('Introduction to "What is
Metaphysics?
Adorno-Metaphysics
.
.
something with regard to the becoming of the divinity itself.
His history is not a mere spectacle for an eternally perfected divine spectator and judge, but is woven into the evolution of the divinity itself' (Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol.
9: Spate Schriften, ed.
Manfred Frings, Bonn 1995, pp.
101?
).
With the idea of the 'becoming of God', Scheler returned to mystical speculation:
It is the old idea of Spinoza, Hegel and many others: primal being be- comes aware of itself in the same act by which man sees himself as founded in it. We only need to reformulate this idea, which up to now has been presented in far too one-sided and intellectualist a way, to mean that man's knowing himself to be founded is a consequence of the active commitment of the centre of our being to the ideal demand of the deity, and the attempt to accomplish it, and in this accomplishment to help to engender for the first time the evolving 'God' as the increasing interpen- etration of spirit and urge. (ibid. p. 70)
However, the doctrine of the evolving God is only fully developed in Scheler's notes on metaphysics published from his posthumous papers, which remained a fragment and of which Adorno cannot have known; cf. the sections 'Weltwerden' and 'Deitas' in 'Manuskripte zur Lehre
vom Grunde aller Dinge' in Scheler, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 1 : Schriften aus dem Nachla(5, Bd. II: Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik, ed. Manfred S. Frings, Berne, Munich 1979, pp. 201ff.
6 Adorno was thinking above all of speculations he had found in the 'Weltalter' fragments, which he discussed in the winter semester 1960/ 1, for example, the sentence: 'Scarcely had the first steps been taken in
reuniting philosophy with nature when the great age of the physical world had to be acknowledged, and the fact that, far from being the
last thing, it was the first, from which all others, even the development of divine life, took their beginning' (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Die Weltalter. Fragmente, in den Urfassungen von 1 8 1 1 und
? ? ?
1 813, ed. Manfred Schroter, Munich 1946, p. 9). While Adorno saw the
,, ,"
, ,'
? ,
',' J
NOTES TO PAGES 10-13 151
?
I
? ? ? traditional doctrine 'that what has become cannot be true' advocated in the 'Weltalter' fragments (Theodor W. Adorno, marginal note at ibid. , p. 4), he noted in the margin beside the sentence quoted: 'Turning point: God as something which evolves' (ibid. , p. 9). And below the keywords in his lecture notes we read: 'the past in God = the absolute
as a process. Distinction between moments within the absolute' (Theodor
W. Adorno Archiv, Zur Einleitung in die 'Weltalter', Stichworte, Bl. 1).
7 'This concept' appears to refer to metaphysics as the doctrine of the enduring, in which, according to Adorno's fundamental critique, metaphysics and epistemology converge: 'With this substitution of the enduring for the truth, the beginning of truth becomes the beginning
of deception' (GS 5, p. 25; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 45ff and passim).
8 The sentence interrupted by this insertion is continued in the first sen-
tence of the 'Notes for Lecture Three'; see p. 12 above.
9 One exception, however, is Heidegger, who in the summer semester of 1 93 1 gave a lecture on 'Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft' concerning
Book e of Aristotle's Metaphysics, subsequently published (d. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, II. Abt. , Bd. 33: Aristoteles, Metaphysik e 1-3, 'Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft', ed. Heinrich Hiini, 2nd
edn, Frankfurt/Main 1990).
10 Wolfgang Kohler ( 1 887-1967), a representative of the Berlin school of
Gestalt theory. Adorno discusses the relationship of Gestalt theory to Kant's concept of synthesis, though without addressing the problem of psycho-physical parallelism, in Lecture Nine on the Critique of Pure Reason; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 153f.
11 In the manuscript this is followed by a sentence which should possibly be read as: 'Phil[osophische] Fragen hangen weitab von dem ab was einem [einen? ] schwant [trennt? ], die Hexenfeuer [? ]' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 1 07882v). The reading of the sentence is extremely uncertain, and its meaning entirely unclear; the German editor has there-
fore omitted it from the text.
Lecture Three
1 The idea of substituting constellations and models for verbal definitions had been fundamental to Adorno's philosophy since his inaugural lecture in 1931; d. GS 1, p. 341 and Rolf Tiedemann, 'Begriff Bild Name. Ober Adornos Utopie der Erkenntnis', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter II, Munich 1993, pp. 103ff.
2 'Inductive metaphysics' refers, above all, to philosophers of the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Fechner, Lotze or Eduard von Hartmann, who sought to arrive at speculative propositions on the basis of the inductive procedures of the natural sciences. According to Marx it is 'the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation' which
'corresponds' to 'an accumulation of misery' (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth 1979, pp. 798f); the theory of
? ;, ?
?
152
NOTES TO PAGE 13
? 3
4
'relatively increasing misery' was created in order to rescue Marx's law of the increasing impoverishment of the proletariat, which appeared to be contradicted by the facts. As early as 1942, in Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie, Adorno had noted that 'the traditional construction of
increasing misery' had 'fallen into ruin'; 'to patch it up with the make- shift concept of relative misery, as was done at the time of the revision- ist dispute, could only suit social-democrat counter-apologists whose ears had been so dulled by their own clamour that they could not even detect the mocking echoes which the phrase "relative misery" sent back to them' (GS 8, p. 384). And in one of Adorno's last works, the lecture 'Spatkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft? ' he writes laconically: 'Prognoses of the class theory, such as those of increasing misery or the collapse of capitalism, have not been fulfilled as drastically as they must be understood if they are not to be deprived of their content; talk of relative misery can only be comic' (GS 8, p. 355).
The two preceding sentences sum up Heidegger's fundamental onto- logy, as developed in Being and Time, and Adorno's critique of it, in the briefest formula; Adorno developed his critique in the first part of Negative Dialectics (d. pp. 61ff).
What the name Luderbach stood for in Adorno's metaphysical experience is revealed in 'Meditations on Metaphysics', written a few days before the lecture:
The course of history forces materialism on metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism. . . . The point of no return has been reached in the process which irresistibly forced metaphysics to join what it was once conceived against. Not since the youthful Hegel has philosophy - unless selling out for authorized cerebration - been able to repress how very much it slipped into material questions of existence. Children sense some of this in the fascination that issues from the ? layer's zone, from carcasses, from the repulsively sweet odor of putrefaction, and from the opprobrious terms used for that zone. The unconscious power of that realm may be as great as that of infantile sexuality; the two intermingle in the anal fixation, but they are scarcely the same. An unconscious know- ledge whispers to the child what is repressed by civilized education; this is what matters, says the whispering voice. And the wretched physical exist- ence strikes a spark in the supreme interest that is scarcely less repressed; it kindles a 'What is that? ' and 'Where is it going? ' The man who man- aged to recall what used to strike him in the words 'dung hill' and 'pig sty' might be closer to absolute knowledge than Hegel's chapter in which readers are promised such knowledge only to have it withheld with a superior mien. (Negative Dialectics, pp. 365-6)
Also see pp. 1 1 6ff above, where Adorno takes up this idea again.
Cf. the section 'The Child's Question' in Negative Dialectics (pp. 1 1 0f). This again refers to 'Meditations on Metaphysics', from which Adorno derived his last six lectures on metaphysics in an 'evolving variation'; see n. 1 above.
? i
, ,,
,'
? 5 6
? 7
Hylozoism is the name given since the seventeenth century to the doctrine of the Ionian Pre-Socratics according to which life (? ? w? ) emerges from a basic substance (? vATJ) - water, air, fire etc. ; on the critique of this by Aristotle (d. Metaphysics, pp. 7ff [A 3ff, 983 a 24ff]) and Zeller's interpretation:
In the earlier Ionian philosophers he censured . . . their neglect of the prime mover and the superficiality with which they made any element they chose into the basic substance, whereas, according to him, the sensible properties and the changes of bodies were conditioned by the opposition of the ele- ments. The same applies to Heraclitus, insofar as he agreed with them in setting up a basic substance. (Zeller, 2. Teil, 2. Abt. , Aristoteles und die alten Peripatetiker, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of 4th edn], p. 284)
Here Adorno probably gave references to the editions of Aristotle to be used - certainly to the recent translation of the Metaphysics by Paul Gohlke (see Lecture 4, n. 13) and possibly also to Zeller's history of ancient philosophy (see Lecture 1, n. 13).
Lecture Four
See Lecture 2, n. 3.
Adorno knew of the dispute between Plato and the Cynic Antisthenes primarily through Zeller:
Whereas Plato derived a clearly realistic system from the Socratic demand for conceptual knowledge, Antisthenes drew from it an equally thorough- going nominalism: universal concepts, he maintained, were mere things of thought; he saw people and horses, not peopleness and horseness. From this standpoint he launched against his fellow disciples a polemic not lacking in coarseness, which was answered robustly enough from the
other side. (Zeller, 2. Teil, 1. Abt. , Sokrates und die Sokratiker, Plato und die alte Akademie, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of 5th edn], pp. 295f)
Cf. Poiiteia, Book 7; St. 514ff.
Locke's theory of the primary and secondary qualities of bodies is to be found in Book 2 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Ch. VIII, ? 8ff:
The power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject, wherein that power is. . . . Qualities . . . are first such as are utterly inseparable from the body, in what estate soever it be. - These I call original or primary qualities of body. . . . Secondly, the power that is in any body, by reason of its insensible primary qualities to . . . produce in US the different ideas of several colours, sounds, smells, tastes etc. These
8
1 2
3 4
NOTES TO PAGES 14-16 153
? ?
?
154
NOTES TO PAGES 17-19
? are usually called sensible qualities. . . . These I call secondary qualities. (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, New
York 1959, p. 169)
5 For Adorno, who saw causality as replaced in a certain sense by 'par- ticipation' in Plato, the doctrine of fLE{}EgLS was particularly important in the version in which it is put forward in the Phaedo (d. Negative Dialectics, St. 99ff).
6 Recent Plato scholarship, as represented by a treatise by Christian Iber, for example, sees in the Parmenides dialogue a dialectical 'rescue' of the 'Many' in Plato against Parmenides's critique of Zeno: 'Many presup- poses One and One produces Many. It is this double thesis which the Parmenides sets out to prove. Plato therefore agrees to a considerable extent with Zeno's critique of multiplicity, but regards the Eleatic's monistic conclusion as false' (Christian Ibers, 'Platons eigentliche philosophische Leistung im Dialog "Parmenides " ', in Dialektischer Negativismus. Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Emil Angehrn et aI. , Frankfurt/Main 1992, p. 188).
7 The reference is to the section 'Oberliefertes' from Part 3 of the 'Historischer Teil' of the Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours):
Plato's attitude to the world is that of a blessed spirit who is pleased to sojourn in it for a while. Since he already knows it; he is not so much concerned with getting to know the world as with kindly imparting to it what he has brought with him, and what it needs so badly. . . . Aristotle's attitude, by contrast, is that of a man, a master-builder. Now that he is here he has to set about his business. He enquires about the soil, but only until he has found firm ground. (Goethe, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 10, Munich 1989, p. 573)
8 The text source incorrectly has 'Aristotle'.
9 Heidegger argues this in, for example, the Introduction to the 5th edi-
tion of 'What is Metaphysics? ':
Such thinking, which recalls the truth of Being, is no longer satisfied with metaphysics, to be sure, but it does not oppose and think against metaphysics either. To return to our image, it does not tear up the root of philosophy. It tills the ground and plows the soil for this root. Meta- physics remains what comes first in philosophy. What comes first in thinking, however, it does not reach. When we think the truth of Being, metaphysics is overcome. We can no longer accept the claim of meta- physics to preside over our fundamental relation to 'Being' or to decisively determine every relation to beings as such.
('Introduction to "What is Metaphysics? " ', trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Heidegger, Pathmarks, Cam-
bridge, Mass. , 1998, p. 279)
And in 'Oberwindung der Metaphysik' in his notes wntten between 1936 and 1946 we read:
, ,
? ? NOTES TO PAGES 20-23
155
? The truth of being decays necessarily as the culmination of metaphysics. Its decay is hastened by the collapse of the world shaped by metaphysics and the devastation of the earth originating in metaphysics. This collapse and this devastation have their fitting executor in metaphysical man un- derstood as the rational animal, the working animal. . . . With the onset of this culmination of metaphysics begins the preparation, unrecognized by and inherently inaccessible to metaphysics, of a first manifestation of the duality of Being and existence. In this manifestation is concealed the first intimation of the truth of Being, which takes back into itself the precedence regarding the workings of Being. (Martin Heidegger, Vortriige und Aufsiitze, Pfullingen 1954, pp. 72 and 78)
10 Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London 1973, pp. 310ff (A 313ff, B 370ff).
11 Adorno repeatedly discusses Kant's twofold aim of critique and rescue in his lectures 'Kants "Kritik der reinen Vernunft"'; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 54, 132f, 143 and passim.
12 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A 1, 980 a 2l.
13 Cf. Aristoteles, Die Lehrschriften, hrsg. , iibertragen und in ihrer
Entstehung erliiutert von Paul Gohlke, Bd. V: Metaphysik, 3rd edn,
Paderborn 1972, p. 35.
14 Heidegger, Being and Time, Tiibingen 1963, p. 215.
15 This wording [German: uberhaupt erst das Thema) appears in the ori-
ginal. An alternative reading which might seem plausible [uberhaupt nicht das Thema) is incorrect, as seems to be proved by the formulation repeated in the penultimate sentence of this paragraph, concerning die Ontologie, die hier [i. e. in Aristotle) erst thematisch ist. 'Theme' and 'thematic', as used by Adorno in this context, are likely to be associated with the idea of a theme touched on for the first time but not yet developed.
16 See p. 16 above.
17 In the text source the German wording has been amended to clarify the
sense.
18 This [Liebe zur Weisheit) is the original wording. It cannot be ruled
out that the usual translation of cpLAoaocp{a represents a slip in this case, as the aocp{a of the Socratic-Platonic tradition fails to express what Aristotle meant, knowledge in the sense of science; in that case Adorno would have wanted to say 'love of knowledge' or, better, 'striving for knowledge', an expression he uses at the end of the lecture (see p. 23 above).
? 19 Adorno may possibly be thinking of ? 6 of Being and Time, in which Heidegger writes that Aristotle, in whose work 'the ancient ontology as developed by Plato turns into "dialectic" ', 'no longer has any under- standing' of it, 'for he has put it on a more radical footing and raised it to a new level [aufhob)' (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 47-8 );
while this does relate syntactically to the dialectic, it implicitly applies equally to ontology. Moreover, Adorno's and Heidegger's concepts of ontology are hardly compatible without further qualification. Whereas Adorno
?
? ?
156
NOTES TO PAGES 24-26
? ? 1
2
3 4 5
6
understands it to mean a thinking which, like that of the Pre-Socratics, 'posits and presupposes the essential' and while he uses it in this sense when speaking of Heidegger's ontology, for Heidegger ontology is al- ways something 'decomposed' by rationality which actually blocks the
desired path towards 'Being itself' . Even in Being and Time, which was still relatively undecided on this issue, the 'title ontology' is 'explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities' (ibid. , p. 32). 'Ontological interpreta- tion,' and therefore Aristotle's as well, 'projects the entity presented to it upon the Being which is that entity's own, so as to conceptualize it with regard to its structure' (ibid. , p. 359), to which conceptualization the truth of Being cannot be reduced, since, according to the 'Letter on Humanism', it calls rather for a thinking 'which is stricter than concep- tual thought' (Heidegger, Wegmarken, Frankfurt/Main 1967, p. 187). Because Aristotle remained within the framework of discursive philo- sophizing, Adorno maintains, he fell victim to Heidegger's criticism as
an ontologist; that Heidegger rejected discursivity and fell back on an archaic murmuring about Being is the persistent thrust of Adorno's critique of Heidegger.
Lecture Five
See the bibliographical reference, in Lecture 1 , n. 1 3 . Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung was first published in 1 844-52 in three volumes, and later editions in six volumes. Adorno owned the second edition of 1 856-68. Zeller also wrote a Grundri(5 der
Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (1883), but this was not used by Adorno.
Cf. the beginning of Lecture 2 in Adorno's keywords, p. 10 and n. 3.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, pp. 51ff (A 1, 982 b 8f).
Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 303ff.
Regarding the recent status of Aristotle scholarship on this point d. Klaus Oehler, Die Lehre vom noetischen und dianoetischen Denken bei Platon und Aristoteles. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Bewu(5tseinsproblems in der Antike, Munich 1962, and the review of Oehler's book by Ernst Tugendhat (Tugendhat, Philosophische Aufsatze, Frankfurt/Main 1992, pp. 402ff).
Adorno here follows Zeller, who always translates Aristotle's oua{a as substance (Substanz) (d. Zeller 11. 2, p. 305). Whereas, at the beginning of Book A, for example, Adolf Lasson and Eugen Rolfes followed Zeller in this, most other German translators prefer Wesenheit (essence, essen-
tiality) (Hermann Bonitz) or Wesen (being, entity) (Paul Gohlke, Franz F. Schwarz); Gadamer follows Heidegger's usage and translates it by: 'Dber das Sein geht die Untersuchung. ' Adorno did not want, of course, to assert a 'derivation' in the etymological sense.
Husserl's expression; d. GS 5, p. 128.
7
? NOTES TO PAGES 27-29
157
? ? 8
9 10
11
12 13
Adorno deals with this problem above all in Lecture 8 of Probleme der Moralphilosophie, d. NaS IV. 10, pp. 117ff.
Cf. Alexandre Koyre, Descartes und die Scholastik, Bonn 1923.
'Per substantiam nihil aliud intelligere possumus, quam rem quae existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum' (Oeuvres de Descartes, publies par Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, vol. VIII- 1 : Principia Philosophiae, Paris 1964, p. 24 [Pars Prima, LI]). 'By substance we can only understand a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing for its existence' (Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valen- tine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1 983,
p. 23).
'Per substantiam intelligo id, quod in se est, et per se concipitur: hoc est id, cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei, a quo formari debeat' ('By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived
through itself, i. e. that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed' (The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, Princeton NJ 1985, p. 408 [Ethics, I, 3]). Reference not traced.
In his brief notes Adorno gives as the reference Kateg. 5 (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10789), i. e. Ch. 5 of The Categories, which begins: 'Substance, in its strictest, first, and chief sense, is that which is neither predicated of any subject, nor is in any; as "a certain man," or "a certain horse'" ? ( The Organon, or Logical Treatises of Aristotle, trans.
Octavius Freire Owen, London/New York 1893, vol. 1, p. 6). Zeller also takes this as his basis when interpreting as follows:
If the universal is not something existing for itself, it cannot be substance. . . . Originally, the term substance . . . was only properly applied to that which can neither be stated as a determination of the nature of something else, nor as something attached to something else as a derivative; in other words, to that which i, only subject and never predicate. Substance is being in the original sense, the substratum by which all other existence is carried. But for Aristotle only the single being is of that kind. The univer- sal, as he himself demonstrated against Plato, is not something existing for itself: everything universal, including the universality of the species, derives its existence only from the single being; it is always stated to be of something else, it refers only to a certain property, not to a 'this'. The single being alone belongs only to itself, is not carried by something else, is what it is through itself, and not merely by reason of some other being.
(Zeller 11. 2, pp. 305? ? ).
The name of the dialogue is missing in the text source, probably because the transcriber was not familiar with it. In the Theaetetus Socrates (St. 152bff) speaks of the relativity of sense perceptions; but Po/iteia,
St. 523bff may also be relevant.
The secretary seems also to have understood this title only partially, as the text source has the words: '. . . de la conscience'. Adorno frequently mentioned Bergson's first book in similar contexts.
ita
? 1 4
15
?
158
NOTES TO PAGES 29-38
? 1 6
17 18 19
1 2
3
4 5
6
7 8
Cf. the Science of L ogic: 'In the sphere of the Notion there can be no other immediacy than one in which mediation is essentially and expli- citly a moment and which has come to be only through the sublating of that mediation' (Hegel's Science of Logic, p. 63 1 ) . Or: '. . . immediacy in general proceeds only from mediation, and must therefore pass over
into mediation' (ibid. , p. 800).
It is unlikely that Adorno was thinking of a specific proof which could
be identified by page numbers; rather, the whole of the logic relating to concepts should be seen as such a 'proof'.
On the concept of the thing in Hume and Kant d. Adorno's lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft', especially Lectures 9 and 10, NaS IVA, pp. 143ff.
Cf. The Categories, Ch. 5, 2 a 15: 'But secondary substances are they,
as species, those primarily-named substances are inherent, that is to say, both these and the genera of these species; as "a certain man" exists in "man", as in a species, but the genus of this species is
"animal'" (Aristotle, The Organon, vol. I, p. 6). According to Zeller the expression 8EVTEpat ovu{at only appears in Ch. 5 of The Categories
(d. Zeller 11. 2, p. 307, n. 1).
Lecture Six
See p. 8 passim above.
Cf. Analytica posteriora, Book I, Ch. 1 1 , 77 a 8 : 'one thing of the many' (Aristotle, The Organon, vol. I, p. 269).
On the Kantian concept of unity in diversity d. Adorno's lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft', especially Lecture 13 (NaS IVA,
pp. 210ff).
See pp. 1 6f above.
Regarding Adorno's discussions of form and matter, EVEpynu and 8vvu/-w;, d. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 313ff.
Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 238ff (A 2 1 8ff, B 265ff).
Cf. p. 19 above.
At the 12th conference of German sociologists, held in Heidelberg on
15-17 October 1954, Adorno read a paper 'Zum Ideologie-Problem' (GS 8, pp. 457ff, under the title Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre); according to the proceedings, published in the KaIner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie, vol. 6, no.
It is the old idea of Spinoza, Hegel and many others: primal being be- comes aware of itself in the same act by which man sees himself as founded in it. We only need to reformulate this idea, which up to now has been presented in far too one-sided and intellectualist a way, to mean that man's knowing himself to be founded is a consequence of the active commitment of the centre of our being to the ideal demand of the deity, and the attempt to accomplish it, and in this accomplishment to help to engender for the first time the evolving 'God' as the increasing interpen- etration of spirit and urge. (ibid. p. 70)
However, the doctrine of the evolving God is only fully developed in Scheler's notes on metaphysics published from his posthumous papers, which remained a fragment and of which Adorno cannot have known; cf. the sections 'Weltwerden' and 'Deitas' in 'Manuskripte zur Lehre
vom Grunde aller Dinge' in Scheler, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 1 : Schriften aus dem Nachla(5, Bd. II: Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik, ed. Manfred S. Frings, Berne, Munich 1979, pp. 201ff.
6 Adorno was thinking above all of speculations he had found in the 'Weltalter' fragments, which he discussed in the winter semester 1960/ 1, for example, the sentence: 'Scarcely had the first steps been taken in
reuniting philosophy with nature when the great age of the physical world had to be acknowledged, and the fact that, far from being the
last thing, it was the first, from which all others, even the development of divine life, took their beginning' (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Die Weltalter. Fragmente, in den Urfassungen von 1 8 1 1 und
? ? ?
1 813, ed. Manfred Schroter, Munich 1946, p. 9). While Adorno saw the
,, ,"
, ,'
? ,
',' J
NOTES TO PAGES 10-13 151
?
I
? ? ? traditional doctrine 'that what has become cannot be true' advocated in the 'Weltalter' fragments (Theodor W. Adorno, marginal note at ibid. , p. 4), he noted in the margin beside the sentence quoted: 'Turning point: God as something which evolves' (ibid. , p. 9). And below the keywords in his lecture notes we read: 'the past in God = the absolute
as a process. Distinction between moments within the absolute' (Theodor
W. Adorno Archiv, Zur Einleitung in die 'Weltalter', Stichworte, Bl. 1).
7 'This concept' appears to refer to metaphysics as the doctrine of the enduring, in which, according to Adorno's fundamental critique, metaphysics and epistemology converge: 'With this substitution of the enduring for the truth, the beginning of truth becomes the beginning
of deception' (GS 5, p. 25; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 45ff and passim).
8 The sentence interrupted by this insertion is continued in the first sen-
tence of the 'Notes for Lecture Three'; see p. 12 above.
9 One exception, however, is Heidegger, who in the summer semester of 1 93 1 gave a lecture on 'Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft' concerning
Book e of Aristotle's Metaphysics, subsequently published (d. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, II. Abt. , Bd. 33: Aristoteles, Metaphysik e 1-3, 'Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft', ed. Heinrich Hiini, 2nd
edn, Frankfurt/Main 1990).
10 Wolfgang Kohler ( 1 887-1967), a representative of the Berlin school of
Gestalt theory. Adorno discusses the relationship of Gestalt theory to Kant's concept of synthesis, though without addressing the problem of psycho-physical parallelism, in Lecture Nine on the Critique of Pure Reason; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 153f.
11 In the manuscript this is followed by a sentence which should possibly be read as: 'Phil[osophische] Fragen hangen weitab von dem ab was einem [einen? ] schwant [trennt? ], die Hexenfeuer [? ]' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 1 07882v). The reading of the sentence is extremely uncertain, and its meaning entirely unclear; the German editor has there-
fore omitted it from the text.
Lecture Three
1 The idea of substituting constellations and models for verbal definitions had been fundamental to Adorno's philosophy since his inaugural lecture in 1931; d. GS 1, p. 341 and Rolf Tiedemann, 'Begriff Bild Name. Ober Adornos Utopie der Erkenntnis', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter II, Munich 1993, pp. 103ff.
2 'Inductive metaphysics' refers, above all, to philosophers of the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Fechner, Lotze or Eduard von Hartmann, who sought to arrive at speculative propositions on the basis of the inductive procedures of the natural sciences. According to Marx it is 'the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation' which
'corresponds' to 'an accumulation of misery' (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth 1979, pp. 798f); the theory of
? ;, ?
?
152
NOTES TO PAGE 13
? 3
4
'relatively increasing misery' was created in order to rescue Marx's law of the increasing impoverishment of the proletariat, which appeared to be contradicted by the facts. As early as 1942, in Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie, Adorno had noted that 'the traditional construction of
increasing misery' had 'fallen into ruin'; 'to patch it up with the make- shift concept of relative misery, as was done at the time of the revision- ist dispute, could only suit social-democrat counter-apologists whose ears had been so dulled by their own clamour that they could not even detect the mocking echoes which the phrase "relative misery" sent back to them' (GS 8, p. 384). And in one of Adorno's last works, the lecture 'Spatkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft? ' he writes laconically: 'Prognoses of the class theory, such as those of increasing misery or the collapse of capitalism, have not been fulfilled as drastically as they must be understood if they are not to be deprived of their content; talk of relative misery can only be comic' (GS 8, p. 355).
The two preceding sentences sum up Heidegger's fundamental onto- logy, as developed in Being and Time, and Adorno's critique of it, in the briefest formula; Adorno developed his critique in the first part of Negative Dialectics (d. pp. 61ff).
What the name Luderbach stood for in Adorno's metaphysical experience is revealed in 'Meditations on Metaphysics', written a few days before the lecture:
The course of history forces materialism on metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism. . . . The point of no return has been reached in the process which irresistibly forced metaphysics to join what it was once conceived against. Not since the youthful Hegel has philosophy - unless selling out for authorized cerebration - been able to repress how very much it slipped into material questions of existence. Children sense some of this in the fascination that issues from the ? layer's zone, from carcasses, from the repulsively sweet odor of putrefaction, and from the opprobrious terms used for that zone. The unconscious power of that realm may be as great as that of infantile sexuality; the two intermingle in the anal fixation, but they are scarcely the same. An unconscious know- ledge whispers to the child what is repressed by civilized education; this is what matters, says the whispering voice. And the wretched physical exist- ence strikes a spark in the supreme interest that is scarcely less repressed; it kindles a 'What is that? ' and 'Where is it going? ' The man who man- aged to recall what used to strike him in the words 'dung hill' and 'pig sty' might be closer to absolute knowledge than Hegel's chapter in which readers are promised such knowledge only to have it withheld with a superior mien. (Negative Dialectics, pp. 365-6)
Also see pp. 1 1 6ff above, where Adorno takes up this idea again.
Cf. the section 'The Child's Question' in Negative Dialectics (pp. 1 1 0f). This again refers to 'Meditations on Metaphysics', from which Adorno derived his last six lectures on metaphysics in an 'evolving variation'; see n. 1 above.
? i
, ,,
,'
? 5 6
? 7
Hylozoism is the name given since the seventeenth century to the doctrine of the Ionian Pre-Socratics according to which life (? ? w? ) emerges from a basic substance (? vATJ) - water, air, fire etc. ; on the critique of this by Aristotle (d. Metaphysics, pp. 7ff [A 3ff, 983 a 24ff]) and Zeller's interpretation:
In the earlier Ionian philosophers he censured . . . their neglect of the prime mover and the superficiality with which they made any element they chose into the basic substance, whereas, according to him, the sensible properties and the changes of bodies were conditioned by the opposition of the ele- ments. The same applies to Heraclitus, insofar as he agreed with them in setting up a basic substance. (Zeller, 2. Teil, 2. Abt. , Aristoteles und die alten Peripatetiker, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of 4th edn], p. 284)
Here Adorno probably gave references to the editions of Aristotle to be used - certainly to the recent translation of the Metaphysics by Paul Gohlke (see Lecture 4, n. 13) and possibly also to Zeller's history of ancient philosophy (see Lecture 1, n. 13).
Lecture Four
See Lecture 2, n. 3.
Adorno knew of the dispute between Plato and the Cynic Antisthenes primarily through Zeller:
Whereas Plato derived a clearly realistic system from the Socratic demand for conceptual knowledge, Antisthenes drew from it an equally thorough- going nominalism: universal concepts, he maintained, were mere things of thought; he saw people and horses, not peopleness and horseness. From this standpoint he launched against his fellow disciples a polemic not lacking in coarseness, which was answered robustly enough from the
other side. (Zeller, 2. Teil, 1. Abt. , Sokrates und die Sokratiker, Plato und die alte Akademie, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of 5th edn], pp. 295f)
Cf. Poiiteia, Book 7; St. 514ff.
Locke's theory of the primary and secondary qualities of bodies is to be found in Book 2 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Ch. VIII, ? 8ff:
The power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject, wherein that power is. . . . Qualities . . . are first such as are utterly inseparable from the body, in what estate soever it be. - These I call original or primary qualities of body. . . . Secondly, the power that is in any body, by reason of its insensible primary qualities to . . . produce in US the different ideas of several colours, sounds, smells, tastes etc. These
8
1 2
3 4
NOTES TO PAGES 14-16 153
? ?
?
154
NOTES TO PAGES 17-19
? are usually called sensible qualities. . . . These I call secondary qualities. (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, New
York 1959, p. 169)
5 For Adorno, who saw causality as replaced in a certain sense by 'par- ticipation' in Plato, the doctrine of fLE{}EgLS was particularly important in the version in which it is put forward in the Phaedo (d. Negative Dialectics, St. 99ff).
6 Recent Plato scholarship, as represented by a treatise by Christian Iber, for example, sees in the Parmenides dialogue a dialectical 'rescue' of the 'Many' in Plato against Parmenides's critique of Zeno: 'Many presup- poses One and One produces Many. It is this double thesis which the Parmenides sets out to prove. Plato therefore agrees to a considerable extent with Zeno's critique of multiplicity, but regards the Eleatic's monistic conclusion as false' (Christian Ibers, 'Platons eigentliche philosophische Leistung im Dialog "Parmenides " ', in Dialektischer Negativismus. Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Emil Angehrn et aI. , Frankfurt/Main 1992, p. 188).
7 The reference is to the section 'Oberliefertes' from Part 3 of the 'Historischer Teil' of the Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours):
Plato's attitude to the world is that of a blessed spirit who is pleased to sojourn in it for a while. Since he already knows it; he is not so much concerned with getting to know the world as with kindly imparting to it what he has brought with him, and what it needs so badly. . . . Aristotle's attitude, by contrast, is that of a man, a master-builder. Now that he is here he has to set about his business. He enquires about the soil, but only until he has found firm ground. (Goethe, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 10, Munich 1989, p. 573)
8 The text source incorrectly has 'Aristotle'.
9 Heidegger argues this in, for example, the Introduction to the 5th edi-
tion of 'What is Metaphysics? ':
Such thinking, which recalls the truth of Being, is no longer satisfied with metaphysics, to be sure, but it does not oppose and think against metaphysics either. To return to our image, it does not tear up the root of philosophy. It tills the ground and plows the soil for this root. Meta- physics remains what comes first in philosophy. What comes first in thinking, however, it does not reach. When we think the truth of Being, metaphysics is overcome. We can no longer accept the claim of meta- physics to preside over our fundamental relation to 'Being' or to decisively determine every relation to beings as such.
('Introduction to "What is Metaphysics? " ', trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Heidegger, Pathmarks, Cam-
bridge, Mass. , 1998, p. 279)
And in 'Oberwindung der Metaphysik' in his notes wntten between 1936 and 1946 we read:
, ,
? ? NOTES TO PAGES 20-23
155
? The truth of being decays necessarily as the culmination of metaphysics. Its decay is hastened by the collapse of the world shaped by metaphysics and the devastation of the earth originating in metaphysics. This collapse and this devastation have their fitting executor in metaphysical man un- derstood as the rational animal, the working animal. . . . With the onset of this culmination of metaphysics begins the preparation, unrecognized by and inherently inaccessible to metaphysics, of a first manifestation of the duality of Being and existence. In this manifestation is concealed the first intimation of the truth of Being, which takes back into itself the precedence regarding the workings of Being. (Martin Heidegger, Vortriige und Aufsiitze, Pfullingen 1954, pp. 72 and 78)
10 Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London 1973, pp. 310ff (A 313ff, B 370ff).
11 Adorno repeatedly discusses Kant's twofold aim of critique and rescue in his lectures 'Kants "Kritik der reinen Vernunft"'; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 54, 132f, 143 and passim.
12 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A 1, 980 a 2l.
13 Cf. Aristoteles, Die Lehrschriften, hrsg. , iibertragen und in ihrer
Entstehung erliiutert von Paul Gohlke, Bd. V: Metaphysik, 3rd edn,
Paderborn 1972, p. 35.
14 Heidegger, Being and Time, Tiibingen 1963, p. 215.
15 This wording [German: uberhaupt erst das Thema) appears in the ori-
ginal. An alternative reading which might seem plausible [uberhaupt nicht das Thema) is incorrect, as seems to be proved by the formulation repeated in the penultimate sentence of this paragraph, concerning die Ontologie, die hier [i. e. in Aristotle) erst thematisch ist. 'Theme' and 'thematic', as used by Adorno in this context, are likely to be associated with the idea of a theme touched on for the first time but not yet developed.
16 See p. 16 above.
17 In the text source the German wording has been amended to clarify the
sense.
18 This [Liebe zur Weisheit) is the original wording. It cannot be ruled
out that the usual translation of cpLAoaocp{a represents a slip in this case, as the aocp{a of the Socratic-Platonic tradition fails to express what Aristotle meant, knowledge in the sense of science; in that case Adorno would have wanted to say 'love of knowledge' or, better, 'striving for knowledge', an expression he uses at the end of the lecture (see p. 23 above).
? 19 Adorno may possibly be thinking of ? 6 of Being and Time, in which Heidegger writes that Aristotle, in whose work 'the ancient ontology as developed by Plato turns into "dialectic" ', 'no longer has any under- standing' of it, 'for he has put it on a more radical footing and raised it to a new level [aufhob)' (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 47-8 );
while this does relate syntactically to the dialectic, it implicitly applies equally to ontology. Moreover, Adorno's and Heidegger's concepts of ontology are hardly compatible without further qualification. Whereas Adorno
?
? ?
156
NOTES TO PAGES 24-26
? ? 1
2
3 4 5
6
understands it to mean a thinking which, like that of the Pre-Socratics, 'posits and presupposes the essential' and while he uses it in this sense when speaking of Heidegger's ontology, for Heidegger ontology is al- ways something 'decomposed' by rationality which actually blocks the
desired path towards 'Being itself' . Even in Being and Time, which was still relatively undecided on this issue, the 'title ontology' is 'explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities' (ibid. , p. 32). 'Ontological interpreta- tion,' and therefore Aristotle's as well, 'projects the entity presented to it upon the Being which is that entity's own, so as to conceptualize it with regard to its structure' (ibid. , p. 359), to which conceptualization the truth of Being cannot be reduced, since, according to the 'Letter on Humanism', it calls rather for a thinking 'which is stricter than concep- tual thought' (Heidegger, Wegmarken, Frankfurt/Main 1967, p. 187). Because Aristotle remained within the framework of discursive philo- sophizing, Adorno maintains, he fell victim to Heidegger's criticism as
an ontologist; that Heidegger rejected discursivity and fell back on an archaic murmuring about Being is the persistent thrust of Adorno's critique of Heidegger.
Lecture Five
See the bibliographical reference, in Lecture 1 , n. 1 3 . Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung was first published in 1 844-52 in three volumes, and later editions in six volumes. Adorno owned the second edition of 1 856-68. Zeller also wrote a Grundri(5 der
Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (1883), but this was not used by Adorno.
Cf. the beginning of Lecture 2 in Adorno's keywords, p. 10 and n. 3.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, pp. 51ff (A 1, 982 b 8f).
Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 303ff.
Regarding the recent status of Aristotle scholarship on this point d. Klaus Oehler, Die Lehre vom noetischen und dianoetischen Denken bei Platon und Aristoteles. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Bewu(5tseinsproblems in der Antike, Munich 1962, and the review of Oehler's book by Ernst Tugendhat (Tugendhat, Philosophische Aufsatze, Frankfurt/Main 1992, pp. 402ff).
Adorno here follows Zeller, who always translates Aristotle's oua{a as substance (Substanz) (d. Zeller 11. 2, p. 305). Whereas, at the beginning of Book A, for example, Adolf Lasson and Eugen Rolfes followed Zeller in this, most other German translators prefer Wesenheit (essence, essen-
tiality) (Hermann Bonitz) or Wesen (being, entity) (Paul Gohlke, Franz F. Schwarz); Gadamer follows Heidegger's usage and translates it by: 'Dber das Sein geht die Untersuchung. ' Adorno did not want, of course, to assert a 'derivation' in the etymological sense.
Husserl's expression; d. GS 5, p. 128.
7
? NOTES TO PAGES 27-29
157
? ? 8
9 10
11
12 13
Adorno deals with this problem above all in Lecture 8 of Probleme der Moralphilosophie, d. NaS IV. 10, pp. 117ff.
Cf. Alexandre Koyre, Descartes und die Scholastik, Bonn 1923.
'Per substantiam nihil aliud intelligere possumus, quam rem quae existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum' (Oeuvres de Descartes, publies par Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, vol. VIII- 1 : Principia Philosophiae, Paris 1964, p. 24 [Pars Prima, LI]). 'By substance we can only understand a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing for its existence' (Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valen- tine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1 983,
p. 23).
'Per substantiam intelligo id, quod in se est, et per se concipitur: hoc est id, cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei, a quo formari debeat' ('By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived
through itself, i. e. that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed' (The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, Princeton NJ 1985, p. 408 [Ethics, I, 3]). Reference not traced.
In his brief notes Adorno gives as the reference Kateg. 5 (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10789), i. e. Ch. 5 of The Categories, which begins: 'Substance, in its strictest, first, and chief sense, is that which is neither predicated of any subject, nor is in any; as "a certain man," or "a certain horse'" ? ( The Organon, or Logical Treatises of Aristotle, trans.
Octavius Freire Owen, London/New York 1893, vol. 1, p. 6). Zeller also takes this as his basis when interpreting as follows:
If the universal is not something existing for itself, it cannot be substance. . . . Originally, the term substance . . . was only properly applied to that which can neither be stated as a determination of the nature of something else, nor as something attached to something else as a derivative; in other words, to that which i, only subject and never predicate. Substance is being in the original sense, the substratum by which all other existence is carried. But for Aristotle only the single being is of that kind. The univer- sal, as he himself demonstrated against Plato, is not something existing for itself: everything universal, including the universality of the species, derives its existence only from the single being; it is always stated to be of something else, it refers only to a certain property, not to a 'this'. The single being alone belongs only to itself, is not carried by something else, is what it is through itself, and not merely by reason of some other being.
(Zeller 11. 2, pp. 305? ? ).
The name of the dialogue is missing in the text source, probably because the transcriber was not familiar with it. In the Theaetetus Socrates (St. 152bff) speaks of the relativity of sense perceptions; but Po/iteia,
St. 523bff may also be relevant.
The secretary seems also to have understood this title only partially, as the text source has the words: '. . . de la conscience'. Adorno frequently mentioned Bergson's first book in similar contexts.
ita
? 1 4
15
?
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NOTES TO PAGES 29-38
? 1 6
17 18 19
1 2
3
4 5
6
7 8
Cf. the Science of L ogic: 'In the sphere of the Notion there can be no other immediacy than one in which mediation is essentially and expli- citly a moment and which has come to be only through the sublating of that mediation' (Hegel's Science of Logic, p. 63 1 ) . Or: '. . . immediacy in general proceeds only from mediation, and must therefore pass over
into mediation' (ibid. , p. 800).
It is unlikely that Adorno was thinking of a specific proof which could
be identified by page numbers; rather, the whole of the logic relating to concepts should be seen as such a 'proof'.
On the concept of the thing in Hume and Kant d. Adorno's lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft', especially Lectures 9 and 10, NaS IVA, pp. 143ff.
Cf. The Categories, Ch. 5, 2 a 15: 'But secondary substances are they,
as species, those primarily-named substances are inherent, that is to say, both these and the genera of these species; as "a certain man" exists in "man", as in a species, but the genus of this species is
"animal'" (Aristotle, The Organon, vol. I, p. 6). According to Zeller the expression 8EVTEpat ovu{at only appears in Ch. 5 of The Categories
(d. Zeller 11. 2, p. 307, n. 1).
Lecture Six
See p. 8 passim above.
Cf. Analytica posteriora, Book I, Ch. 1 1 , 77 a 8 : 'one thing of the many' (Aristotle, The Organon, vol. I, p. 269).
On the Kantian concept of unity in diversity d. Adorno's lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft', especially Lecture 13 (NaS IVA,
pp. 210ff).
See pp. 1 6f above.
Regarding Adorno's discussions of form and matter, EVEpynu and 8vvu/-w;, d. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 313ff.
Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 238ff (A 2 1 8ff, B 265ff).
Cf. p. 19 above.
At the 12th conference of German sociologists, held in Heidelberg on
15-17 October 1954, Adorno read a paper 'Zum Ideologie-Problem' (GS 8, pp. 457ff, under the title Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre); according to the proceedings, published in the KaIner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie, vol. 6, no.
