No More Learning

Cf. p. 19 above.
At the 12th conference of German sociologists, held in Heidelberg on
15-17 October 1954, Adorno read a paper 'Zum Ideologie-Problem' (GS 8, pp. 457ff, under the title Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre); according to the proceedings, published in the KaIner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie, vol. 6, no. 3/4 (1953/4), Alfred Weber did not read a paper, but made several contributions to a 'round-table discussion on the problem of ideology'. The remarks by Weber to which Adorno refers, which unfor-
tunately are reported only briefly by Leopold von Wiese, seem to have been made in this discussion. Only one reference to them, in a contribu- tion to the discussion by Arnold Hauser, has survived ( 'But to come back to the example of the dispute over universals given by Herr Weber - it is probably the best example of how elements conditioned by existence
in which
? ? " ,
NOTES TO PAGES 38-39 159
? permeate thought. Nominalism, too, would never have come into being through its own intrinsic logic, had not the individual as such been striving to emancipate himself' [ibid. , p. 395] ).
9 Alfred Weber was born in 1868.
10 In 1965 Karl Heinz Haag (b. 1924), whose doctorate had been awarded
by Horkheimer and Adorno in 1951, taught philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt/Main, where he had quali- fied as a lecturer in 1956. His most recent publication had been a contribution to the Adorno Festschrift of 1963; it touches on Adorno's discussions many times, but does not contain the exact formulation in question (for similar formulations ef. Haag, 'Das Unwiederholbare', in Zeugnisse. Theodor W. Adorno zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Max Horkheimer, Frankfurt/Main 1963, pp. 152ff; also Haag,
Philosophischer Idealismus. Untersuchungen zur Hegelschen Dialektik mit Beispielen aus der Wissenschaft der Logik, Frankfurt/Main 1967, pp. 7ff); it is also possible that Adorno was referring here to an oral contribution that Haag may have made at Adorno's advanced seminar in philosophy, which he attended regularly.
11 'The relationship of genesis to validity [Genesis und Geltung] is dis- cussed frequently by Adorno, for example, at length with reference to Husserl in Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie [ef. GS 5, pp. 79ff], and also in his introduction to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology
[trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby, London 1976], one of his most recent works' (NaS IV. 4, p. 397). On genesis and validity in Kant ef. Lecture
15 on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' (ibid. , pp. 242ff).
12 Max Scheler (1874-1928) was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Frankfurt/Main as successor to Hans Cornelius early in 1928, but died
there on 19 May the same year. Adorno briefly played with the idea of qualifying as a lecturer under Scheler, as we learn from a letter to Alban Berg of 14 May 1928:
The question now is whether Max Scheler, freshly appointed to the Chair at Frankfurt, and of whom you must know through Franz Blei or through essays by Hermann Bahr, and who is certainly an exceptional man, will supervise my Habilitation. There are some reasons to suppose he will, as many of the influential people here will support me; but it is far from certain, as Scheler will bring his own candidates with him from Cologne. Whether my present, not exactly Schelerian work (an epistemology of psychoanalysis) will be suitable is still quite uncertain, and it would be highly inconvenient for me if this book, written primarily with this pur- pose in mind, should completely miss its objective and if I had to write
something else - although with Scheler I could get by with fewer conces-
sions. All the same, to be frank, I really worry very little about all this,
and if my whole Habilitation - which for me is a social affair but not a
practical or economic necessity - were to come to nothing, I should be
heartily indifferent and even, au fond, glad. (Theodor W. Adorno and
Alban Berg, BriefwechseI 1 925-1 935, ed. Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt/Main 1997, p. 169)
? ? ( . ,j,
?
? 160
1 3
NOTES TO PAGES 39-40
That Adorno always regarded Scheler as an 'exceptional man' is also
shown by a dissertation report of 1965, in which he defends the philo-
sopher against his critics: 'The wealth of philosophical experience which animates Scheler's work and which he strives to organize is dismissed
? 14
too readily. The author ought to have recognized the obvious dictions and rifts in Scheler's doctrine as reflections of objective ones, and interpreted them as such' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, 'Amtliche
Schriften' ) .
Adorno probably had in mind Scheler's switch to a materialist phenom- enology, for which the eidetic sphere of Husserl's phenomenology, which was content to remain within the merely logical sphere, had been aban- doned in favour of a 'renewal of intuitive Platonism . . . though one from which the Platonic reification of Ideas and all mythical adjuncts had been completely eliminated' (Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7:
Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Die deutsche Philosophie der
Gegenwart, ed. Manfred S. Frings, Berne, Munich 1973, p. 310). Scheler sought to erect on intuitively perceived essences, which were strictly distinguished from the species of logic, a dualistic metaphysics, a 'realm of being' organized hierarchically on scholastic principles, to which finite things stood in a 'relationship of being' as 'participants' in the Platonic fLE{}EtL<;. 'Knowledge is a relationship of being,' he writes in Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, using formulations he repeated in his last book, Die philosophische Weltanschauung, 'it is a relation- ship of participation by an existent in the thusness (Sosein) of another existent, through which no change in this thusness is posited' (Scheler,
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8: Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, 3rd edn, Berne, Munich 1980, p. 203; also d. vol. 9: Spate Schriften, p. 111). Such knowledge, which would represent a validity in itself, would indeed be separated from its genesis by a xwpwfL6<;. However, the late Scheler seems to want to move away from this position again, as in texts published posthumously under the title Zusatze aus den nachgelassenen Schriften:
'Eternal truths' are . . . not assumed by US - even with regard to the truths which touch on genuine relationships of being. According to our doc- trine, the supra-singular spirit has no idea ante res (which, as in the theistic system, would only realize its creative will), but actively produces the essentialities which are represented through the world only in and with the realization of the world in absolute time, so that temporality, not eternity, obtains . . . even in the realm of essentialities. (ibid. , p. 289)
Cf. Edmund Husser! , Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, vol. 1, Prolegomena to Pure Logic, London/New York 1970. Also see the discussions in Adorno's Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie referred to in n. 11.
Gunter Ralfs comments as follows on the relationship of genesis and validity in Aristotle from the philological viewpoint:
contra-
15
NOTES TO PAGES 40-41
161
? ? 16
17 1 8
Aristotle was convinced that the temporal genesis and development of human knowledge was the exact inverse of the metaphysical and logical relationship of things: what I first perceive sensibly in things, the 1Tp6TEPOV
1TpO> ? fLiis, is, in the metaphysical structure of the phenomenon exam- ined, the vaTEpov <plJaE! and '\6ycp; what is before our eyes points back to what it was originally. Aristotle therefore formulates the principle that the 1Tp6TEPOV <pDa? ! is the vaTEpov 1TpO> ? fLii> . . . ; i. e. the original being is perceived last. Aristotle therefore distinguishes between the origin and the grounds of knowledge. He thus arrives at the deep insight that the highest and first principles reveal themselves last, as principles, at the very end of the temporal development: the 1TPWTOV '\6ycp is the vaTEpov Xp6vcp. (Gunter Ralfs, 'Was bedeutet die Aristotelische Formel TO T{ ? v Elva! ? ', in Ralfs, Lebensformen des Geistes. Vortrage und Abhandlungen, ed. Hermann Glockner, Cologne 1964, p. 33)
Aristotle, Metaphysics, p. 58 (last sentence modified) (A, 983 b 27ff). Adorno also uses this quotation in the chapter on freedom in Negative Dialectics, p. 216.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, p. 346 (r8, 1012 b 31); also d. ibid. , A 8 1073 a; Physica VIII 5, 256 b 13ff; De anima III 10, 433 b.
The unsatisfactoriness of Aristotle's solution to the problem of TOOE TL and Eloo, is formulated concisely by Haag:
For Platonic idealism the Form, as the only entity susceptible to cogni- tion, was at the same time the truly existent. Aristotle wanted to break with this. The roOf TI, the res singularis, which did not coincide with the Form, was to be the truly real. But this intention could not be main- tained. The particular was too radically estranged from the universal to mean anything on its own account. Only the ElOos offered intelligible content. The unknownness of matter and of the individual compelled Aristotle to conceive them as determined by form, the structure of which they adopt. Their own meaning was thereby reduced to that of form. The problem of the synthesis of unity and diversity, the abolition of the Platonic chorismos, remained unsolved. ( Haag, Philosophischer Idealismus, p. 8)
19 On the question of the substantiality of the odTEpm ouaLm d. the passage quoted by Zeller in Lecture 5, n. 13 and its continuation:
The genera can be called substances only derivatively, in that they represent the common essence of certain substances. This is more strongly the case the closer they are to the single substance, so that the species merit that name more than the genera. However, if the strict concept of the sub- stance is applied they do not deserve it at all, as they are constituted by single beings, and because it is true of them as of any universal that they do not express a This but a Such, not substance but the constitution of
substance. (Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 306? )
20 At this point Adorno distances himself from Zeller, who expressly denied that the 'idea of mediation' was present in Aristotle:
? 162
NOTES TO PAGES 42-45
? Form and matter require . . . no further mediation to form a whole, but are immediately united: form is the closer determination of matter indeterminate in itself, which directly absorbs the formal determination it lacks. When the possible becomes the real, the two do not stand opposite each other as two things, but possibility, considered in terms of its mat- ter, is one and the same thing as that of which its form is the reality. (Cf. Zeller 11. 2, p. 323)
Lecture Seven
1 The following half-page is based largely on conjecture, as the text source contains a large number of gaps, at least some of which must be the result of a malfunction of the recording apparatus.
2 Adorno's fundamental critique of the question of the 'absolutely primary thing' and of the 'strong use of the concept of the first' can be consulted in the Introduction to Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (GS 5, pp. 12ff, especially pp. 15f).
3 An allusion to Marx's polemic Misere de la philosophie. Reponse a la Philosophie de la misere de M. Proudhon, published in 1847, which included the first systematic account of historical materialism; in the second part, especially, it comprised a critique of philosophy as prac- tised by the Hegelian school, which Marx confronted with the sense of history which Hegel himself had possessed. Whereas Marx drew from the poverty of philosophy the conclusion that it should be replaced by
history, for Adorno, who held fast to philosophy in a changed historical situation, the 'poverty of philosophy' consisted, as the following sen- tences demonstrate, in the objective compulsion linking thought to the discursive sphere, from which, nevertheless, it must detach itself if it is to become materialist in earnest; also see the references in the next note.
4 On the far-reaching consequences of this idea - that all philosophy 'by virtue of its procedures' necessarily 'pre-judges' in favour of idealism (GS 6, p. 531) - in Adorno's thought cf. the Introduction to Negative
Dialectics, pp. 1 1ff; also d. Tiedemann, 'Begriff Bild Name', p. 103.
5 Cf. Adorno's Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre (GS 8, pp. 457ft) and the revised version in the volume of the Institut fur Sozialforschung,
Soziologische Exkurse. Nach Vortragen und Diskussionen, Frankfurt/
Main 1956 (Frankfurter Beitrage zur Soziologie, Bd. 4), pp. 162ff.
6 In vol. 1 of Logical Investigations, which, however, was not published
until 1900; d. the reference in Lecture 6, n. 14.
7 But see Lecture 6 , n . 1 3 . Regarding Adorno's critique of the 'two-
worlds theory' of the late Scheler, see Negative Dialectics:
A sociology of knowledge . . . denies not only the objective structure of society but the idea of objective truth and its cognition. . . . Classification serves the tel quel localization of the mind. Such a reduction of so-called 'forms of consciousness' goes perfectly with philosophical apologetics. The excuse of the sociology of knowledge - that the truth or untruth of
? ? ? ? NOTES TO PAGES 45-49 163
? philosophical teaching has nothing to do with social conditions - remains undisturbed; relativism allies itself with the division of labor. The late Scheler did not hesitate to exploit this in his 'two-worlds theory'. (ibid. , p. 198)
8 The formulation is quoted from Benjamin's notes for the Arcades project: 'A decisive rejection of the concept of "timeless truth" is in order.
Yet truth is not only - as Marxism claims - a temporal function of knowledge, but is bound to a temporal core, which is contained both in the known and in the knowing subject' (Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte
Werke, unter Mitwirkung von Theodor W. Adorno und Gershom Scholem hrsg. von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhauser, vol. 5, 4th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1996, p. 578).
9 Not identified as a quotation; but d. , for example, ? 1 5 of Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie, in which the 'genuine reflection of the philosopher on what he really aims at' is described as follows: 'The sedimented conceptuality, which
is taken for granted as the ground of his private and unhistorical work, is to be brought back to life in its hidden historical meaning' (Husser! , Logical Investigations, vol. 8, pp. VI, 72f).
10 See Lecture 4.
11 Three Ethics by Aristotle have been passed down: whereas the authen-
ticity of parts of the Magna Moralia is disputed, the Eudemian Ethics is regarded as an early version of the Nicomachean Ethics, which con- tains the most extensive discussions.
12 In the dialogues Protagoras (St. 350 Bf? ) and Laches (St. 191 Df? ); however, Aristotle himself defines avopE{a more unambiguously in this sense: 'We see that the coward, the daredevil and the man of courage face the same situation, but how they face it is different. The first two represent too little and too much, while the third steers a middle course
and therefore conducts himself correctly' (Nicomachean Ethics, III 10, 1116 a).
That a fundamental motif of Adorno's whole philosophy stems from this idea can be seen from a comparison with the opening of the central second part of Negative Dialectics:
There is no Being without entities. 'Something' - as a cognitatively indis- pensable substrate of any concept, including the concept of Being - is the utmost abstraction of the subject-matter that is not identical with think- ing, an abstraction not to be abolished by any further thought process. Without 'something' there is no thinkable formal logic, and there is no way to cleanse this topic of its metalogical rudiment. (ibid. , p. 135)
Adorno sought, in the reflection of traditional philosophy, to take fur- ther the analysis of the 'strong philosophical concept' 'in the direction of nonconceptuality' (ibid. ).
The relationship between form and content is the same, i. e. 'external'
(see p. 46 above) in Kant, as Adorno repeatedly argues in his lectures, Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' (d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 79ff).
? 13
14
?
? 164
NOTES TO PAGES 50-53
? 15
1 2
3
In his years at Oxford (1934-8) Adorno came across the influence of the school of Francis Herbert Bradley (1846-1924), the important Hegelian. The name of the 'Oxford philosopher' referred to here is not
in the lecture transcript; Adorno probably named Geoffrey Reginald Gilchrist Mure, and was thinking of his book A Study of Hegel's Logic
(Oxford 1950).
Lecture Eight
See pp. 19f above.
'I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith. The dogmatism of metaphysics, that is, the pre-
conception that it is possible to make headway in metaphysics without a previous criticism of pure reason, is the source of all that unbelief, always very dogmatic, which wars against morality' (Immanuel Kant's
Critique ofPure Reason, p. 29 [B XXX]).
The German lecture transcript has the words 'immer auch das' instead of 'immer auf das' and some omission marks. The amendment is based on Adorno's notes for the lecture (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo
10792). Also d. the corresponding passage in Zeller:
Just as . . . Plato had distinguished knowledge, as cognition of the eternal and necessary, from imagination or opinion, whose sphere is the accidental, so, too, did Aristotle. For him, as for Plato, knowledge arises from wonderment, from the derangement of commonplace ideas, and for him, too, its object is the universal and the necessary; the accidental cannot be knowledge, only opinion. (Cf. Zeller 11. 2, p. 162)
The Greek quotation is missing from the transcript; here it is taken from Adorno's lecture notes (d. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10792); in Aristotle d. Met. e 8, 1050 b 11? .
See p. 75 above.
In his Formal and Transcendental Logic of 1929 Husser! distinguishes
between the contingent and the formal a priori; in defining the 'judicatively cognizing subjectivity' he encounters
restrictive essential structures that fall under the heading of pure reason and, in particular, pure judicative reason. Such a subjectivity also in- volves as a presupposition a continual and essentially necessary relatedness to some hyletic components or other; as apperceptional foundations for the possible experiences that judging necessarily presupposes. Therefore, if we define the concept of form, as a principle, by the essentially neces- sary components of any rational subjectivity whatever, the concept hyle
(exemplified by every 'Datum of sensation') is a form-concept and not what we shall define as the opposite of this, a contingent concept. On the other hand, there is no essential requirement that a judicatively cognizing subjectivity . . . be capable of sensing colors or sounds, that it be capable
? ? 4
5 6
? ? NOTES TO PAGES 53-57 165
? of sensible feelings having just such and such a differentia, or the like - though the concept of such matters too can be framed as apriori (as freed from everything empirically factual). Accordingly they too have their Apriori, which, however, is contingent and not an Apriori of pure reason; or, as we may also say, introducing an old word that tended blindly in the same direction, it is not an 'innate' Apriori. (Edmund Husser! , Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns, The Hague 1 969, p. 30)
7 Adorno is thinking of the 'apriori of the emotional' which Scheler advocated in opposition to Kant's 'equating of the aprioristic with the conceptual', of 'apriorism with rationalism':
Our entire mental life, and not just objective cognition and thought as cognition of being, which has pure acts and laws of action in accordance with its own nature and content, and independently of the fact of human organization. The emotional aspects of mind, feeling, preferring, loving, hating and willing, also have an original a-priori content which they do not derive from 'thinking', and which ethics can identify quite indepen- dently of logic. There is an a priori 'ordre du coeur' or 'Logique du coeur',
as Blaise Pascal aptly puts it. (Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2, Bernel Munich 1980, p. 82)
8 Adorno was probably thinking here of his teacher Hans Cornelius, as the next example cited, referring to the optical similarity series, seems to prove; d. the reference to Cornelius's commentary on Kant in NaS IV. 4, pp. 366f, n. 39.
9 Cf. the discussion on the possibility of synthetic a priori judgements, which nevertheless stem from experience, in Adorno's lectures, Kants
'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' (NaS IVA, pp. 49f).
10 See the opening of the second part of Negative Dialectics, cited in
Lecture 7, n. 13, and the ensuing discussion of the indissolubility of the
'something' .
11 On Kant's distinction, d. the 'Postulates of empirical thought in general',
according to which possibility and reality are 'categories of modality', which 'have the peculiarity that, in determining an object, they do not in the least enlarge the concept to which they are attached as predicates. They only express the relation of the concept to the faculty of know- ledge': '1. That which agrees with the formal conditions of experience, that is, with the conditions of intuition and of concepts, is possible. 2. That which is bound up with the material conditions of experience,
that is, with sensation, is actual' (Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, p. 239 (A 218f, B 265f). In other words, 'The postulate bearing on the knowledge of things as actual does not, indeed, demand immedi- ate perception, and, therefore, sensation. . . . In the mere concept of a thing no mark of its existence is to be found' (ibid. , pp. 242-3 [A 225, B 272]).
12 Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 384ff (A 406ff, B 433ff).
13
? ?
See p. 66 above.
166
NOTES TO PAGES 57-63
? 14
Cf. Fr. 1 of Anaximander of Miletus: 'The beginning and origin of existing things is O:TrELpOV (the boundlessly indeterminate). But whereof existing things are become, therein also they pass away according to their guilt; for they render each other just punishment and penance according to the ordinance of time' (Diels/Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th edn, vol. 1, p. 89). Aristotle uses the term in Meta- physics K 10, 1066 a 35 (d. Aristotle, Metaphysics, pp. 367ft) and elsewhere; also d. the Physics, which contains no reference to a sub- stantial infinite.
Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 409ff (A 444ff, B 472ft). Adorno discusses the third antinomy in Negative Dialectics (d. pp. 244ff) and, above all, in the lectures Probleme der Moralphilosophie
See pp. 40f above. On the theory of the unmoved mover d. esp. Klaus Oehler, Der Unbewegte Beweger des Aristoteles, Frankfurt/Main 1984. Wilhelm Weischedel's main work, Der Gott der Philosophen. Grundlegung einer philosophischen Theologie im Zeitalter des Nihilismus, 2 vols, reprint of 3rd edn, Darmstadt 1994, is devoted to the connection between metaphysics and theology; on Aristotle d. ibid. ,
vol. 1, pp. 54ff.
The scholastic doctrine of the analogia entis, an official dogma of the Church since 1 2 1 5 , regulates the correspondences between God and that which He has created in terms of similarity and dissimilarity; the theorem contains in essence the core content of ontology as it developed from the Pre-Socratics, to reach a high point and a turning point in St Thomas Aquinas. Cf. e. g. Gunther Mensching, Thomas von Aquin, Frankfurt/Main, New York 1995 (Reihe Campus Einfuhrungen, Bd. 1087), pp. 94ff.
Lecture Nine
See p. 55 above.
In his Ideas for a Philosophy ofNature of 1797 Schelling writes: 'with the removal of the problem of how matter is originally possible, the problem of a possible universe is also removed' (Schellings Werke, Munich 1956, p. 190). And:
Objects themselves can be considered as products of forces, causing the phantasm of the thing in itself, which is supposed to be the cause of our representations, to vanish of its own accord. Indeed, what can have any effect on mind except mind itself, or something related to it by nature? It is therefore necessary to conceive of matter as a product of forces, since force is the only non-sensible aspect of objects, and mind can only encounter what is analogous to itself. (ibid. , p. 226)
Cf. Kroner's interpretation: 'The notion of the forces by means of which matter is constructed is nothing other than an attempt by the mind
? 16 17
18
? 1 2
? 15
(d. NaS IV. 10, pp. 54ft).
NOTES TO PAGES 65-67
167
? ? to reconstruct in thought the original synthesis produced in perception. The true concept of matter would be the one which re-established that perception' (d. Richard Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel, 2 vols in 1 vol. , 2nd edn, Tiibingen 1961, vol. 2, p. 25). On the changes undergone by the theory of matter in Schelling's natural philosophy d. Kroner, ibid. ,
pp. 23ff.
3 See the first of the 'Postulates of empirical thought in general': 'That
which agrees with the formal conditions of experience, that is, with the conditions of intuition and of concepts, is possible,' referred to in n. 1 1 above.
4 On this 'most famous of Kant's formulations' d. Adorno's ninth lecture on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' (NaS IV. 4, pp. 147f). On Kant's 'Copernican revolution', ibid. , pp. 55f passim and Negative Dialectics, pp. 247f.
5 Cf. Metaphysics Ll 4, 1015 a 5ff: 'Nature . . . is attributed to those things . . . which are composed of matter and form. It consists of primary matter [7TpWT'! ] VA'! ]] 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.