phase consists so far only in the dissolution of the subject, without yet giving rise to a new one, individual experience necessarily bases enough from his necessary entanglement in liberalistic thinking i self on the old subject, now historically condemned, which is still The conception of a totality harmonious through all its antagonisms for-itself, but no longer in-itself. The subject still feels sure of its compels him to assign to individuation, however much he may autonomy, but the nullity demonstrated to subjects by the con- designate it a driving moment in the process, an inferior status in centration camp is already overtaking the form of subjectivity the construction of the whole. The knowledge that in pre-history he objective tendency asserts itself over the heads of human beings, itself. Subjective reflection, even if critically alerted to itself, has ndeed by virtue of annihilating individual qualities, without the something sentimental and anachronistic about it: something of a reconciliation of general and particular-constructed in thought lament over the course of the world, a lament to be rejected not for ever yet being accomplished in history, is distorted in Hegel: with its good faith, but because the lamenting subject threatens to become serene indifference he opts once again for liquidation of the par- Boosted in its condition and so to fulfl in its turn the law of the ticular. Nowhere in his work is the primacy of the whole doubted world,s course. Fidelity to one's own state of consciousness and experience is forever in temptation of lapsing into infidelity, by The more questionable the transition from reflective isolation to glorified totality becomes in history as in Hegelian logic, the more denying the insight that transcends the individual and calls his eagerly philosophy, as the justification of what exists, attaches itself substance by its name. to the triumphal car of objective tendencies. The culmination of the Thus Hegel, whose method schooled that of Minima Moralia gued against the mere being-for-itself of subjectivity on all its philosophy occasion enough to do so. Hegel, in hypostasizing both levels. Dialectical theory, abhorring anything isolated,cannot bourgeois society and its fundamental category, the individual, did admit aphorisms as such. In the most lenient instance they might, not truly carry through the dialectic between the two. Certainly he to use a term from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Mind, be perceives,with classical economics, that the totality produces and tolerated as'conversation'. But the time for that is past. Neverthe- reproduces itself precisely from the interconnection of the anta- less, this book forgets neither the systems claim to totality, which gonistic interests of its members. but the individual as such he for would suffer nothing to remain outside i, nor that it remonstrates the most part considers, naively, as an irreducible datum-just against this claim. In his relation to the subject Hegel does not what in his theory of knowledge he decomposes. Nevertheless, in respect the demand that he otherwise passionately upholds: to be an individualistic society, the general not only realizes itself through in the matter and not always beyond it,, to penetrate into the the interplay of particulars, but society is essentially the substance immanent content of the matter, If today the subject is vanishing, of the e Individu aphorisms take upon themselves the duty 'to consider the evan- For this reason, social analysis can learn incomparably more from escent itself as essential,. They insist, in opposition to Hegel's prac- dividual experience than Hegel conceded, while conversely the tice and yet in accordance with his thought, on negativity: The life large historical categories, after all that has meanwhile been per- of the mind only attains its truth when discovering itself in absolute petrated with their help, are no longer above suspicion of fraud. In desolation. The mind is not this power as a positive which turns the hundred and fifty years since Hegel's conception was formed, away from the negative, as when we say of something that it is null, some of the force of protest has reverted to theindividual. Compared or false, so much for that and now for something else; it is this power to the patriarchal meagreness that characterizes his treatment in only when looking the negative in the face, dwelling upon it. a Hegel, the individual has gained as much in richness, differentiation The dismissive gesture which Hegel, in contradiction to his own and vigour as, on the other hand, the socialization of society has insight, constantly accords the individual, derives paradoxically enfeebled and undermined him. In the period of his decay, the I. Phanom ie des geistes, Warke 3, Frankfurt 1970, P. s2(The Pheno individuals experience of himself and what he encounters con- menology of Mind, London 1966, p. 112) tributes once more to knowledge, which he had merely obscured as a. Phanomenologie des Geistes, p. 36(The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 93). long as he continued unshaken to construe himself positively as the