Adorno faulted Hegel for treating the bourgeois individual as an irreducible reality

Evidence

In his introduction, Adorno emphasized how far he thought philosophy had come since Hegel, who in his more generous moments had tolerated aphorisms as “conversation.” 102 Hegel, consistently attacking the fur-sick sein of subjectivity as inadequate, had made one major error. He had hypostatized the bourgeois individual and civil society of his day as irreducible realities. This permitted him to pay as much attention as he did to the totality. Since his time, however, their vulnerability had been amply demonstrated. By the mid-twentieth century the forces of the social totality were so great that subjectivity, bourgeois or otherwise, was in mortal danger. “In the face of totalitarian unity,” Adorno wrote, “which cries out for the elimination of differences directly as meaning [welche die Ausmerzung der Differenz unmiltelbar als Sinn ausschreit], something of the liberating social forces may even have converged in the sphere of the individual. Critical Theory lingers there without a bad conscience.” 103 In short, as Adorno wrote in one of his most often quoted epigrams, Das Ganze ist das Unwahre, “the whole is the untrue.” — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 834

Categorization

• XREF: Adorno’s inversion of Hegel (the whole is the untrue) is the exact reverse of Hegel’s famous claim that the true is the whole — useful for orienting how the Frankfurt School diverged from its Hegelian roots. — connects to: Hegel’s dismissal of the individual stems from liberal assumptions — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 11; Adorno and Horkheimer rejected immediacy and Hegel’s identity of subject and object. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 258; Adorno defended typologies because capitalism had destroyed authentic individualism for most people — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 681 (+4 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The move of locating liberating potential not in totality but in the vulnerable, threatened individual against totalitarian unity is a dense inversion of the dialectical tradition worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• Adorno rejected Hegel’s rationality thesis as a capitulation to unreason #expands (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 185
• Adorno rejected idealist reconciliation of class antagonism as evading objective social causes #expands (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 236