of former
metaphysics
which was intended to be the scientific construc- tion of the world in terms of thoughts alone' (Hegel's Science of Logic, trans.
Adorno-Metaphysics
I would just point out that perhaps one of the clearest manifestations of what I am concerned with here is the way in which certain names can vouch for that experience.
In Proust they are the names of Illiers and Trouville, Cabourg and Venice.
s I myself have had a similar experience with such names.
When one is on holiday as a child and reads or hears names like Monbrunn, Reuenthal, Hambrunn, one has the feeling: if only one were there, at that place, that would be it.
This 'it' - what the 'it' is - is extraordinarily difficult to say; one will probably be able to say, following Proust's tracks here
too, that it is happiness. When one later reaches such places, it is not there either, one does not find 'it'. Often they are just foolish villages. If there is still a single stable door open in them and a smell of a real live cow and dung and such things, to which this experience is no doubt attached, one must be very thankful today. But the curious thing is that, even if 'it' is not there, if one does not find in Monbrunn any
of the fulfilment which is stored up in its name, nevertheless, one is not disappointed. The reason, if I am interpreting it correctly, is that - and you must forgive me if I ramble a bit in this lecture, in just the way that Kant forbids6 - one is, as it were, too close, one is inside the phenomenon, and has the feeling that, being completely inside it, one cannot actually catch sight of it? Once, many years ago, in Minima Moralia, I wrote about thanking and gratitude, which have their dignity - and I did not mean dignity in the idealist sense - because the giving of thanks is the only relationship that consciousness can
have to happiness, whereas the person who is happy is too close to it to be able to have any standpoint towards it within consciousness. 8 At such moments one has a curious feeling that something is receding - as is also familiar from an old symbol of happiness, the rainbow - rather than that one has really been done out of it. I would say,
therefore, that happiness - and there is an extremely deep constella- tion between metaphysical experience and happiness - is something within objects and, at the same time, remote from them.
But as I mention this example to you, I become aware of how extraordinarily precarious such speculations are. I have just picked out a stratum of these experiences quite arbitrarily; another, perhaps
? LECTURE EIGHTEEN 141
? far more crucial one, is the experience of deja
did I see that before? that can be induced by a certain type of children's book. In such experiences one succumbs to the conditions of the empirical world; one succumbs to all the fallibility which attaches to one's own psychology, one's wishes, one's longing. All metaphysical experiences - I should like to state as a proposition here - are fallible. I would say, in general, that all experiences which have to be lived, which are not mere copies or reconstructions of that which is in any case, contain the possibility of error, the possibility that they can completely miss the mark. And, in much the same way as I indicated
earlier with regard to the concept of tradition, it may be one of the ! {;EVS? , the deceptions in which scientific-idealist thinking has enmeshed us, that we believe a piece of knowledge to rank higher the less it is liable to failure, to disappointment. It might well be that, according to this criterion, everything which really matters would be excluded as unworthy of being known; whereas in truth - so it seems to me - only what can be refuted, what can be disappointed, what can be wrong, has the openness I have spoken of/ that is, it is the only thing which matters. It is in the concept of openness, as that which is not already subsumed under the identity of the concept, that the possibil- ity of disappointment lies. And I should like to say that within the meaning of these reflections on the possibility of metaphysics there lies a peculiar affinity to empiricism. For empiricism, with its emphasis on empirical sources, implies an element of metaphysics at least in the sense that the essential knowledge is seen as that which does not coincide with concepts, but which, as it were, falls accidentally into my lap, and thus always includes the possibility that it might not do
so. Such knowledge therefore has an inherent fortuitousness, from which it derives an element of meaning which, according to the pre- valent logic, is excluded precisely by the concept of the accidental. Fallibility, I would say, is the condition of the possibility of such metaphysical experience. And it seems to attach most strongly to the weakest and most fragile experiences.
On the other hand, however, from the extreme doubtfulness of what I have just said, a doubtfulness which, I believe, is indispensable to thought if it wants to be anything at all, you might gain a critical insight which, from the opposed standpoint, sounds highly heretical. You all know that the critical theory of society, and especially its
popularized form in the modernistic vulgar theology of today, is fond of adducing the Hegelian and Marxian concept of rei(ication, and that,
for it, only what is entirely exempt from reification can be counted as knowledge or truth. But if you bear in mind the peculiarly fallible and unavoidably problematic nature of metaphysical experience that
vu, the feeling: When
?
?
142 LECTURE EIGHTEEN
? ? i
I have described, the concept of reification may, in a complementary way, take on a meaning which is far from purely derogatory. It is a meaning in which, as in Marx, the whole of idealism is contained, in that the assumption is made that even that which is not I, which is
not identical, must be able to resolve itself entirely, as it were, into the actual, present I, into the actus purus. That none of this is plain sailing, that these questions are not so simple - Hegel undoubtedly had an inkling of this in his later phase. And the traits of reactionary harshness we find so disturbing in Hegel are certainly connected to the realization that the moment of the complete dissolution of all objectivity in what might be called the living subject also contains a deceptive element, in the absolute presence of the subject in that which it is not. When I said earlier that pure mystical experience is a somewhat dubious matter, that it is far less pure and inward and far more concretely objective than one would expect from its concept, I was referring to this same deception.
What I am saying to you appears to be in sharp contradiction to the idea that cognition should necessarily be fallible if the resulting knowledge is to be worthy of being thought. And I would not presume, and certainly not in the miserably few minutes we have left, to resolve this contradiction. I would say, however, that precisely the polarity I am referring to - that, on the one hand, it is a condition of meta- physical experience that it can miss the mark, that it can be quite wrong; and that, on the other, it requires an objective moment, anti- thetical to it and incapable of being assimilated to it - that these two motifs together form the dialectical figure, the dialectical image,1O through which alone one can, perhaps, gain awareness of what is meant by the concept of metaphysical experience. The objective cat-
egories of theology are not only - as it appears from Hegel's early
theological writings published by Herman Nohlll - residues of the
positive moment which are then resolved into subjectivity, into life,
in a process of increasing, dialectical identification, but actually com-
plement the weakness of immanent dialectics: they reclaim, in a sense,
what is not assimilated by the dialectic and would, as the merely
other, be devoid of any determination. Thus, not only the ossified
society, but also the moment of the primacy of the object which I
have repeatedly mentioned,12 was precipitated in the objectivity of
the metaphysical categories. And between these two moments - on
the one hand the flashes of fallible consciousness which I illustrated
by the example of place names, and on the other the primacy of the
object - there seems to me to exist a curious constellation. True, it is
one which is discharged abruptly at certain moments, rather than being a merely contemplative entity which could be grasped as a kind
? ? ? LECTURE EIGHTEEN
143
? of categorial structure of a so-called matter of fact. If everything objective is volatilized by consciousness - and this applies especially to metaphysical objects - thought regresses to the subjectivism of the pure act. It then finally hypostatizes the mediation carried out by the
subject itself, as a kind of pure immediacy. This may help to explain the quite significant fact that Kant, who attempted in the Critique of Practical Reason to interpret metaphysical ideas as a full participation
of the subject, indeed, as nothing other than pure reason itself, finally moved almost imperceptibly to a position where he sought for that subjectivity precisely the objective correlatives that he had previously criticized and radically excluded. It is a remarkable fact that, in this way, even the concept of the highest good and the concept of human- ity are resurrected in the Critique of Practical Reason. 13 But despite all this it has to be said that, in the course of advancing enlightenment,
the possibility of metaphysical experience is tending to become paler and more desultory. If one reads Proust today, the accounts of such metaphysical experience, which play such an enormous role in his work - although even there they are far more bare and limited than one might expect - have a Romantic moment through which they are already exposed to criticism. It is as if the joy of finding that some- where some such thing as life were possible at all - and this is the counter-motif to reification - had lured the subject of the experience into directly equating these surviving traces of the life with the meaning
of life itself.
As a result, one will have to pursue metaphysical experience into a
stratum which originally was extremely alien to it. For in reality it now survives only negatively. I would say - and this must be under- stood very strictly and made into a kind of canon for metaphysical thinking itself - that the form in which metaphysical experience still manifests itself with any compelling force today is not that which has made itself suspect as a sphere of Romantic wishing, but is the ex- perience which leads to the question: Is that all? It is the experience which, if I might speak for once like an existentialist, perhaps bears the greatest resemblance, among the 'situations' we pass through,14 to the situation of fruitless waiting: that is no doubt the form in which
metaphysical experience manifests itself most strongly to us. It made an unforgettable impression on me when my composition teacher, Alban Berg, told me more than once that what he regarded as the crucial and most important parts of his own work, and the ones he liked best, were the bars in which he expressed situations of fruitless waiting. He experienced these things so deeply that they reached the threshold of consciousness, although, heaven knows, that is not re-
? quired of an artist. But the authenticity of even this is not guaranteed,
?
144
LECTURE EIGHTEEN
? for where there is no longer any life, where immediacy has been so truly abolished as in the world in which we exist, the temptation is doubly strong to mistake the remnants of life, or even the negation of the prevailing condition, for the absolute.
We reach here, if you like, the crucial distinction between the considerations I have been presenting to you and the Hegelian philo- sophy to which these considerations owe so much. It lies in the fact that Hegel's philosophy contains a moment by which that philosophy, despite having made the principle of determinate negation its vital nerve, passes over into affirmation and therefore into ideology: the belief that negation, by being pushed far enough and by reflecting itself, is one with positivity. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, the doctrine
of the positive negation, is precisely and strictly the point at which I refuse to follow Hegel. There are other such points, but in the context of this discussion this is the one to which I should refer. One might be inclined to think that if the present situation is really experienced as negatively as we all experience it, and as only I have taken it upon myself, as a kind of scapegoat, to express it (that is the only difference separating me from other people), one might think that by negating this negativity one had already attained the positive; and that is a very great temptation. And when I told you that the form of determin- ate negation is the only form in which metaphysical experience survives today, I myself was moving at least in the direction of that idea. But this transition is not itself compelling: for if I said that the negation of the negation is the positive, that idea would contain within itself a
thesis of the philosophy of identity and could only be carried through if I had already assumed the unity of subject and object which is supposed to emerge at the end. If, however, you take seriously the idea I put forward earlier today, that the truth of ideas is bound up
with the possibility of their being wrong, the possibility of their failure, you will see that this idea is invalidated by the proposition that, merely by negating the negation, I already have the positive. In that easelS one would be back in the sphere of false, deceptive and, I would say, mythical certainty, in which nothing can be wrong and in which, probably for that reason, everything one said would be all the more hopelessly lost. For thought there is really no other possibility, no other opportunity, than to do what the miner's adage forbids: to work one's way through the darkness without a lamp, without possessing the positive through the higher concept of the negation of the negation, and to immerse oneself in the darkness as deeply as one possibly can. For one thing is undoubtedly true: I told you that, where there is no longer life, the temptation to mistake its remnants for the absolute, for flashes of meaning, is extremely great - and I do not wish to take
? ? LECTURE EIGHTEEN 145
? that back. Nevertheless, nothing can be even experienced as living if it does not contain a promise of something transcending life. This transcendence therefore is, and at the same time is not - and beyond that contradiction it is no doubt very difficult, and probably impos-
sible, for thought to gO. 16
In saying that, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the feeling that I have
reached the point where the insufficiency of my own reflections con- verges with the impossibility of thinking that which must nevertheless be thought. 17 And all I hope is that I may have given you at least an
idea of that convergence.
?
GS 1 GS 3
GS 5
GS 6 GS 8 GS 9. 1 GS 10. 1
GS 10. 2
GS 1 1 GS 20. 1 GS 20. 2 NaS 1. 1
Philosophische Fruhschriften, 3rd edn, 1996
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklarung. Philosophische Fragmente, 3rd edn, 1996
Zur Metakritik der ErkenntnistheorielDrei Studien zu Hegel, 4th edn, 1996
Negative DialektiklJargon der Eigentlichkeit, 5th edn, 1996 Soziologische Schriften I, 4th edn, 1 996
Soziologische Schriften 1. Erste Halfte, 4, 1975
Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I: PrismenlOhne Leitbild, 2nd edn, 1996
Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II: EingriffelStichworteiAnhang,
1977
Noten zur Literatur, 4th edn, 1996
Vermischte Schriften I, 1986
Vermischte Schriften II, 1986
Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2nd edn, 1994
EDITOR'S NOTES
? Abbreviations
Adorno's writings, when translated, are quoted from the English-language editions. When no English translation is available, the references are to the German editions, Gesammelte Schriften (edited by Rolf Tiedemann in collaboration with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz,
Frankfurt/Main 1970- ) and Nachgelassene Schriften (edited by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt/Main 1993- ), when included there. The follow- ing abbreviations are used:
? ? NOTES TO PAGES 1-3
147
? Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' ( 1 959), ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 1995
NaS IV. 4
NaS IV. 10
NaSIV. 15 EinleitungindieSoziologie(1968),ed. ChristophGodde,1993
Lecture One
1 Adorno is referring to Negative Dialectics, written between 1959 and 1966; in his lecture series in the summer semester of 1965 he is thinking in particular of 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (Adorno, Negative Dia-
lectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London 1990, pp. 361ff; cf. GS 6, pp. 354ff), on which he was working intensively in May 1965 and to which he referred in Lectures 13-18, held in July 1965 (see n. 9 below).
2 Apart from the discussion in 'Meditations on Metaphysics', Adorno deals with Kant's attitude to metaphysics above all in Lectures 4 and 5 in the series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' of 1 959 (cf. NaS IV. 4, pp. 57? ? ). The most lucid account of Kant's renewal of the foundations of metaphysics known to the Editor is to be found in an early lecture by Horkheimer, from the winter semester 1925/6 (cf. Max Horkheimer,
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, vol. 10: Nachgelassene Schriften 1914-1931, 2. Vorlesung iiber die Geschichte der deutschen idealistischen Philosophie [u. a. j, Frankfurt! Main 1990, pp. 24? ? ); Adorno is likely to have taken over Horkheimer's
account without questioning it.
3 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. ]. Hollingdale,
Harmondsworth 1961, p. 58 (although the term is translated here as 'afterworld'); a direct equation between metaphysics and the 'back- world' is to be found, for example, in Human, All Too Human: 'When we hear the subtle talk of the metaphysicians and backworldsmen, we certainly feel that we are the "poor in spirit"; but we also feel that ours is the heaven of change, with spring and autumn, winter and summer, while theirs is the backworld, with its grey, frosty, endless mists and shadows' (Nietzsche, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 2, Munich 1993, p. 386). Regarding this metaphor of Nietzsche's which Adorno was fond of quoting see NaS IV. 4, p. 165 and pp. 382f, and NaS IV. 15, p. 38, and finally Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie.
Zur Einleitung, ed. Rudolf zur Lippe, vol. 2, 5th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1989, p. 162.
4 Cf. GS 9. 1, p. 446 - Adorno also cites this statement by the test subject in 'Theses against occultism' in Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott, London 1974, pp. 238-44; dealing primarily with occultism in contem- porary society, the 'Theses' nevertheless contain nothing less than
Adorno's theory of the relationship of occultism to metaphysics, of the 'contamination of mind and existence, the latter becoming itself an attribute of mind' (ibid. , p. 243 ). Adorno's aphorism 'Occultism is the
Probleme der Moralphilosophie (1963), ed. Thomas Schroder, 1995
? ?
148
NOTES TO PAGES 4-5
? metaphysic of dunces' (ibid. , p. 241) has meanwhile appeared in the Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie as an example of his 'radical antagonism' to occultism, which, in fact, the authors find rather too
radical (d. H. Bender and W. Bonin, 'Okkultismus', in Hist. Wb. Philos. , vo! ' 6, Basle, Stuttgart 1984, co! . 1144f).
See Lecture 4.
6 Most probably an allusion to the book by Heimsoeth (present in
Adorno's library), which deals with the dispute over universals under the title 'Das Individuum'; d. Heinz Heimsoeth, Die sechs gro(5en Themen der abendlandischen Metaphysik und der Ausgang des
Mittelalters, 4th edn, Darmstadt 1958, pp. 172f? .
7 See Lecture 6, p. 38 above
8 See Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences of
1830: 'Thoughts can be called . . . objective thoughts and these include the forms which are considered in ordinary logic and are used only as forms of conscious thought. Logic therefore coincides with metaphysics, the science of things couched as thoughts which were supposed to ex- press the essences of things' (trans. from Hegel, Werke in 20 Banden, Frankfurt/Main 1969-71, vo! ' 8, pp. 80f). Or in the Introduction to
'The Objective Logic': 'The objective logic . . . takes the place . . .
of former metaphysics which was intended to be the scientific construc- tion of the world in terms of thoughts alone' (Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London/New York 1969, p. 63).
9 Adorno seldom expressed himself as explicitly on the systematic import- ance of this motif as in the lectures on 'Aesthetics' of 1958/9. Here he spoke of the necessity of gaining access to 'something like a philosophical prehistory of concepts which, in our view [i. e. his and Horkheimer's] should replace mere verbal definitions, which are always arbitrary and
non-binding'; as an example he mentions 'the theory of art as mimetic behaviour, developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 3539f). The lecture series on Philosophische Terminologie, held by Adorno over two semesters in 1962 and 1963, is his most extensive treatment of the 'prehistory' of philosophical concepts
(d. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie. Zur Einleitung, 2 vols, Frank-
furt/Main 1973, 1974). For other aspects of his idea of philosophical prehistory d. Rolf Tiedemann, ' ''Nicht die Erste Philosophie sondern eine letzte " . Anmerkungen zum Denken Adornos', in Theodor W. Adorno, 'Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse'. Ein philosophisches
Lesebuch, Frankfurt/Main 1997, pp. 16f.
10 Adorno dealt with Comte's 'law of three stages' again in Introduction
5
to Sociology, the lecture series held in the summer semester of 1968 (d. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund ]ephcott, Cambridge 2000, p. 131).
Comte characterizes the transition from fetishism to polytheism as fol-
11
lows: 'The transformation of fetishes into gods endows each thing with an abstract peculiarity, instead of the life attributed to it. This makes it susceptible to animation by a supernatural power. Each god assumes a
NOTES TO PAGES 6-10
149
? quality common to many fetishes, and such a concept demands a metaphysical manner of thinking' (Auguste Comte, Die Soziologie. Die positive Philosophie im Auszug, ed. Friedrich Blaschke, Leipzig 1933, p. 193).
12 On Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy and the revival of Aristotle in the Christian Middle Ages, d. Otfried H6ffe, Aristoteles, Munich 1996, pp. 269ff; on the former especially Ernst Bloch, 'Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke', in E. Bloch, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz, Frankfurt/Main 1972 (Gesamtausgabe vol. 7),
pp. 479ff.
13 On the closing of the school of Proclus in Athens by an edict of Justinian
in AD 529 one should consult Zeller, who was also Adorno's favourite authority in other matters of Greek philosophy (d. Eduard Zeller, Die Philosophie der Criechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung [hence- forth 'Zeller,'] 3. Teil, 2. Abt. , Die nacharistotelische Philosophie. 2. Halfte, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of the 5th edn], pp. 915f); for more details on the Persian exile chosen by Simplikios and six other philosophers see Ueberweg-Praechter (d. Friedrich Ueberweg, Crundri(5 der Geschichte der Philosophie, 1. Teil: Die Philosophie des Altertums, 12th edn, ed. Karl Praechter, Berlin 1926, pp. 634f).
14 As a means of 'noting' what metaphysics was, as understood by Adorno, the reader is referred definitively to Lecture 33 in Philosophische Terminologie, his most concise 'explanation of the term metaphysics', which also defines its subject matter (d. Adorno, Philosophische Ter- minologie, vol. 2, pp. 160ff).
Lecture Two
1 No transcriptions of the lectures on 13 and 18 May have been pre- served; instead the brief notes on which Adorno based the lecture are reproduced.
2 This passage connects with the discussion of the formalization of the concept of metaphysics at the end of the first lecture (pp. 8f above).
3 This characterization of the 'usual definition' of metaphysics already contains a clear allusion to Aristotle's Metaphysics, to which two-thirds of the lecture are devoted: the science which investigates the ultimate ground or cause of existing things (d. Aristotle's Metaphysics, trans.
John Warrington, London 1956, p. 54 [A 2, 982 b 8f]) is intrinsically a 'fundamental science', and in Aristotle's terminology is called the 'primary science' (d. ibid. , pp. 155ff [E 1, 1026 a 24]). IIpw'T'Y) ovala, 'primary substance', is used by Aristotle as a synonym for ElSa,: 'By "form" I mean a thing's essence and primary substance' (ibid. , p. 181
[Z 7, 1032 b If]): metaphysics, according to Aristotle, is the science of forms; according to Adorno, it 'is essentially concerned with concepts, and with concepts in a strong sense' (p. 5 above).
? ? 150
NOTES TO PAGE 10
? 4 Adorno always had a strong interest in gnostic ideas, although he men- tioned this mainly in conversations; when he was trying to persuade Hans Jonas to give a lecture on Marcionian gnosticism in 1959, he characterized his interest in the philologist from Sinope: 'Moreover, Valentinus' gnosticism is just as important to me as Marcion's, in which only a very specific motif interests me specially: the denunciation of the demiurge' (Letter to Hans Jonas, 12. 10. 1959). If it is remembered that the question 'whether one can still live after Auschwitz' (cf. Negative Dialectics, p. 362) is central to the 'Meditations on Metaphysics', the connection with the accusation of the 'just', cruel and malevolent God
by Marcion is obvious enough.
5 With the doctrine of the 'divinity as a coming-to-be' in his late meta-
physics, from the early 1920s, Scheler parted company with the per- sonal concept of God he had advocated earlier, in his Catholic phase: 'Man - a brief festival in the immense span of universal evolution - signifies . . . 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.
too, that it is happiness. When one later reaches such places, it is not there either, one does not find 'it'. Often they are just foolish villages. If there is still a single stable door open in them and a smell of a real live cow and dung and such things, to which this experience is no doubt attached, one must be very thankful today. But the curious thing is that, even if 'it' is not there, if one does not find in Monbrunn any
of the fulfilment which is stored up in its name, nevertheless, one is not disappointed. The reason, if I am interpreting it correctly, is that - and you must forgive me if I ramble a bit in this lecture, in just the way that Kant forbids6 - one is, as it were, too close, one is inside the phenomenon, and has the feeling that, being completely inside it, one cannot actually catch sight of it? Once, many years ago, in Minima Moralia, I wrote about thanking and gratitude, which have their dignity - and I did not mean dignity in the idealist sense - because the giving of thanks is the only relationship that consciousness can
have to happiness, whereas the person who is happy is too close to it to be able to have any standpoint towards it within consciousness. 8 At such moments one has a curious feeling that something is receding - as is also familiar from an old symbol of happiness, the rainbow - rather than that one has really been done out of it. I would say,
therefore, that happiness - and there is an extremely deep constella- tion between metaphysical experience and happiness - is something within objects and, at the same time, remote from them.
But as I mention this example to you, I become aware of how extraordinarily precarious such speculations are. I have just picked out a stratum of these experiences quite arbitrarily; another, perhaps
? LECTURE EIGHTEEN 141
? far more crucial one, is the experience of deja
did I see that before? that can be induced by a certain type of children's book. In such experiences one succumbs to the conditions of the empirical world; one succumbs to all the fallibility which attaches to one's own psychology, one's wishes, one's longing. All metaphysical experiences - I should like to state as a proposition here - are fallible. I would say, in general, that all experiences which have to be lived, which are not mere copies or reconstructions of that which is in any case, contain the possibility of error, the possibility that they can completely miss the mark. And, in much the same way as I indicated
earlier with regard to the concept of tradition, it may be one of the ! {;EVS? , the deceptions in which scientific-idealist thinking has enmeshed us, that we believe a piece of knowledge to rank higher the less it is liable to failure, to disappointment. It might well be that, according to this criterion, everything which really matters would be excluded as unworthy of being known; whereas in truth - so it seems to me - only what can be refuted, what can be disappointed, what can be wrong, has the openness I have spoken of/ that is, it is the only thing which matters. It is in the concept of openness, as that which is not already subsumed under the identity of the concept, that the possibil- ity of disappointment lies. And I should like to say that within the meaning of these reflections on the possibility of metaphysics there lies a peculiar affinity to empiricism. For empiricism, with its emphasis on empirical sources, implies an element of metaphysics at least in the sense that the essential knowledge is seen as that which does not coincide with concepts, but which, as it were, falls accidentally into my lap, and thus always includes the possibility that it might not do
so. Such knowledge therefore has an inherent fortuitousness, from which it derives an element of meaning which, according to the pre- valent logic, is excluded precisely by the concept of the accidental. Fallibility, I would say, is the condition of the possibility of such metaphysical experience. And it seems to attach most strongly to the weakest and most fragile experiences.
On the other hand, however, from the extreme doubtfulness of what I have just said, a doubtfulness which, I believe, is indispensable to thought if it wants to be anything at all, you might gain a critical insight which, from the opposed standpoint, sounds highly heretical. You all know that the critical theory of society, and especially its
popularized form in the modernistic vulgar theology of today, is fond of adducing the Hegelian and Marxian concept of rei(ication, and that,
for it, only what is entirely exempt from reification can be counted as knowledge or truth. But if you bear in mind the peculiarly fallible and unavoidably problematic nature of metaphysical experience that
vu, the feeling: When
?
?
142 LECTURE EIGHTEEN
? ? i
I have described, the concept of reification may, in a complementary way, take on a meaning which is far from purely derogatory. It is a meaning in which, as in Marx, the whole of idealism is contained, in that the assumption is made that even that which is not I, which is
not identical, must be able to resolve itself entirely, as it were, into the actual, present I, into the actus purus. That none of this is plain sailing, that these questions are not so simple - Hegel undoubtedly had an inkling of this in his later phase. And the traits of reactionary harshness we find so disturbing in Hegel are certainly connected to the realization that the moment of the complete dissolution of all objectivity in what might be called the living subject also contains a deceptive element, in the absolute presence of the subject in that which it is not. When I said earlier that pure mystical experience is a somewhat dubious matter, that it is far less pure and inward and far more concretely objective than one would expect from its concept, I was referring to this same deception.
What I am saying to you appears to be in sharp contradiction to the idea that cognition should necessarily be fallible if the resulting knowledge is to be worthy of being thought. And I would not presume, and certainly not in the miserably few minutes we have left, to resolve this contradiction. I would say, however, that precisely the polarity I am referring to - that, on the one hand, it is a condition of meta- physical experience that it can miss the mark, that it can be quite wrong; and that, on the other, it requires an objective moment, anti- thetical to it and incapable of being assimilated to it - that these two motifs together form the dialectical figure, the dialectical image,1O through which alone one can, perhaps, gain awareness of what is meant by the concept of metaphysical experience. The objective cat-
egories of theology are not only - as it appears from Hegel's early
theological writings published by Herman Nohlll - residues of the
positive moment which are then resolved into subjectivity, into life,
in a process of increasing, dialectical identification, but actually com-
plement the weakness of immanent dialectics: they reclaim, in a sense,
what is not assimilated by the dialectic and would, as the merely
other, be devoid of any determination. Thus, not only the ossified
society, but also the moment of the primacy of the object which I
have repeatedly mentioned,12 was precipitated in the objectivity of
the metaphysical categories. And between these two moments - on
the one hand the flashes of fallible consciousness which I illustrated
by the example of place names, and on the other the primacy of the
object - there seems to me to exist a curious constellation. True, it is
one which is discharged abruptly at certain moments, rather than being a merely contemplative entity which could be grasped as a kind
? ? ? LECTURE EIGHTEEN
143
? of categorial structure of a so-called matter of fact. If everything objective is volatilized by consciousness - and this applies especially to metaphysical objects - thought regresses to the subjectivism of the pure act. It then finally hypostatizes the mediation carried out by the
subject itself, as a kind of pure immediacy. This may help to explain the quite significant fact that Kant, who attempted in the Critique of Practical Reason to interpret metaphysical ideas as a full participation
of the subject, indeed, as nothing other than pure reason itself, finally moved almost imperceptibly to a position where he sought for that subjectivity precisely the objective correlatives that he had previously criticized and radically excluded. It is a remarkable fact that, in this way, even the concept of the highest good and the concept of human- ity are resurrected in the Critique of Practical Reason. 13 But despite all this it has to be said that, in the course of advancing enlightenment,
the possibility of metaphysical experience is tending to become paler and more desultory. If one reads Proust today, the accounts of such metaphysical experience, which play such an enormous role in his work - although even there they are far more bare and limited than one might expect - have a Romantic moment through which they are already exposed to criticism. It is as if the joy of finding that some- where some such thing as life were possible at all - and this is the counter-motif to reification - had lured the subject of the experience into directly equating these surviving traces of the life with the meaning
of life itself.
As a result, one will have to pursue metaphysical experience into a
stratum which originally was extremely alien to it. For in reality it now survives only negatively. I would say - and this must be under- stood very strictly and made into a kind of canon for metaphysical thinking itself - that the form in which metaphysical experience still manifests itself with any compelling force today is not that which has made itself suspect as a sphere of Romantic wishing, but is the ex- perience which leads to the question: Is that all? It is the experience which, if I might speak for once like an existentialist, perhaps bears the greatest resemblance, among the 'situations' we pass through,14 to the situation of fruitless waiting: that is no doubt the form in which
metaphysical experience manifests itself most strongly to us. It made an unforgettable impression on me when my composition teacher, Alban Berg, told me more than once that what he regarded as the crucial and most important parts of his own work, and the ones he liked best, were the bars in which he expressed situations of fruitless waiting. He experienced these things so deeply that they reached the threshold of consciousness, although, heaven knows, that is not re-
? quired of an artist. But the authenticity of even this is not guaranteed,
?
144
LECTURE EIGHTEEN
? for where there is no longer any life, where immediacy has been so truly abolished as in the world in which we exist, the temptation is doubly strong to mistake the remnants of life, or even the negation of the prevailing condition, for the absolute.
We reach here, if you like, the crucial distinction between the considerations I have been presenting to you and the Hegelian philo- sophy to which these considerations owe so much. It lies in the fact that Hegel's philosophy contains a moment by which that philosophy, despite having made the principle of determinate negation its vital nerve, passes over into affirmation and therefore into ideology: the belief that negation, by being pushed far enough and by reflecting itself, is one with positivity. That, Ladies and Gentlemen, the doctrine
of the positive negation, is precisely and strictly the point at which I refuse to follow Hegel. There are other such points, but in the context of this discussion this is the one to which I should refer. One might be inclined to think that if the present situation is really experienced as negatively as we all experience it, and as only I have taken it upon myself, as a kind of scapegoat, to express it (that is the only difference separating me from other people), one might think that by negating this negativity one had already attained the positive; and that is a very great temptation. And when I told you that the form of determin- ate negation is the only form in which metaphysical experience survives today, I myself was moving at least in the direction of that idea. But this transition is not itself compelling: for if I said that the negation of the negation is the positive, that idea would contain within itself a
thesis of the philosophy of identity and could only be carried through if I had already assumed the unity of subject and object which is supposed to emerge at the end. If, however, you take seriously the idea I put forward earlier today, that the truth of ideas is bound up
with the possibility of their being wrong, the possibility of their failure, you will see that this idea is invalidated by the proposition that, merely by negating the negation, I already have the positive. In that easelS one would be back in the sphere of false, deceptive and, I would say, mythical certainty, in which nothing can be wrong and in which, probably for that reason, everything one said would be all the more hopelessly lost. For thought there is really no other possibility, no other opportunity, than to do what the miner's adage forbids: to work one's way through the darkness without a lamp, without possessing the positive through the higher concept of the negation of the negation, and to immerse oneself in the darkness as deeply as one possibly can. For one thing is undoubtedly true: I told you that, where there is no longer life, the temptation to mistake its remnants for the absolute, for flashes of meaning, is extremely great - and I do not wish to take
? ? LECTURE EIGHTEEN 145
? that back. Nevertheless, nothing can be even experienced as living if it does not contain a promise of something transcending life. This transcendence therefore is, and at the same time is not - and beyond that contradiction it is no doubt very difficult, and probably impos-
sible, for thought to gO. 16
In saying that, Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the feeling that I have
reached the point where the insufficiency of my own reflections con- verges with the impossibility of thinking that which must nevertheless be thought. 17 And all I hope is that I may have given you at least an
idea of that convergence.
?
GS 1 GS 3
GS 5
GS 6 GS 8 GS 9. 1 GS 10. 1
GS 10. 2
GS 1 1 GS 20. 1 GS 20. 2 NaS 1. 1
Philosophische Fruhschriften, 3rd edn, 1996
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklarung. Philosophische Fragmente, 3rd edn, 1996
Zur Metakritik der ErkenntnistheorielDrei Studien zu Hegel, 4th edn, 1996
Negative DialektiklJargon der Eigentlichkeit, 5th edn, 1996 Soziologische Schriften I, 4th edn, 1 996
Soziologische Schriften 1. Erste Halfte, 4, 1975
Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I: PrismenlOhne Leitbild, 2nd edn, 1996
Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II: EingriffelStichworteiAnhang,
1977
Noten zur Literatur, 4th edn, 1996
Vermischte Schriften I, 1986
Vermischte Schriften II, 1986
Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2nd edn, 1994
EDITOR'S NOTES
? Abbreviations
Adorno's writings, when translated, are quoted from the English-language editions. When no English translation is available, the references are to the German editions, Gesammelte Schriften (edited by Rolf Tiedemann in collaboration with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz,
Frankfurt/Main 1970- ) and Nachgelassene Schriften (edited by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt/Main 1993- ), when included there. The follow- ing abbreviations are used:
? ? NOTES TO PAGES 1-3
147
? Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' ( 1 959), ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 1995
NaS IV. 4
NaS IV. 10
NaSIV. 15 EinleitungindieSoziologie(1968),ed. ChristophGodde,1993
Lecture One
1 Adorno is referring to Negative Dialectics, written between 1959 and 1966; in his lecture series in the summer semester of 1965 he is thinking in particular of 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (Adorno, Negative Dia-
lectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London 1990, pp. 361ff; cf. GS 6, pp. 354ff), on which he was working intensively in May 1965 and to which he referred in Lectures 13-18, held in July 1965 (see n. 9 below).
2 Apart from the discussion in 'Meditations on Metaphysics', Adorno deals with Kant's attitude to metaphysics above all in Lectures 4 and 5 in the series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' of 1 959 (cf. NaS IV. 4, pp. 57? ? ). The most lucid account of Kant's renewal of the foundations of metaphysics known to the Editor is to be found in an early lecture by Horkheimer, from the winter semester 1925/6 (cf. Max Horkheimer,
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, vol. 10: Nachgelassene Schriften 1914-1931, 2. Vorlesung iiber die Geschichte der deutschen idealistischen Philosophie [u. a. j, Frankfurt! Main 1990, pp. 24? ? ); Adorno is likely to have taken over Horkheimer's
account without questioning it.
3 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. ]. Hollingdale,
Harmondsworth 1961, p. 58 (although the term is translated here as 'afterworld'); a direct equation between metaphysics and the 'back- world' is to be found, for example, in Human, All Too Human: 'When we hear the subtle talk of the metaphysicians and backworldsmen, we certainly feel that we are the "poor in spirit"; but we also feel that ours is the heaven of change, with spring and autumn, winter and summer, while theirs is the backworld, with its grey, frosty, endless mists and shadows' (Nietzsche, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 2, Munich 1993, p. 386). Regarding this metaphor of Nietzsche's which Adorno was fond of quoting see NaS IV. 4, p. 165 and pp. 382f, and NaS IV. 15, p. 38, and finally Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie.
Zur Einleitung, ed. Rudolf zur Lippe, vol. 2, 5th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1989, p. 162.
4 Cf. GS 9. 1, p. 446 - Adorno also cites this statement by the test subject in 'Theses against occultism' in Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott, London 1974, pp. 238-44; dealing primarily with occultism in contem- porary society, the 'Theses' nevertheless contain nothing less than
Adorno's theory of the relationship of occultism to metaphysics, of the 'contamination of mind and existence, the latter becoming itself an attribute of mind' (ibid. , p. 243 ). Adorno's aphorism 'Occultism is the
Probleme der Moralphilosophie (1963), ed. Thomas Schroder, 1995
? ?
148
NOTES TO PAGES 4-5
? metaphysic of dunces' (ibid. , p. 241) has meanwhile appeared in the Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie as an example of his 'radical antagonism' to occultism, which, in fact, the authors find rather too
radical (d. H. Bender and W. Bonin, 'Okkultismus', in Hist. Wb. Philos. , vo! ' 6, Basle, Stuttgart 1984, co! . 1144f).
See Lecture 4.
6 Most probably an allusion to the book by Heimsoeth (present in
Adorno's library), which deals with the dispute over universals under the title 'Das Individuum'; d. Heinz Heimsoeth, Die sechs gro(5en Themen der abendlandischen Metaphysik und der Ausgang des
Mittelalters, 4th edn, Darmstadt 1958, pp. 172f? .
7 See Lecture 6, p. 38 above
8 See Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences of
1830: 'Thoughts can be called . . . objective thoughts and these include the forms which are considered in ordinary logic and are used only as forms of conscious thought. Logic therefore coincides with metaphysics, the science of things couched as thoughts which were supposed to ex- press the essences of things' (trans. from Hegel, Werke in 20 Banden, Frankfurt/Main 1969-71, vo! ' 8, pp. 80f). Or in the Introduction to
'The Objective Logic': 'The objective logic . . . takes the place . . .
of former metaphysics which was intended to be the scientific construc- tion of the world in terms of thoughts alone' (Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London/New York 1969, p. 63).
9 Adorno seldom expressed himself as explicitly on the systematic import- ance of this motif as in the lectures on 'Aesthetics' of 1958/9. Here he spoke of the necessity of gaining access to 'something like a philosophical prehistory of concepts which, in our view [i. e. his and Horkheimer's] should replace mere verbal definitions, which are always arbitrary and
non-binding'; as an example he mentions 'the theory of art as mimetic behaviour, developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 3539f). The lecture series on Philosophische Terminologie, held by Adorno over two semesters in 1962 and 1963, is his most extensive treatment of the 'prehistory' of philosophical concepts
(d. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie. Zur Einleitung, 2 vols, Frank-
furt/Main 1973, 1974). For other aspects of his idea of philosophical prehistory d. Rolf Tiedemann, ' ''Nicht die Erste Philosophie sondern eine letzte " . Anmerkungen zum Denken Adornos', in Theodor W. Adorno, 'Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse'. Ein philosophisches
Lesebuch, Frankfurt/Main 1997, pp. 16f.
10 Adorno dealt with Comte's 'law of three stages' again in Introduction
5
to Sociology, the lecture series held in the summer semester of 1968 (d. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund ]ephcott, Cambridge 2000, p. 131).
Comte characterizes the transition from fetishism to polytheism as fol-
11
lows: 'The transformation of fetishes into gods endows each thing with an abstract peculiarity, instead of the life attributed to it. This makes it susceptible to animation by a supernatural power. Each god assumes a
NOTES TO PAGES 6-10
149
? quality common to many fetishes, and such a concept demands a metaphysical manner of thinking' (Auguste Comte, Die Soziologie. Die positive Philosophie im Auszug, ed. Friedrich Blaschke, Leipzig 1933, p. 193).
12 On Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy and the revival of Aristotle in the Christian Middle Ages, d. Otfried H6ffe, Aristoteles, Munich 1996, pp. 269ff; on the former especially Ernst Bloch, 'Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke', in E. Bloch, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz, Frankfurt/Main 1972 (Gesamtausgabe vol. 7),
pp. 479ff.
13 On the closing of the school of Proclus in Athens by an edict of Justinian
in AD 529 one should consult Zeller, who was also Adorno's favourite authority in other matters of Greek philosophy (d. Eduard Zeller, Die Philosophie der Criechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung [hence- forth 'Zeller,'] 3. Teil, 2. Abt. , Die nacharistotelische Philosophie. 2. Halfte, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of the 5th edn], pp. 915f); for more details on the Persian exile chosen by Simplikios and six other philosophers see Ueberweg-Praechter (d. Friedrich Ueberweg, Crundri(5 der Geschichte der Philosophie, 1. Teil: Die Philosophie des Altertums, 12th edn, ed. Karl Praechter, Berlin 1926, pp. 634f).
14 As a means of 'noting' what metaphysics was, as understood by Adorno, the reader is referred definitively to Lecture 33 in Philosophische Terminologie, his most concise 'explanation of the term metaphysics', which also defines its subject matter (d. Adorno, Philosophische Ter- minologie, vol. 2, pp. 160ff).
Lecture Two
1 No transcriptions of the lectures on 13 and 18 May have been pre- served; instead the brief notes on which Adorno based the lecture are reproduced.
2 This passage connects with the discussion of the formalization of the concept of metaphysics at the end of the first lecture (pp. 8f above).
3 This characterization of the 'usual definition' of metaphysics already contains a clear allusion to Aristotle's Metaphysics, to which two-thirds of the lecture are devoted: the science which investigates the ultimate ground or cause of existing things (d. Aristotle's Metaphysics, trans.
John Warrington, London 1956, p. 54 [A 2, 982 b 8f]) is intrinsically a 'fundamental science', and in Aristotle's terminology is called the 'primary science' (d. ibid. , pp. 155ff [E 1, 1026 a 24]). IIpw'T'Y) ovala, 'primary substance', is used by Aristotle as a synonym for ElSa,: 'By "form" I mean a thing's essence and primary substance' (ibid. , p. 181
[Z 7, 1032 b If]): metaphysics, according to Aristotle, is the science of forms; according to Adorno, it 'is essentially concerned with concepts, and with concepts in a strong sense' (p. 5 above).
? ? 150
NOTES TO PAGE 10
? 4 Adorno always had a strong interest in gnostic ideas, although he men- tioned this mainly in conversations; when he was trying to persuade Hans Jonas to give a lecture on Marcionian gnosticism in 1959, he characterized his interest in the philologist from Sinope: 'Moreover, Valentinus' gnosticism is just as important to me as Marcion's, in which only a very specific motif interests me specially: the denunciation of the demiurge' (Letter to Hans Jonas, 12. 10. 1959). If it is remembered that the question 'whether one can still live after Auschwitz' (cf. Negative Dialectics, p. 362) is central to the 'Meditations on Metaphysics', the connection with the accusation of the 'just', cruel and malevolent God
by Marcion is obvious enough.
5 With the doctrine of the 'divinity as a coming-to-be' in his late meta-
physics, from the early 1920s, Scheler parted company with the per- sonal concept of God he had advocated earlier, in his Catholic phase: 'Man - a brief festival in the immense span of universal evolution - signifies . . . 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.
