NEGATIVE DIALECTICS (1)

[Dennis R Redmond]

On Fri, 6 Mar 1998, Eric Oberle wrote:

> As for who is being referred to, I do not know either, though we can be
> sure it is not Hegelians--1819 would be a bit early for such, and Adorno's
> description of naive empiricism and lazy subjectivism doesn't fit any of
> them.  More likely were dealing with Fichteans, i.e. subjective idealists,
> rather than objective idealists like Hegel.  One could guess that perhaps
> one is dealing with religious-oriented subjectivism of the Schelling or
> even the Herderian type.  Some years ago, I searched Goethe's Dichtung und
> Wahrheit for this reference, but in vain.

I think the reference is to Goethe's Faust Part I, the famous scene where
Mephistopheles assumes Faust's role, temporarily, and gives a number of
candidates all kinds of scurrilous advice. It's interesting that Adorno
stresses the nascent dialectical charge to Goethe's otherwise very
conservative text -- very much like Adorno's reading of Hegel, which
constantly stresses the deeply radical cross-currents underlying the
static, reified motion of the World Spirit. Goethe's own target wasn't the
19th century Romantics or idealists -- Faust Part I was written in the
late 18th century -- but the crude empiricists and Court philosophers
legion to the fragmented, para-feudal states of the German principalities
(of course, Faust Part II does indeed attempt to take on the Hegelians,
though without much success -- there's a student scene where
Mephistopheles, instead of bamboozling the young, ends up being pretty
much tossed aside as an elderly wash-up by pragmatic, business-minded
kids).

It's true that the Ashton translation is better than nothing; still, I
wish some radical scholars somewhere would take the time and do the job
right. Fifty percent of Adorno is nice, but eighty/ninety percent would be
even better.

-- Dennis