Adorno’s Critique of Fichte’s Idealism: An Appraisal

Abstract This article challenges Adorno’s characterization of Fichte’s idealism as an extreme form of identity thinking that entails complete human domination of nature. Its argument consists of two main stages. First, Fichte’s idealism will be shown to explain the possibility of the type of critical subject that Adorno presupposes in such a way that a certain primacy must be accorded to the subject in its relation to the object. Second, a distinction between two levels of inquiry and presentation – the transcendental level and the historical empirical level – will be drawn. This distinction is applied to the concept of a relation between the subject or ‘I’ and the object or ‘not-I’ in such a way as to (1) relate this concept to the type of ‘historico-practical’ concept already introduced with reference to the concept of enlightenment and (2) avoid a too literal interpretation of those passages in Fichte’s writings concerning the relationship between the human mind and nature that appear to justify Adorno’s characterization of his idealism.