Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy by Andrew Bowie (review)

It would not be too much to say that Andrew Bowie has written a tour-de-force. Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy is a book on Adorno that covers, in at least some detail, elements of almost all of Adorno’s thought, from dialectics to aesthetics to philosophy of action to philosophy of nature to epistemology and metaphysics to philosophy of history to ethics, politics, and beyond. Yet, it is also a book that engages, in profound and interesting ways, with contemporary Anglophone philosophy. Above all, the book is motivated by two concerns. The first is to insert Adorno as a profitable interlocutor into contemporary meta-philosophical discussions, especially discussions about the ‘ends’ of philosophy (taken, as Bowie highlights, in both senses of ‘ends’ as “aims” and “conclusions” – see 5). The second is to show that Adorno offers an important and often neglected alternative to the multitude of positions adopted in the Anglophone philosophical world.

A significant portion of Bowie’s book is dedicated to showing the philosophical failures of segments of contemporary Anglophone philosophy, failures that are unified by a lack of sensitivity to the historical dimensions of philosophy. As Bowie puts it, “the failure to see that the history of a philosophical problem is itself part of what that problem is vitiates significant amounts of contemporary philosophy” (7). What’s significant for Bowie about Adorno in this context is that Adorno is not ‘baldly’ historicist in this regard: so while “concepts are seen by Adorno as inherently involving movement” they are not thereby devoid of “having some kind of identity” (7). This is one way to of saying that Adorno is not Rorty; things do not simply boil down to contingencies that pile up over time (122). Neither, however, is Adorno simply a Hegelian or neo-Hegelian, where the contingencies add up to a positive whole (see especially chapter 3). So what is Adorno’s position?

Bowie’s suggestion is that Adorno is a sort of Hegelian, one who might be understood as adopting elements of Hegel’s legacy in the same way Robert Pippin has adopted those elements, chiefly by rejecting the idea that there can be any defensible perspective within philosophy that doesn’t somehow account for and involve the irreducible, first-person, normative dimension of human experience (e.g., 83 and 112). Where Adorno allegedly breaks with someone like Pippin (but also Brandom and others) is in maintaining that the variety of norms that come to be sedimented over time might be contradictory or inherently inhospitable to the sort of transparency that neo-Hegelians envision. I will return to a discussion of this point shortly, but for now I want to highlight why this already suggests Adorno as an important interlocutor in contemporary philosophy. As Bowie impressively shows, various reductive, eliminativist naturalisms actually dovetail with metaphysical approaches. Both sets of approaches above all dissolve human suffering, the former by sometimes going as far as suggesting that ‘pain’ is “not real” (78) to the extent that pain is allegedly only “what is discovered by establishing the laws under which the neurological data can be subsumed” 78), and the latter by trying to “justify pain as a part of a meaningful world-order” (79). Ultimately, in their various forms (although this is not made explicit, one suspects that Bowie’s critique, on Adorno’s behalf, would apply as much to, say, Paul and Patricia Churchland as it would to Alvin Plantinga), what both approaches suggest is a conception of nature which is ultimately untenable, since it is one that conceives of nature as inherently timeless (something which we need not assume to do good science, or, for that matter, good philosophy—see 85ff). By sketching Adorno’s alternative notion of ‘nature-history,’ Bowie highlights how an alternative view of history raises new and interesting avenues for philosophy (see chapter 4).

Because such a conception of nature expands nature in the ways in which contemporary thinkers like McDowell and Pippin have been suggesting, it allows us to take...