bullet would risk recreating what it destroyed.31
Adorno instead mobilizes an array of deflections against systemic thinking
in general, some of which inform his more specific arguments against
Hegel’s system, and which may be understood as metacritical forays
(rather than ‘metacritique’ per se). This evasive strategy is consistent with
the importance that Adorno places on the stylistic and formal32 elements
of his philosophy, beyond simply the content: the metacritical content
of Negative Dialectics must be adequate to that which it critiques, but con-
stantly aware of the dangers of duplicating the false forms it seeks to crit-
icize. The difficulty of the work is partly due to tension between those
contradictory aspirations. Adorno could never countenance the refusal to
engage with the truth-content of philosophy inherent within such

devices as a ‘mistrust of meta-narratives’ (Lyotard) or ‘ironic post-meta-
physical thinking’ (Rorty and, arguably, Habermas). Such externally
imposed interventions deny both the responsibilities of critique and the
principle of determinate negation, and end up reaffirming what they
negate through lack of reflection on their own perspective.
Yet remaining immanent, acknowledging that metacritique cannot
simply step out of the tradition from which it emerges, risks reproducing
the false forms of that tradition. This is the substance of Adorno’s com-
ment on presentation (Darstellung).
Presentation is not a matter of indifference or external to philosophy,

but immanent to its idea. Its integral moment of expression, non-
conceptually-mimetic, becomes objectified only through presenta-
tion in language. The freedom of philosophy is nothing other than
the capacity of giving voice to this unfreedom. If the moment of
expression tries to be anything more, it degenerates into a point of
view; were it to relinquish the moment of expression and the obli-
gation of presentation, it would converge with science. Expression
and stringency are not dichotomous possibilities for it. They need
each other, neither is without the other.33
Therefore, Adorno’s metacritique of systems cannot be conducted or

presented as a set of critical assertions, but must be understood as oper-
ating within the form of that which it criticizes. In this sense it reworks
the performative element of the Phenomenology, enacting its own inner
impulse.34
Adorno regards philosophical systems as distinguished by two ambi-
tions: towards presuppositionlessness on the one hand and towards
self-generation on the other, ambitions that come together in the idea
of a total, self-completing system. To counteract the self-completing
tendency, Adorno mobilizes metacritical elements of Lukács’s and
Nietzsche’s work to present a thumbnail historical account of the rise of
rationalist systems in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics. The for-
mer’s insight into the fact that systematic philosophy ‘reflects’ a society
initially based on, and tending towards an ever greater degree of,
systematization – an aspect of what Adorno elsewhere calls the ‘soci-
etalization of society’35 – is deployed in the observation that:
In the history of philosophy the systems of the seventeenth century

had an especially compensatory purpose. The same ratio which, in
unison with the interests of the bourgeois class, smashed the feudal
order of society and its intellectual reflection, scholastic ontology,

into rubble, promptly felt the fear of chaos while facing the ruins,
their own handiwork. … In the shadows of the incompletion of its
emancipation, the bourgeois consciousness had to fear being cashiered
by a more progressive class; it suspected that because it was not the
entire freedom, it only produced the travesty of such; that is why it
expanded its autonomy theoretically into the system, which at the
same time took on the likeness of its compulsory mechanisms.36
To claim that the fear of anarchy, internalized and redirected in response

to the emerging world economic system, produces a concern with self-
completing systems, looks, on the surface, to be a straightforwardly
materialist – and, potentially, reductionist to the same degree – ideological
claim that points towards the liquidation of philosophy. Yet such a
Lukácsian maneuver is immediately contradicted by the second part
of Adorno’s narrative, in which the systems of German idealism are
presented in terms of Nietzsche’s conception of the will to power. In the
primal ego, according to Adorno’s sketch here,
what is other (l’autrui) must be associated with what is evil, in order

to empower the will against it, and to dominate over it. Fichte’s
philosophical system, in which the identification of what is not-I
provides the driving force for the construction of the founding/
grounding act, as well as the incorporation of the world within the I,
represents the sublimation of this anthropological schema … The
system is the belly turned mind, and rage is the mark of each and
every idealism.37
We can understand the two quite different perspectives in these two sec-
tions as complementary only if we comprehend them both as part of
the metacritical array of forays against systems and as internal critiques
of Lukács and Nietzsche. In this respect, the argument is parallel to the
strategy undertaken within Dialectic of Enlightenment. Both the Lukácsian
account of systems as expressions of the underlying socio-political-
economic order, and Nietzsche’s account of the bad faith inherent in the
redirection of the instinctual drive towards system-building, are, by
themselves, inadequate. The common element of that inadequacy is the
reduction of the system to its underlying productive mechanism, with-
out reflection on the meaning and significance of that which was
produced. Thus, Lukács attempts to press the history of thought into
social forms, while Nietzsche simply refuses to engage with the concrete
forms of domination and ressentiment within which his critique operates.
However, if they are re-construed as varieties of metacritique operating

within the framework of a negative dialectics, they can act to weaken
the system-building propensity both philosophically and sociologically,
while remaining methodologically subordinate to the dialectical self-
understanding of immanent critique.
A further metacritical device, deployed against the second element,
the idea of presuppositionlessness, emerges from Adorno’s reflections on
the contradictions of the systems form. Adorno’s approach here recalls
Hegel’s reworking of ancient skepticism into a system of antinomies.
According to Adorno, Hegel’s demand for experience to yield to the
object requires acknowledging the inner dynamic of the system, which
is inherently antinomical. This is so because the antinomical form
embodies two mutually opposed forces: towards infinity, in the form of
a dynamics – the urge to exceed – and towards totality, in the form of a
statics – the urge to contain. The antinomical form of the system is there-
fore the source of the limited contradictions that emerge in the course
of the unfolding of its content. Thus, Adorno says, “the pedantries of all
systems, down to the architectonic complexities of Kant – and even of
Hegel, despite the latter’s program – are the marks of an a priori inescapable
failure, noted with incomparable honesty in the fractures of the Kantian
system.”38 The failure is a priori because it lies in the inner tension
between the outcome of the attempt to produce a completed system, and
the motivations that brought it forth.
This brings our discussion back to the importance of understanding
Adorno’s metacritique of systems in the context of his relationship to
Hegel’s self-completing skepticism. For metacritique, understood as
internal to a negative dialectics, derives from an Hegelian impulse. Adorno
identifies its origin, anticipating the argument in Negative Dialectics, in
his earliest major work Metakritik der Epistemologie:
Though Hegel’s logic, like Kant’s, may be fastened to the transcen-

dental subject, and be completed (vollkommener) Idealism, yet it refers
beyond itself … . The power of the uncontradictable, which Hegel
wields like no other … is the power of contradiction. This power
turns against itself and against the idea of absolute knowledge … . It
thus also undermines the primacy of the system and its own content.39
In Negative Dialectics, Adorno presents the attempt to unfasten Hegel’s

thinking from its self-completing moment as part of his critique of
systems, an attempt to overthrow the aims and inner tendencies of
systemic thinking. Hegel’s system is prejudiced at its outset; his
substantive philosophizing had as its fundament and result the primacy

of the subject or, in the famous formulation from the introduction to
the Logic, the identity of identity and non-identity. To him, the deter-
minate particular was determinable by the Spirit, because its immanent
determination was supposed to be nothing other than the Spirit.40
Against this inner tendency is to be opposed a notion of dialectics itself

derived from Hegel, a dialectics whose “motion does not tend to the
identity in the difference between each object and its concept; instead it
is suspicious of all identity.”41 Therefore, the idea of a negative dialectics
attempts to counter what ancient skepticism understood as the dogma
that inheres within the arch[ of a program oriented towards results. It is
a self-consciously one-sided project, not undertaken for the sake of gain-
ing a hitherto unacknowledged and privileged access to knowledge or
truth (even where such knowledge or truth is that there is none, an
equally dogmatic stance). Neither is it lacking in self-consciousness about
its own stance – it is “driven by its own inevitable insufficiency” as “the
consistent sense of non-identity.”42 At the same time, to unfasten Hegel’s
thinking from its self-completing moment requires not a return to the
pre-Hegelian categories of critique, but a reorientation of aims and ten-
dencies, equally rejecting the demand to ground reflection and experi-
ence in a moment of reconciliation and completion, and the empiricist
conceit of simply proceeding without proper examination of the skeptical
problems which produce such a demand.
6.5. Against identity
Adorno’s attack on systems is linked with his rejection of idealism in

general. The distinctive element of German idealism from Kant to Hegel
is its reflexivity, which, as I argued in Chapter 4, can be regarded as the
skeptically inspired attempt to rid idealism of its subjective element.
Adorno’s metacritique of this reflexive element echoes Nietzsche’s con-
viction of the will-less, purely formal Kantian subject, bereft of purposes
and desires, castrated as an intellect. But for Adorno, it is not the subject
that is reduced by the attempt to expel purpose and interest from the
act of knowing, but the object.
Idealism’s protou pseudos [proto-falsity] ever since Fichte was that the
movement of abstraction allows us to get rid of that from which we
abstract. It is eliminated from our thought, banished from the realm

where the thought is at home, but not annihilated in itself; the faith
in it is magical. Thinking without what is thought would counter-
mand its own concept and that which is thought indicates in advance
the existents.43
The tendency of idealism to reduce the object to its concept is the philo-
sophical expression of experience under the rule of the commodity form –
a tendency that Adorno captures under the rubric of identity-thinking.
Adorno’s notion of identity-thinking is multifaceted, in terms of its
meaning and implications. To identify per se is not to engage in identity-
thinking. However, two ‘systematic falsifications’ arise from identity-
thinking, which together may be said to constitute its ‘identitarian’
quality.44
The first is the tendency, in a society dominated by the principle of
formal rationality, to think and know objects not in the form in which
they present themselves, that is, according to the “conceptuality pre-
vailing in the object itself,”45 but as they fall within a preformed matrix
of categories and associations that act to economize, functionalize and
reduce to the commodity form whatever is brought into the field of
experience. It is in this sense that Adorno claims that “the principle
of exchange, the reduction of human labor to the abstract universal
concept of average working time … is the social model of the identity
principle.”46 The institutionalization of the principle both in its external
(social) and internal (experiential) form has pathological, though osten-
sibly contradictory, effects. On the one hand, it reproduces and legiti-
mates the logic of domination within social relations, over nature, and
within subjective representation. On the other hand, it progressively
increases the distance between the subject, both as social and individual,
and the actual qualities of the object, which then become reified in the
‘second nature’ of society. Thus, according to Adorno, “subjectivism and
reification are not incompatible opposites, but corollaries.”47
A second aspect of identity-thinking, which Adorno addresses in
Negative Dialectics explicitly in terms of Marx’s theory of exploitation,
concerns the conflation of identity with ‘rational identity’. Adorno’s
concrete example of this phenomenon concerns the application of the
Idea of freedom, which, when apprehended ‘rationally’, is an Ideal existent
and carries with it an internally utopian element.48 But in a vocabulary
increasingly drained of the concept of non-factual meaning, any claim
to the current state of society (or of any particular individual) to be
‘free’, that makes use of this ideal rational element, is subject to the
suspicion of meaninglessness. Thus the claim that rational identity

becomes absorbed into identity is the general version of MacIntyre’s
theory of the disintegration of contemporary moral vocabularies.
6.6. Block and the mourning of metaphysics
In recognizing the significance of the antinomy between reflection and

experience, and rejecting Hegel’s attempts to resolve it, Adorno affirms
a commitment to a non-identical moment outside idealism – what Kant
understood, within the context of experience, as the unsynthesized
contents of an intuition. This moment is expressed by Adorno in two
terms, each of which can be elaborated with respect to Hegel’s skeptical
method – the ‘preponderance’ (Vorrang) of the object, and the notion of
‘block’.
The notion of preponderance intimates the need not for ontology, but
for an ‘ontological moment’. Adorno appeals to that moment as a critical
counterweight to the assumption in favor of the primacy of the subject
that escalates from the idealist critique of Kant. In Negative Dialectics,
Adorno frames that moment in relation to Heidegger’s claim to the turn
towards fundamental ontology that arises from a proper reconsideration
of Kant’s first Critique.
Heidegger’s major work on Kant, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,
emphasizes the importance of the “Schematism” chapter in the first
Critique, as implicitly pointing towards the ‘lack of fit’ between intuition
and understanding, and therefore the need for a ‘common root’ to both,
which is the contribution to the apprehension of Being carried out by
the transcendental imagination.49 Heidegger therefore follows a path
initially pursued by Hegel in Faith in Knowledge, in which that common
root (the Absolute, for Hegel) is defined in terms of the identity of iden-
tity and non-identity, where those terms map onto the functions of
intuition and understanding in Kant. Heidegger’s account of the imagi-
nation links it with language, allowing him to trace the origins of the
common root to primordial time.50 Heidegger’s intent is to head off
Hegel’s attempt to ‘evert’ the meaning of the common root, to give it a
social and historical form (substance that becomes subject). But by turning
the meaning of the transcendental imagination inside out, so to speak,
understanding it in terms of a primal objectivity, the reflexive critique
of idealism is also skirted.
For Adorno, the ‘ontological moment’ maps onto the first of the two
barriers that Kant erects against subjectivism. Heidegger’s attempt to
simply posit that barrier in terms of primal objectivity amounts to an
avoidance of critical reflexivity, and is therefore, at root, anti-critical,

anti-Enlightenment and reactionary. Any attempt, indeed, even if self-
consciously enacted, to avoid reflexivity will either revert to a pre-critical
dogmatism or drift back towards myth.51 Hence, Adorno’s insistence
that a negative dialectics “requires an ontological moment, to the extent
that ontology critically strips the binding constitutive role from the sub-
ject, but without substituting for the subject through the object in a sort
of second immediacy.”52 That moment is expressed by Adorno, not as
‘being’ but as ‘something’, a term in which resistance to abstraction is
concenrated, and thus is able to do the work of maintaining non-identity.
‘Something’ – as a cogitatively indispensable substrate of any con-

cept, including the concept of Being – is the utmost abstraction of the
subject-matter that is not identical with thinking, an abstraction not
to be abolished by any further thought process.53
Thus Adorno affirms an entity that bears close resemblance to what

ancient skepticism defines as azetetos, that which cannot be questioned
or brought within the ambit of subjectivity. In this respect, the critique
of abstraction affirms the need to recover something lost or diminished
by Cartesianism.
Adorno’s notion of the metaphysics of the block is an extension of the
second Kantian barrier that Lukács identifies, that between the Ideas of
reason and the activity of the understanding. But the notion of block is
also self-consciously framed at the nexus of Hegel’s reflexive critique of
Kant. Hegel’s skepticism emphasizes the incoherence of reason merely
positing a block to the remit of consciousness. The point is brought out
by Adorno as follows:
In Kant, the idea that a world divided into subject and object, the
world in which, as prisoners of our own constitution, we are involved
only with phenomena, is not the ultimate world, already forms the
secret source of energy. Hegel adds an un-Kantian element to that:
the idea that in grasping, conceptually, the block, the limit that is set
to subjectivity, in understanding subjectivity as ‘mere’ subjectivity,
we have already passed beyond that limit.54
It is at the contact point between Kant’s stubborn refusal to give up the

reference to a ‘beyond’, within which the notions of subjectivity and
objectivity still have meanings separate from each other, and Hegel’s
recognition that the realization of the existence of such a reference
overthrows it, that Adorno’s commitment to a residual metaphysics

inheres. The doctrine of block is a device intended to express a com-
mitment to Kant’s Ideas of reason, and therefore as a reaffirmation of
Kant’s second barrier. Inasmuch as Hegel’s self-completing skepticism
breaches that barrier, in its attempt to actualize philosophy, to close the
gap between the love of knowing and actual knowing, it must be rejected.55
On the other hand, in the absence of the aspiration – without the love
of knowing – philosophy is reduced to the subjective reflection of an
increasingly reified society. In his lectures on Kant’s first Critique, Adorno
expresses the predicament as metaphysical mourning.
[W]e have a situation in which knowledge is illusory because the

closer it comes to its object, the more it shapes it in its own image
and thus drives it further and further away … . This is what is reflected
in the doctrine of the block; it is a kind of metaphysical mourning, a
kind of memory of what is best, of something that we must not
forget, but that we are nevertheless compelled to forget.56
Given Adorno’s view of the double-ascendance of subjectivism and reifi-

cation on the one hand and the eclipse of moral–rational vocabulary on
the other, we might expect his reflections to be pitched directly against
these tendencies. But to hope that philosophy could be effective
in this way is to misunderstand its energies and significance. Rather, the
notion of block merely opposes non-identity to identity and anti-systemic
to systemic thinking. Such antinomian thinking intimates the need
for a philosophy that resists completion by virtue of its own internal
consistency.
Notes
Introduction
1. The importance of Marxism to critical theory is the central tenet of what
remains perhaps the most influential account in English of the critical theory
research program, David Held’s Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to
Habermas (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press,
1980). See especially p. 13. Cf. Douglas Kellner, Critical Theory, Marxism and
Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 1–2.
For bibliographies of both the principal writings of and commentary on the
Frankfurt School, see David Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, pp. 484–99,
and Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, trans. by Michael Robertson
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 715–71.
2. This change should not be viewed as a one-sided process; important shifts in
the meaning of philosophy itself have been driven partly by critical theory.
3. On the history of the relationship between Adorno’s philosophical interests
and the other members of the School, see Held, Introduction to Critical Theory,
pp. 200–2. For a fine summary of Adorno’s conception of the role of philos-
ophy within critical theory in general, see Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical
Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 8–12. For a perspective on the
key differences between Adorno and Habermas, see J.M. Bernstein, Recovering
Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (London:
Routledge, 1995), p. 29.
4. Garbis Kortian, Metacritique: The Philosophical Arguments of Jurgen Habermas
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), p. 32.
5. Rorty’s argument is presented in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1980), and refined in subsequent works. Taylor’s essay, “Inter-
pretation and the Sciences of Man,” in Review of Metaphysics, 25:1 (1971),
pp. 3–51, provides the basis for his anti-naturalistic and subsequently anti-
foundationalist hermeneutics. Lyotard, in arguing for the ‘end of metan-
arratives’ in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by
G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), takes explicit aim at epistemology’s self-conception.
6. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by N. Kemp Smith (London:
MacMillan, 1929), A424, B451.
7 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), p. 47.
8. Ibid.
9. See Kortian, Metacritique: The Philosophical Arguments of Jurgen Habermas,
p. 30. Cf. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. by
Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), pp. 39–40.
10. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 47.
11. Miller’s translation renders this inaccurately as ‘thoroughgoing skepticism’
(see Ibid., p. 49). For a full discussion of the difference, see Chapter 4.
146
Notes 147
12. See, for example, Richard H. Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to
Spinoza, 3rd edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979).
13. G.W.F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. by H.B. Nisbet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 23.
1. Idealism, Metacritique and Ancient Skepticism

1. The key work on the influence of ancient skepticism is Popkin’s History of
Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza. Recent specialist scholarship on ancient skep-
ticism has been pioneered by Miles Burnyeat who has explored it in a number
of influential and historically sensitive articles (see, e.g., “Can the Skeptic Live
his Skepticism,” in The Skeptical Tradition, ed. by M.F. Burnyeat (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1983) pp. 117–48), “Idealism and
Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed,” Philosophical
Review, January 1982, pp. 3–40 and “The Skeptic in his Place and Time,” in
Philosophy in History, ed. by Richard Rorty, J.B. Schneewind and Quentin Skinner
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 225–54.
2. The resurgence follows especially the work of Alisdair MacIntyre, and the
continuing attention accorded to Hannah Arendt’s focus on Greek ethics.
Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of Desire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1994), as I show here, has been influential in drawing attention to
neglected aspects of Hellenistic philosophy in general.
3. There is significant disagreement regarding the most basic tenets of ancient
skepticism. Probably the most widespread understanding is that it represents
a form of phenomenalism, as Frede and Stough both argue (see Michael
Frede, Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1995) pp. 179–225 and Charlotte Stough, Greek Skepticism (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1969) pp. 67–97). For a criticism of
this interpretation, in which it is attributed directly to historical insensitivity,
see Burnyeat, “Can the Skeptic Live his Skepticism,” p. 127. Cf. Gisela Striker,
“Skeptical Strategies,” in Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic
Philosophy, ed. by M. Schofield, M.F. Burnyeat and J. Barnes (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980), pp. 54–83.
4. The Lectures are general acknowledged to be one of Hegel’s more conservative
works, in which – from the standpoint of critical theory – the dialectic
appears in its most dogmatic form.
5. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 123–38.
6. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axi note (a). For a review and critique of
Schulze’s arguments in Aenesidemus, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), pp. 266–84.
7. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, p. 270.
8. See Isaiah Berlin, Against the Current (New York: Viking, 1980) p. 9. Hamann
is also the subject of a separate late essay by Berlin, The Magus of the
North: J.G. Hamann and the Origins of Modern Irrationalism (New York: Farrar,
Strauss & Giroux, 1994). On the influence of Hamann on later idealism, Cf.
Beiser, The Fate of Reason, pp. 39–43.
9. See the discussion in Chapter 5. On Jacobi’s diagnosis of nihilism, see Beiser,
The Fate of Reason, p. 81.
148 Notes
10. Schulze’s argument is really presented in two steps. First, he lodges the
metacritical claim against Kant, and only then appeals to the return to Hume.
His argument can only be successful, then, if Hume’s skepticism is accepted
at face value.
11. Hegel excoriates this approach memorably in the Encyclopedia Logic as the
doctrine of the “wise Scholasticus, who refuses to enter the water until he has
learned how to swim.” See G.W.F. Hegel, Logic, trans. by William Wallace,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 14.
12. It may therefore also be understood as anticipating a key element of the
Phenomenology, in which philosophical positions are encountered and
attacked not simply on the basis of their internal coherence, but also of their
historical specificity, and therefore as both logically and actually surpassed.
The most obvious example of this is Hegel’s account of sense-certainty,
which includes an ‘anthropological’ account of the development of human
consciousness, and a scornful aside against Schulze, who is accused of raising
a level of consciousness of the world that has been surpassed even by animals
to the status of a philosophical truth. See Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 109.
13. See J.G. Fichte, “Review of Aenesidemus,” in Fichte: Early Philosophical
Writings, trans. and ed. by Daniel Breazeale (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1988), pp. 59–77.
14. Cf. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, p. 268.
15 G.W.F. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy, Exposition
of its Different Modifications and Comparison of the Latest Form with
the Ancient One,” in Between Kant and Hegel, trans. and ed. by H.S. Harris
and G. DiGiovanni (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985),
pp. 313–14.
16. Ibid. The same issue is at stake when Hegel warns ‘us’ in the first chapter of
the Phenomenology that our approach to the first shape of spirit must be one
of ‘receptive’ apprehension rather than ‘active’ comprehension (Hegel,
Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 58). See also the discussion in Chapter 4.
17. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy,” p. 339.
18. Ibid., p. 330.
19. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in Hume’s Enquiries,
ed. by L.A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 159.
20. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholson
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 57.
22. Schulze, Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie, cited by Hegel, “On the
Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy”, p. 318.
23. See Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. and ed. by R.G. Bury
(London: Heinemann, 1942), pp. 23–6.
25. See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 49.
26. Hegel, Logic, pp. 118–19.
27. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1970), p. 20.
28. See David Sedley, “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism,” in The Skeptical
Tradition, ed. by Miles Burnyeat (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1983), p. 17.
Notes 149
29. See Harris and DiGiovanni, Between Kant and Hegel, p. 360 n. 77.
30. Michael Forster, Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1989), p. 35.
31. Hegel, “On the Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy”, p. 330.
32. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 4.
33. Ibid., p. 13. Cf. Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory,
2nd edn (London: Duckworth, 1982), p. 148.
35. For a detailed analysis of the historical context of Hellenistic philosophy, see
Burnyeat, “The Skeptic in his Place and Time,” pp. 225–54.
36. The account of Epicureanism that follows is influenced by Nussbaum’s inter-
pretation of the dominant themes of Epicureanism in The Therapy of Desire.
37. MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 169.
38. Ibid.
39. Macintyre draws attention to the centrality of the notion of law in Stoic
philosophy, and how this chimed with the social rigidity of Imperial Rome.
He argues that Stoicism, in its rejection of the Aristotelian account of the
plurality of virtues in favor of the hegemony of law, anticipates the demise of
the idea of a community’s common good, which he takes as the definitive
ethical shift in the transition to modernity. See also the discussion of
MacIntyre’s affinity with the critical theorists’ conception of ethics and
modernity in Chapter 5.
41. This account of the epistemic commitments of Stoicism is influenced by
Nussbaum, Burnyeat, David Sedley, “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism,”
in Burnyeat (ed.) The Skeptical Tradition, pp. 9–30, and Pierre Couissine, “The
Stoicism of the New Academy”, in Burnyeat (ed.) The Skeptical Tradition,
pp. 31–64.
42. See Sedley, “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism”, p. 14.
43. Cicero, Academica, trans. by H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1933), p. 561.
44. The meaning and extent of Socrates’ irony cannot be discussed further here.
The question of the role of irony in ancient skepticism is under-explored.
However, there does seem to be a consensus among scholars that, at least
with respect to Pyrrho, no irony was present.
45. Agog[ and haeresis were understood as in opposition to each other, although
this is not retained in translation.
46. Schulze, Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie, cited by Hegel, “On the
Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy,” p. 320.
48. Ibid., p. 320.
49. Hegel remarks that Pyrrho should be understood as a “creative individual
[origineller Mensch]” (Ibid., p. 333), whose philosophy grew out of his life-
practice, and thereby became the foundation of a school. Pyrrho, therefore,
in common with other such spontaneous thinkers, represents a kind of
orginal unity of natural consciousness and reflection. The development of
ancient skepticism, and the transformation of the Pyrrhonian agoge into a
formal haeresis, culminating in Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism,
parallels the increasing polarization of experience and reflection and the
turning of each against the other.
150 Notes
50. Cicero, Academica, p. 565.

51. Hegel, in the skepticism essay, presents the Parmenides as the primary
forerunner of Ancient skepticism. For an account of the probable influences
on Arcesilaus, see Sedley “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism,” p. 11.
52. See Ibid., p. 17.
53. Cf. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, p. 23.
54. See Sedley, “The Motivation of Greek Skepticism,” p. 17.
55. Tropos means a ‘turning’, as distinguished from a rule or a principle.
57. Ibid., p. 338.
58. The term arch[ designates both a beginning and a regulating principle.
Heidegger captures this element when he notes that: “arch[ has a double
meaning: that from which something emerges, and that which governs over
what emerges in this way” (Martin Heidegger, “Modern Science, Metaphysics
and Mathematics, in Basic Writings,” trans. and ed. by David Farrell Krell
(London: Routledge, 1994), p. 284).
59. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, pp. 28–9.
61. Ibid., pp. 290–1.
62. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 160.
63. See Burnyeat, “Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism,” pp. 118–19.
2. On the Origins of Modern Skepticism: Descartes,

Doubt and Certainty
1. Miles Burnyeat, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and
Berkeley Missed,” p. 19.
2. Especially the consequences of Galileo’s discoveries. As Anthony Giddens
argues, in The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1990), p. 19, the distinctively modern experience of ‘empty’ or
‘abstract’ space is dependent logically and chronologically on both the scien-
tific abstracting capability, and the practice of universal map cartography that
was first practised by Western travelers and explorers of the sixteenth century.
3. For a discussion of the meaning of reification, see Chapter 6. In this context,
it is enough to note that reification involves the large-scale institutionaliza-
tion of alienating social processes.
4. For an account of the neo-Kantian origins of both Lukàcs’s and Heidegger’s
perspectives, see Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press,
1981), pp. 24–31. For a more detailed account of the convergences between
Lukács and Heidegger, see Lucien Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards
a New Philosophy, trans. by W.Q. Boelhower (London: Routledge, 1977).
For Adorno’s own account of the influence and importance of Lukács,
see Adorno, “Reconciliation under Duress,” in Aesthetics and Politics, trans.
by R. Taylor (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 151–76.
5. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics
(London: Merlin Press, 1968), p. 112.
Notes 151

7. René Descartes, Discourse on Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes
Volume I, ed. by J. Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 89.
8. Descartes, Discourse on Method, p. 90.
9. Cf. Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry (London: Penguin,
1990), p. 34. Williams draws attention to the subjective and rather hesi-
tant aspect of Descartes’ initial resolve, suggesting its unusual and non-
universalizable character. One of most trenchant of Descartes’ contemporary
critics, Pierre Bourdin, raises similar concerns regarding the privileging of
the individual’s doubts (excerpted in the “Seventh Objection and Replies”
in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Volume II, pp. 361–76), but
Descartes’ dismissal of such objections is quite perfunctory.
10. Harry Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in
Descartes’ Meditations (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), p. 15.
11. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy in The Philosophical Writings
of Descartes, Volume II, p. 8.
12 J.M. Bernstein, The Philosophy of the Novel: Lukács, Marxism and the Dialectics
of Form (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 161.
Bernstein takes the Discourse on Method as both logically prior and more
central to Descartes’ project than the Meditations, and he associates that
project with the establishment of the atomistic self, as a form compatible
with the redefinition of nature as subject to the infinity of human desire.
The self is co-originary with this redefinition. Bernstein’s argument bears
comparison with Arendt’s conception of the modern self as occupying an
Archimedean point (see later), in the sense that both associate the origins of
the Western notion of the self with the emergence of an instrumental
relationship to nature.
13. I borrow the term from Habermas, who designates by it the continuity
between French rationalism and German idealism, as granting special status
to the ‘I’.
14. This would be the standard account of the relationship between belief and
truth within modern analytic philosophy. According to this, knowledge is
simply justified true belief. Therefore the criteria for a subject S knowing
p are: (1) p (2) S believes p (3) S is justified in believing p.
15. This way of understanding the relationship is parallel to the investigation in
Chapter 3, where we will examine the notion of legitimacy in Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason. It is enough to note here that Kant makes a distinction
between a de facto mode of deduction and one arrived at de jure. The former
he distinguishes as “the manner in which a concept is acquired through
experience and through reflection on experience, and which therefore
concerns, not its legitimacy, but only its de facto mode of origination”
(Critique of Pure Reason, A85).
16. Cf. the analysis in Leszek Kolakowski, Husserl and the Search for Certitude (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), where he uses Husserl as a vehicle to
come to terms with the interest in certainty in Western thought. While
Kolakowski’s conclusions have some bearing on the contradictions inherent
in the idea of a search for certainty, he takes the concept of certainty itself to
be quite transparent.
152 Notes
17. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, (An English Translation of Les Mots
et Les Choses) (London: Routledge, 1970), pp. 18–23.
18. Ibid., p. 55.
19. Ibid., p. 52.
20. Thus, in “Regulae VII,” Descartes notes that “enumeration alone, whatever
the question to which we are applying ourselves, will permit us always to
deliver a true and certain judgment upon it” (The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, Volume II, p. 354).
21. Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 55.
22. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1980), p. 330.
23. Descartes’ suspicion is, in some respects, the epistemological counterpart to
his contemporary Hobbes’ political pessimism. The factical basis of Hobbes’
views in the violence of seventeenth century European Society is generally
recognized; the influence of that society on Descartes’ epistemology is less
often noted.
24. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958), p. 253.
25. The challenge is not to the senses only, but to the rational context within
which sensory evidence was admittted. As Heidegger argues, Galileo and his
opponents both observed the same fact; what allowed Galileo to present
conclusions regarding the differing rates of fall of bodies in terms of law was
his initial, a priori formulation of motion as an invariant property of bodies
in general, and not as belonging to any specific body (see “Modern Science,
Metaphysics and Mathematics,” p. 289).
26. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism 3rd edn, trans.
and ed. by Stephen Kalberg (Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury Press, 2003),
pp. 53–101. Arendt uses Weber’s analysis as a kind of shorthand to describe
the social changes that developed alongside the process of world alienation:
the rise of industrial capitalism, accompanied by the displacement of the
dominant social forms of family and property by nationality and labor-power,
and the emergence of the modern atomized individual, capable of assuming
an independent legal and economic identity. Arendt therefore follows Marx
and Hegel in recognizing the importance of ‘legal status’ as a condition for
the rise the modern individual – capable, for Hegel, of assuming the identity
of citizenship and, for Marx, of selling his or her labor on the ‘free’ market.
27. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 253.
28. See, for example, Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science (Oxford University
Press, 1997), pp. 45–8. Arendt draws primarily on Russell and Whitehead in
drawing her conclusions regarding the philosophical significance of the
scientific revolution.
30. Ibid., p. 265.
31. Ibid., p. 264. Giddens, in The Consequences of Modernity, points out that the
instrumentalization of the experience of time and space is not simply
the condition for conceptualizing the earth as a single unity, but also makes
possible the construction of the modern experience of locale and life-stage.
According to Arendt, earth alienation also involves the displacement of the
earth from the center of Creation, which sets in motion a progressive reduction
Notes 153
of its cosmological significance. In the twentieth century, this has proceeded

in conjunction with the progressive devaluation of the earth, expressed in
contemporary representations of the earth not as a dwelling place or habitat
but as a prison (see The Human Condition, p. 2).
32. See Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 256–7. Arendt insists on the historically
factual level of her analysis. Alienation refers simply to the introduction of
imagined distance into relationships, both between human beings and to the
objects of their knowledge and action.
33. See Ibid., p. 285.
34. This formulation of the Cartesian problem is presented by John McDowell,
“Subjective Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,” in Subject, Thought
and Context, ed. by Philip Pettit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986),
pp. 147–52.
36. This is Arendt’s formulation, but it could be noted that the notion of a
common sense stands in for the idea of the Cartesian transcendental subject.
For an interpretation of Arendt’s notion of a post-Cartesian sensus communis,
see Michael Gottsegen, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 130, 207.
37. John McDowell, “Subjective Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,” p. 148.
McDowell takes up this point in pursuing a theory of ‘object dependence’,
which has been influential among contemporary realists.
38. Descartes actually notes that his senses have “deceived” him, using the
French verb tromper. I alter the paraphrasing in order to bring out the signif-
icance of the idea of deception only at the third stage of doubt.
39. Cf. Bernard Williams, “Descartes’ Use of Skepticism,” in Burnyeat (ed.), The
Skeptical Tradition, p. 343.
40. Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I, p. 89. Cf. the interpretation of
Rodolphe Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1986), p. 67.
41. Descartes, Objections and Replies, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes.
42. Heidegger, “Modern Science, Mathematics and Metaphysics,” in Basic
Writings, p. 302.
43. Heidegger goes on to argue that, in the form in which Descartes expresses it,
the bare Cogito, the ‘I-think’, unites the I-principle with the core of modern
mathematics, the numerary, expressed in the principle of contradiction. He
goes on to argue for a conception of the mathematical (mathesis) that exceeds
the merely numerary. Heidegger, once again, is taking up themes addressed
by Lukács and the critical theorists in the modern convergence of the
rational with the mathematical.
44. Descartes, Objections and Replies, in Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume I,
p. 244.
45. Ibid.
46. Heidegger, “Modern Science, Mathematics and Metaphysics,” p. 302.
47. Jaatko Hintikka, (1962) “Cogito ergo Sum: Inference or Performance,”
Philosophical Review, 71, p. 170.
48. Ibid., p. 168 (italics added).
49. Frankfurt has pointed to some of the problems of this interpretation, including
its inconsistency with key patterns of argument presented in the second
154 Notes
meditation. Frankfurt, however, then goes on to argue again for an inferentially

based reading. See Frankfurt (1996) “Descartes’ Discussion of his Existence
on the Second Meditation,” in Philosophical Review, 75, pp. 185–207.
50. Descartes, Meditations, p. 27.
51. John Morris, “Descartes’ Natural Light,” in Rene Descartes: Critical Assessments,
Vol 1, ed. by George J.D. Moyal (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 413–29.
52. Ibid., p. 432.
53. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. by Allan Bloom (London:
Penguin, 1979), p. 267.
54. Ibid., p. 268.
3. The Question of Legitimacy: Skepticism, Law and

Transcendental Idealism
1. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Axi.
2. Ibid., Bxvi.
3. Ibid., Bi.
4. The relationship between Kant and Rousseau is obviously more complex
than we allow for here. For a general analysis see, for example, W. Kersting,
“Politics, Freedom and Order,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. by
Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 342–6.
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. by G.D.H. Cole (New York:
Everyman, 1996), pp. 211–12.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Rodney
Livingston (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 150.
7. Dieter Henrich, “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction,” in Kant’s Transcendental
Deductions, ed. by E. Forster (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1989), p. 31.
8. Ibid., p. 35.
9. Kant was a librarian at the royal library in Konigsberg for six years.
10. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A91, B124.
11. Ibid., A91, B124. Kant’s formulation is a rather extreme interpretation of
Hume’s conclusions. As will be seen later, Hume himself did not consider the
causal relation to be an illusion as such. The interpretation is justified in this
context, however, and perhaps should be understood as a veiled criticism of
Hume’s failure to sufficiently distinguish the status of causality from
concepts for which he would have had as much contempt as did Kant.
12. Ibid., A84, B117.
13. Ibid., A87, B119.
14. Ibid., A88, B120.
15. Ibid., A88, B121.
16. The general significance of the distinction between objective validity and
objective reality for understanding the course of the transcendental deduction
is a much disputed and extremely complex topic. The problem derives from
the fundamental distinction between logic and ontology which Kant
opposed to Wolff’s rationalism, and which remained an irresolvable ambiguity
throughout key sections of the first Critique. Here we are concerned only with
the implications of this distinction for skepticism. Paul Guyer, in “The
Notes 155
Transcendental Deduction of the Categories,” in The Cambridge Companion

to Kant, takes the distinction to be complementary to that between the
transcendental and the empirical. Thus he says that “a concept has objective
reality if it has at least some instantiation in experience but objective validity
only if it applies to all possible objects of experience” (p. 125). This claim is
filled out in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), pp. 11–24. Robert Pippin argues, on the contrary,
that the status of the categories in determining objective reality is the
stronger claim, and I take him to be correct in this (see Robert Pippin, Kant’s
Theory of Form (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 154). This
also commits him to pursuing the apperception issue more deeply than
Guyer, thus leading him towards Fichte and Hegel. See Robert Pippin, Hegel’s
Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), pp. 18–22.
18. The function of unity in the constitution of reality is discussed in Dieter
Henrich, “The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction,” in
Reading Kant: New Perspectives on Transcendental Arguments and Critical Philosophy,
ed. by Eva Schaper (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 251–79. Henrich argues
against unity as the basis for the course of the transcendental deduction in
favour of the identity of the subject. However, this does not affect the impor-
tance of the function of unity in the ‘constitution of reality’ issue.
19. Manfred Kuehn, “Kant’s Conception of Hume’s Problem”, in Immanuel Kant’s
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics in Focus, trans. and ed. by B. Logan
(London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 156–7.
20. Ibid., p. 157.
21. See, for example, N. Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure
Reason, (London: MacMillan, 1923), pp. xxv–xxx.
22. Kuehn, “Kant’s Conception of ‘Hume’s Problem’,” p. 168.
23. Ibid.
24. Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, trans. by B. Logan
(London: Routledge, 1996), p. 33.
25. See, for example, E. Forster, “How are Transcendental Arguments Possible?”
in Reading Kant: New Perspectives on Transcendental Arguments and Critical
Philosophy, ed. by Eva Schaper (London: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 11–34. A more
sophisticated defense of this approach is made by Ernst Cassirer in Kant’s Life
and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), in which the
deduction from knowledge of objects is tied to the more general character of
the Copernican Revolution. Kant himself distinguishes between the analytic
mode of argument offered in the Prolegomena from the synthetic mode of
the first Critique. On the difference between the two, see Dieter Henrich, “The
Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” Review of Metaphysics,
88, pp. 640–59.
26. See Henrich, “The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction,” for
an analysis of why this form fails. Cf. Pippin, Kant’s Theory of Form, pp. 183–5.
27. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B20.
28. Henrich, “The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,” p. 652.
29. Heidegger interprets Kant’s task as “a pure phenomenology of the subjectiv-
ity of the subject.” However, he sees the quaestio quid juris as merely “a formula
156 Notes
for the task of an analytic of transcendence” (Martin Heidegger, Kant and the
Problem of Metaphysics, trans. by J.S. Churchill (Indianopolis, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1962), p. 59). In the light of our previous discussion
concerning Kant’s conception the demand for a deduction, it should be clear
that the juridical aspect of the deduction cannot be dispensed with in the
manner in which Heidegger does so. Concomitantly, the importance of
understanding Kant’s task juridically if the continuity with Hume’s skepti-
cism is to be authentic will be shown in what follows.
30. For instances of this traditionalist understanding of the relationship see
A. Lovejoy “On Kant’s Reply to Hume,” in Kant: Disputed Questions, ed. by
Moltke S. Gram (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1967). Guyer’s extensive
scholarship on the relationship also seems to tend towards this reading.
See, for example, P. Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge
University Press, 1987), Chapter 4.
31. For his critique of Kant’s understanding of the category of causality, see
Arthur Schoperhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. by E.F.J. Payne
(New York: Dover, 1969), pp. 440–54.
32. See Henrich, “The Proof Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction,”
p. 654.
33. For further analysis of the issue see Paul Guyer, “Kant on Apperception and
A Priori Synthesis,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 17, pp. 205–12.
34. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B135.
35. Antinomy is another term that has a legal origin. According to Howard Caygill,
“[a]ntinomy is a rhetorical form of presentation … in which opposed argu-
ments are presented side by side with each other. The form was widely used in
seventeenth-century jurisprudence (as in Eckolt’s De Antinomiis of 1660) to
point to differences between laws arising from clashes between legal jurisdic-
tions.” (Howard Caygill, A Kant Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 75.)
36. Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 6.
37. Ibid., pp. 15–16. Rose has argued elsewhere that the key element seized upon
by the later generations of Kant critics is the particularity of the justice
claimed, and the consequent encroachment of sociohistorical contingency
into that adjudication. See Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 43–5.
38. The same result emerges when the problem is seen with respect to Kant’s
relationship to Rousseau on the question of legitimacy. The idea embodied
in Rousseau’s concept of the general will rests on the identity of the subject
and object of legislation. The quaestio quid juris in that instance would be
by what authority is that identity itself constructed? The role accorded by
Rousseau to the original social contract might be said to be an attempt to
address this problem. However, it still bears the stamp of an attempt to answer
only the question of fact.
39. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (London:
Penguin, 1967), p. 42.
40. See Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, p. 448.
42. Fichte made a number of revisions in the text for different editions of the
work, which appeared three times in the period from 1794 to 1802. The
translation used here, J.G. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. and ed. by
P. Heath and J. Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), incor-
porates these changes into the text without notation.
Notes 157

44. Henrich, in “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction,” states that Kant understands
reflection to be always implicit in any investigation. Hence “we reflect
always, but investigation is a deliberate activity” (p. 43). He also notes that
“reflection is not introspection. It accompanies operations internally. It is
not the achievement of a philosopher who, by means of a deliberate effort
and within an intentio obliqua, turns inward to examine the operations of
reason. Thus it is a source, not an achievement” (p. 42). This interpre-
tation is presumably intended to deflect the move to the Fichtean position.
However, it seems to me that the distinction between a ‘source’ and an
‘achievement’ cannot be accounted for from within the Kantian frame-
work. Fichte has a similar criticism in mind when he states that “The self is
at once the agent and the product of action; the active and what the activ-
ity brings about; action and deed are one and the same.” (Fichte, Science of
Knowledge, p. 97).
45. Immanuel Kant Logic, trans. by R. Hartmann & W. Schwartz (New York:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1974), p. 99.
47. Ibid., A262, B318.
48. Ibid., A261, B317.
49. Ibid., A263, B319.
50. Ibid., A268, B324.
51. Kant makes reference to the ‘common root’ of our faculties in the Introduction
to the first Critique, and declares it to be unknowable. Heidegger takes up this
theme in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, pp. 50–9, stating the common
root to be the faculty of imagination.
52. Moltke Gram, in an influential article, “The Impossibility of Transcendental
Deductions,” in Kant Disputed Questions, ed. by Moltke Gram (New York:
Quadrangle Books, 1967), identifies the weak point in Kant’s argument as the
possibility of schematically identifying a field of reference for the objects
whose conditional existence is to be proved with reference to the subject.
However, he ignores the role Kant accorded to the concepts of reflection in
accomplishing this.
53. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, p. 30.
54. Ibid., p. 38.
55. Ibid., p. 41.
56. Ibid., p. 33. Henrich credits Fichte with grasping the ‘circularity’ of the act
of reflection, thus overthrowing a dogmatic paradigm that had subsisted
from Descartes through Locke and Liebniz to Kant. The circle consists in the
idea that when I think of myself – make myself an object – I can think of
myself doing this. But the actual doing of it is something separate from me
conceptualizing myself doing it; therefore, the I-object always remains
beyond the I-subject because the former only exists inasmuch as it is an
object. The circle is therefore irresolvable.
58. Henrich, “The Identity of the Subject in the Transcendental Deduction,” p. 253.
59. Fichte’s philosophy may therefore be thought of as enunciating two principles
of modernity: mass democracy and the demands of radical individualism.
The combination, as Marcuse and others argue, leads to social atomization.
60. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 154.
158 Notes
61. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A424, B452. In fact, as Caygill has pointed out,
appearances, under Kant’s theory of experience, themselves are never ‘decep-
tive’ as such. (See A Kant Dictionary, pp. 79–80.) It is the way appearances are
taken up by the subject that generates deception.
4. Hegel and Self-Completing Skepticism

1. G.W.F. Hegel, Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1975), p. 119.
2. See Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Athlone Press, 1981)
pp. 149–54 and Werner Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology: Its Point and Purpose –
A Commentary on the Preface and Introduction (New York: Harper & Row,
1975), p. 51.
4. Ibid., A268–9, B324–5.
5. Fichte, Science of Knowledge, p. 114. Italics added.
7. The categorical imperative never states what one should do in any specific
set of circumstances. It merely provides a doctrinal rule through abstracting
from all the content of those circumstances. The meaning of the categorical
imperative is also closely related to the problems of arch[ and telos, since it
is supposed to “declare an action to be of itself necessary without reference
to any purpose, without any other end.” (Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the
Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by J.W. Ellington, in Kant’s Ethical Philosophy
(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 25.) Hegel’s critique
of Kant’s ethics is similar to his critique of his epistemology; that con-
tent always seeps into form, and that neither reason nor the will, as Kant
understands them, is purely formal, but continually subject to uncognized
qualifications.
8. This illustrates again the significance of Henrich’s ‘Rousseauian criterion’.
10. Ibid., p. 16.
11. There are, though, occasional tendencies in Kant toward Fichte’s position.
For example, in his footnoted remark that “deficiency in judgment is just
what is ordinarily called stupidity, and for such a failing there is no remedy.
An obtuse or narrow-minded person to whom nothing is wanting save a
proper degree of understanding and the concepts appropriate thereto, may
indeed be trained through study, even to the extent of becoming learned. But
as such people are commonly still lacking in judgment (secunda Petri), it is
not unusual to meet learned men who in the application of their scientific
knowledge betray the original want, which can never be made good” (Critique
of Pure Reason, B173).
12 G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. by W. Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany,
NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), p. 69.
13. See Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness,
pp. 24–35.
14. In the early writings, Hegel speaks of identity and difference, rather than
identity and non-identity. The distinction between the words ‘difference’
Notes 159
and ‘non-identity’ is itself informative. Non-identity is merely that which

stands outside identity; hence it is defined only with respect to identity itself,
which is therefore the privileged term. For this reason, Adorno consistently
refers to the ‘non-identical’ in attempting to dissociate Hegel’s philosophy
from what he perceives as its subjectively idealist bias (see Negative Dialectics,
p. 149).
15. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, p. 70. The concept/intuition language, according
to Hegel, is also inadequate because it takes experience to consist in the func-
tion of faculties. This leaves it open to a psychologistic interpretation.
16. The centrality and complexity of the issue for Hegel can be realized if we
consider the general structure of the Science of Logic in terms of this criticism.
The logic of being treats of the contradictions and concomitant determina-
tions that arise from the categories of experience, when they are propounded
as immediate objects. The recurring contradictions and incomprehensibility
of the categories, and therefore the failure of the logic of being, make neces-
sary a logic of essence in which the categories are examined in terms of the
‘determinations of reflection’. However, this too is to be understood as a
demonstration of failure. For a discussion of Hegel’s logic as a process of failure,
see Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 185–96.
17. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, p. 154.
18 G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. by A.V. Miller (New York: Humanities
Press, 1993) p. 77.
19. Ibid., p. 76.
20. Ibid.
21. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, p. 36.
22. Garbis Kortian, Metacritique: The Philosophical Arguments of Jurgen
Habermas, p. 34.
23. On the combination of circumstances that forced Hegel to change the title of
the work see Robert Pippin, “You Can’t Get There from Here: Transition
Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in F. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 52–3.
24. Walter Kaufmann, “Hegel’s Conception of Phenomenology,” in Phenomenology
and Philosophical Understanding, ed. by Eva Pivcevic (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975), p. 67. Cf. Pippin, “You Can’t Get There from Here:
Transition Problems in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” pp. 53–6.
25. See Walter Kaufmann, Hegel: A Re-Interpretation (Notre Dame, IN: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1965).
26. Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 4.
27. Cf. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, p. 150.
28. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, p. 300.
29. This interpretation appears in Quentin Lauer, An Interpretation of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit (Fordham, NY: Fordham University Press, 1982)
pp. 38–9. A similar version appears in Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and
History (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 67–9, although here Houlgate pres-
ents the issue in terms of the reader’s relationship to the Science of Logic. See
also J. Loewenburg, Hegel’s Phenomenology: Dialogues on the Life of the Mind
(New York: Open Court, 1965), p. 15. The common element of all these read-
ings is that the initial standpoint of the ‘we’ is taken as unproblematic. From
what I have already said with reference to Hegel’s critique of Fichte, it
160 Notes
should be clear that Hegel could hardly have understood this standpoint as
unproblematic in itself. These interpretations also ignore the problem of
taking natural consciousness as given, as simply something ‘we’ take up or
merely observe in our capacity as ‘phenomenologists’. Even where some
gloss is given to this problem, for example, in Loewenhoek, where he states
that the impartiality of the phenomenological standpoint depends on us first
“yielding to the stand-point of the shape of consciousness in question” (p. 15),
the problem is not encountered dialectically, that is, by engaging with the
claims that a ‘shape of natural consciousness’ might raise against ‘us’.
31. Marx, Hegel’s Phenomenology: Its Point and Purpose – A Commentary on the
Preface and Introduction, p. 144.
32. Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Concept of Experience, trans. by K.R. Dove (New
York: Harper and Row, 1970), pp. 66–7.
33. Adorno challenges Heidegger’s reading of the Phenomenology in his own essay
on Hegel’s concept of experience as follows: “For Hegel, what experience is
concerned with at any particular moment is the animating contradiction of
such absolute truth. Nothing can be known ‘that is not in experience’ –
including, accordingly, the Being into which existential ontology dis-
places the ground of what exists and is experienced” (Adorno, Hegel: Three
Studies, p. 53).
34. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, pp. 71–2.
35. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 49–50.
36. Ibid., p. 50.
38. Kant distinguishes critique as a canon as opposed to an organon of knowledge.
See Critique of Pure Reason, A795, B823.
39. Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 150–1
40. See Theodor, W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Rodney
Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), p. 145.
41. Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 191.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., p. 34.
44. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, p. 73.
45. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. by A. Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1981), p. 43.
5. Skepticism, Nihilism and the Crisis of Rationality

1. For Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse, while it is important that philosophy
be understood as an expression of social forces, it is equally important that
it be salvaged as something other than a mere expression and be generative
of new and alternative conceptions of rationality. Without this generative
and emancipatory dimension, philosophy is reduced to the same impotent
role assigned to it by positivism.
2. See Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 121. Adorno here describes skep-
tical empiricism as a “naked, supposedly ideology-free hegemony of mere
facts which human beings are expected to accept supinely.” In this section,
Notes 161
Adorno opposes skeptical empiricism to two further, rather loosely constructed

conceptions of skepticism, which are related to the alternatives posed by
Hegel in the Phenomenology. One, associated with Montaigne, is humanist, lib-
eral and progressive; the other, associated with Vilfredo Pareto, is relativist,
nihilist and – as Adorno suggests in his “Contribution to the Theory of
Ideology” – proto-fascist. For reasons discussed in Chapter 1, however, Pareto’s
thought could hardly be described as skeptical. Rather, it is relativist, and
belongs to a tradition of conservatism opposed, above all, to the universalist
claims of the Enlightenment (Cf. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity
(London: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 90). Similarly, Montaigne’s humanism, I
would argue, is less skeptical than it is an historically particular counter-reac-
tionary response to Scholasticism.
3. Weber’s notion of Zweckrationalität comprises three interrelated complexes:
the growth and extension of scientific rationality, the disenchantment of the
world and the eclipse of absolute ethical precepts by a utility-bound ethics.
Some of the specific ways in which these complexes influenced the critical
theorists are treated later. For a more general overview of that influence see
Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, pp. 65–70.
4. This is not to suggest that Weber was the first to generalize crises of rational-
ity into crises of society, but he was the first to cast the problem of reason in
explicitly sociological terms and thus, arguably, lay the groundwork for the
more general problem of ‘modernity’. For an explicitly philosophical contex-
tualization of Weber’s role in the emergence of that problem, see Robert
Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 7.
5. In this respect, Dialectic of Enlightenment remains perhaps even more timely
today, in the ‘age of globalization’, than at the time of its publication, inasmuch
as the institutions and principles with which it takes issue have only now come
to be seen in their full-fledged global form. For a discussion of the relationship
between early critical theory and globalization, see Douglas Kellner, “Theorizing
Globalization,” in Sociological Theory, November 2002, p. 290.
6. The conception of class as a universal social subject is not confined to the
Marxist-Lukácsian appeal to the proletariat, but also appears in Mannheim’s
conception of the intellectual stratum. Veblen’s appeal to the ‘engineers’ may
also be understood in terms of the casting of a ‘universal interest’ onto a
particular class.
7. There is disagreement both between the first generation of critical theorists
themselves on the interpretation of Marx’s theories of value, and between
commentators on how to understand those differences. One of the most lucid
accounts appears in Rose, The Melancholy Science, pp. 30–1, where she insists
that the notion is central to the theories propagated by Adorno, Lukács and
Benjamin, in the sense that each depends on the contrast between use-value
and exchange-value as a core component of their analyses. Similarly, Held has
insisted on the importance of the universalization of exchange-value as the
core component of Adorno’s critique of identity. Neither Held nor Rose, how-
ever, draw out the importance of the ‘self-expanding’ quality that underpins
capitalist production, that is, that capitalism as an economic system requires
ever-increasing quantities of surplus value. This component of Marx’s the-
ory has been thought to be fatally dependent on the ‘labor theory of value’,
and to have been effectively dropped by the critical theorists. Nevertheless,
162 Notes
the fact that Adorno (and others) reject Marx’s idea that ‘labor is the source
of all value’ in no way commits them to the claim that the depression of
wages below the level of their value in production is not one key systematic
component of capitalist accumulation. In recent years, theories of globaliza-
tion have given something of a new lease of life to the labor theory of value
which is quite compatible with critical theory. The most sophisticated ver-
sion is to be found in the work of Immanuel Wallerstein’s theory of ‘deru-
ralization’. See Wallerstein The End of the World as we Know It: Social Science
for the End of the Twenty-First Century (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. 79–80.
8. Where this is understood uncontroversially as the principle that the maxi-
mization of profit in production is the first and, in many situations, only
priority of capitalism as an economic and political system.
9. Under Durkheim’s sociological paradigm, differentiation is straightforwardly
associated with increasing complexity. This is not a necessary consequence,
since it is perfectly possible for society to become progressively more seg-
mented and stratified, but also for the underlying principles under which that
differentiation occurs to become progressively simpler and more centralized.
10. The best account of this variation is presented by Wiggerhaus in his biograph-
ical panorama of the key members of the Frankfurt School. See Wiggerhaus,
The Frankfurt School, pp. 41–105.
11. Adorno takes Durkheim as the exemplar of positivism in the social sciences.
His most adept and swiftest destruction of Durkheim’s presuppositions
appears in Negative Dialectics, p. 326 note.
12. Heidegger’s ‘ontologization of history’ is the arch-culprit here. See Negative
Dialectics, pp. 130–1.
13. See Wiggerhaus, The Frankfurt School, pp. 534–5.
14. See Horkheimer “Traditional and Critical Theory,” pp. 198–200.
15. Heidegger, post-structuralists, pragmatists and others all draw – either implic-
itly or explicitly – on the implications of the claim to nihilism.
16. For an account of Nietzsche’s nihilism that frames it in terms of a different set
of categories (primarily ‘active’ and ‘passive’), see Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche
Contra Rousseau (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 44–5.
17. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 377. Adorno’s point is placed in dramatic con-
temporary relief if we consider the sociologist Alan Wolfe’s observations on
the Chicago School of Economics view of economics as a total science, insist-
ing that “the tools of economic analysis can be used not just to decide
whether production should be increased or decreased, but in every kind of
decision making situation. Thus we have been told … that a man commits
suicide ‘when the total discounted lifetime utility remaining to him reaches
zero’.” (Alan Wolfe, Whose Keeper: Social Science and Moral Obligation (Berkeley
and Los Angeles CA: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 36–8.)
18. Truth as the identity of thought with its object is, for Adorno, modeled on
the principle of exchange. “The exchange-principle, the reduction of human
labor to an abstract general concept of average labor-time, is fundamentally
related to the identification-principle. It has its social model in exchange,
and it would not be without the latter.” Negative Dialectics, p. 146.
19. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 377.
20. Ibid.
Notes 163
21. Adorno places great emphasis on the importance of the Amphiboly chapter
of the first Critique. See Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 154.
22. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, §1.
23. Ibid., §12A.
24. Nietzsche associates this ideal strongly with metaphysical system-building.
25. Ibid., §14.
26. Ibid.
27. The three ideals align to some extent with the three Critiques.
28. In this respect, Nietzsche’s diagnostic outlook on the significance of
Enlightenment skepticism is not substantively different from that of Hegel
or the other German idealists. But, where the German idealists sought to
critique the Enlightenment separation of truth and value in the name of
establishing the ‘common root’ or Sollen of theoretical and practical reason
(Kant and Fichte) or of Sittlichkeit (Hegel), Nietzsche seeks to push the sepa-
ration toward what he sees as its logical outcome, the overcoming of enlight-
enment rationality itself, and of its completion or ‘perfecting’ in the
recognition of the will to power.
29. MacIntyre has pointed out, with some justification, that this worldview is
first clearly enunciated by Pascal. See After Virtue, p. 54.
30. Cf. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 179.
31. Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity, p. 72. Berlin is quoting Carl
Becker’s account of the significance of Hume’s skepticism.
32. Hume Treatise of Human Nature, III.1.i.
33. Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 19.
34. Ibid.
35. Cf. J.M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge
36. The is/ought distinction that arises from Hume’s Fork has been restated and
redescribed in various ways. In modern positivism, it is expressed in the view
that value judgments are incapable of being expressed in the language of
science. Therefore, they cannot be candidates for truth or falsehood. A more
reflexive view, clearly expressed in one of Carl Hempel’s seminal articles, is
that truth, as science, involves a commitment to value that may be, and
clearly often is, in conflict with other values. To choose truth over alternative
possible ends is to value a particular end, or particular vocabulary type, over
others. See Carl Hempel, “Science and Human Values,” in Social Control in a
Free Society, ed. by R.E. Spiller (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1960), pp. 39–64. The degree to which Hempel’s insight is acknowl-
edged and actualized within the scientific community is an open question.
37. The theme is repeated in Marcuse’s 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” in
Robert Paul Wolff (ed.), A Critique of Pure Tolerance (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1965), pp. 81–123.
38. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. 19.
39. Horkheimer’s conception of the irrationality of modern society is that it pres-
ents a mismatch between self-conception and reality. This view captures only
one dimension of what Adorno dubs identity-thinking. For a perceptive
discusison of how Adorno takes up Horkheimer’s critique of identity, see
Susan Buck Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press,
1977), p. 189.
164 Notes
40. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 20.

41. Horkheimer was thinking primarily of fanatical nationalism, but the
observation is no less valid today where forms of toxic gemeinschaft express
themselves as religious fundamentalism.
42. Indeed, as Adorno and Horkheimer argue in “The Elements of Anti-Semitism”
section of Dialectic of Enlightenment, fanaticism and instrumental reason have
to be understood as mutually supportive. A similar argument has been made
recently by, among others, Benjamin Barber, whose Jihad Vs. McWorld (New
York: Ballantine, 1996) replays the analyses of the culture industry and anti-
semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment from a global perspective.
43. Cf. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 77.
44. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, pp. 113, 256.
45. MacIntyre’s solution to that problem – recovering the language of
Aristotelian virtues as an adequate vehicle for understanding moral action –
has exerted influence over Habermas’s evolving interest in teleological ethics
in general (e.g., Jurgen Habermas, The Future of Human Nature, trans. by
William Rehg, Max Bensky and Hella Beister (Oxford: Polity Press, 2004),
pp. 44–7). For a variety of reasons, I believe that that turn should be regarded
as reactionary. First, MacIntyre’s account depends on an impoverished
conception of agency, and while it is certainly true that morality and ethical
life depend on shared traditions and practices that are historically ‘given’, it
is also the case that they can be oriented to ‘real’ ideals that are not institu-
tionalized in any group practice or tradition per se, but are still meaningful
as moral practices. Second, MacIntyre offers no compelling reason why the
only alternative to Nietzsche is Aristotle, and his conception depends, as
others have pointed out, on an insufficiently critical account of the ethical
shortcomings of the ancient Greek polis.
48. See Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, p. 77. Bernstein argues that,
historically, “three pressures converged to make the search for rational foun-
dations for morality necessary and intelligible”: the redescriptions of qualities
of things in terms of the mathematized language of natural science, the
destruction of canonical knowledge brought about by experimentation and
the rise of individualism (pp. 78–9). I would add a fourth element, intimated
by MacIntyre’s stance but explicitly drawn out in Foucault’s investigations,
which would be of equal importance and at a similar level of operative
impact to those processes that Bernstein describes: the rise of the state, par-
ticularly in Northern Europe, which brought with it the need for redescription
and control of the vocabulary and spheres of social life, including sexuality,
sanity and ‘morality’.
49. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 51
50. According to MacIntyre, the paradigm of value-free sociology is best
expressed in the work of Erving Goffman, who imposes its premises on the
actual conduct of social life. See MacIntyre, After Virtue, p. 115.
52. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, trans.
and ed., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1946), p. 141.
Notes 165

54. I owe this general interpretation of Weber’s position to Robert Hollinger’s
essay, “From Weber to Habermas,” in E.D. Klemke, R. Hollinger and
D.W. Rudge, eds., Introductory Readings in the Philosophy of Science (Amherst,
NY: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp. 539–49.
55. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Volume I,
trans. by Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
CA: University of California Press, 1978), p. 24.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid., p. 85.
58. Ibid.
59. See, for example, Hollinger, “From Weber to Habermas,” p. 542.
60. Weber, Economy and Society, p. 26.
61. Immanuel Wallerstein, The End of the World As We Know It, p. 144.
62. Liah Greenfeld, in The Spirit of Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2001), argues that in this respect the content of Weber’s
argument has been widely misunderstood. However, she then also argues that
the form of Weber’s argument (which could be construed as a kind of tran-
scendental argument) has also been completely misconstrued, revealingly
enough, by economists. “Economists and economic historians argue end-
lessly the reasons for the relative prosperity of nations, for their success or fail-
ure in the industrial race, but they do not ask why such a race exists at all and
why nations should want to enter it. This they regard as self-evident. But
there is nothing self-evident about it. In most historical societies, economic
activities held the place occupied by classes which participated in them – the
bottom of the social ladder and value hierarchy” (p. 5). It is the valuation of
formal rationality that is itself in need of explanation, and to which Weber
had addressed his essays on the Protestant ethic.
63. Adorno and Horkheimer tend towards the use of the (Lukácsian) language of
the objectification of consciousness to describe this process. Habermas pairs
the idea of colonization with Alfred Schutz’s notion of the lifeworld to
express a similar observation (see, e.g. The Theory of Communicative Action:
Volume II: Liefworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans.
Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1981), p. 395).
64. But also, many suspect, to be on the ‘winning’ side of the historical process.
65. Raymond Aron, German Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 83.
66. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Volume I, §3,4. Hegel’s term for his skepticism
is sich-vollbringende. The translation of both terms is ambiguous, but both
may be rendered as self-completing. I owe the parallel to Rose, Dialectic of
Nihilism, p. 68 n. 1.
67. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. and trans.
by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1966), §11.
68. Cf. Ansell Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau, p. 120.
69. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. by Walter Kaufmann
(New York: Vintage, 1989), III, §11.
70. Cf. Aaron Ridley, “Science in the Service of Life: Nietzsche’s Perspectivism,”
in The Proper Ambition of Science, ed. by M.W.F. Stone and J. Wolff (London:
Routledge, 2000), p. 95.
71. Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, III, §11.
166 Notes
72. Ibid., III, §23.

73. Ibid., III, §12.
74. Ibid., III, §24.
75. Ibid., III, §27.
76. See Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan
Smith (New York: Pantheon Press, 1972), pp. 36–7.
77. The Genealogy of Morals, III, §27.
78. Aaron Ridley, “Science in the Service of Life: Nietzsche’s Perspectivism,” p. 96.
79. See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 4.
80. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming
(London: Verso, 1972), pp. 11–12.
81. Ibid., p. xvi.
82. For an account of the neo-Kantian framework of modern sociology, see Rose,
Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 13–36.
84. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 35–6.
85. Ibid., p. 36.
86. Ibid., p. 11.
87. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
88. Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, pp. 126–7.
89. For a thorough refutation of this reading, see Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical
Introduction (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 41–2.
90. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 28.
91. As Simmel remarks, “In the whole history of economic activity, the stranger
makes his appearance everywhere as a trader, and the trader makes his as a
stranger” (Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. by Donald Levine, On Individuality
and Social Forms (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), p. 144).
92. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 61.
93. Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction, p. 25. Cf. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment
and Ethics, pp. 83–6.
94. Cf. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics, pp. 94–5.
6. Negative Dialectics and the Fate of Critical Theory

1. Max Horkheimer, “Postscript,” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays, p. 245.
2. Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: Selected
Essays, p. 204.
3. Cf. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory, pp. 224–25.
4. For an account of the idealism/materialism problem in “Reification and the
Consciousness of the Proletariat,” see Andrew Arato and Paul Breines, The
Young Lukács and the Origins of Western Marxism (New York: Seabury Press,
1979), pp. 121–3.
5. For one of the best accounts of the relationship between Marx’s theory of
value and his theory of the commodity, see Robert L. Heilbroner, Marxism:
For and Against (New York: Norton, 1980), pp. 93–140.
6. Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, p. 86.
Notes 167
7. The literature on Lukács’s use of the concept of reification is complex and

voluminous. For a critical account that situates the issue with reference to
Adorno, see Rose, The Melancholy Science, pp. 27–51. For more sympathetic
expositions of the specifically Lukácsian use of the concept, see Bernstein,
The Philosophy of the Novel, pp. 5–10 and Arato and Breines, The Young Lukács
and the Origins of Western Marxism, pp. 113–41. For an interesting recent
account, defending the contemporary relevance of the concept, see Timothy
Bewes, Reification, or The Anxieties of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 2002).
8. The weight given to the relationship, as either ‘reflection’ or ‘expression’ varies,
as discussed later.
10. Ibid., p. 128.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., p. 117 (italics added).
13. Ibid., p. 169.
14. See Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 214.
16. Ibid., p. 115.
17. Ibid., p. 104.
18. Heidegger draws attention to the supposed ‘mystification’ inherent in the
concept of reification in explicating what “we are to understand positively
when we think of the unreified being of the subject, the soul, the con-
sciousness, the spirit, the person” (Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John
Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962), p. 72. See also
Goldmann, Lukács and Heidegger: Towards a New Philosophy, pp. 19–21.
19. In fact, Marcuse discusses Hegel’s early systems, (from the so-called Jena
system of 1802 to the Science of Logic) as a series of attempts to grasp the idea
of a social ontology.
20. See Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, p. 95.
21. Ibid., p. 29.
22. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, p. 176.
23. Which is not to deny that philosophy cannot fill a critical role in under-
standing the evolution of society and its own position as a cultural form
within that evolution. Mannheim gave the sociology of knowledge a con-
servative dimension by burdening its historicist element with an unreflective
and functionalist relativism. I would argue that the most valuable element
of Horkheimer’s somewhat contested legacy to contemporary critical theory
is to point the way to a sociology of knowledge that could remain both crit-
ical and sociological, but the point cannot be pursued further here. For some
recent reflections on Horkheimer’s legacy see Seyla Benhabib, Wolfgang
Bonss, John McCole (eds.), On Max Horkheimer: New Perspectives (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1993).
24. See Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics, pp. 66–8. Cf. Howard
Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London: Routledge, 1998),
pp. 34–52.
25. See Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, pp. 530–7.
26. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 145–6.
27. See Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology, pp. 21–37. Rose’s characterization of all
sociology as infected with a pervasive neo-Kantian reductionism seems itself
168 Notes
reductive, but her account of the neo-Kantian roots of modern sociology is

convincing.
28. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, p. 148.
30. Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge,
1998), p. 155.
31. Buck-Morss argues, however, that the very consistency of Adorno’s ‘anti-
system’ leads it back to systematic thinking. See The Origins of Negative
Dialectics, p. 189.
32. It seems an exaggeration to claim, as Rose does, that Adorno has “trans-
formed Marxism into a search for style” (see Rose, The Melancholy Science,
p. 139). Nevertheless, it is difficult to overestimate the importance that
Adorno places on presentation.
33. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 18. Given the nature of what is at stake in their
research program, the members of the Frankfurt School could not evade the
issue of the presentation of their ideas. The contradictions within which
Horkheimer finds himself entangled in his attempt to present his ideas in a
conventional form are apparent in the conclusion to Eclipse of Reason:
Language is assumed to suggest and intend nothing beyond propaganda.
Some readers of this book may think that it represents propaganda
against propaganda, and conceive each word as a suggestion, slogan
or prescription. Philosophy is not interested in issuing commands. The
intellectual situation is so confused that this statement itself may in turn
be interpreted as offering foolish advice against obeying any command …
it may even be construed as a command directed against commands.
(p. 184)
34. This is not to associate the performative element with any notion of an
‘inner necessity’. As Horkheimer points out, “Critical theory is indeed
incompatible with the belief that any theory is independent of men and
even has a growth of its own” (“Traditional and Critical Theory,” p. 229).
35. See Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 78.
37. Ibid., p. 23.
38. Ibid., pp. 21–2.
39. Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology, trans. by Willis Domingo (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1982), pp. 3–4.
41. Ibid., p. 145.
42. Ibid., p. 5.
43. Ibid., p. 135.
44. Adorno’s discussion of these falsifications is concentrated in the two sections
“On the Dialectics of Identity” and “Cogitative Self-Reflection” (Negative
Dialectics, pp. 146–51). It is dangerous to pare Adorno’s project down to
a particular and limited set of concerns, but an argument can be made
for viewing these two sections as the real heart of the work. For a sum-
mary expression of this reading see Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative
Dialectics, p. 189.
Notes 169
45. Theodor W. Adorno et al. (ed.), The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology (New
York: Harper and Row, 1976), p. 69.
48. Cf. Rose, The Melancholy Science, p. 44.
49. See Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, p. 144.
50. Ibid., p. 202.
51. Thus Heidegger’s Dasein is perpetually at risk of transcending its actual
historical substrate and being reified as a Subject.
52. Cf. Jarvis’ extremely clear discussion of the differences between Adorno and
Heidegger, in Adorno: A Critical Introduction, pp. 201–07.
54. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, p. 6.
I am indebted to Dennis Redmond (see http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/

ndtrans.html) for help in many of the amended translations from Negative
Dialectics in this chapter.
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Index
absolute, Hegel’s, 6, 85, 98–9, 143; apprehension, 27, 33, 84, 96, 143;
knowing, 86, 88, 90, 140; versus comprehension, 92
method, 96; standpoint, 77, 80, Arcesilaus, 22, 23, 28, 29, 30
82, 85, 86, 97 arch[, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 39, 40, 50,
academic skepticism, see ancient 67, 74, 76, 82, 87, 89, 97, 105,
skepticism 141; arch[-necessity, 79, 80, 88,
accident (tuchikos), 31, 51 97, 132
Adorno, Theodor W., 1, 6–8, 18, 33, Archimedean point, 44
37, 52, 57, 88, 90, 93, 94, 99, architectonic, 67, 140
103–8, 111, 115, 119–24, 126–8, Arendt, Hannah, 25, 41, 43–4
130, 133–45 Aristotle, 23, 24, 62
Aenesidemus, 15, 16, 19, 20, 22, 23, Aron, Raymond, 116
26, 29, 30, 31 asceticism, 43, 44, 117, 118, 119
Aenesidemus (Schulze), 15, 16, 17, 19 ataraxia, 24, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32
agog[, 26, 32 atomization, 105, 110
Alexander, 24 azetetos, 27, 44, 144
alienation, 36, 37, 43, 44, 105,
123, 124 Beck, Lewis White, 60
ancient skepticism, 7, 13–17, 19, 20, Beiser, Frederick,16
35, 36, 47, 76, 77, 80, 95, 97, 98, belief, 14, 17, 20, 21, 24, 25, 28, 32,
140, 141; academics, 16, 18, 19, 40, 46, 47; certainty and, 27;
20, 22, 23, 30, 31; Adorno and, living without, 26;
144; Cartesian doubt and, 27, 35, see also doubt
37, 38, 40, 45, 51; evolution of, Benjamin, Walter, 135
23, 26, 28–30; freedom of, 20; Berlin, Isaiah, 109
Hegel’s understanding of, 13, 14, Bernstein, J.M., 40, 124
17–19, 20, 22–3, 27, 28, 32–4, 96; Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche), 117
information on, 20, 22; block, 27, 52, 106, 130, 133, 134,
interpretation of, 13, 22; modern 143–5
empiricism and, 13, 19, 27, 35; Burnyeat, Miles, 32, 36
motivation of, 31–2; Schulze and,
15–17, 20, 22, 23; Stoicism and, Capital (Marx), 129
25–6, 30; tropes, 22–3, 28, 30; see capitalism, 105, 115, 124, 129, 131;
also pyrrhonism; reflexivity; global, 105; spirit of, 124
skepticism Carneades, 22, 23, 29, 31
animism, 123, 124 categories, 66, 70, 84, 85, 86, 98, 103,
antinomy, 47, 66, 73, 98, 106, 114, 105, 108, 121, 127, 129, 134,
115, 143; of law, 66; see also 135, 141, 142; of reflection, 87,
Critique of Pure Reason 103; of representation, 41; of
appearances, 16, 26, 27, 29, 44, 45, 81 resemblance, 41; table of, 62, 67;
apperception, 65, 70, 71, 78, 79, 134; of the understanding, 8, 62–3, 65,
unity of, 6, 64, 65, 77, 78, 84, 128 68, 74, 131, 133
176
Index 177
causality, 65, 73, 86, 109; objectivity critique of modernity, 125;

of, 58, 61, 64, 74, 83, 87 interpretations of, 122–4; Negative
certainty, 16, 19, 20, 26, 27, 33, 38, Dialectics and, 127, 139;
39, 42, 43, 45, 50, 51, 55, 59, 62, standpoint of, 119
80; desire for, 40, 42; meaning of, dialectics, 76, 99, 119, 126, 137, 141;
40–1; self-evidence and, 39–41; negative, 6, 8, 104, 128, 130, 134,
see also doubt 140, 141, 144; speculative, 76, 99
Christianity, 14, 118 differance, 99
Cicero, 22, 26, 28, 29 difference, see identity
civil society, 55, 66 differentiation, 105, 121, 129
Clitomachus, 29 Diogenes Laertius, 2, 29
Cogito ergo Sum, 37, 38, 47–51; as Discourse on Method (Descartes), 38
inference, 48; as performative, 49; disenchantment, 104, 105, 129
self-evidence and, 45, 47 dogma, 7, 18, 20, 29, 30, 37, 47
commodities, 37, 121, 129, 132; domination, 104, 108, 109, 115, 120,
commodification, 115, 130; 121, 123, 129, 139, 142; will to,
commodity fetishism, 123, 128; 123, 124
commodity form, 129, 142 doubt, 7, 17, 19, 30, 33, 34, 37, 44,
common root (of understanding and 45, 63, 73, 83, 94; belief and, 20;
intuition), 69, 110, 143 Cartesian, 4, 35–8, 41, 43–5, 49,
Copernican Revolution, 55 51, 95; certainty and, 26, 38–9,
critical theory, divisions within, 1, 88; 41; in Hume, 60–1, 85;
as research program, 8; Hegel hyperbolic, 49, 50; meaning of,
and, 2, 6, 8, 88, 99, 103, 125, 20–1, 27; method of, 38, 43, 45,
127–8; modernity and, 6, 36, 41, 47; pathway of, 95; skepticism
103, 104, 120; philosophy and, 1, and, 20; stages of, 44, 45–8;
2, 103–6, 127 universal, 44–5; see also ancient
Critique of Pure Reason (first Critique) skepticism; belief; skepticism
(Kant), 4, 17, 55, 56, 57, 61, 62, Durkheim, Emile, 105
64, 66, 67, 68, 72, 74, 77, 82, 90,
111, 134; “Amphiboly of the economics, 114, 115
Concepts of Reflection”, 68, 69, Economy and Society: An Outline of
108; “Antinomy of Pure Reason”, Interpretive Sociology (Weber), 114
4, 74; “Paralogisms of Pure ego, 71, 79, 80, 86, 87, 99; see also self
Reason”, 80; “Schematism”, 143 emotivism, 112
empiricism, 15, 19, 35, 56, 58, 66,
de-divinization, 7, 122 137, 141; idealism and, 17;
deduction, 48, 59, 66, 67, 71, 75, 84, rationalism and, 35; skeptical, 4,
86, 97, 128, 133; meaning of, 13, 18, 19, 27, 35, 83, 95, 103,
57–8, 66; see also transcendental 104, 106, 107, 110, 117, 119, 124;
deduction see also ancient skepticism;
democracy, 114 skepticism
Derrida, Jacques, 99 Encyclopaedia Logic (Hegel), 14, 21, 76
Descartes, René, 3, 4, 7, 33, 35–51, 55, enlightenment, 4, 7, 16, 42, 104, 105,
57, 72, 80, 81, 91 108, 111, 112, 116, 119, 120, 122,
Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and 123, 125, 133, 144; meaning of,
Horkheimer), 7, 8, 103, 104, 106, 121, 124; myth and, 119–20, 122,
107, 111, 116, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125; self-conception of,
123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128; as 119, 125; world-view of, 109
178 Index
Epicureanism, 13, 21, 22–5, 26, 48 development of, 7, 51, 103, 125,
Epicurus, 24, 25, 26 131, 133; see also idealism
epistemology, 8, 15, 17, 25, 43, 67,
106, 118, 134, 135, 136; demise Habermas, Jurgen, 1–3, 88, 122,
of, 2, 3, 5 123, 138
epoch[, 26–9, 30, 31, 32 Hamman, J.G., 3
essence, 37, 108, 135; logic of, 85 Harris, H.S., 22
eudaimonia, 23–4, 31 Hegel, G.W.F., 1–8, 13–20, 22, 23, 25,
experience, 33, 36, 37, 45, 47, 51, 58, 27, 28, 30, 32–7, 51, 56, 57, 72,
59, 74, 78, 105, 115, 119, 129, 74–9, 81–99, 103, 104, 106–8,
137, 142; doubt and, 44, 51; in 111, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125–8,
Hegel’s Phenomenology, 91–3, 94, 130, 131, 134–7, 140, 141, 143
97; Hegel’s theory of, 87, 89, 90, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience”
92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 140; Kant’s (Heidegger), 93
theory of, 55, 56, 59, 60–2, 64, Heidegger, Martin, 36–7, 48–9,
77, 80–1, 84–5, 98; legitimation 93, 143
of, 8, 60, 67, 70, 71, 83, 109; Hellenistic philosophy, 13, 14, 23, 24
limits of, 15, 61, 74; ordinary, 18, Henrich, Dieter, 57, 58, 63, 72, 81
19, 66, 72, 80, 98; reflection and, Herder, J.G., 16
18, 19, 21, 30, 33, 68–73, 78, Hintikka, Jaatko, 49, 51
81–2, 84, 106, 137, 141, 143; historicism, 2, 13, 16, 17, 20, 106, 120
speculative, 3; see also reflection History and Class Consciousness: Studies
external world, loss of, 28, 44–6, 78; in Marxist Dialectics (Lukács),
problem of, 35, 36, 45 37, 128
homo oeconomicus, 113, 124
fact-value distinction, 106, 109, 111 Horkheimer, Max, 1, 7, 8, 88, 103–6,
faith, 7, 30, 43, 51 110, 111, 115, 119–24, 127, 128,
Faith and Knowledge (Hegel), 82, 85, 99 132, 135
Fichte, J.G., 3, 8, 17, 51, 56, 67, The Human Condition (Arendt), 43
69–72, 75, 77–87, 89, 91–3, Hume, David, 3, 4, 7, 8, 15–19, 27,
96, 97, 109, 127, 128, 131, 132, 32, 33, 56, 58, 60–6, 68, 72–4,
139, 141 77, 80–3, 85, 87, 91, 95, 104,
Forster, Michael, 22 109, 110, 117
Foucault, Michel, 41, 42, 118, 123 Hume’s antinomy, 80, 81
foundationalism, 3, 37, 122 Hume’s Fork, 109–10
founding/grounding act, 50, 80 Hume’s Law, 109–10
Frankfurt, Harry, 39 Hume’s principle, 61
Frankfurt School, see critical theory Hume’s problem, 61, 62, 64, 83
hyper-skepticism, 64
Galilei, Galileo, 43
Gassendi, Pierre, 48 idealism, 2, 5, 84, 95, 98, 106, 130,
genealogy, 35, 117 131, 133, 134, 139, 140–3;
Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 116, Fichtean, 86, 92, 141; liquidation
117, 124 of, 106; materialism and, 121;
general will, 56–7 objective, 5, 51, 65, 106;
geometry, 37, 59 speculative, 77; subjective, 5, 82,
German idealism, 13, 72, 77, 103, 85, 131, 137; transcendental, 62,
127, 130, 131, 132, 135, 139, 141; 70, 86; see also empiricism;
critical theory and, 82, 103, 128; German idealism
Index 179
identity, 6, 41, 42, 68, 79, 84, 85, 86, Locke, John, 110
87, 91, 99; absolute, 120; abstract, Logic (Kant), 68
78; difference and, 41, 42, 68, 84, logic of representation, 41
99, 141; identity-thinking, 8, 105, logic of resemblance, 41
130, 134, 141–3; non-identity lucretius, 24
and, 6, 87, 98, 99, 141, 143, 144, Lukács,Georg, 37, 42, 127–34, 136,
145; relative, 86; of the subject, 138, 139, 144
60, 75, 83; see also absolute, Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 3, 138
Hegel’s; Negative Dialectics
ideology, 5, 47, 111, 115, 121, Machiavelli, Niccolo, 25
123, 130 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 25, 111–13, 143
immanence, principle of, 124 Marcuse, Herbert, 1, 105, 110,
immediacy, 16, 18–19, 36, 48, 59, 128, 135
86–7, 91–2, 118, 137, 144, Marx, Karl, 1, 2, 36, 37, 77, 92, 93,
incommensurability, 35, 111, 121 105, 123, 124, 128–30, 132, 142
industrialism, 121, 123 Marx, Werner, 77, 92, 93
instrumentalism, 40, 104, 107, Marxism, 1, 2, 120, 121, 127, 128,
111, 116 129, 130, 132, 134, 135
intuition, 50, 51, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, materialism, 4, 8, 42, 43, 121, 123,
69, 70, 77, 82, 83, 84, 85, 133, 129, 139; versus idealism, 120
143; intellectual, 26, 70, 79, 80, mathematics, 37, 39, 42, 62, 63, 74
85, 86, 87, 91 McDowell, John, 45
irrationalism, 7, 107 medicine, 24
isosthenia, 28, 29, 30, 73 Meditations (Descartes), 38, 39, 40, 45,
49, 50, 51, 55, 72, 91
Jacobi, F.H., 16 metacritique, 3, 6, 23, 66, 88, 89, 96,
Jarvis, Simon, 124, 137 136, 137–8, 140; meaning of, 15,
judgments, 51, 62, 68; synthetic 88, 137, 140, 141; of systems,
a priori, 63, 67, 82, 83, 87, 117 138–40
Metakritik der Epistemologie
Kant, Immanuel, 2–6, 8, 14–17, 31, (Adorno), 140
33, 55–72, 74–85, 87, 89–94, meta-narratives, 2, 138
96–9, 104, 106–10, 117, 118, metaphysics, 4, 37, 42, 48, 56, 62, 80,
127, 128, 130–4, 140, 141, 143, 143, 144, 145; mourning and,
144, 145 143, 145; overcoming of, 107;
katalepsis, 26 post-metaphysical thinking,
Kortian, Garbis, 2, 3, 88 2, 138
Kuehn, Manfred, 60, 61 Metrodorus, 26
Middle Academy, 28, 29
labor, 44, 105, 110, 120, 135, 142 morality, 109, 111, 112, 125;
law, 25, 55, 57, 64, 66, 117; antinomy justification of, 111, 112
of, 66 Morris, John, 50, 51
Lectures on the History of Philosophy myth, 7, 107, 119, 121, 123, 124, 132,
(Hegel), 14 144; see also enlightenment
legitimacy, 8, 33, 55, 58–60, 63, 66,
67, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 83; natural consciousness, 17, 18, 19,
meaning of, 57; reflexivity 66, 72–3, 74, 82, 86, 87–8, 91,
and, 56, 57 93–5, 97
liberalism, 4, 107, 111, 113, 115, 122 natural light, 50–1
180 Index
negative dialectics, see dialectics 92; “Stoicism, Skepticism and the

Negative Dialectics (Adorno), 6, 8, 104, Unhappy Consiousness”, 14;
106, 107, 119, 120, 121–31, structure of, 18, 33, 77, 87, 88,
133–45; “Concepts and 89; table of contents of, 90
Categories”, 134; identity- Plato, 23, 24, 26, 28, 51, 118
thinking in, 141–2; metacritique positivism, 5, 106, 113, 134
in, 137, 139–40; presentation of, presuppositionlessness, 51, 138, 140
138; self-completing skepticism Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics
and, 136, 137, 140; see also (Kant), 61, 62, 63, 83
Dialectic of Enlightenment protestantism, see reformation
neo-Kantianism, 37, 120, 136 Pyrrho of Elis, 15, 22, 23, 26, 28,
New Left, 1 29, 30
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 6, 8, 16, 67, 99, Pyrrhonism, 22, 30, 31, 32
104, 106–11, 116–19, 123, 124,
127, 138, 139, 141 question of right (quid juris), 58, 63,
nihilism, 8, 16, 67, 104, 107, 108, 64, 66, 77, 78, 83, 94; and
109, 111, 116, 117, 119, 127; question of fact (quid facti), 58,
forms of, 107–8; self-completing, 64, 66
116, 119
Nussbaum, Martha, 23, 24, 31, 32 rationalism, 4, 7, 35, 36, 37, 41, 42,
48, 58, 110, 131, 133, 138; see
objective reality, 59, 60, 62, 63, 83; also empiricism
and objective validity, 59–60, 62 rationality, 4, 7, 35, 55, 103, 106, 107,
Odysseus, 124 112, 113, 120, 122, 123, 124, 125,
“On the Relationship of Skepticism to 128, 135; dissolvent, 119, 122;
Philosophy” (1801 essay) (Hegel), formal, 104, 107, 117, 119, 121,
14–20, 22, 94, 95, 119 142; as ideology, 121;
ontological moment, 133, 134, instrumental, 88, 103, 104, 107,
143, 144 111, 113, 116, 125; substantive,
ontology, 36, 37, 48, 90, 93, 106, 128, 114–16; see also reason; value
135, 138, 143–4 rationalization, 105, 110, 111, 113, 129
The Order of Things (Foucault), 41 realism, 5, 17, 43, 65, 93
Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Sextus), 20, 22 reality, 27, 30, 43, 44, 47, 86, 94, 110,
121, 133; objective, 59–60, 62–3,
Parmenides (Plato), 28 83; social, 8, 132, 135
perspectivism, 118 reason, 2, 4, 6, 15, 17, 20, 23, 35, 37,
phenomenology, 35, 43, 77–8, 39, 43, 45, 50, 51, 55, 58, 61, 66,
89–90, 106 73, 76, 77, 80, 82, 98, 103, 104,
Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 3, 4, 6, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111, 120, 121,
7, 14, 16, 17, 72, 89, 91–4, 96, 97, 123, 127, 128, 131, 144; crisis of,
98, 99, 104, 106, 119, 128, 136, 14, 66, 103, 104, 108, 128, 130;
138; as education, 97; as critique of, 5, 8, 14, 15, 16, 84,
historico-transcendental 93; disuniting of, 109, 110;
deduction, 96; interpretations of, experience and, 58, 59, 73; ideas
90, 92, 93–7; Introduction, 5, 6, of, 67, 82, 116, 133, 144, 145;
19, 21, 31, 37, 76, 89, 106, 125, interests of, 79, 80; mathematical,
137; method of, 6, 8, 14, 17, 32, 37, 51; subject-centered, 131;
35; path of, 89, 94, 96; Preface, tribunal of, 55, 66, 72, 94, 117;
89, 90, 92, 97; science of the unity of, 4, 109; see also
experience of consciousness and, rationality; understanding
Index 181
Reason and Revolution (Marcuse), 135 for, 14, 31, 32, 37, 38, 42, 43, 71,
reflection, 18, 38, 78, 79, 106, 135, 74, 79, 95, 140; nihilism and, 8,
138, 139, 145; circle of, 81; 116, 119, 127; self-completing, 6,
concepts of, 19, 21, 67–8, 69–70, 7, 8, 33, 76, 77, 87, 88, 89, 94, 95,
72, 77–8, 84, 86–7, 92, 108; in 96, 97, 116, 117, 128, 131, 137,
Hegel’s Phenomenology (as 139, 140, 145; thoroughgoing,
philosophical consciousness), 18, 95; see also ancient skepticism
87, 94, 96, transcendental, 69–71; Sloterdijk, Peter, 41, 42, 43
see also experience the Social Contract (Rousseau), 56
reflexivity, 2, 8, 16, 52, 57, 64, 65, 117, social theory, 2, 5, 111, 130, 135, 136;
118, 119, 124, 132, 134, 141, 143, philosophy and, 130, 135
144; ancient skepticism and, 20–1, society, 5, 104, 105, 106, 120, 128,
28, 32, 34; reflexive skepticism, 129, 131, 132, 135, 136, 138, 142;
56, 77, 78, 82, 83, 85, 87, 97, 117, capitalist, 105, 129, 131;
141; see also legitimacy evolution of, 120, 121; as second
Reformation, 43, 55 nature, 129, 142
Regulae (Descartes), 50 sociology, 2, 105, 112, 120, 136; of
reification, 37, 128, 129, 130, 133, knowledge, 135, 136; philosophy
142, 145 and, 135
Reinhold, Karl, 15 solidarity, 105, 135
relativism, 110, 118 solipsism, 91
ressentiment, 139 space, 44, 59, 60; and place, 36
Rorty, Richard, 3, 118, 122, 138 speculation, 4, 18, 33, 76, 77, 99
Rose, Gillian, 66, 77, 97, 98, 136 Stevenson, C.L., 112
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 24, 51, 56, 57, Stoicism, 13, 14, 21, 22–6, 29, 30
71, 72, 81 Strauss, Leo, 21, 27
subjectivity, 31, 38–9, 124,
Schelling, F.W.J., 99 144; problem of, 36, 99,
scholasticism, 7, 40, 41, 42, 45, 138 131, 144; subjectivization/
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 64, 65, 67, de-subjectivization, 36, 39, 42,
78, 107 48, 57
Schulze, G.E., 3, 14–20, 22, 23, 27, 28, symmetry, 67, 78, 90
30, 31, 64, 65, 88, 95, 96, 103 synthetic method (Kant), 65
Science of Knowledge (Fichte), 67–9, 71, systems, 6, 8, 32, 33, 37, 42, 50, 51,
72, 75, 81 67, 93, 94, 95, 97, 98–9, 105, 108,
Science of Logic (Hegel), 14, 77, 85, 86, 109, 118, 119, 127, 128, 130, 131,
90, 96, 98, 141 132, 145; arch[ necessity and, 79,
Sedley, David, 29 88, 97; Fichte’s, 77, 78, 81, 85,
self, 38, 39, 40, 48, 50, 69, 70, 71, 79; as 87, 127, 131; Hegel’s, 51, 77, 88,
identical, 65; see also apperception 130, 135, 137, 141; inner
self-completing skepticism, necessity of, 79, 80, 98; Kant’s,
see skepticism 15, 82, 83, 85, 106, 133, 134;
Sextus Empiricus, 20, 22, 23, 28, 29, metacritique of, 136–41, 145
31, 47
Simmel, Georg, 129 table of judgments, 62, 67, 74, 82
skepsis, 20 Taylor, Charles, 3
skepticism: Hegel’s classification of, 22; telos, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 38, 76, 97
meaning of, 3, 4, 6, 7, 13, 20, 21, thing-in-itself, 64, 69, 83, 131, 134;
38, 40, 77; modern, 21, 27, 33, 34, as limit, 130, 133
35, 61, 94; moral, 109; motivation time, 44, 60, 143
182 Index
transcendental deduction, 8, 55–67, value, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 114,
70, 72, 81, 83, 91; demand for, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119;
58–60, 67, 71, 75, 86; in first and exchange-value and use-value,
second editions of Kant’s first 129, 132, 133; hypothetical
Critique, 65–6; historico- versus categorical judgments of,
transcendental, 96; necessity of, 113, instrumental versus
60, 66, 80, 83; necessity of intrinsic, 113, 114; law of, 105;
demand for, 80, 81, 82, 83; self-expanding, 129; value-free
see also Critique of Pure Reason rationality, 112, 115, 116;
transcendental place, 69 value-rational action, 114–16
transcendental standpoint, 125 Vico, Giambattista, 42
Treatise of Human Nature
(Hume), 72 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 115
Weber, Max, 43, 104, 105, 107,
understanding, 5, 21, 50, 56, 61, 62, 111–16, 119, 124, 129
64, 67, 68, 69, 74, 80, 83, 84, 96, will to power, 117, 139
143, 144; concepts of, 8, 55, 57, The Will to Power (Nietzsche), 108,
58, 59, 60, 62, 68, 74, 131, 133; 116, 139
reason and, 80, 82, 131 will to truth, 117–19
universalism, 21, 123 world spirit, 25, 120, 125
universalization, 41, 42, 44, 45
utility, 108, 109, 111, 112, 115 Zarathustra, 117

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Skepticism, Modernity

and Critical Theory

General Editor: Gary Banham

Series Editor’s Preface ix

Part I Skepticism and Modern Philosophy 11

2 On the Origins of Modern Skepticism: Descartes,

Part II Skepticism and Idealism 53

4 Hegel and Self-Completing Skepticism 76

Part III Skepticism and the Critique of Modernity 101

6 Negative Dialectics and the Fate of Critical Theory 127

Select Bibliography 170

For some time now the question of the philosophical understanding of

modes of active thought-experience required to comprehend the position

Among social theorists, the critical theory of the Frankfurt School is

a ‘post-metaphysical thinking’. The real differences are no doubt more

that has had the effect of problematizing the presuppositions and

A direct line of descent from the Phenomenology of Spirit to Critical

philosophy, together with an indication of the fault lines along which

the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science (Wissenschaft),

This step in Hegel’s argument, in the Introduction to the Phenomenology,

This suspension of the problem at the level not of the relationship

historically and sociologically. Infused throughout the book, therefore,

two chapters that together trace the course of that development. In

[P]hilosophy …, as the thought of the world, appears only at a time

Scholarly interest in ancient skepticism has been resurgent in recent

1.1. Hegel’s 1801 essay on skepticism: The

The 1801 essay must be understood as operating within two fairly

explain the grounds of experience. Therefore, the reversion to Hume’s

ones, and to conceptualize the history of philosophy, perhaps for the

1.2. Ancient versus modern skepticism

By the time Hegel published the 1801 essay on skepticism, Aenesidemus

of the Phenomenology, which has a double-layered structure in which the

[i]n schools of philosophy that make emphatic use of the concept of

the existence of what is given within the compass of our consciousness

points out, historically inaccurate. Schulze attributes to Aenesidemus

A final general difference between ancient and modern skepticism has

1.3. Ancient skepticism and Hellenistic Philosophy: The

Ancient skepticism, as a tradition, exhibits a greater differentiation

evolution of the tradition can be encapsulated within the ideas of the

is “one with philosophy.” Second there is a

skepticism that is self-sundered from it [which] can be divided into

term. Most informed accounts associate it strongly with health, which

This dialectic of individuality and cosmopolitanism has constituted the

1.4. Hegel and the evolution of ancient skepticism

Hegel’s account of the core concepts of ancient skepticism in the 1801

undecidability of everything, as his Stoic opponents pointed out, had a

implicit dogma in their practice of non-assent was treated as a threat

This formal [ formell ] semblance of an assertion it is, which the

Aenesidemus’ attack on the Academics then, parallels Schulze’s attack

1.5. Arch[ and telos

Ataraxia just comes by chance, tuchikos, as a result of a process [the

The serendipitous and hidden manner in which this transformation

As Burnyeat points out, however, Hume offers no real argument to

In this extreme … [which] grew into a subjectivity of knowledge,

nothing at all, because it nullifies itself at the extreme, or else it must

Hegel’s view of the significance of ancient skepticism is therefore to be

The fundamental difference in orientation between ancient and modern

2.1. Cartesianism as a modern problematic

‘Modern philosophy’ begins with Descartes, and with Cartesian doubt,

[t]he problem which typifies ancient philosophical enquiry in a way

with the inherently conservative and (for Adorno) foundationalist, ori-

Apart from its implications for understanding the relationship between

the skeptical ruse being introduced.6 By contrast, the problem of