the Introduction to the Lectures on the
Philosophy
ofHistory: 'World
history is progress in consciousness of freedom - a progress which we have to recognize in its necessity' (Hegel, Werke, vol.
history is progress in consciousness of freedom - a progress which we have to recognize in its necessity' (Hegel, Werke, vol.
Adorno-Metaphysics
]] and the form or essence, and is the end
[purpose] of all becoming' (Aristotle, Metaphysics, p. 9). Zeller, on whom Adorno bases his argument here, interprets 7TPWT'! ] VA'! ] as
follows:
If in a given case we abstract that which an object has yet to become from everything else, we obtain a certain matter which lacks a certain form, and thus contains only the possibility of that form. If we abstract from abso- lutely everything which is the result of becoming, if we imagine something objective which has not yet become anything, we obtain pure matter with- out any formal determination, something which is nothing but can become everything, the subject or substrate to which no conceivable predicate can
be applied but is therefore equally receptive to them all. In other words, we obtain something which is everything in terms of possibility and nothing in terms of reality, pure potential being without any actuality.
He adds in a note:
? Aristotle calls this pure matter - which, however, never exists - 7TpclJTT} vAT}, contrasting it to vAT} . ! uXaTT} (l8w" oida EKauTov), matter which is combined with a certain form without needing any further elaboration: 7TPWTT} vAT} is matter prior to elementary differences; the . ! UXaTT} vAT} of a of the human being are the menstrual fluids [as the 'material cause']. (Cf. Zeller
? sculpture, for example, is bronze or stone, while the . ! uXaTT} vAT} II. 2, p. 319f)
? 6 Cf. Zeller:
Matter as such, what was called primary matter, is devoid of form or determination, being that which precedes all becoming and shaping. It is the substratum endowed with none of the properties in which the form of things consists. It is thus also the unlimited or infinite, not in the spatial sense (for Aristotle does not admit the possibility of spatial infinity . . . ),
? 168 NOTES TO PAGES 67-73
? but in the broad sense of this term, where it refers to anything which is not limited or fixed by any formal determination, has attained neither conclusion nor perfection.
From the appended note: 'By D. 7TEtpOV Aristotle means, firstly, the spatially unlimited, and he investigates the concept from this standpoint in . . . Physics III, 4ff. But since he now finds that in reality no infinite space can exist, the unlimited finally coincides for him with d6pWTOV or vAr/ (Zeller 11. 2, pp. 3 2 1 ? ) . On the original concept of D. 7TEtpOV in Anaximander see Lecture 8, n. 14.
7 Adorno is referring here to the definition of the 'Apollonian soul' and its 'ahistoricity', a central motif of Spengler, which is to be found, in some form, on all but a few pages of The Decline of the West. For example,
cf. the discussion in the chapter on 'Music and Sculpture':
The Hellenic temple is conceived and formed as a solid body. For the formal sensibility which produced it no other possibility existed. For this reason the history of the plastic arts of antiquity is that of an unceasing labour to perfect a single ideal, and to master the free-standing human body as the quintessence of pure objective presence. . . . It has never been remarked . . . how rare this genre is, an exception, anything but a rule. In fact, this sculptural art, which placed the naked body freely on a level plane and formed it from all sides existed only once, in antiquity, since this was the only culture which completely rejected any transcendence of sensible boundaries in favour of space. . . . This Apollonian sculpture is a pendant to Euclidean mathematics. Both repudiate pure space and see the a priori of perception in bodily form. This sculpture acknowledges neither ideas pointing into the distance nor personalities or historical events, but only the self-limited existence of bodies confined within their own surfaces.
(Cf. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. 1, Munich 1920, pp. 310f)
8 Adorno is probably thinking of the famous issue of Logos devoted to Spengler, in which Karl Joel and Eduard Schwartz wrote on Spengler's treatment of philosophy and history; Ludwig Curtius, in an essay 'Morphologie der antiken Kunst', criticized the treatment of these sub- jects in The Decline ofthe West; d. Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift fur Philosophie der Kultur, ed. Richard Kroner and Georg Mehlis, vol. 9 (1920/1), pp. 133ff.
9 An allusion to De consolatione philosophiae, the main work, written in prison, of the Roman Neo-Platonist Boethius (480-525), who was also important as a translator and editor of Aristotle.
Lecture Ten
1 Published in 1938 in Leiden. See Adorno's review of the book, GS 20. 1, pp. 240f.
? ? 2 For example, by Zeller:
NOTES TO PAGES 74-78 169
? Aristotle generally mentions four kinds of grounds or causes: the material, the conceptual or formal, the prime mover and the final cause. However, on closer examination these four causes boil down to the first two. The concept of any thing cannot differ from its purpose, as all purposiveness aims at the realization of a concept. This concept, however, is also the moving cause, whether it sets the thing in motion from within as its soul, or whether its motion comes to it from outside. For even in the second case it is the thing's concept which brings about the motion, both in the works of nature and in those of art: only a human being can engender a human
being; only the concept of health can impel the physician to work towards the bringing forth of health. Likewise, we will find pure form, the highest purpose of the world and the cause of its motion, combined in the highest cause or the divinity. But even in his explanation of nature Aristotle distinguishes only two kinds of causes, necessary and final causes, i. e. the effect of matter and the effect of form or the concept. It is only this difference, therefore, that we must regard as original. The distinction between the formal, effective and final causes is merely secondary; and even if all three are not always united in the single thing, in themselves,
by their nature, they are one, and are only split apart in the realm of sensible phenomena: that which has become has several causes, but the eternal has only one, the concept. (Zeller 11. 2, pp. 327? ? )
3 See Lecture 8, n. 14. Adorno also refers to Anaximander's 'saying' in GS 5, p. 32 and NaS IVA, p. 332.
4 Adorno discusses the general crisis of causality today in the chapter on freedom in Negative Dialectics, pp. 265ff; also d. NaS IVA, p. 141 and pp. 212ff.
5 See p. 40 above.
6 On the Kantian concept of causality based on freedom d. especially
Lectures 4 and 5 in Frobleme der Moralphilosophie, NaS IV. 10, pp. 54ff.
7 Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, pp. 138ff. (M 6-9, 1080 a 12ff)
Lecture Eleven
1 The poet is Ovid; d. the opening of Metamorphoses: 'Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum / unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe, / quem dixere Chaos: rudis indigestaque moles . . . ' ('Before the land and sea were made / In all the world one only face of Nature did
abide, / Which was called Chaos, a huge rude heap . . . ' (Ovid, Selected
works, London/New York 1939, p. 130).
2 Cf. Moliere, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, I, 7:
MAITRE DE PHILOSOPHIE: Tout ce qui n'est point prose est vers; et tout ce qui n'est point vers est prose.
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Et comme l'on parle qu'est-ce que donc que cela? MAITRE DE PHILOSOPHIE: De la prose.
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Quoi? Quand je dis: 'Nicole, apportez-moi mes pantoufles, et me donnez mon bonnet de nuit', c'est de la prose?
? ?
170
NOTES TO PAGE 78 MAITRE DE PHILOSOPHIE: Oui, Monsieur.
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Par rna foil II y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien, et je vous suis Ie plus oblige du monde de m'avoir appris cela.
(Moliere: Oeuvres completes II. Textes etablis, presentes et annotes par Georges Couton, Paris 1971, p. 730)
? PHILOSOPHER:
prose.
MR JORDAIN: PHILOSOPHER:
Whatever isn't prose is verse and anything that isn't verse is
And talking, as I am now, which is that? That is prose.
MR JORDAIN: You mean to say that when I say 'Nicole, fetch me my slippers' or 'Give me my night-cap' that's prose?
PHILOSOPHER: Certainly, sir.
MR JORDAIN: Well, my goodness! Here I've been talking prose for forty
years and never known it, and mighty grateful I am to you for telling me! (trans. John Wood, London 1 953)
3 Adorno discusses Augustine's philosophy of history in the text Fortschritt, cf. GS 10. 2, pp. 620ff.
4 Regarding the gradual character of the Aristotelian concept of devel- opment cf. Ernst Bloch, who finds 'an element of the transient' within Aristotle's logic:
the element of development, which for us cries out for the dialectic, does not proceed by leaps in Aristotle. Development contains no revolutionary element, but is exclusively evolutionary. . . . Development for him is a gradually evolving entelechy, Neptunic, forming like water over long, long periods, not Vulcanic, coming into being with sudden violence, abrupt transitions. Thus the dialectic is eliminated from Aristotle's concept of development. (Ernst Bloch, Leipziger Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie 1 950-56, vol. 1 : Antike Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main 1 985, p. 229)
5 In Schopenhauer's philosophy the concept of the urge or yearning (Drang) refers to 'the objectivity of the Will on the lowest rung'; he depicts the Will as 'a blind urge, a dark, dull drive, remote from any- thing directly perceptible'. But
we are presented with the very peculiar phenomenon that the blind action of the Will, and the action illuminated by knowledge, cross over into each other's spheres in a very surprising way. . . . Knowledge in general, whether of reason or merely of perception . . . stems originally from the Will, forming part of the higher stages of its objectification as a mere fL7Jxav? , a means of survival for the individual and the species, like any other organ of the body. (Arthur Schopenhauer, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 1 , Darmstadt 1982, pp. 221ff)
? ? ? NOTES TO PAGES 79-84 171
? Just as Schopenhauer establishes a lineage between urge and cognition, Scheler identifies an unconscious 'urge of feeling' even in plants which, through participating in the 'primal phenomenon of expression', rep- resent 'a kind of yearning towards the highest principle'; plants, he main- tains, have 'a certain physiognomy expressing their inner states, their urges of feeling . . . such as listlessness, vigour, luxuriance, poverty' (Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, p. 15).
6 A problematic passage which cannot be emended with certainty. (Cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10461? ).
7 In the winter semester 1 964/5 Adorno was lecturing on 'the doctrine of history and freedom', d. NaS IV. 13 (in preparation).
8 Zeller concludes from the Aristotelian definitions of matter that
one might think that matter could not be distinguished from form solely by a lack, by a not-being-there-yet, but must add to it something of its own. But we shall rate this significance of matter even more highly if we recall that the philosopher regards only the individual entity as something substantial in the full sense. If only the individual thing is substance, while form . . . is always something universal, and if the ground of the individual thing therefore resides in matter, it is hard to avoid the conclu- sion that the ground of substantial being must also lie in matter, and that substance is not pure form, but only an entity composed of form and matter. Indeed, as substance is defined as the substratum (V7TOKEl/LEVOV), while matter is supposed to be the substratum of all being, matter alone, it seems, could claim to be recognized as the original substance of all things. This, however [Zeller goes on], Aristotle could not possibly con- cede. (Zeller 11. 2, p. 344)
9 This passage is based on an emendation in the edited text of which the editor is far from certain. (Cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10463. )
10 Cf.
the Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy ofHistory: 'World
history is progress in consciousness of freedom - a progress which we have to recognize in its necessity' (Hegel, Werke, vol. 12, Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 32).
11 Cf. the preface to the Philosophy of Right: 'What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational' (Hegel's Philosophy ofRight, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford 1 967, p. 10).
12 Physica III 1, 201 a 10; quoted in Zeller II, p. 351. 'The final coming- to-reality of something present merely as possibility, as far as it is such, is (evolutionary) change. ' (Cf. Aristotle, Philosophische Schriften in sechs Banden, vol. 6, p. 51. )
13
14 Cf. the passages cited as support by Zeller 11. 2, p. 356, n. 2, esp. from
See p. 63 above and Lecture 9, n. 2. the Physics; Zeller concludes:
Aristotle imagines the effect of the mover [i. e. form] on the moved [i. e. matter] to be conditioned by a continuous touching of the twO, and this condition seems to him all the more necessary since he maintains that the
?
? 172 NOTES TO PAGES 85-90
? purely incorporeal also has its effect through touching: even thinking is supposed to assimilate what is thought through touching it; the thought thus stands in the same relation to the thinker as form to matter. And the divinity is supposed likewise to touch the world as the prime mover.
(ibid. , pp. 356f)
Lecture Twelve
1 Cf. pp. 80f above.
2 See Lecture 3, p. 14, and esp. n. 7.
3 See p. 36 above.
4 Seep. 81above.
5
6
7
On Heidegger's concept of historicity and Adorno's critique of it, d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 394f, n. 204, but esp. Negative Dialectics, pp. 128f? .
Cf. 'Wenn im Unendlichen', from Zahme Xenien: 'Und alles Driingen, alles Ringen / 1st ewige Ruh' in Gott dem Herrn. ' [All yearning and struggle is everlasting peace in the Lord] (Goethe, Samtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebucher und Gesprache, hrsg. von Hendrik Birus [u. a. ], I.
Abt. , Bd. 2: Gedichte 1 800-1 832, Frankfurt/Main 1 988, p. 680).
On the inversion of dynamic and static with reference to Aristotle, Horkheimer writes:
Movement as such, detached from its social context and its human aim, becomes the mere appearance of movement, the bad infinity of mech- anical repetition. . . . It is no accident that in the basic text of western philosophy, Aristotle's Metaphysics, the idea of universal dynamism could be combined directly with an unmoved prime mover. The circumstance that the blind development of technology heightens social repression and exploitation threatens at each stage to turn progress into its opposite, total barbarism. (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, Frankfurt! Main 1991, pp. 140f)
Hardly anywhere more clearly than in Metaphysics, A 3, 1069 b 35ff; Gohlke's commentary on this is as follows:
This must be followed by a demonstration that neither matter nor form comes into being as an ultimate raw material. Everything is transformed from something through something into something. It is transformed 'through' the prime mover, 'from' matter 'into' form. If not only the bronze sphere, but also bronze and sphericality, came into being, that would go on for ever. So there must be a stopping point somewhere. (Aristoteles, Metaphysik, iibertr. von Paul Gohlke, p. 357)
See esp. Lecture 1, pp. 3f above.
See p. 53 above.
See pp. 30f above.
Metaphysics, A 7, 1072 b 15, 18H contains argumentation on the life of the unmoved mover:
8
9 10 1 1 12
? NOTES TO PAGES 90-92 173
? It is a life which is always the noblest and the happiest that we can live. . . . Thought . . . must be thought of what is best in itself; i. e. that which is thought in the fullest sense must be occupied with that which is best in the fullest sense. Now thought does think itself, because it shares in the intelligibility of its object. It becomes intelligible by contact with the intelligible, so that thought and object of thought are one. (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 346). Also see Lecture 13, n. 3.
13 TO yap alho VOELV EUT{V TE Kat Elva! ; translated as: 'for thinking and being are the same thing' (Diels/Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
vol. 1, p. 231).
14 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Das Problem des Idealismus. Stichworte zur
Vorlesung 1 953/54', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter V, Munich 1 998. Karl Reinhardt's book Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (4th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1985) was especially important for Adorno's understanding of Parmenides, although it touches only peripherally on the proposition of the identity of thinking and being.
15 Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 368f, n. 1:
Aristotle states frequently and with great force that neither a 7TOtT/O', nor a 7Tpag" can be attributed to the divinity. . . . Rather, he says very gener- ally that . . . both 7TpaTTEtV and 7TO'EtV must be seen as foreign to the divinity, that the perfection manifested in action (practical virtue) finds room only in human intercourse and among creatures subject to human passions . . . and that all action is a means to an end different to it, and cannot therefore be attributed to the divinity, for which there is no goal still to be attained.
16 For the recent position of Aristotle scholarship on this question d. Joachim Ritter's essay of 1 953, 'Die Lehre vom Ursprung und Sinn der Theorie bei Aristotle', in Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu
? 1 7
1 8 19
Aristoteles und Hegel, Frankfurt/Main 1 969, pp. 9ff.
A sharply divergent historical-philosophical interpretation is to be found in Horkheimer's essay 'Die gesellschaftliche Funktion der Philosophie'
of 1940:
Although Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, regards the self-contemplation of the soul, the theoretical attitude, as the highest happiness, he says explicitly that this happiness is only possible on a specific material basis, that is, under certain social and economic conditions. Plato and Aristotle do not believe, like Antisthenes and the Cynics, that reason is capable of constant development to a higher level in people who literally lead a dog's life, or that wisdom could go hand in hand with penury. For them, just conditions were a prerequisite for the unfolding of the intellectual powers of human beings, and this idea underlies the whole of western
humanism. (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Frankfurt/Main 1988, p. 346)
Not traced.
See Lecture 1, n. 8.
? ?
174
1
2
NOTES TO PAGES 94-95 Lecture Thirteen
? 3
In the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt/Main the granite sculpture Empedocles ( 1 954) stood in the entrance hall of the main building, in front of the Rector's office.
Cf. Remark 3 in Chapter 1 of the Science of Logic:
With this wholly abstract purity of continuity, that is, indeterminateness and vacuity of conception, it is indifferent whether this abstraction is called space, pure intuiting, or pure thinking; it is altogether the same as what the Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, physically motion- less and equally unmoved in sensation, conception, fantasy, desire and so on, looking only at the tip of his nose, he says inwardly only Om, Om,
Om, or else nothing at all. (Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London 1969, p. 97)
Cf. Aristotle: 'Therefore, since the supreme intellect is the best thing in the world, it must think itself; its thinking is a thinking of thinking' (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 349). On this question Zeller writes:
God is . . . the activity of absolute intellect, and to this extent he is that which is absolutely real and living, and the primal source of all life. But what is the content of this thinking? All thinking derives its value from what is thought, but divine thinking can derive it from nothing lying outside itself, and can have no content other than what is best; but it alone is the best. God therefore thinks himself, and his thinking is a thinking of thinking, so that in divine thinking, as cannot be otherwise for pure intellect, thinking and its object coincide absolutely. This immut- able abiding of thinking in itself, this indivisible unity of the thinker and the thought, is the absolute bliss of God. (Zeller 11. 2, pp. 366f)
In his lecture series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vemunft' Adorno attaches his own definition of philosophy to that of Aristotle when he says that philosophy 'is really concerned with the "thinking of thinking", as Aristotle has defined it - in which the thought processes of logic and the
positive sciences must review themselves critically' (NaS IV. 4, p. 127). Cf. the paragraph with this title in 'Kritik des logischen Absolutismus':
The necessity of the contingency of the factual in idealism is made by Husser! into the virtue of the purity of the idea. The ideas remain behind as the caput mortuum of a life deserted by spirit. The various material
sciences are conceived in a totally empiricist way. . . . In his conception of 'absolutely strict regularity' he is too free with the 'thousands of accidents' which are not accidents. For the scientist, chance is the unwelcome re- sidue which settles at the bottom of his concepts, while for the 'common man', whose name Husserl utters without any compunction, it is what befalls him and against which he is defenceless. The scientist fancies that he can prescribe laws to the world; the 'common man' must obey each law in practical terms. He can do nothing about this, and may rightly
? 4
5
? NOTES TO PAGES 96-98
175
? consider it fortuitous; but that the world is made up of those who are exposed to such accidents and others who, though they may not make the law, can console themselves with its existence, is no accident, but is itself the law of real society. No philosophy which considers the 'world's conception' should ignore this. For Husserl, however, the sacrifice of empiricism does not open unrestricted insight to such connections, but he simply repeats the shoulder-shrugging prejudice that it all depends on one's point of view. Knowledge of the factual need not be too punctili- ous, since it in any case bears the taint of fortuitousness. Reality becomes an object of mere opinion. This modesty is as false as its complement, the hubris of the absolute. (GS 5, pp. 92f)
6 Cf. the preface to the Phenomenology ofSpirit: 'To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfilment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black - this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity' (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford 1 977, p. 9).
7 Which text of Lessing's Adorno was thinking of here, and whether he was thinking of a particular text, has not been ascertained. Behind it is probably Lessing's realization that the 'gratuitous truths of history
. . . can never become proofs of necessary truths of reason'; Lessing called this the 'wretched wide ditch .
[purpose] of all becoming' (Aristotle, Metaphysics, p. 9). Zeller, on whom Adorno bases his argument here, interprets 7TPWT'! ] VA'! ] as
follows:
If in a given case we abstract that which an object has yet to become from everything else, we obtain a certain matter which lacks a certain form, and thus contains only the possibility of that form. If we abstract from abso- lutely everything which is the result of becoming, if we imagine something objective which has not yet become anything, we obtain pure matter with- out any formal determination, something which is nothing but can become everything, the subject or substrate to which no conceivable predicate can
be applied but is therefore equally receptive to them all. In other words, we obtain something which is everything in terms of possibility and nothing in terms of reality, pure potential being without any actuality.
He adds in a note:
? Aristotle calls this pure matter - which, however, never exists - 7TpclJTT} vAT}, contrasting it to vAT} . ! uXaTT} (l8w" oida EKauTov), matter which is combined with a certain form without needing any further elaboration: 7TPWTT} vAT} is matter prior to elementary differences; the . ! UXaTT} vAT} of a of the human being are the menstrual fluids [as the 'material cause']. (Cf. Zeller
? sculpture, for example, is bronze or stone, while the . ! uXaTT} vAT} II. 2, p. 319f)
? 6 Cf. Zeller:
Matter as such, what was called primary matter, is devoid of form or determination, being that which precedes all becoming and shaping. It is the substratum endowed with none of the properties in which the form of things consists. It is thus also the unlimited or infinite, not in the spatial sense (for Aristotle does not admit the possibility of spatial infinity . . . ),
? 168 NOTES TO PAGES 67-73
? but in the broad sense of this term, where it refers to anything which is not limited or fixed by any formal determination, has attained neither conclusion nor perfection.
From the appended note: 'By D. 7TEtpOV Aristotle means, firstly, the spatially unlimited, and he investigates the concept from this standpoint in . . . Physics III, 4ff. But since he now finds that in reality no infinite space can exist, the unlimited finally coincides for him with d6pWTOV or vAr/ (Zeller 11. 2, pp. 3 2 1 ? ) . On the original concept of D. 7TEtpOV in Anaximander see Lecture 8, n. 14.
7 Adorno is referring here to the definition of the 'Apollonian soul' and its 'ahistoricity', a central motif of Spengler, which is to be found, in some form, on all but a few pages of The Decline of the West. For example,
cf. the discussion in the chapter on 'Music and Sculpture':
The Hellenic temple is conceived and formed as a solid body. For the formal sensibility which produced it no other possibility existed. For this reason the history of the plastic arts of antiquity is that of an unceasing labour to perfect a single ideal, and to master the free-standing human body as the quintessence of pure objective presence. . . . It has never been remarked . . . how rare this genre is, an exception, anything but a rule. In fact, this sculptural art, which placed the naked body freely on a level plane and formed it from all sides existed only once, in antiquity, since this was the only culture which completely rejected any transcendence of sensible boundaries in favour of space. . . . This Apollonian sculpture is a pendant to Euclidean mathematics. Both repudiate pure space and see the a priori of perception in bodily form. This sculpture acknowledges neither ideas pointing into the distance nor personalities or historical events, but only the self-limited existence of bodies confined within their own surfaces.
(Cf. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, vol. 1, Munich 1920, pp. 310f)
8 Adorno is probably thinking of the famous issue of Logos devoted to Spengler, in which Karl Joel and Eduard Schwartz wrote on Spengler's treatment of philosophy and history; Ludwig Curtius, in an essay 'Morphologie der antiken Kunst', criticized the treatment of these sub- jects in The Decline ofthe West; d. Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift fur Philosophie der Kultur, ed. Richard Kroner and Georg Mehlis, vol. 9 (1920/1), pp. 133ff.
9 An allusion to De consolatione philosophiae, the main work, written in prison, of the Roman Neo-Platonist Boethius (480-525), who was also important as a translator and editor of Aristotle.
Lecture Ten
1 Published in 1938 in Leiden. See Adorno's review of the book, GS 20. 1, pp. 240f.
? ? 2 For example, by Zeller:
NOTES TO PAGES 74-78 169
? Aristotle generally mentions four kinds of grounds or causes: the material, the conceptual or formal, the prime mover and the final cause. However, on closer examination these four causes boil down to the first two. The concept of any thing cannot differ from its purpose, as all purposiveness aims at the realization of a concept. This concept, however, is also the moving cause, whether it sets the thing in motion from within as its soul, or whether its motion comes to it from outside. For even in the second case it is the thing's concept which brings about the motion, both in the works of nature and in those of art: only a human being can engender a human
being; only the concept of health can impel the physician to work towards the bringing forth of health. Likewise, we will find pure form, the highest purpose of the world and the cause of its motion, combined in the highest cause or the divinity. But even in his explanation of nature Aristotle distinguishes only two kinds of causes, necessary and final causes, i. e. the effect of matter and the effect of form or the concept. It is only this difference, therefore, that we must regard as original. The distinction between the formal, effective and final causes is merely secondary; and even if all three are not always united in the single thing, in themselves,
by their nature, they are one, and are only split apart in the realm of sensible phenomena: that which has become has several causes, but the eternal has only one, the concept. (Zeller 11. 2, pp. 327? ? )
3 See Lecture 8, n. 14. Adorno also refers to Anaximander's 'saying' in GS 5, p. 32 and NaS IVA, p. 332.
4 Adorno discusses the general crisis of causality today in the chapter on freedom in Negative Dialectics, pp. 265ff; also d. NaS IVA, p. 141 and pp. 212ff.
5 See p. 40 above.
6 On the Kantian concept of causality based on freedom d. especially
Lectures 4 and 5 in Frobleme der Moralphilosophie, NaS IV. 10, pp. 54ff.
7 Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, pp. 138ff. (M 6-9, 1080 a 12ff)
Lecture Eleven
1 The poet is Ovid; d. the opening of Metamorphoses: 'Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum / unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe, / quem dixere Chaos: rudis indigestaque moles . . . ' ('Before the land and sea were made / In all the world one only face of Nature did
abide, / Which was called Chaos, a huge rude heap . . . ' (Ovid, Selected
works, London/New York 1939, p. 130).
2 Cf. Moliere, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, I, 7:
MAITRE DE PHILOSOPHIE: Tout ce qui n'est point prose est vers; et tout ce qui n'est point vers est prose.
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Et comme l'on parle qu'est-ce que donc que cela? MAITRE DE PHILOSOPHIE: De la prose.
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Quoi? Quand je dis: 'Nicole, apportez-moi mes pantoufles, et me donnez mon bonnet de nuit', c'est de la prose?
? ?
170
NOTES TO PAGE 78 MAITRE DE PHILOSOPHIE: Oui, Monsieur.
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: Par rna foil II y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j'en susse rien, et je vous suis Ie plus oblige du monde de m'avoir appris cela.
(Moliere: Oeuvres completes II. Textes etablis, presentes et annotes par Georges Couton, Paris 1971, p. 730)
? PHILOSOPHER:
prose.
MR JORDAIN: PHILOSOPHER:
Whatever isn't prose is verse and anything that isn't verse is
And talking, as I am now, which is that? That is prose.
MR JORDAIN: You mean to say that when I say 'Nicole, fetch me my slippers' or 'Give me my night-cap' that's prose?
PHILOSOPHER: Certainly, sir.
MR JORDAIN: Well, my goodness! Here I've been talking prose for forty
years and never known it, and mighty grateful I am to you for telling me! (trans. John Wood, London 1 953)
3 Adorno discusses Augustine's philosophy of history in the text Fortschritt, cf. GS 10. 2, pp. 620ff.
4 Regarding the gradual character of the Aristotelian concept of devel- opment cf. Ernst Bloch, who finds 'an element of the transient' within Aristotle's logic:
the element of development, which for us cries out for the dialectic, does not proceed by leaps in Aristotle. Development contains no revolutionary element, but is exclusively evolutionary. . . . Development for him is a gradually evolving entelechy, Neptunic, forming like water over long, long periods, not Vulcanic, coming into being with sudden violence, abrupt transitions. Thus the dialectic is eliminated from Aristotle's concept of development. (Ernst Bloch, Leipziger Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie 1 950-56, vol. 1 : Antike Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main 1 985, p. 229)
5 In Schopenhauer's philosophy the concept of the urge or yearning (Drang) refers to 'the objectivity of the Will on the lowest rung'; he depicts the Will as 'a blind urge, a dark, dull drive, remote from any- thing directly perceptible'. But
we are presented with the very peculiar phenomenon that the blind action of the Will, and the action illuminated by knowledge, cross over into each other's spheres in a very surprising way. . . . Knowledge in general, whether of reason or merely of perception . . . stems originally from the Will, forming part of the higher stages of its objectification as a mere fL7Jxav? , a means of survival for the individual and the species, like any other organ of the body. (Arthur Schopenhauer, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 1 , Darmstadt 1982, pp. 221ff)
? ? ? NOTES TO PAGES 79-84 171
? Just as Schopenhauer establishes a lineage between urge and cognition, Scheler identifies an unconscious 'urge of feeling' even in plants which, through participating in the 'primal phenomenon of expression', rep- resent 'a kind of yearning towards the highest principle'; plants, he main- tains, have 'a certain physiognomy expressing their inner states, their urges of feeling . . . such as listlessness, vigour, luxuriance, poverty' (Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, p. 15).
6 A problematic passage which cannot be emended with certainty. (Cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10461? ).
7 In the winter semester 1 964/5 Adorno was lecturing on 'the doctrine of history and freedom', d. NaS IV. 13 (in preparation).
8 Zeller concludes from the Aristotelian definitions of matter that
one might think that matter could not be distinguished from form solely by a lack, by a not-being-there-yet, but must add to it something of its own. But we shall rate this significance of matter even more highly if we recall that the philosopher regards only the individual entity as something substantial in the full sense. If only the individual thing is substance, while form . . . is always something universal, and if the ground of the individual thing therefore resides in matter, it is hard to avoid the conclu- sion that the ground of substantial being must also lie in matter, and that substance is not pure form, but only an entity composed of form and matter. Indeed, as substance is defined as the substratum (V7TOKEl/LEVOV), while matter is supposed to be the substratum of all being, matter alone, it seems, could claim to be recognized as the original substance of all things. This, however [Zeller goes on], Aristotle could not possibly con- cede. (Zeller 11. 2, p. 344)
9 This passage is based on an emendation in the edited text of which the editor is far from certain. (Cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10463. )
10 Cf.
the Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy ofHistory: 'World
history is progress in consciousness of freedom - a progress which we have to recognize in its necessity' (Hegel, Werke, vol. 12, Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 32).
11 Cf. the preface to the Philosophy of Right: 'What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational' (Hegel's Philosophy ofRight, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford 1 967, p. 10).
12 Physica III 1, 201 a 10; quoted in Zeller II, p. 351. 'The final coming- to-reality of something present merely as possibility, as far as it is such, is (evolutionary) change. ' (Cf. Aristotle, Philosophische Schriften in sechs Banden, vol. 6, p. 51. )
13
14 Cf. the passages cited as support by Zeller 11. 2, p. 356, n. 2, esp. from
See p. 63 above and Lecture 9, n. 2. the Physics; Zeller concludes:
Aristotle imagines the effect of the mover [i. e. form] on the moved [i. e. matter] to be conditioned by a continuous touching of the twO, and this condition seems to him all the more necessary since he maintains that the
?
? 172 NOTES TO PAGES 85-90
? purely incorporeal also has its effect through touching: even thinking is supposed to assimilate what is thought through touching it; the thought thus stands in the same relation to the thinker as form to matter. And the divinity is supposed likewise to touch the world as the prime mover.
(ibid. , pp. 356f)
Lecture Twelve
1 Cf. pp. 80f above.
2 See Lecture 3, p. 14, and esp. n. 7.
3 See p. 36 above.
4 Seep. 81above.
5
6
7
On Heidegger's concept of historicity and Adorno's critique of it, d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 394f, n. 204, but esp. Negative Dialectics, pp. 128f? .
Cf. 'Wenn im Unendlichen', from Zahme Xenien: 'Und alles Driingen, alles Ringen / 1st ewige Ruh' in Gott dem Herrn. ' [All yearning and struggle is everlasting peace in the Lord] (Goethe, Samtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebucher und Gesprache, hrsg. von Hendrik Birus [u. a. ], I.
Abt. , Bd. 2: Gedichte 1 800-1 832, Frankfurt/Main 1 988, p. 680).
On the inversion of dynamic and static with reference to Aristotle, Horkheimer writes:
Movement as such, detached from its social context and its human aim, becomes the mere appearance of movement, the bad infinity of mech- anical repetition. . . . It is no accident that in the basic text of western philosophy, Aristotle's Metaphysics, the idea of universal dynamism could be combined directly with an unmoved prime mover. The circumstance that the blind development of technology heightens social repression and exploitation threatens at each stage to turn progress into its opposite, total barbarism. (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, Frankfurt! Main 1991, pp. 140f)
Hardly anywhere more clearly than in Metaphysics, A 3, 1069 b 35ff; Gohlke's commentary on this is as follows:
This must be followed by a demonstration that neither matter nor form comes into being as an ultimate raw material. Everything is transformed from something through something into something. It is transformed 'through' the prime mover, 'from' matter 'into' form. If not only the bronze sphere, but also bronze and sphericality, came into being, that would go on for ever. So there must be a stopping point somewhere. (Aristoteles, Metaphysik, iibertr. von Paul Gohlke, p. 357)
See esp. Lecture 1, pp. 3f above.
See p. 53 above.
See pp. 30f above.
Metaphysics, A 7, 1072 b 15, 18H contains argumentation on the life of the unmoved mover:
8
9 10 1 1 12
? NOTES TO PAGES 90-92 173
? It is a life which is always the noblest and the happiest that we can live. . . . Thought . . . must be thought of what is best in itself; i. e. that which is thought in the fullest sense must be occupied with that which is best in the fullest sense. Now thought does think itself, because it shares in the intelligibility of its object. It becomes intelligible by contact with the intelligible, so that thought and object of thought are one. (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 346). Also see Lecture 13, n. 3.
13 TO yap alho VOELV EUT{V TE Kat Elva! ; translated as: 'for thinking and being are the same thing' (Diels/Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
vol. 1, p. 231).
14 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Das Problem des Idealismus. Stichworte zur
Vorlesung 1 953/54', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter V, Munich 1 998. Karl Reinhardt's book Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (4th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1985) was especially important for Adorno's understanding of Parmenides, although it touches only peripherally on the proposition of the identity of thinking and being.
15 Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 368f, n. 1:
Aristotle states frequently and with great force that neither a 7TOtT/O', nor a 7Tpag" can be attributed to the divinity. . . . Rather, he says very gener- ally that . . . both 7TpaTTEtV and 7TO'EtV must be seen as foreign to the divinity, that the perfection manifested in action (practical virtue) finds room only in human intercourse and among creatures subject to human passions . . . and that all action is a means to an end different to it, and cannot therefore be attributed to the divinity, for which there is no goal still to be attained.
16 For the recent position of Aristotle scholarship on this question d. Joachim Ritter's essay of 1 953, 'Die Lehre vom Ursprung und Sinn der Theorie bei Aristotle', in Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu
? 1 7
1 8 19
Aristoteles und Hegel, Frankfurt/Main 1 969, pp. 9ff.
A sharply divergent historical-philosophical interpretation is to be found in Horkheimer's essay 'Die gesellschaftliche Funktion der Philosophie'
of 1940:
Although Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, regards the self-contemplation of the soul, the theoretical attitude, as the highest happiness, he says explicitly that this happiness is only possible on a specific material basis, that is, under certain social and economic conditions. Plato and Aristotle do not believe, like Antisthenes and the Cynics, that reason is capable of constant development to a higher level in people who literally lead a dog's life, or that wisdom could go hand in hand with penury. For them, just conditions were a prerequisite for the unfolding of the intellectual powers of human beings, and this idea underlies the whole of western
humanism. (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Frankfurt/Main 1988, p. 346)
Not traced.
See Lecture 1, n. 8.
? ?
174
1
2
NOTES TO PAGES 94-95 Lecture Thirteen
? 3
In the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt/Main the granite sculpture Empedocles ( 1 954) stood in the entrance hall of the main building, in front of the Rector's office.
Cf. Remark 3 in Chapter 1 of the Science of Logic:
With this wholly abstract purity of continuity, that is, indeterminateness and vacuity of conception, it is indifferent whether this abstraction is called space, pure intuiting, or pure thinking; it is altogether the same as what the Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, physically motion- less and equally unmoved in sensation, conception, fantasy, desire and so on, looking only at the tip of his nose, he says inwardly only Om, Om,
Om, or else nothing at all. (Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London 1969, p. 97)
Cf. Aristotle: 'Therefore, since the supreme intellect is the best thing in the world, it must think itself; its thinking is a thinking of thinking' (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 349). On this question Zeller writes:
God is . . . the activity of absolute intellect, and to this extent he is that which is absolutely real and living, and the primal source of all life. But what is the content of this thinking? All thinking derives its value from what is thought, but divine thinking can derive it from nothing lying outside itself, and can have no content other than what is best; but it alone is the best. God therefore thinks himself, and his thinking is a thinking of thinking, so that in divine thinking, as cannot be otherwise for pure intellect, thinking and its object coincide absolutely. This immut- able abiding of thinking in itself, this indivisible unity of the thinker and the thought, is the absolute bliss of God. (Zeller 11. 2, pp. 366f)
In his lecture series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vemunft' Adorno attaches his own definition of philosophy to that of Aristotle when he says that philosophy 'is really concerned with the "thinking of thinking", as Aristotle has defined it - in which the thought processes of logic and the
positive sciences must review themselves critically' (NaS IV. 4, p. 127). Cf. the paragraph with this title in 'Kritik des logischen Absolutismus':
The necessity of the contingency of the factual in idealism is made by Husser! into the virtue of the purity of the idea. The ideas remain behind as the caput mortuum of a life deserted by spirit. The various material
sciences are conceived in a totally empiricist way. . . . In his conception of 'absolutely strict regularity' he is too free with the 'thousands of accidents' which are not accidents. For the scientist, chance is the unwelcome re- sidue which settles at the bottom of his concepts, while for the 'common man', whose name Husserl utters without any compunction, it is what befalls him and against which he is defenceless. The scientist fancies that he can prescribe laws to the world; the 'common man' must obey each law in practical terms. He can do nothing about this, and may rightly
? 4
5
? NOTES TO PAGES 96-98
175
? consider it fortuitous; but that the world is made up of those who are exposed to such accidents and others who, though they may not make the law, can console themselves with its existence, is no accident, but is itself the law of real society. No philosophy which considers the 'world's conception' should ignore this. For Husserl, however, the sacrifice of empiricism does not open unrestricted insight to such connections, but he simply repeats the shoulder-shrugging prejudice that it all depends on one's point of view. Knowledge of the factual need not be too punctili- ous, since it in any case bears the taint of fortuitousness. Reality becomes an object of mere opinion. This modesty is as false as its complement, the hubris of the absolute. (GS 5, pp. 92f)
6 Cf. the preface to the Phenomenology ofSpirit: 'To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfilment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black - this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity' (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford 1 977, p. 9).
7 Which text of Lessing's Adorno was thinking of here, and whether he was thinking of a particular text, has not been ascertained. Behind it is probably Lessing's realization that the 'gratuitous truths of history
. . . can never become proofs of necessary truths of reason'; Lessing called this the 'wretched wide ditch .
