Hegel ─ Three Studies

This short masterwork in twentieth-century philosophy provides both a majorreinterpretation of Hegel and insight into the evolution of Adorno's critical theory. The firststudy focuses on the relationship of reason, the individual, and society in Hegel, defending himagainst the criticism that he was merely an apologist for bourgeois society. The second studyexamines the experiential content of Hegel's idealism, considering the notion of experience inrelation to immediacy, empirical reality, science, and society. The third study, "Skoteinos," is anunusual and fascinating essay in which Adorno lays out his thoughts on understanding Hegel. In hisreflections, which spring from his experience teaching at the Goethe University in Frankfurt,questions of textual and philosophical interpretation are intertwined.Rescuing the truth value ofHegel's work is a recurring theme of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, and nowhere isthis goal pursued with more insight than in these three studies. The core problem Adorno sets forhimself is how to read Hegel in a way that comprehends both the work and its historical context,thereby allowing conclusions to be drawn that may seem on the surface to be exactly opposed to whatHegel wrote but that are, nevertheless, valid as the present truth of the work. It is theelaboration of this method of interpretation, a negative dialectic, that was Adorno's underlyinggoal.Adorno's efforts to salvage the contemporaneity of Hegel's thought form part of his response tothe increasingly tight net of social control in the aftermath of World War II. In this, his work isrelated to the very different attempts to undermine reified thinking undertaken by the variousFrench theorists. The continued development of what Adorno called "the administered world" has onlyincreased the relevance of his efforts.