Concrete Negation: The Dialectic of Culture's Self-Destruction in Cassirer and Adorno

This paper concerns the problem of “negation” in the context of a philosophy of culture. The leading question is whether the concrete negation of culture – that is, its destruction – can be thought consistently. Ernst Cassirer’s rather constructive take on negation as a necessary element in the process of cultural formation is considered with a focus on the dialectic of mythical consciousness. This view is, then, contrasted with Theodor W. Adorno’s decidedly negative philosophy, and his understanding of cultural criticism in particular – including the infamous statement about poetry after Auschwitz. My interpretation of Cassirer seeks to reveal his rich and complex view on cultural progression as the continuous self-transgression of symbolic forms which, in truly Hegelian spirit, is driven by contradiction. In discussing Adorno, I show how his philosophy – arguably the most consequent negative philosophy at hand – allows to address devastating destruction without diminishing it. While this seems an advantage over Cassirer, it turns out that Adorno’s view cannot make intelligible how the process of culture goes on after what he calls the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. In the end, neither perspective can offer a fully satisfactory way of theorizing the negation of culture consistently, yet both are needed as steps towards a comprehensive theory of cultural destruction.