Antinomic normativity: Negative dialectics,moral skepticism,and the problem of the normative foundations of critique

I Skepticism and dialectics

The skeptical trilemma mentioned above comprises three of the five tropes associated with the name Agrippa and presented by the Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus. That is how (Sextus Empiricus, 2000, 4) defines skepticism: ‘Scepticism is an ability to set out oppositions among things which appear and are thought of in any way at all, an ability by which, because of the equipollence in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgment and afterwards to tranquility’. Pyrrhonian skepticism is also an ability to set out oppositions – in Ancient Greek, a δυναμις αντιθετική, an ability of antithetics. ² Two opposing propositions cannot be true simultaneously, but because each has the same weight of reason as the other, none of them can invalidate the other. However, they cannot both be true if the object is not to be thought of as nonsensically contradictory, and what remains is only the alternative of the epoché, a suspension of belief. However, left with no certainty about his beliefs, the Pyrrhonian has no alternative but to act in accordance with what appears immediately to her. This practical outcome of ancient skeptical reasoning would resonate, for example, in Descartes’s idea of a provisional morality that should be adopted after proceeding with his methodic doubt: I doubt everything and, in the end, I act just like I had not raised a single doubt (I obey the law and customs of my country, I act firmly and resolutely and I do not let doubts make me hesitate, I implicitly recognize the weight of reality and acknowledge that it is better to change myself than to try to change the world) (Descartes, 2006, 21 f.).

In his stay in Jena, Hegel retrieved Pyrrhonic skepticism to show the limitations of another kind of skepticism that became popular as a way of putting in question Kant’s theoretical architecture (in its turn also heavily influenced by ancient skepticism), represented particularly by Gottlob E. Schulze. In a review of Schulze’s book Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie in 1802, Hegel distinguishes two ‘generations’ of skeptical tropes between those seventeen reported by Sextus in his Pyrrhoniae Hypotyposes. While the earlier Ten Tropes were taken by Hegel as healthy ways to destabilize the certainty about the empirical facts and the knowledge of finite things, that is, about what concerns the operations of understanding, the latter Five Tropes would partially miss the point as they are set against philosophy itself, also against the activity of speculative reason. These latter tropes, which include the trilemma, would be helpful against the ‘dogmatism of finitudes’, leading it through the road of speculative thought, but they would also be ‘completely useless against philosophy’ (Hegel, 1985, 335), that is, against that same speculative thought. In general, the argumentative effectiveness of the Five Tropes against foundationalism depends on the interpretation that the foundation we search for is a finite ‘thing’; something conditioned, an object individualized by understanding. In that case, against any dogmatic foundation, going through these tropes would result in the demonstration that the ‘thing’ that occupies the place of a foundation was nothing but one side of a necessary antinomy, because the opposite statement would easily be shown to be equally supported by reasons.

However, in contrast to skepticism, for young Hegel, equipollence is not the last step in the argument. The two statements in equipollence are recognized as an antinomy in its own right, and no epoché results from them. They are both right, implying each other’s falsity and contradicting the principle of non-contradiction. That original unity of contradictory statements is reason, that is, is what reason is, and it is not a ‘foundation’ if understood as something different from what is founded. ‘The rational has no opposed counterpart – it includes both of the finite opposites, which are mutual counterparts, within itself’ (Hegel, 1985, 336 f.). The young Hegel, here not far from Schelling, sees Spinoza as a master of such apprehensions of the rational; in his concept of God, the pairs of opposites – essence-existence, cause-effect, and one-many – are conceived each as a unity, wherein both sides of the respective oppositions are negated: ‘every such proposition of Reason permits resolution into two strictly contradictory assertions (…). Thus the principle of skepticism: panti logoi logos isos antikeitai, ³ comes on the scene at its full strength’ (Hegel, 1985, 324 f.). For Hegel, in 1802, skepticism was simply the negative and free side of every true philosophy (like Plato’s Parmenides, also mentioned as an example by him), even if philosophy could not be reduced to that side. Spinoza’s God goes beyond skepticism because it is not a ‘foundation’ of what there is, it is what there is. Accepting the speculative unity of the opposites, we fall at the same time into the three horns of the trilemma, which is then blown up: God (sive natura) is an ultimate given, is an infinite series of conditions, and is a circle which supports itself, so it is also none of these ‘things’.

Even in his youth, Hegel acknowledged a kernel of truth in skepticism, viewing his evolving speculative dialectic as a means of overcoming it without sacrificing that element. Adorno, however – at least according to his reputation – would have formulated a dialectic ‘without synthesis’, thus remaining within the moment of antithesis. Does that mean that Adorno's dialectic represents a relapse into skepticism?

II Adorno, moral skeptic?

Adorno’s predilection for essayist prose suggests a certain relationship with skepticism. Since Montaigne, the oscillating, non-thetic style of the essay has been related to the antithetic spirit of skepticism and its refraint from forming beliefs. It would not be unreasonable to suggest that a classic of essayism and at the same time of moral skepticism, namely, Montaigne’s Of Cannibals (Montaigne, 1958, 150 ff.), anticipates a theme found in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, namely, the accusation of a barbarian element in the heart of European civilization. Of course, Adorno himself never associates his essayistic form of exposition or his material philosophical position with skepticism because he is definitely neither a skeptic nor explicitly sees, as Hegel does, any positive relation between skepticism and his dialectics. In late capitalism, as shown by Horkheimer, skepticism, which has once at least proven a positive relation to humanism and political emancipation, changes its function to ‘pure conformism’: ‘Skepticism, once the negation of prevailing illusions, today stands against nothing more than the interest in a better future’ (Horkheimer, 1988, 273). Nevertheless, when Habermas (1985, 136 and 156) again famously objected to the authors of the Dialectic of Enlightenment that they had given a ‘sarcastic approval to ethical skepticism’ and ‘abandoned themselves (…) to an unrestrained skepticism of reason, instead of considering the reasons to doubt that skepticism itself’, even if he may be wrong, he was not saying something nonsensical. As Peter Gordon states, ‘the image of Adorno as a skeptic about normativity is not implausible, and it has hardened into conventional wisdom for a variety of reasons’ (Gordon, 2023, 6). ⁴ Adorno’s attitude towards practical normativity seems to be, generally speaking, a skeptical one, and his possible defense to the criminal charge of letting critique go ungrounded, as I will try to sketch below, is also not unrelated, if not to skepticism in general, then certainly to ancient skeptical reflections.

If I see correctly, it is in quasi-skeptical terms, for example, that Freyenhagen addresses and tries to give a positive answer to what he calls Adorno’s ‘Problem of Normativity’. By this, he means the fact that even if his philosophy would contain normative claims, Adorno would also claim that the good cannot be known, and therefore, he would not be ‘entitled to make the normative claims his philosophy contains’ (Freyenhagen, 2013, 7). Thus, one of the measures one should take to ‘live less wrongly’ in a false world would be a kind of practical epoché, a ‘distancing’ or ‘suspension from one’s life’ (Freyenhagen, 2013, 163). Although this is not Freyenhagen’s explicit conclusion, we can see a resemblance between Adorno’s supposed account of normativity and ethical skepticism. ⁵ Amy Allen’s suggestion that Adorno embraces a ‘metanormative contextualism’ also seems to align him with the skeptics. Allen used this expression to describe her own position regarding the normative foundations of critique and, according to her, it describes Adorno’s perspective, among others. In her words: ‘First, moral principles or normative ideals are always justified relative to a set of contextually salient values, conceptions of the good life, or normative horizons—roughly speaking, forms of life or lifeworlds. Second, there is no über-context, no context-free or transcendent point of view from which we can adjudicate which contexts are ultimately correct or even in a position of hierarchical superiority over which others’ (Allen, 2016, 215). Thus, ‘my first-order normative commitments require – in a further reflexive turn – a metanormative or second-order reflexivity about the status of my own normative horizon’ (Allen, 2016, 218). Before the normative convictions of someone from another lifeworld, I had no reason to believe that my convictions were better. They are antinomic. This is essentially what the skeptic Montaigne did when he heard about the savage habits of the cannibals. ⁶ However, I claim that this is not Adorno’s attitude. ⁷ Although, it is striking that this is always attributable to him.

III Minima Moralia and the reality of antinomy

Adorno’s supposed moral skepticism is most prominent in the book Minima Moralia. There, we see a philosopher who emigrated to escape the war and the annihilation of his people, now looking for the good everywhere – in the streets, stores, at the movies, in his own room, in family, friendships, wealth, in all kinds of objects – and not finding it. Would it be a good description if we say that Adorno was skeptical of a good life? Before proceeding, I will analyze some of its aphorisms.

‘But the thesis of this paradox leads to destruction, a loveless disregard for things which necessarily turns against people too; and the antithesis, no sooner uttered, is an ideology for those wishing with a bad conscience to keep what they have. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’ (Adorno, 2005, 39). In this famous passage from the eighteenth aphorism, ‘Refuge for the homeless’, we are dealing with a reasoning that has all the traits of the ancient skepticism praised by Hegel, but now turned inside out. Adorno examines a thesis (say, one ought to dwell in a ‘functional modern habitation (…) devoid of all relation to the occupant’), then an antithesis (say, one ought to live in a ‘genuine, but purchased, period-style house’ that emulates the ‘traditional residences we grew up in’ (Adorno, 2005, 38)), and none of them seems right. The Pyrrhonian would suspend belief in the correction of the thesis because he would see an equal weight of justification to assign a correction to the antithesis. Adorno, conversely, passes to the antithesis in the first place because he cannot agree with the thesis but is then surprised by the fact that he cannot agree with the antithesis either. It is not the case that the equal positive weight of the second proposition gives grounds to give up the first proposition, but that their equal null weight is a reason for not subscribing to any. While the Pyrrhonian, just for the sake of the skeptical method, would analyze the second proposition even if he saw reasons to agree with the first and concede correctness to it, Adorno only goes to the antithesis because there was no way to go with the thesis. While the Pyrrhonian also finds good reasons to support the second, Adorno sees this path as closed as well. For the ancient skeptic, both thesis and antithesis may be true, so I cannot decide. Adorno, finds no truth (or correctness) at all, neither here nor there. However, he does not just stand there like a Buridan’s ass. The fact that he finds contradictory equally valid norms in this world does not mean that he is skeptical, but that the late capitalism’s world has a structural affinity with skepticism, as Horkheimer pointed out. What Adorno then suggests sounds strikingly like something Pyrrho could have said: ‘The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted (unverbindliches), suspended one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one’s own needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight (belasten) to it as to something still socially substantial and individually appropriate’ (Adorno, 2005, 39, my emphasis). However, what follows is all but a state of peace of mind: ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’ (Adorno, 2005, 39). Or, as Adorno states in the sixth aphorism, entitled ‘Antithesis’, this retreat to private life has nothing to do with a search for peace and quiet: ‘There is no way out of entanglement. The only responsible course is to deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence and for the rest to conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively, and unpretentiously as is required, no longer by good upbringing, but by the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell’ (Adorno, 2005, 27 s.). Going through the antinomy does not lead to ataraxia and has no quietist implications, but quite the opposite: it leads to uncomfortable, even infernal feelings such as shame and despair (Adorno, 2005, 247). The aforementioned ‘best mode of conduct’ was rather only the ‘less bad’, not because of its (equally bad) immediate practical consequences, but only because it was the only one where the agent was reflexive and aware of his condition. However, if we cannot call this skepticism, we cannot also say that this was not related to skepticism. Like Hegel, would Adorno also assume that there is some kind of relation between skepticism and dialectics?

In the hundred-twenty-fifth aphorism, Olet, Adorno compares the presence or absence of shame in the habit of receiving money for favors on both sides of the North Atlantic. Europeans would feel shame, a heritage of the pre-capitalist habits of noblesse, indicating that some actions should not be exchangeable like things because they have value in themselves: to give money for them would be to demean them, and shame comes from the offense. The same feeling makes no sense for an American born in a territory with no feudal past, where capitalism made tabula rasa of what was there before, and everything is exchangeable and measurable in terms of money from the beginning. While the European aristocratic shame comes from an old ideological privilege of nobles who did not need to be paid for each other’s favors because they already directly exploited the unpaid labor of the serfs, the American democratic shamelessness in the naturalization that the labor force is a commodity and should be paid ‘contribute[s] to the persistence of what is utterly anti-democratic, economic injustice, human degradation’ (Adorno, 2005: 195). The antinomy is set up: ‘to the uninformed European, Americans in their entirety can so easily appear as people without dignity, predisposed to paid services, just as, conversely, they are inclined to take him for a vagabond and aper of prince’ (Adorno, 2005: 195).

Auction, the seventy-seventh aphorism, exposes the emergence of another practical antinomy in the changing relationship between luxury and mass commodities with the advancement of technology. As the access to certain goods is massified, ‘luxury is sapped’ (Adorno, 2005: 120). A luxury commodity is experienced as not being under the sway of the universal fungibility of everything. Of course, the happiness that adheres to it as if it were an exception to the rule, an island of qualitative nonfungibility in the ocean of quantitative relations, is false, pure fetishism (in the peculiar sense, mixing Marx and Freud, in which Adorno uses the notion (see Mioyasaki, 2002)). Actual happiness would be to be able to escape universal exchangeability. Luxury promises this, but it is just an unnoticed extreme case of the same fungibility, which presupposes the exploration of labor and unequal distribution. With the massification of what used to be luxury, an extra contradiction has overdetermined the former. Now, what is experienced as luxury is something arbitrary, seen as luxury not exactly because of its qualitative properties (now more accessible), but because of its unpayable price; it is consumed as its most important property and as an end in itself. If the consumption of luxury was a false promise before, now it did not hide its character and did not even carry the promise. Again, we observe a practical antinomy. If, because of their universal fungibility, self-realization is not to be found in the consumption of massified goods, however good their quality, comfort, or taste, luxury goods do not escape the rule; on the contrary, it is pure fungibility itself that is consumed in them.

Drawing on Kierkegaard, Tom Whyman suggests that we should not read what he calls Adorno’s ‘Wrong Life Claim’ in terms of ‘value’ in the sense that ‘everything (in our present social world) exhibits “wrongness” in the sense that it has the value or quality of “being wrong,”’ but rather in terms of ‘despair’, by what he means that ‘society would count as “wrong,” not because it is literally, objectively evil; but rather because it is somehow distorted, not itself. Society, for instance, ought to provide for the possibility of general human flourishing, but our society (as we know) does not’ (Whyman, 2019, 12). Whyman tries to get around the accusation of the normative groundlessness of Adorno’s critique. He reads, for example, the thirty-sixth aphorism, Health unto death, and also finds an antinomy: ‘both health and sickness are equally bad, so we should neither be healthy nor sick ... what then? We’ve got nowhere to go from there, we’re just stuck in the realm of incoherent naysaying that Adorno’s critics always suspected he inhabits. But now consider that what Adorno is really saying is – on the despair-reading – that the “healthy” today really exhibits sickness, because our present notion of health is distorted; because we just don’t know what health is, we lack a coherent conception of healthiness. So then we can hold on to the thought that we should be healthy instead of sick ... it’s just that we need a proper understanding of what “health” is first, if we are ever going to get well at all’ (Whyman, 2019, 13). This is a reasonable interpretation, as long as we do not conclude that the task of the critic is first to construct a normative understanding of health that is not in itself sick, a kind of idea of pure health. Adorno argues that such a thing is not available to us, and the simple affirmation of such a transcendent idea, once thrown into the nexus of immanence of this antinomic world, would replicate the structure into which it fits. The soundness of Whyman’s interpretation lies in the idea that Adorno is not talking about practices or norms that are bad in every possible world but about an actual bad whole in which the abstractly isolated elements are concretely entangled in their opposites, and that for a reason.

IV The (im)possibility of a normative foundation of criticism

Even if Adorno is not interested in designing some kind of social ontology, ⁸ he would see no problem in assuming that in our societies there are social practical norms, that they prescribe courses of action and behaviors, and that they may even constitute and be constituted by the recognition of those concerned, such as Hegel’s objective spirit. It is not that we should doubt the validity of normative propositions. Adorno’s answer to the normativity problem is not that normativity does not exist, cannot be known, or should not be considered. In a broad sense, normativity exists everywhere in both practical and theoretical reasoning. There is no access to space outside the normatively structured space of reasons. People recognize social norms as valid and correct, and recognize each other in light of these norms. Still, we can say that, for Adorno, validity (understood here as the mode of existence of norms) is not the same as correctness. In contrast, Adorno famously stated that the social world in which we live is a false one, where no right life is possible; here, tendentially at least, all norms that are valid are wrong. To be valid, for Adorno, is somehow almost the same as being wrong, even if that is not a necessary proposition but a contingent one, relative to our specific social world. This is, of course, a very pretentious argument, ⁹ one that only makes sense through the lens of Marx’s critique of political economy, both in his analysis of the interconnectedness of every individual action in a system that produces injustice through the fair exchange of equivalents (Marx, 1976, 270 ff.) and in his demonstration of how the capitalist normative framework, when consequently realized, ends up engendering states of affairs that contradict their generating norms (Marx, 1976, 725 ff.).

When we read Adorno’s sentence that ‘the whole is the false’ (Adorno, 2005, 50), we are tempted to think that the whole is a consistent one, where everything fits in harmoniously. Adorno equated the whole with a system, and the main feature of a system is its inner coherence. In this case, it would suffice to act at odds with the whole to act morally. To negate a coherent whole, it suffices to negate a single part of it, say, one of its normative imperatives formulated propositionally. A real ‘outsider’ would then be the only moral agent. However, should we be able to do so, this whole would no longer be the whole anymore. Should there be something outside it, it would no longer be the whole. Of course, Adorno does not say that everyone acts uniformly every time, so there is no factual deviation from the norms that compose that whole. On the contrary, because it is not a monolithic and plainly uniform normative order, it can be, in that sense, a whole encompassing all norms, actions, and relations, and also each of their opposites. ¹⁰ The thing changes if that whole (the capitalist form of life) is not formally coherent but accommodates contradictory normative propositions or real processes that are suitable to be conceptually grasped – that is, formulated in normative propositions that correspond to them to a greater or lesser extent. Formally considered, such a system, taken as a normative system, would trivialize (in a logical sense) moral action. If a system contains a single contradiction, then every sentence can be deduced from it. However, this is system composed of contradictions. In other words, every action in such a whole would be right, supported by a norm contained in or implied by the normative system. For Adorno, what happens is that in such a system opposite normative propositions are valid. Still, given that each of them is entangled in a state of affairs that contradicts it and as it should be possible to find a contradictory but equally valid norm for each of them, none of its norms is correct in the strictest sense. ‘Even the norms which condemn the present world are themselves the fruits of iniquities. All morality has been modeled on immorality and to this day has reinstated it at every level’ (Adorno, 2005, 187). The whole is the false, which does not imply that the part is true. Therefore, the problem is not exactly that we cannot know the good in this world. The real problem is that the good is also bad. Needless to say, grounding critique in the ‘good’ norms of this world would mean exactly taking part in its bad reproduction.

The problem with contemporary normativism in critical theory would be, for Adorno, as Testa and Henning mentioned at the beginning of this article, the idea that the whole of our social ontology is equated with the normative. If the space of reasons of capitalism is contradictory (Evans, 2021), that is because capitalism (as a mode of production and a form of life) is not just a space of reasons but is better described as a complex social-historical ontology in which the space of reasons falsely presents itself as an autonomous system normatively determinant of the social form itself. Its contradictory character is an index of the falsity of the way it appears. ¹¹

V Skepticism turned inside out (or negative dialectics and real antinomics)

The skeptical trilemma leads to a legitimate refusal of the idea that critique should have a foundation, but, left on its own, also produces the undesirable practical outcome that critique may simply follow what immediately appears. Evans ends his skeptical questioning of the problem of the normative foundation of critique with that residual suggestion: ‘the justification for critique of the way things are is simply that we do not want them to be this way. Of course, this throws up a host of issues. (…) [I]s this not just decisionism?’ (Evans, 2023, 17). Following the skeptic until the point where equipollence had to emerge, Hegel simultaneously dismantled and accepted the skeptical attitude towards the idea of a foundation, understanding it as the speculative movement of reason where the equipollent opposites are identified. For the young Hegel, the problem is also not exactly the search for a foundation; it lies in the idea that that foundation should be singularized as an object of cognition, a thing, or, for our purposes, a norm. Adorno shares something in common with both. Analogous to the young Hegel, he saw a kind of unity of contradictory practical norms in the ethical life of modern capitalist societies. Unlike Hegel, and in that regard, closer to the skeptic, he does not see the original unity of contradictory normative propositions as an overcoming of skepticism through a better comprehension of what it means to be a foundation. For Adorno, there is no purely theoretical way to overcome the antinomy (and, contextually, no practical way in view too). ¹² If something like a foundation for an antinomic world is to be found, then positing it (for example, as a criterion for critique) is the same as insisting on the antinomic state of affairs. For Adorno, foundations – at least the foundations of this world – are there to be deposed, for they entrap us in infernal alternatives between antinomic behaviors.

I then arrive at Evans’ Adornian suggestion of a kind of criticism without foundations. He says: ‘The task of explaining and thinking through what we want might take us back to Adorno and his near-definition of negative dialectics: “reciprocal critique of the general and the particular, the identifying acts which judge whether the concept does justice to what it is dealing with, and whether the particular also fulfills its own concept, are the medium of the thinking of the non-identity of the particular and concept.” ¹³ Here, neither the concept nor the particular are foundational. Instead, each is measured against the other, constantly’ (Evans, 2023, 18). The idea of a reciprocal critique of opposites (among others, the opposition at stake between the general and the particular) escapes both skepticism and foundationalism regarding the criterion of critique. The whole idea of negative dialectics has to do with this and can be seen as Adorno’s particular dialectical overcoming of skepticism as well as his anticipated defense against Habermas’s objections. I will attempt to develop this further in the conclusion.

Where it finds inadequacies in its object, says Adorno, immanent critique must seek ‘to derive them from the irreconcilability of the object’s moments. It pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of the task itself. In such antinomies criticism perceives those of society. A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure’ (Adorno, 1988, 32). Before an antinomic world, critique cannot but account for it theoretically, explaining but by no means justifying it. This is why Adorno’s negative dialectics has frequently been the target of derogatory accusations of being a kind of amputated dialectics, as if it were what Adorno himself called ‘the serene demonstration of the fact that there are two sides to everything’ (Adorno, 2005, 247). ¹⁴ In a critical assessment of Adorno’s work before the publication of Negative Dialectics, Ilse Müller-Strömsdörfer (1960, 104) pointed out that ‘the propensity towards polarization, towards a two-stage approach, as opposed to Hegel’s three-step, is evident everywhere; it pervades Adorno’s entire oeuvre and is in fact the characteristic feature of his philosophy’.

While Lukács saw a series of antinomies emerge in bourgeois thinking, all of them deriving from the fundamental theoretical opposition between subject and object, Adorno went further and recognized that the bourgeois world also poses us before practical antinomies of every sort. Adorno not only recognized these real antinomies in society but also drew from them implications for a reformulation of critical dialectical thinking. His reciprocal critique of antinomic opposites is not the same as a reciprocal correction of opposites that finds a solution in a middle term and even less so if that middle term is understood as a concrete intersection between them. Hegel’s concept of mediation sometimes seemed like compromise solutions between incompatible extremes (for example, in the state, as depicted in the Philosophy of Right). Even worse, Adorno believes that when mediation does not appear as a concrete third thing, it is itself hypostasized by Hegel. What Adorno calls the hypostasis of mediation (Adorno, 1973, 329) resides in the fact that mediation – for him, a bad abstraction of thought – is treated as something independent of the mediated extremes, acting by itself. Against that model, Adorno develops the idea of mediation not as ‘a middle element between extremes’, but as something that ‘takes place in and through the extremes, in the extremes themselves’ (Adorno, 1993, 8 f.). Adorno’s conception of ‘dialectical mediation is not a mean between opposed terms, for it is only produced by entering into the heart of the extreme, and it is precisely by driving this extreme to the uttermost point that we become aware of its opposite within the extreme itself’ (Adorno, 2017, 187). Negative dialectics ‘does not seek a middle ground between the two; it opposes them through the extremes themselves, convicts them of untruth by their own ideas’ (Adorno, 1973, 35).

When Adorno speaks about the mutual confrontation of opposites, this critical procedure is not motivated by some abstract idea of how critique should be. This is the only way out to deal with a normative antinomic world. As in Hegel, the identity of the antinomic extremes is discovered; however, unlike Hegel, this identity does not form a posited third term. They are the same, for each is what it is through the mediation of the other. According to Adorno, paradoxically, their identity is already rather their dissolution. Not the identity of the opposites stabilizes the opposition in tension, but the contradiction in identity perennially threatens its disintegration, as in capitalist crises when the identity logic of commodity exchange shows its non-identity in practice.

VI Conclusion: beyond self-consummating skepticism

Five years after Hegel’s essay on Schulze, when skepticism returns in the Introduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the ‘path of doubt’, or ‘what is customarily understood’ by it – ‘a shaking of this or that supposed truth, followed by the disappearance again of the doubt, and then a return to the former truth so that in the end the thing at issue is taken as it was before’ – will be further conceptually elaborated and incorporated in Hegel’s philosophy, now rather in the form of a real ‘self-consummating skepticism’, a ‘conscious insight into the untruth of knowing as it appears, a knowing for which that which is the most real is rather in truth only the unrealized concept’ (Hegel, 2018, 52). Skepticism’s abstract negation (Hegel, 2010, 131) gives way to speculative determinate negation (Hegel, 2018, 53) – according to Hegel, a form of skepticism that is no longer one-sided but is taken to its ultimate consequences. ¹⁵ Left by itself, skepticism ‘misjudges its result by clinging to it as a mere (i.e., abstract) negation’, but Hegelian philosophy claims to know skepticism better than the latter knows itself, as it ‘contains the sceptical within itself as one of its moments, namely, as the dialectical’ (Hegel, 2010, 131). In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel then calls skepticism a ‘negative dialectic’ that ‘is ineffective against the speculative’ (Hegel, 1986, 397).

Like Hegel, Adorno’s negative dialectics claims to operate not by abstract (i.e., skeptic) negation but by determinate negation. This seems to have left us with an impasse. Adorno cannot stay in the antinomy and simply live with it, like the skeptic, nor can he surpass it into some speculative positivity that does not efface the antinomy but – quite the opposite – preserves it in a way that is both tense and stable. For Adorno, this last option, Hegel’s idea of Aufhebung and determinate negation, is not only a conceptual fixation of the antinomy, but also its justification.

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, after alluding to ‘bourgeois skepticism’ as an example of abstract negation, Adorno and Horkheimer equated Hegel’s concept of determinate negation, in an unorthodox interpretation, with the Hebrew notion of prohibition of images. Then they concluded against Hegel: ‘With the concept of determinate negation Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postulating the known result of the whole process of negation, totality in the system and in history, as the absolute, he violated the prohibition and himself succumbed to mythology’ (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, 18). Therefore, Adorno’s determinate negation is determinate not because it gives a determinate outcome of the negation but because it identifies the identity of the antinomic opposites through themselves. This identification of the real existing contradiction is already an exposition of the falsity of the world that produces it without any further need to determine some positive that would necessarily come because it would already have been there. Therefore, even if Adorno’s version of determinate negation, as opposed to that of Hegel, does not preserve the antinomy, it does not make it abstract (similar to skepticism). ‘Antinomy explodes the system’, says Adorno in his study on Husserl (Adorno, 2013, 29). For Adorno and Horkheimer in the same passage of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, determinate negation ‘is not exempted from the enticements of intuition by the sovereignty of the abstract concept, as is skepticism, for which falsehood and truth are equally void’, but, as it ‘discloses each image as script’, that is, as concept in the intuition, ‘it teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth’ (Adorno & Horkheimer, 2002, 18). If Hegel thought that his dialectics were the consummation of skepticism by itself, Adorno could reply that this was exactly why it should be reproached. Just as the skeptic recognizes equipollence but leaves everything as it is, so does, for Adorno, Hegel’s dialectics, which in the end offers an image of an antinomic and simultaneously rational (i.e., normatively justified) social world. Adorno’s negative dialectics is thus neither skeptical nor foundationalist about normativity, but rather denounces the skeptical foundations of capitalist ethical life.