Escaping Adorno’s iron cage, the impossibility of Godless critical theory

Adorno’s The Culture Industry and  is one of the most influential texts of critical theory, illustrating how capitalist society instramentalizes reason enslaving mass-produced man fed into a totalizing system of control.

Adorno is stuffed with essential insights into modernity, and I agree with a great deal of his assessment….but he has his critics,  stuck in a marxist materialistic determinism, as Gillian Rose has astutely noted, Adorno’s thought ‘is haunted by a ghostly missing agency’.

He both denies the efficacy of the subject, due to its implication in commodity culture and instrumental rationality, while at the same time making the subject the agent of an attentive eschatological reserve.This attempt – in the words of Espen Hammer – to ‘affirm the subject in its moment of involuntary annihilation’ is ambitious, to say the least.

Habermas argues that Adorno cuts off the limb he is standing on, commit- ting a ‘performative contradiction’ that employs reason and the subject in a circular and groundless critique. 

But here I’d like to ask, does Adorno’s own system of thought escape his own critique ? How can he justify his own conception of truth, his particular values, or, especially, his unique, and problematic, anthropology ?

 David M Wilmington revisits his thesis HERE, noting

“…the theory of the culture industry itself proceeds from and is guided by certain anthropological assumptions.”

The basics of Adorno’s critique.

The basics, Wilmington says, is that, 

“…the modern enlightenment intentionally set itself against myth in an attempt to sever ties with anything that kept humanity linked to nature. Reason, reduced to instrumental thinking that grasps at control and mastery, became a self-protecting totality, and enlightenment came to be defined by whatever functions of reason ensured the separation from myth and the progress of control Adorno’s invocation of the Kantian “schema,” which categorizes raw data for processing by human reason. 

In this key passage, Adorno identifies the germ of the culture industry’s enforced sameness as that which has taken the place of Kant’s “secret mechanism within the psyche” that preforms “immediate data to fit them into the system of pure reason.”

 Where this Kantian notion of an inner schematization is still active, in that the subject itself relates the data to concepts, the influence of the culture industry preempts

all classification by the consumer herself by pre-classifying everything. This is not merely a question of broadcasting or enforcing a system of classification. In some way, “the schematicism of production” itself pre-classifies all products of the culture industry. The schema, the classification, somehow inheres in the products because they have been created under the material conditions of industrial capitalism. This manipulated and manipulating schema is a modern mechanism which preempts the work of the relatively active mechanism posited by Kantian epistemology.

At its root in the schema, however, it is the preformation of epistemology into easily commodifiable units. Here is the fundamental for which the culture industry is a faithful overtone: thought is starved of anything not reduced to the quanta of the marketplace. The character of this data is governed by “the iron law that the information in question shall never touch the essential, shall never degenerate into thought.”

(Pseudo) Knowledge Is (Enslaving) Power

"Where the supply and promotion of traditional commodities might delude people into assuming that value inhered in an object, the system Adorno attempts to diagnose limits people to finding value only in the pre-commodfied information, whose standards of “accuracy” (itself a category imposed for the purposes of control) can be manipulated to oppose any thought.

 The information allowed by the system informs us only about mass culture itself: it is “a system of signals that signals itself.”

Since the system holding the reins of every aspect of society is the system of industrial capitalism, it is no surprise to find an endless desire for information - spurred on even at the self-identified “popular level” by the social need to be in-the-know, to gain the prestige of being “well-informed.”

Once information is defined solely as data, as “facts” that can be easily arranged in order to be grasped quickly, as that which can be “recognized, subsumed and verified,” everything in tension with that schema must—by definition—be rejected “as idiocy or ideology, as subjective in the derogatory sense.”

OK.

Now, Adorno, Williamton notes, "examines everything in terms of its attentiveness to, or mediation of, material historical conditions”, using negative dialectics to confront and read idols, discussing their falseness, while true dialectic being its own check on its own power, and the result is truth.

However, Williamston says, “we must ask which truth will necessarily wind up as the recipient of dialectic’s power.”

“It seems that the material conditions out of which this dialectic emerges would, in fact, predetermine what it recognizes as the truth to which it would hand over power.

*Despite the claim that no absolute idea stands behind his critique of the culture industry’s representations, Adorno’s definitions (of human flourishing and telos  , especially) and understanding of human dynamics (epistemology, for example) are clearly guided by standards or ideals supplied to him by his own fundamental commitments: the definitions and dynamics of Marxist thought.
The nature of Adorno’s “truth” is such that it is simply not a part of, nor can it be recognized in or engage with, the capitalist society of the modern west for Adorno, the goal of all critique—even a critique of Marxian materialism itself —is to serve a focus on “concrete social reality and the emancipatory goals of Marxism.”

So historical materialism, the primacy of the socio-economic/political material conditions, is the given standard.

While this does not cause a problem  in itself —every critique must have its normative standpoints—Adorno applies his standard in such a way that only something completely outside the industrial capitalist “current conditions” could even allow the possibility of true thought and freedom. 

In effect, Adorno surreptitiously advocates for his ideal— as much as he rejects the charge of utopianism—by “pathologizing” the alternative that was already winning the day by the mid-1940s.

Mere Shades: Life as death

"The anthropology underlying Adorno’s analysis and critique provides him with mere shades as humans: the non-incarnate and bloodthirsty simulacra of humans Odysseus encounters in the Land of the Dead. Homer imagined this as the state of the masses of the dead; Adorno accepts this half- or non-life as the state of the masses of the living.

Without a conceptually coherent account of transcendence, Adorno is trapped in a hermeneutical spiral—an infernal vision where even genuinely utopic hopes cannot escape, on the one hand, the potential for evil (seen in whichever genius demons assembled and maintain the conditions for capitalism), and on the other hand, the soulless, imago-less sheep that make up the vast masses of humanity.

*The reason for his entrapment helps us see the most important limitation in Adorno’s critique: because of his definition of humanity and of truth, and his commitment to a brand of materialism as the standard against which he judges everything, he must see key elements of human flourishing, and even of human thought, as completely contingent upon a social order.
This is not a question of identifying better or worse social orders — for Adorno, the material conditions under capitalism create a system under which human flourishing and life itself are not possible.

Although he refuses to adequately describe an alternative social order, the standards against which he judges and condemns “current conditions”adhere within rigid parameters.

*Where he rightly diagnoses a strain of anti-mythological enlightenment thinking that reduces truth to the quanta of mathematics, he cannot escape the quanta of his own preordered formulae —a system of categories and dynamics in which human life is utterly bound to the material realities of economic and political power.

 Himself afraid of the “myth” of the non-material transcendent, Adorno binds truth to the earth and explains away any account of genuinely transcendent truth as another system-underwriting cog in the machine.

Although more of the truth may one day be revealed under the right (economic/political) conditions, it is already—and has always been—present, susceptible to discovery in material reality.

The materialist schema at the core of his epistemology and anthropology is at least as effective a jail-keeper as industrial capitalism: it makes humans entirely responsible for freeing up the truth (or at least more of it) because there is no truth that is beyond humanity.

Ultimately, Adorno cannot trust the human because he cannot give an account of human life that includes anything other than the already-present. All that can possibly change (within Adorno’s anti-transcendent materialist cosmology) is only what already is within humanity.

Thus the boundaries to Adorno’s undefined eschaton are purely human: capitalism, industry, class, etc.

In the absence of something like the Christian claim of Incarnational transcendence —something that is both materially present in history and really transcendent of all human experience and language — he is left with a notion of life enslaved to the materially present.

He must hinge his critique of the closed system of the culture industry upon a standard of truth, excellence, freedom, etc., that exists in a place Totally Other than anything within the system.

But since even this Totally Other must already be entirely (and paradoxically) contained within the human, the Other must be merely the unrealized potential of the human. In other words, Adorno’s “Totally Other” is merely a future and developed part of the “Same.”

When the Apostle Paul can cry out from within his own “closed system” of doing what he does not want to do and failing to do what he wants, he can give an account of why the standard against which he judges himself is good: the standard is not human. Similarly, when he cries out, much as Adorno tries to cry out, “Who can deliver me from this body of death?”

Paul does so with both real despair and real hope- the question is, after all, “rhetorical” and directed at the transcendent source of the standard.

By limiting himself to the merely material, Adorno destroys the human by limiting it to the merely human. By limiting himself to the merely human, Adorno destroys the hope he seeks to stimulate.

Where Christians must begin an anthropology from the recognition of a transcendent Creator in whose image humanity was created, Adorno cannot allow for any real transcendence at any point.

It is therefore ironic that the only theology Adorno wants (eventually) is an empty “transcendence” that he must have to get out of the closed system he serves (the mere possibility of which is denied by his own presuppositions) —a moment of the possibly-other that comes from nowhere (a filthy past which should preclude its existence), arises in a cesspool (in which it could never be recognized) and points to nowhere and no-One that is not already materially present in humans and their material social conditions.”

Adorno and theology

Now, Adorno, from his interpretation of Kantian philosophy, is motivated by the following concern in his take on religion, he says: 

“Certainly a ratio that does not wantonly absolutize itself as a rigid means of domination requires self-reflection, some of which is expressed in the need for religion today. But this self-reflection cannot stop at the mere negation of thought by thought itself, a kind of mystical sacrifice, and cannot realize itself through a ‘leap’: that would all too closely resemble the politics of catastrophe.”

Christopher Craig Brittain explains,

“In this statement, Adorno locates the contemporary ‘need for religion’ in the effort of reason to resist absolutizing itself. He suggests that theology is related to reason’s critique of itself. Furthermore, he connects it with a determination to resist the ‘negation of thought by thought itself’ – i.e. to a rejection of nihilism. It is also clear in these words that Adorno associates religion with what he calls ‘metaphysical experience’.

However, Adorno would equally see religion  even as a manifestation of rational thought pushing beyond itself, if conceptualized would be just as much an idol as any scientific fact.

This is because the ‘metaphysical moment’ in thought does not amount to a positive grasp of something directly ‘in-itself ’. Here one can see that Adorno is indeed a student of Kant. For him, metaphysics is not an intuition into the ‘true nature of things’; neither does it lead to the sense of some sort of meaning in life."

So….what’s the alternative ? Well, it’s still religion. Milbank offers a different account of getting past such Kantian prison schemas.

Brittian says, 

“Milbank’s counterproposal is to suggest that ‘to reason truly one must be already illumined by God’, for only virtuously ordered desire and reason resolve the ‘nihilistic contradictions of philosophy’.

Milbank responds to the Kantian block by arguing that it remains ‘haunted by this question of ontological depth “behind” finite phenomena’.This suggests to him that knowledge is only truly achieved through faith, and that this involves some form of revelation received from outside the finite.

 In his critique of the Kantian sublime, which resides at the limits of conceptuality and thus cannot be represented, he argues that Kant fails to recognize that the unknown ‘is not simply that which cannot be represented, but is also that which arrives’.

He continues:‘only if reality itself is regarded as “given” from some beyond does it become possible to trust that what is communicated and circulated may assume new meanings’.

One can escape the empty formalism of Kantian liberal political theory, Milbank says, only through ‘a kind of collective supra-rational devotion’.

 The point of human life, he suggests, is to be educated into this kind of devotion. Thus, ‘freedom . . . must first of all be the generous imparting of what one has learned’.

Contrary to the empty formalism he sees in Kant, Milbank argues that any moral theory in which freedom and reconciliation are more than a generalized formal principle is only possible in an unfounded particular praxis - that of  Jesus of Nazareth.

He argues that ‘a claim to know truly, a claim to know at all, as Plato argued, only makes sense within the frame- work of meathexis  (participation)’.

Until one accepts the Christian metanarrative (as Milbank understands it), one is chained to the wall of Plato’s cave.

He advocates for the ‘Platonic view that reason, to be reason, in some sense knows before it knows’.Thus,‘reason, to be reason, must therefore also be faith’. It is ‘only through assent to the realm of eternal unchanging forms, or of the ideas in the mind of God’ that one encounters where the ‘actual abides’.

Only those initiated into the true order of reality hidden behind sense experience might leave the shadows of the cave and enter into the sunlight of reality: ‘to reason truly one must be already illumined by God.”

Secularism as social control, the culture industry of Disenchantment

Secularism is the new mythos manufactured by the culture industry. Paul Tyson, in his book  Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times, (now only 2.99 on kindle) writes,

“The Christian maintains that the passive acceptance of culturally constructed errors regarding reality will result in false valuations, false loyalties, and futile and destructive lifestyles. Such error results in idolatrous impiety in the living of one’s life. So to philosophical and religious people, metaphysical incoherence, and treating metaphysics simply as an entirely natural function of the vested power structures and operational norms of any society, cannot be mildly accepted...

“But . . . what if it is really the real world that Christian doctrine is concerned with, and what if the value-neutral mechanical determinism of secular reality is in fact something of a bizarre fantasy that is not, after all, faithful to reality?”

These operational norms and the assumptions about the nature of reality that go with them are at least partly shaped by the vested power interests of those who govern us. Thus shared reality beliefs are intimately enmeshed in the necessary power structures, with all their vested interests, in which we live.

 ....it may well be that those power structures are as interested in promoting zones of illusion that hide oppression within our assumed understanding of reality as they are in facilitating the true flourishing, freedom, and dignity of our lives. Those who never question the realities with which they are presented are easily controlled by those who set up the power structures and wield influence in any given society. ”

“Increasingly a deep cultural unknowing regarding what the point and meaning of our wondrous objective knowledge and manipulative power might be is now a pervasive background feature of our cultural life form. This leaves us at the mercy of the brazen manipulative irrealism and the morally unconstrained instrumentalism of consumer culture. The vested power interests native to pragmatic consumerism delight in playing with our subjective beliefs and molding our objective behaviors to suit its merely instrumental ends. Market realism and the mass media age thrives on generating seductive ready-made consumer identities saturated in powerful illusions that prime our fantasies of desire and manipulate our inchoate fears, and all for the meaningless “point” of getting us to spend money.

 Once we are out of touch with thinking about moral and spiritual reality it does not take long for us to get out of touch with material reality as well (think of speculative trading and the non-material bubble worlds possible within cyberspace). The escapism, narcissism, and virtual brilliance of our powerful entertainment industry, and a flagrant disregard for the physical environment on which our very lives depend, is also characteristic of our times. ”“

For now we have power without wisdom or piety, existence without nobility, lives without any transcendently referenced point, birth and death without intrinsic meaning, time and seasons without liturgical reference, holidays without the holy. (Though, of course, we do have very fancy and cheap flat screen TVs.) Now the West has unleashed enormous instrumental and military forces on the globe and has built a set of global structures that facilitate unprecedented economic and material exploitation; but all this power is directed to no common good, to no intrinsically valuable end. Under this situation, if we have no sense of accountability to any moral truth or any sacred meaning in how we govern the world, then we may drag the whole world down into the West’s spiritual bog and visit unprecedented destruction on the entire globe in the process. ”

For what different discourses of power consider as real and knowable, and what they do not perceive and thus label as unreal and unknowable, has enormous importance on how we actually live. Disciplines of desire and character formation are naturally aligned with the tacit collective goals of any given life form, and these goals are only visible within shared frames of belief, and those shared frames of belief have deep leverage on our way of life because they are richly, imaginatively, and allegorically constructed.

Yet ironically—as Nietzsche himself understood—any view of reality that is only defined within the order of the tangibly apparent, the empirical realm, is just as much imaginatively constructed and a shared frame of belief as are outlooks situated within a metaphysically three-dimensional frame of belief. Formation in any collective belief alignment is deeply mytho-poetic and happens below the conscious and “adult radar of our stated metaphysical convictions. The metaphysical formation that we absorb from the stories and ideas of our culture’s collective imagination become the background cultural wallpaper of any given way of life. 

Thus, typically unknown to us, it is the distinctive narratives and particular imaginative landscapes of our culture that shape our sympathies, our apathies, and our social norms. These deep narratives discipline our desires and motivate our actions. 

Thus, the visibilities and invisibilities thrown up by a culture’s mytho-poetic outlook shape its most basic moral and political framework.

Yet this dynamic of the normalization of exploitation via the techniques of skillfully-crafted marketing illusions and production invisibilities. . . almost any tradeable commodity—is tied to a deep cultural belief that makes the modern Western consumer way of life work. 

The belief that makes it all work is that public facts and material things are objective and have no inherent value or meaning, for values and meanings are matters of personal preference and are thus up to individuals to select for themselves. And that belief is a function of a one-dimensional metaphysical outlook where only objects that you can see and touch are really real.”

 …it is the functional assumption that meanings and values are not part of objective reality but are rather essentially personal and cultural constructions that means that financial and objective “realism” trumps personal and cultural values and meanings, without us even noticing that there is a contest.

“this way of seeing and acting easily makes abstract fantasies (such as money) into real objects, and embodied normative realities (such as human dignity) into abstract fantasies. But if there is only one dimension to reality then both money and human dignity are equally artifices of manipulation, and there is no meaningful way of saying why one of them is more intrinsically important than the other.” 

"Yet it is Nietzsche who makes the remarkable claim that the very notion of validly interpreted historical truth is essentially mythic, and that mythos is always prior to logos—and modern logos is no exception.

….he was particularly sensitive to the fact that all thinking and all human action is only meaningful to us because of words. But words are very fragile and malleable things. Their meanings are a function of culturally situated use, and all cultural and historical situations are contingent and shifting artifacts of imagination, desire, and power, and provide us with no fixed or objectively factual grounding in truth.

Mythos—as a richly imaginative store of pre/super-rational culturo-linguistically embedded meanings—is seen by both thinkers as the grounds of human logos. That is, human reason is not the grounds of truth and any human picture of truth is grounded itself in something more basic than itself.

“…the modern worldview is just as imbedded in mythos as any other worldview. Collective imaginative narratives are not optional extras that cultures may or may not have; they are inherent to human culture and linguistically expressed human reason. As such mythos always gives rise to and shapes the understanding of reason (logos) that any given cultural life form largely accepts."

As David Bentley Hart says, 

"So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.”

Hart also explicates just how we got here,

“With its ambition to perfect a method of pure induction, it proposed to the imagination the idea of a “real” physical world hidden behind the apparent one, an occult realm of pure material causation, utterly devoid of all the properties of mind, most especially intentional purposes.

 From at least the time of Galileo, a division was introduced between what Wilfrid Sellars called the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” — between, that is, the phenomenal world we experience and that imperceptible order of purely material forces that composes its physical substrate. And, at least at first, the divorce was amicable, inasmuch as phenomenal qualities were still granted a certain legitimacy; they were simply surrendered to the custody of the immaterial soul. But mind was now conceived as an exception within the frame of nature.

In the pre-modern vision of things, the cosmos had been seen as an inherently purposive structure of diverse but integrally inseparable rational relations — for instance, the Aristotelian aitia, which are conventionally translated as “causes,” but which are nothing like the uniform material “causes” of the mechanistic philosophy. 

And so the natural order was seen as a reality already akin to intellect. Hence the mind, rather than an anomalous tenant of an alien universe, was instead the most concentrated and luminous expression of nature’s deepest essence. This is why it could pass with such wanton liberty through the “veil of Isis” and ever deeper into nature’s inner mysteries.

The manifest image was soon demoted to sheer illusion, and the mind that perceived it to an emergent product of the real (which is to say, mindless) causal order.

Rather, however, than attempt to explain nature in terms of a “mind-like” order of rational relations, as Aristotelian tradition did, Dennett seeks to do very nearly the opposite: to reduce mind and nature alike to a computational system…

Perhaps the mind inhabits a real Platonic order of being, where ideal forms express themselves in phenomenal reflections, while the scientific image — a mechanistic regime devoid of purpose and composed of purely particulate causes, stirred only by blind, random impulses — is a fantasy, a pale abstraction decocted from the material residues of an immeasurably richer reality.”

Hart's “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity.

Elsewhere he makes this point about the function of disenchanted atheism in society :

"This, I think, is how one must finally understand the popular atheist vogue that has opened so lucrative a niche market in recent years: it is an expression of what a Marxist might call the “ideological superstructure” of consumerism. Rather than something daring, provocative, and revolutionary, it is really the rather insipid residue of the long history of capitalist modernity, and its chief impulse – as well as its chief moral deficiency – its bourgeois respectability.

Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can. 

Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods.

Our sacred wit is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice. God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of our social universe: the price tag.

So it was really only a matter of time before atheism slipped out of the enclosed gardens of acadame and down from the vertiginous eyries of high cosmopolitan fashion and began expressing itself in crassly vulgar form. It was equally inevitable that, rather than boldly challenging the orthodoxies of its age, it would prove to be just one more anodyne item on sale in the shops, and would be enthusiastically feted by a vapid media culture not especially averse to the idea that there are no ultimate values, but only final prices.

In a sense, the triviality of the movement is its chief virtue. It is a diverting alternative to thinking deeply. It is a narcotic. In our time, to strike a lapidary phrase, irreligion is the opiate of the bourgeoisie, the sigh of the oppressed ego, the heart of a world filled with tantalizing toys.”

The Experience of God, 312-313).

We have never been disenchanted. Magic never disappeared. Weber himself was steeped in mysticism. Rather, modernity is a case of rival “Enchantments".

The Myth of Disenchantment, by Jason Joseph Storm, explores this as well, Storm says, 

“I would like to emphasize that the secular is not primarily a subtraction of religion. Put in Hegelian terms, the secular results from an ongoing “sublation” (Auhebung) of religion, which it simultaneously encapsulates, transforms and opposes. 

Some secular concepts represent the transposition of religious concepts into a new key or configuration at the very moment they are presented as oppositional.

In the European case, Christian theological concepts were repurposed to point directly to the state instead of God, e.g. the transposition summarized in the phrase vox populi, vox dei… 

For Foucault, truth is the active expression of a society’s system of “knowledge-power” and therefore science-centric discourse is nevertheless deeply entangled with political and economic concerns. In part, what this demonstrates is that ideology is not merely a false consciousness, but that science (or perhaps scientism) actually furthers the consolidation of species ideologies and secularism in

particular.

The combination of science and ideology determines the architecture of what appears to be possible—both physically and politically. It gives form to secular appeals to practicality and determines the contours of the “worldliness” to which secularism is directed.

The secular is generally presented as the real and the other as the allegory. Put another way, secularization produces doppelgangers—one marked as actual and the other as phantasm, e.g. political sovereignty (framed as real) and divine sovereignty (framed as allegorical or irrelevant). 

Additionally, I note that European scientistic discourse in the nineteenth century brought with it a particular aesthetic impulse toward something called “reality” or “realism.”

This aesthetic, more than anything found in science itself, serves to affect cultural transformations beyond any scientifically verifiable claims. On its own, this produces some of the effects described as part of secularization.

Insofar as the secular resets on its oppositions, it is often unnamed but marked instead as the non-religious, non-superstitious, or simply real politics. But what counts as “real” at a given moment is historically contingent. 

In Marxist terms each new class “has to give its ideas the form of universality, and represent them as the only rational, universally valid ones.” 

                                                         sexy Adorno

Hegel, thinking as radical love, and God as condition for politics.

For Hegel, thinking is radical loving, and only trinitarian theology allows for the conditions of reality to BE thinkable, and politics to BE  possible (as an authentic politics was unimaginable without the doctrine of the Trinity, since the doctrine affirmed the impossibility of unmediated identity)  
Rowan Williams says,

"The religion that is properly related to itself, the religion that is transparent to itself, thinks itself - spells out the inseparability of thinking God and thinking the reconciled consciousness; it also, very importantly, explains why such a religion can only be a historically determined ('positive' or `revealed') faith. Consciousness is necessarily the recognition of self in the other, and so no individual or timeless subjectivity could be actual, could think itself, the world, or God. To think myself is to discover my identity in the alien givenness of the past, and to think history is to find it in my consciousness (thereby discovering that there is no such reality as a consciousness that is `privately' mine). Thus the supreme awareness of thinking, thinking reconciliation, God, must be a historical discovery or recognition.

Yet the recognition issues in something more than mere historical narrative- or rather it must dispossess itself of the positive so as to recover it as the content of thinking.

So we have been *led to begin to think what thinking is, and so we are able to say that the condition for thinkable reality is the fundamental `process, movement, life' of self-differentiation and self-recovery.` To speak of this condition `in itself', to speak of spirit beyond time, God before creation, is in one sense an impossibility, since it is apparently to try to think being without otherness; but in fact the structure of trinitarian doctrine enables us to avoid talking plain nonsense here, because it speaks of an eternal, irreducible being-in-the-other.

To try and think the condition for thinkable reality would be a contradiction if God were envisaged as an unmediated identity; but the Christian vision is of a God who is quintessentially and necessarily mediated in a divine selfhood that is simultaneously its own absolute other. And, Hegel concludes, the complete transparency of self in the other that is God's act of being (as `Father' and `Son') is what constitutes God as `Spirit', as living consciousness proceeding into the determinate otherness of the world.

`That this is so is the Holy Spirit itself, or, expressed in the mode of sensibility, it is eternal love.’

Hegel himself says,

“I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other - and I am only because I have peace with myself; if I did not have it, then I would be a contradiction that falls to pieces. This other, because it likewise exists outside itself, has its self-consciousness only in me, and both the other and I are only this consciousness of being-outside-ourselves ourselves and of our identity; we are only this intuition, feeling, and knowledge of our unity. This is love, and without knowing that love is both a distinguishing and the sublation of the distinction, one speaks emptily of it. This is the simple, eternal idea.”

Williams continues, 

"Our thinking, then, is ultimately radical loving: ecstasy, being-outside-ourselves. ourselves. And it is manifest as such because of the way in which the specific Christian tradition instructs us to think God: prior to any contingent otherness in the world, beyond a supposed determinate otherness between `God' and `the world' (which, as we have seen, is not really thinkable) God as such, in se, is the positing and sublating of `ideal' otherness.

Theologically, the Spirit is what makes possible the extension or repetition of the Father-Son relation for persons within the created order.

Thought thinks itself, `abstractly', thinks the concrete other, its alien but inseparable and necessary partner, and thinks itself ultimately as the productive historical life that issues from living-in-the-other - as the life of the subject in community. And insofar as the community is truly thought, it is a life in which reconciliation and freedom are actual: it is `ethical' life, in which sacred and secular are indistinguishable.

What is more, thinking the life of the community in this sense is passing beyond the Enlightenment,which conceives only of an abstract and non-historical reconciliation. The Enlightenment becomes aware of the power of thought over against externality, heteronomy, tradition or authority, so that its ideal of freedom remains fundamentally negative. It also is incapable of thinking God except as a determinate other (which is, of course, not thinking God at all): its God will either become the abstract and unknown deity of Kantianism or - as a twentieth-century reader is bound to conclude - disappear entirely. 

Enlightenment thought leaves the gulf open between two possible destinies for the spirit: an `absolute' freedom that is in fact bondage because it is incapable of enactment in the concrete world, and a subjectivity without content, legislating for itself according to `private' sensibility.

Concrete freedom is the development of selfhood in the otherness of what is given - at every level; and the concluding message of the Philosophy of religion lectures is that concrete freedom is unimaginable, unrealisable, if thinking revolts against the triune God, against thought as self-love and self-recovery recovery in the other, against thought as ecstasis.

That politics is not thinkable apart from the trinitarian dogma as thought by Hegel. `Concrete freedom' is the condition in which human selves have understood stood that they have no unmediated identity, and so (of course) no legitimate interests that are purely private or individual: they recognise the identity of their interests with the `law' of the community (not necessarily the de facto law of a presently existing state).;' Thought as ecstasis dictates the dissolution of any conception of rights as competitive tive assertion or safeguards against the claims of an alien collectivity, though the perception of rights in such terms is the necessary step away from the tyranny of an illegitimate collective power, the force of a corporate political entity that has not yet been thought or understood. 

The concrete freedom that lies beyond the Enlightenment assertion of rights `against' authority is the action that follows on grasping that my welfare or fruition is attainable only in the welfare or fruition of all: I lose my conception of private right so as to negotiate with the otherness of other persons a good neither mine nor theirs. And to do this with understanding, not slipping back into the forms of primitive consciousness in which the otherness of the other is eroded, is the business of free political life - which is the life pointed to by the Christian Church, but conspicuously not realised in its history, since it has been historically ally guilty of reverting to pre-conscious patterns of power.”

*For Hegel, an authentic politics was unimaginable without the doctrine of the Trinity, since the doctrine affirmed the impossibility of unmediated identity.

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