The Frankfurt school makes it clear that the peculiar power of the dialectic awakened by Idealism persisted in Germany well into the middle of the twentieth century. This is what distinguishes German philosophy from all other western philosophy, whether Continental or Anglo-American. But the dialectic consistently falls under the Kantian definition of ‘consciousness’ as reflective awareness, and not simple sentience. It is this which allows for the emergence of Marxism as serious philosophy. Since self-awareness pivots on ‘the object’ (although ‘object’ is a category created by self-awareness), the Kantian definition allows us to assume the potency of the thing-in-itself as the prior condition for ‘consciousness’.

            But the dialectic, in its ‘primal’ condition, depends on the play between the simple or infant sentience, which necessarily not only persists within the frame of reflective awareness but also grounds it, and the naturally divided reflective awareness. The dialectic arises precisely because the divided nature of reflective awareness necessarily seems to always point toward the simple or direct awareness as the ‘other’ within the frame of reflection, the ‘other side’ of the reflective process, when in fact ‘both sides’ are reflective, with the ‘simple’ awareness embracing both.

            When we place this dance between Two and Three at ‘the object’, we can apparently ‘deconstruct’ the object dialectically. But if, as Marxists, we essentially deny consciousness apart from ‘the material’, so that consciousness only takes the form of the object on the one hand, and only manifests as a pervasive condition of the collectivity on the other (something which can only happen under the aegis of the Kantian definition of consciousness), the object becomes a magical entity which both manifests and deconstructs consciousness.

            The Marxist then finds himself in the position where he must both assert and deny this magical property of the object, with the consequence that dialectic itself becomes both ‘pure’ process and hypostatic ‘entity’. But this is in fact tautology, since what was initially asserted was the object as the bearer of reality: i.e., ‘materialism’.

            The peculiarity of the Frankfurt school, of course, is that, in more or less openly recognizing this paradox, which essentially passes beyond the dialectical process itself, it confronted the dialectical potency as the mirror of the mirror, the reflection of the reflective process. Its ‘materialism’ became ‘dialectic’. Dialectic itself stands in for ‘the real’. But, as such, the process of dialectic becomes a moving rondeau of thought, apparently explicating by a sequential penetration that seems to exfoliate the given problem toward some revelation, although no primal or final moment is possible, since dialectic, as such, precludes ground, foundation and so forth. But the ‘target’ thus shifts toward consciousness itself. Dialectic alternately hypostatizes awareness (as ‘mind’) and ‘thing’. What the Frankfurt school effected was a definition of awareness in terms of this process, a mirror image for the structure of awareness as the mirroring function for things; but viewed only as ‘dialectic’, that is, something held as necessarily other than awareness.

            Here is that timeless suspension which allows for the extraordinary analysis of the development of nineteenth century industrialism and bourgeois society. The only problem being that the alienation which Marxism, and hence the Frankfurters, assign to industrial development is as old as human self-awareness, as old as the allegory of the garden. Granted that ‘bourgeois’ flowering of a unique sort takes place in the middle class societies that anchor the new imperialism of industrial commerce, as the ‘advanced’ nations impose themselves on ‘undeveloped’ markets, but the bourgeois mentality is imprinted in Akkadian clay tablets. It is an urban mentality, perhaps. But the alienation of the self through the act of self-awareness is the basis of urban culture. The alienation is not unique.

            The alienation is not unique except in terms of the development of dialectic. That is, what differs in the nineteenth century is the emergence of the ground understanding that allows for dialectic, not as the mechanics of logic, but as the mechanics of consciousness. It is dialectic itself which not only pronounces but embodies the final alienation, radicalizing the separation in consciousness which had hitherto been intuitive or tacit in all self-understanding.

            The two modes of the witness in the moment of self-awareness are the necessary basis for dialectic. But the dialectical impulse arises from the fact that neither alternative is the ultimate actuality of sentience, which is the simple or direct awareness of animal and infant, the immediacy of value and awareness – apparently the nature of consciousness as an evolutionary product.

            While the ‘conscious’ witness – that is, the self-consciously recognized witness – posits whatever it witnesses (including ‘itself’) as immediately independent or self-dependent, and therefore assigns the quality of immediacy to it, everything it thus witnesses as other and thus ‘immediate’ has in fact already been subjected to the reflective process.

            The ‘dialectic’, at its root, is not only the corollary ‘inversion’ of this process, it is this process. That is, because it is an act of consciousness which produces self-awareness, and the products of self-awareness, including our ‘consciousness’ of the witness, these are already dialectical process. And since ‘reflection’ means that the mirror fact persists in these phenomena, the enacting of reflection can move in either direction at any point. They are already dialectical in fact, apart from as well as ‘within’ the reality assigned to them.

            Dialectical abstraction can only follow this given dialectical fact. The ‘abstraction’ alone is what stands outside the original dialectical fact inherent in the given presentation. And only insofar as the dialectic is ‘expressed’ apart from the fact.

            Habitual abstraction wholly obverts the alienation, an alienation that allows us to move through the ‘facts’ of the world and ourselves while pursuing other goals. This alienation is what allows for ‘art’, since art is the non-habitual expression that momentarily collapses the alienation.

            As much as the Marxists and others want to insist on some ‘external’ apocalyptic change that favors the dispossession of individual alienation, and therefore of individuality in art, the issue finally is awareness. And while consciousness is universal, it is also necessarily individual.

            The problem always was and always will be solipsism. We cannot obviate our individual and exclusive self-involvement by an act of extraneous or abstract dialectic. Only the dialectical act that obviates our alienation by an expressive immediacy that collapses the prior dialectic of self-awareness in all our present experience – that is, art itself – can release us.

            Only legitimate creativity, the truly prophetic leap, can transcend our mutual as well as internal alienation, since finally the two forms of alienation subsist together in the nature of our experience.

            What has changed is precisely the recognition of the intimacy of the problem.