Philosophy’s Unworkable Poles

Andrew Bowie, Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy

Polity, 288pp, £17.99, ISBN 9780745671581

reviewed by Tom Hastings

In Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy Andrew Bowie attempts several, equally ambitious things. Firstly, a synoptic reading of the state of contemporary philosophy details the ways in which the idealist traditions Theodor Adorno spent his writing life attacking have suffered a radical narrowing of perspective in recent decades. Bowie’s central claim is that aspects of Adorno’s work deemed too difficult or exaggerated to implement practically in philosophical debates, might be reclaimed to highlight the meta-problems that consistently obscure the relevance of those debates to the realities of social life in the 21st century.

In fact, ‘meta’ is the crucial word here. By repeatedly wielding the tag ‘contemporary philosophy’ to set the parameters of what is at stake, Bowie also sets Adorno up as a kind of transhistorical watchdog, capable of taking an ‘out of touch’ partnership of analytic epistemology and reductive naturalism to task. This simplification is a necessary measure, as the book’s secondary, more far-reaching and hopeful aim is to trouble the methodologically entrenched divergences between the Analytic and Continental traditions—to see how these camps might come together to foster some kind of socially legitimate practice.

The Ends of Philosophy begins by appealing to the common sense of ‘the people’: ‘Most, if not all, of us live with contradictory stances on a whole swathe of issues and people… [this] is strikingly at odds with many prevalent attitudes to philosophy’ Of course, awareness of the way in which philosophical concepts and categories are corrupted and made inadequate by historical events, aesthetic pleasure, and the daily grind is the core insight of Adorno’s critical project. And it is for this reason Bowie suggests that Adorno be taken seriously by philosophers at work today.

If The Ends of Philosophy was intended to simply reaffirm the original project of the Frankfurt School, this could be argued in essay form. However, as Bowie’s writing itself makes clear, the problem with straightforward explanation is that ‘it reduces everything to the ways in which it can be made identical with other things’. Bowie’s ‘answer’ to this problem is surprisingly refreshing (if a little simplistic). The reader is issued with the following pragmatic directive: by reading the knotty, hyperbolic passages of the major narratives ‘in conjunction with the more cautious manner of arguing of the lectures, something more interesting appears, namely an account of why modern philosophy has such problems dealing with questions of subjectivity’. That is to say, Bowie demonstrates the value, or ‘truth-content’, of Adorno’s presentation of ideas by first persuading the reader to recognise that the more contemporary philosophy attempts to account for the life of the individual subject, by objectifying her impulses on paper, the further it falls from the mark.

As Bowie surmises, it is now up to those lofty-sounding agents, historical events and aesthetic pleasure, to draw attention to philosophy’s unrealistic, unworkable poles of total relativism and total essentialism. This conclusion follows buoyantly on from a careful and penetrating elaboration of some key Adornian concepts, such as ‘non-identity’ and ‘natural history’. However, this analysis is not matched by Bowie’s presentation of contemporary ‘trends’, which does feel slightly piecemeal at times, and sustained on the back of broadcasts such as ‘the natural sciences increasingly occupy formerly philosophical territory’.

The book’s six heavyweight chapters work through major areas of philosophical concern for Adorno: determinate negation and dialectics; truth-content; ‘second nature’; the nature of freedom and aesthetics. In moving through these different spaces, Bowie’s narrative itself performs Adorno’s refusal to side with any one camp. For instance, at one point we are told that ‘Adorno’s resistance to relativism is based on the fact that in real engagement with culture nobody accepts that judgement is arbitrary.’ This kind of statement might appear to sponsor or approve the contemporary subject’s referral to a priori legitimating norms. However, it is matched and overturned through other statements, such as follows: ‘Adorno … regarded the idea that the truth about nature lay solely in what is expressed in timeless deterministic laws as an invalid metaphysical reduction.’

In Adorno (and Bowie’s) view, contemporary philosophy is ‘wrong’ precisely because it fails to recognise and account for the way truth emerges as a result of contradictions that cannot be negated or resolved. Where a bad kind of truth applies to any system or statement that presents itself as ‘self-legitimating’, a ‘truth-content’ means that a system or statement contains truth to the extent that it ‘reveals the limitations of the subject … [and] makes apparent an essential contradiction in modernity’.

As a principle of critical practice this will get you to the airport. However, the exciting work really takes off when Bowie puts pressure on the fault lines that connect Adorno’s philosophical progenitors (Kant, Hegel, Fichte) to his estranged progeny (Richard Rorty, Robert Pippin). For instance, as Bowie claims, Adorno advocates for some kind of ‘ownership of norms in the Pippin-Hegel sense’, but then precludes the possibility of ever sustaining those norms, because whatever transcendence is attained ultimately ‘depends on the same will as motivates our natural impulses’. And because ‘nature is indissolubly linked to the nature which investigates it, namely us’, whatever norms we have live under constant threat, like cod in the North Sea, or the NHS.

Bowie is a fiercely critical writer when on the offensive. This is a good thing, because it is only by herding Adorno into double binds such as these, and by asking questions that would seem to risk his own project (such as, ‘does Adorno himself not rely on a kind of dogmatism?’) that Bowie is able to convincingly prove his point about truth’s contradictory nature.

Over the course of a long final chapter, Bowie delineates the presentness of ‘human sense-making’ through various mimetic forms, from child’s play to art-making. The book’s main criticism is launched to startling effect, which is that ‘the currently dominant philosophical model in many areas of Anglophone philosophy… fails to deal adequately with crucial ways in which sense is made in the modern world.’ The point is not to take Adorno’s aesthetic prescriptions at face value – in which case the reader would be left with a bookshelf narrower than that of FR Leavis – but to understand how art is capable of articulating themes and perspectives that philosophy often fails to grasp. Because art is, in Adorno’s phrase, a ‘judgementless synthesis’, the receptive individual is able to gain a kind of understanding that is necessary to the extent that it ‘is not reducible to what can be said about what it conveys’.

The niggling weakness of this chapter comes from Bowie’s ongoing attempt to rescue jazz music from Adorno’s stubborn non-approval. This feels personal. For instance, we are told that ‘although Adorno himself seemed largely incapable of seeing it, the history of jazz exemplifies what he means’. Undoubtedly, this defence follows on from Bowie’s previous publication, Music, Philosophy and Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 2009), through which he explored the value of music to philosophy. However, in the context of the argument here, ‘the history of jazz’ is presented as an Ur-form (as opposed to an illustration) that unhelpfully distracts from the carefully articulated argument for the value of ‘sense-making’ to philosophy.

If my response to this book has been rather descriptive and rigid, this is because The Ends of Philosophy compels the reader to enter forms of argumentation that do not give easy answers. In this sense, Bowie’s close, analytic and comparative readings offer much rich material for further thinking—a thinking that is somehow lacking from the book’s concluding section. Yet, as Bowie makes abundantly clear, answers are not to be found in ready supply for Adorno, so why should we find them here? As Bowie asserts:

The complexity is, in a way that in other cases it often is not, the result of Adorno’s justified refusal to think that clear philosophical answers resolve metaphysical questions. We can approach such questions only in the concrete process of revealing both what generates meaning and what it is in this generation that can also contribute to delusion and the destruction of meaning.

If I were a ‘contemporary philosopher’ at work in the analytic tradition, this book might trouble my practice for a day or two, but I’m sure that I’d quickly climb back up my tower. I wonder whether, in suggesting that philosophy overhaul its entire foundation, Bowie might actually be widening the fault-line that separates the critical theorists from the philosophers. But that is beside the point … What this book really does is to grab hold of Adorno by the roots and branches—to show the vital worth of his criticality anew. As Bowie makes clear, the immediacy of recognition was never a validating marker for Adorno. If redemption precariously touches the present moment by a hair’s breadth, just as anamnesis trails the present without inhabiting it, then to realise either in the present is to succumb to the violence of identity.
Tom Hastings is a PhD candidate at the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at University of Leeds. He runs the art writing blog www.mineralmatters.wordpress.com.