No More Learning

' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Paul Tillich to Adorno, undated [co early October 1 965] ) . From Adorno's reply:
The word-of-God theology in the sense you refer to, which, by the way, had been prepared by Heidegger since his 'turning point', I reject no less than you do. The mystical conception of language of which it is so remin- iscent has meaning only in the context of a positive theology. Otherwise the philosophy of language becomes something like a fetishism of lan- guage. What is the word of God supposed to mean without God? No, that won't do, and not only will it finally lead to a resurrection of the liberal-secular moralization of theology, but these theologians will make common cause with the logical positivists, for whom language has a very similar function, namely to replace the subject. (9. 10. 1965, to Paul Tillich)
Probably an allusion to the metaphor used by Kleist to describe his acquaintance with 'the new, so-called Kantian philosophy' (d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 376f, n. 99).
Cf. Karl Barth, Der Romerbrief, 1st version 1919, 2nd version 1920; now 15th edn, Zurich 1989.
7 The text source reads 'Konstantin Brunn', but undoubtedly the Zurich Professor of Systematic and Practical Theology Emil Brunner (1889- 1966) is meant; he was one of the co-founders of dialectical theology,
and was also a participant, with Adorno and Horkheimer, in the so- called Frankfurt conversation of 1931 on the 'meeting' of Protestant theology with the proletariat and with secular culture; d. 'Das Frank- furter Gesprach', in Paul Tillich, Briefwechsel und Streitschriften.
Theologische, philosophische und politische Stellungnahmen und Gesprache, ed. Renate Albrecht and Rene Tautmann, Frankfurt/Main
1983, pp. 314ff).
8 Ferdinand Ebner (1882-1931), an Austrian primary school teacher and
Catholic linguistic philosopher, was a member of the circle associated
with the periodical Der Brenner.
9 Friedrich Gogarten ( 1 887-1 967), a Protestant theologian and pupil of
Ernst Troeltsch. Since 1933 Gogarten had held a Chair at Gbttingen.
10 Adorno is thinking primarily of Gogarten, who wrote in 1933 on the 'unity of Gospel and national character', arguing that 'we must strive, bound by God's words, to perceive in the great events of our days a new task which our Lord has set for our Church' (quoted by Erich Trier [review]: 'Friedrich Gogarten, Einheit von Evangelium und Volkstum? ' Hamburg 1933, in ZeitschriftfurSozialforschung3 [1934],
5
6
p. 307 [vol. 2]).
? ? 11
12 13
14 15
Adorno is referring to Schweppenhauser's doctoral thesis, not published until 1 967, and especially to the last chapter, entitled 'Postscript' ( cf. Her- mann Schweppenhauser, Kierkegaards Angriffaufdie Spekulation. Eine Verteidigung, Frankfurt/Main 1967; 2nd, revised version, Munich 1993). First published in 1902; now in Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Prosa II, ed. Herbert Steiner, Frankfurt/Main 1959 (Gesammelte Werke in Einzelausgaben), pp. 7ff.
Adorno is speaking of H. G. Adler (1910-88) and his book
Theresienstadt 1 94 1 - 1 945. Das A ntlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte Soziologie Psychologie (Tiibingen 1955). On H. G. Adler also cf. GS 20. 2, p. 495; on Beckett's statement referred to in the fol-
lowing text cf. Negative Dialectics, pp. 367f.
See Lecture 14, n. 11. In a letter of 24. 5. 1947 Horkheimer reported on his reading of Der SS-Staat, cf. Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 17: Briefwechsel 1941-1948, Frankfurt/Main 1996, p. 814.
The passage Adorno is referring to is in ? 28 of the Critique of
Judgement:
Nature considered in an aesthetical judgment as might has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime. If nature is to be judged by us as dynamically sublime, it must be represented as exciting fear. . . . But we can regard an object as fearful, without being afraid ofit; viz. if we judge of it in such a way that we merely think a case in which we would wish
to resist it, and yet in which all resistance would be altogether vain. [Adorno annotated the last sentence in his copy with: 'Critique ofJudge- ment: rather: the image mediates the fear concealed in reality'. J Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening, rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like; these exhibit our faculty of resistance as insignificantly small in comparison with their might. But the sight of them is the more attractive, the more fearful it is, provided only that we are in security. (Kant's Kritik ofJudgment, trans. ]. H. Bernard, London/New York 1 892,
pp. 123-5)
Adorno annotated the last paragraph in the margin: 'Like the poetry of the young Goethe. ' Cf. NaS 1. 1, p. 243, and ibid. , n. 284.
Part of the sentence has been omitted from the text source.
? August Strindberg's novel Black Banners (cf. A. Strindberg, Schwarze Fahnen, Munich/Leipzig 1916, p. 254).
NOTES TO PAGES 122-130 183
? ? 1 6 1 7
1
Lecture Seventeen
Allusion to Schelling'S writings on 'Die Weltalter' (see the reference in Lecture 2, n. 6) on which Adorno and Horkheimer had held their advanced philosophy seminar in the winter semester of 1960/1.
?
184
NOTES TO PAGES 130-131
? 2
3 4 5
Cf. Franz Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente II in der Fassung der Handschriften, ed. Jost Schillemeit, Frankfurt/Main 1 992, p. 123: 'To have faith in progress does not mean to have faith that any progress has yet taken place. That would not be faith. '
Published in London, 1948. Conjectural reading.
Cf. ? 53 of Being and Time:
if by Being towards death we do not have in view an 'actualizing' of death, neither can we mean 'dwelling upon the end in its possibility'. This is the way one comports oneself when one 'thinks about death', ponder- ing over when and how this possibility may perhaps be actualized. Of course, such brooding over death does not fully take away from it its character as a possibility. Indeed, it always gets brooded over as something that is coming; but in such brooding we weaken it by calculating how we are to have it at our disposal. (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 305-6; d. Adorno's The Jargon of Authenticity, where this formulation is quoted
(ibid. , p. 131)
The National Socialist Ernst Krieck (1882-1947), professor at the Piidagogische Akademie in Frankfurt/Main since 1928, had become rector of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitiit in 1933. In a report on Arnold Gehlen, Horkheimer refers to the same quotation when he compares Gehlen's theory of institutions with 'Krieck's thesis' 'that only sacrifice makes us free, sacrifice for its own sake' (Horkheimer,
Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 8 : Briefwechsel 1 949-73, Frankfurt/Main 1996, p. 420). Whether the quotation is correctly attributed to Krieck, in whose work it has not been traced, seems doubtful in view of a passage in The Jargon of Authenticity: 'In 1938 a National Socialist functionary wrote, in a polemical variation on a Social Democratic phrase: " Sacrifice will make us free" '; the source given is: 'd. Herbert Marcuse's critique in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, vol. VII (1938), p. 408'. However, Marcuse's critique is of a book by Franz B6hm (Anti-Cartesianismus. Deutsche Philosophie im Widerstand, Leipzig 1938); as a review of a book by Krieck begins on the next page, a lapse
of memory by both Horkheimer and Adorno seems likely.
Cf. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, p. 1 3 8 : 'Death is the possibil- ity of the absolute impossibility of Dasein. ' (Quoted from Being and Time, ? 50. )
Adorno probably has a passage from ? 47 of Being and Time in mind:
Yet when someone has died, his Being-no-longer-in-the-world (if we understand it in an extreme way) is still a Being, but in the sense of the Being-just-present-at-hand-and-no-more of a corporeal Thing. . . . The end of the entity qua Dasein is the beginning of the same entity qua some- thing present-at-hand. . . . From a theoretical point of view, even the corpse which is present-at-hand is still a possible object for the student of patho- logical anatomy, whose understanding tends to be oriented to the idea of life. (ibid. , pp. 281-2)
? 6
7 8
? ? NOTES TO PAGES 132-134 9 Cf. the following passage from ? 54:
185
? ? Man alone carries about with him in abstract concepts the certainty of his death, and yet, most strangely, this certainty arouses anxiety in him only at isolated moments when some cause brings it vividly to his imagination. Against the mighty voice of nature reflection can do little. In man too, as in the animal which cannot think, prevails the certainty sprung from his innermost consciousness, that he is nature, is the world itself, so that no-one is noticeably troubled by the idea of their certain and never distant death, but each carries on his life as if he must live for ever. . . . (Schopenhauer, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 1, pp. 388f)
10 In his essay on Bloch's Spuren Adorno connected this motif to the sections entitled 'Kleine Grille' and 'Weiter geben' in that work:
In the traces which the experience of individual consciousness helps to unfold, the rescue of illusion has its centre in what the book on utopia called the encounter with self. The subject, man, he argues, is not himself at all; he is illusory both as an unreal entity which has not yet emerged from possibility, and as a reflection of what he could be. Nietzsche's idea of the human being as something which must be overcome is modulated into a sphere without violence: 'for man is something which has yet to be found'. (GS 11, p. 238)
The reason for his non-identity with himself, however, is the material-
IStlC one
that human beings in a universal exchange society are not themselves but agents of the law of value. For in history up to now, which Bloch would not hesitate to call prehistory, humanity was an object, not a subject. 'But no one is what he thinks, and even less what he represents. And indeed, all are inclined to be too much in favour of what they have become, not too little. ' (ibid. , p. 239)
11 On the function of education in the social philosophy of Helvetius cf. Max Horkheimer, 'VorIesung iiber die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie', in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9: Nach-
gelassene Schriften 1914-1931, Frankfurt/Main 1987, pp. 362ff, and the dissertation by Giinther Mensching, supervised by Adorno and Horkheimer, Totalitat und Autonomie. Untersuchungen zur philosop- hischen Gesellschaftstheorie des franzosischen Materialismus, Frankfurt/ Main 1971.
12 Cf. GS 11, p. 567.
13 In Freud's early theory of the drives the concept of the ego-drives is
used synonymously with that of the self-preservation drives and con- trasted to the sexual drives:
These instincts are not always compatible with each other; their interests often come into conflict. Opposition between ideas is only an expression
? ?
? ?
? ?
? 186
NOTES TO PAGES 135-136
? of struggles between the various instincts. . . . A quite specially important part is played by the undeniable opposition between the instincts which subserve sexuality, the attainment of sexual pleasure, and those other instincts, which have as their aim the self-preservation of the individual - the ego-instincts. As the poet has said, all the organic instincts that operate in our mind may be classified as 'hunger' or 'love'. (Sigmund Freud, Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, vol. 11
(1910), London 1962, pp. 213-14)
According to Freud's later theory, which operates with the antithesis of the Eros and death drives, the self-preservation drives are a special case among the Eros drives.
14 Cf. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff, London 1957, The Captive, Part I, pp. 243ff. The passage, which Adorno also interprets in his Kleine Proust-Kommentare (d.
GS 1 1 , pp. 2 1 3ff) , influenced his thinking about immortality more than anything else. Bergotte dies while visiting an exhibition where he wanted to study 'a little patch of yellow wall' in Vermeer's View of Delft:
He was dead. Permanently dead? Who shall say? Certainly our experi- ments in spiritualism prove no more than the dogmas of religion that the soul survives death.
All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations con-
tracted in a former life; there is no reason inherent in the conditions of life on this earth that can make us consider ourselves obliged to do good, to be fastidious, to be polite even, nor make the talented artist consider himself obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work the admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms, like the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who must for ever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer. All these obligations which have not their sanction in our present life seem to belong to a different world, founded upon kindness, scrupulosity, self-sacrifice, a world entirely dif- ferent from this, which we leave in order to be born into this world, before perhaps returning to the other to live once again beneath the sway of those unknown laws which we have obeyed because we bore their
precepts in our hearts, knowing not whose hand had traced them there - those laws to which every profound work of the intellect brings us nearer and which are invisible only - and still! - to fools. So that the idea that Bergotte was not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improb- able. (ibid. , pp. 2S0f)
15 Cf. the sketch of the essay planned by Adorno on 'L'innommable': 'Is nothingness the same as nothing? That is the question around which everything in B[eckett] revolves. Absolutely everything is thrown away,
because there is only hope where nothing is kept back. The fullness of nothingness. This the reason for the insistence on the zero point. ' And:
'The positive categories, such as hope, are the absolutely negative ones in B[eckett]. Hope is directed at nothingness' (source: Rolf Tiedemann, "'Gegen den Trug der Frage nach dem Sinn". Eine Dokumentation zu
? NOTES TO PAGES 136-138 187
? Adorno's Beckett-Lektiire', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter III, Munich 1994, pp. 73, 44).
16 Cf. GS 11, pp. 213ff; regarding the comparison between Proust and Kafka: 'Here . . . we find a statement which, at least in the German version, has echoes of Kafka. It is: "the idea that Bergotte is not wholly and permanently dead is by no means improbable'" ? (ibid. ; d. Proust, Remembrance, p. 251).
17 The name of the first poet mentioned was not understood by the secretary; possibly Heym should be conjectured.
Lecture Eighteen
1 See Lecture 1, n. 1 and Lecture 13, n. 9. On 29. 7. 1965, when Adorno gave the last of the lectures on metaphysics, the first manuscript version of Meditationen zur Metaphysik, which he had begun to dictate on 3. 5. 1965, was completed. It was still entitled Zur Metaphysik, but from the second version, dating from 18. 5. 1965, it was called Meditationen zur Metaphysik. While Adorno also refers in his notes to Metaphysische
Thesen, no other reference to Reflexionen zur Metaphysik as a title has
been traced.
2 See pp. 15ff, 101-2 and 104 passim.
3 Adorno knew of the Sohar speculations through Scholem; d. the latter's
translation of the first chapter and especially the introduction to the translation (Die Geheimnisse der Schopfung. Ein Kapitel aus dem Sohar von G[erschomJ Scholem, Berlin 1935). Cf. Adorno's letter of 19. 4. 1939 to Scholem (Theodor W. Adorno, 'Urn Benjamins Werk. Briefe an
Gerschom Scholem 1 939-1 955', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter V, Munich 1998).
4 As early as 1804 Schelling used the term 'positive philosophy' to refer to his own philosophy, equally opposed to rationalism and empiricism; this philosophy was not content with reason - regarded as 'negative' in relation to the real - but was directed towards the real itself: 'The positive philosophy . . . does not take as its starting point what is merely present
in thought, or anything occurring in experience. . . . Its principle is found neither in experience nor in pure thinking. It can thus set out only from the absolutely transcendent . . . ' (Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung 1 841142, ed. Manfred Frank, 3rd edn, Frankfurt/Main 1 993, p. 146). Scholars have treated Schelling'S late thought, which he himself claimed to be both an 'existential philosophy' and a foundation for a 'philo- sophical religion', as verging on the apocryphal, if not on obscurantism; only recently has it also been seen as an attempt to overcome idealism.
In his reference to the theological speculation in the Cabbala Adorno probably had in mind an essay by Jiirgen Habermas which discusses connections between Schelling on the one hand and the Sohar, Isaak
Luria and Jakob Bohme on the other (d. Jiirgen Habermas, 'Dialektischer Idealismus im Dbergang zum Materialismus - Geschichtsphilosophische
? ?
188
NOTES TO PAGES 140-145
? Folgerungen aus Schellings Idee einer Contraction Gottes', in Habermas, Theorie und Praxis. Sozialphilosophische Studien, Neuwied/Beriin 1963,
pp. 108ff).
5 The place names in Proust have been conjectured, since the text source
contains only omission marks.
6 Adorno is thinking of a passage in the chapter on amphiboly in the
Critique of Pure Reason: 'The critique of this pure understanding . . . does not permit us . . . to stray into intelligible worlds; nay, it does not allow of our entertaining even the concept of them' (Immanuel Kant's Critique ofPure Reason, p. 294 (A 289, B 345)). Also d. NaS IV. 4, p. 17, passim.
7 On the constellation of happiness and place names in Adorno d. Negative Dialectics, p. 373, and NaS 1. 1, p. 279, n. 1.
8 Cf. Minima Moralia, p. 109 ('Second Harvest').
9 Cf. p. 68 above.
10 Adorno took over the concept of the dialectical image from Benjamin,
but characteristically remodelled it in his own theory; on Adorno's use of the term d. Tiedemann, Begriff Bild Name, pp. 92ff.
11 Cf. Hegel, Theologische Jugendschriften, nach den Handschriften hrsg. von Herman Nohl, Tubingen 1907.
12 Not in this lecture, at least the surviving part; but d. Negative Dia- lectics, pp. 173ff, and GS 10. 2, pp. 741ff.
13 In this connection d. Adorno's lecture series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft', NaS IV. 10, pp. 118ff, and ibid. , pp. 262f.
14 The concept of the 'situation' was endowed with the value of a category by Jaspers; it was emphasized less by Heidegger, but most of all in the existentialism of Sartre; d. the section 'Freedom and Facticity: the
Situation' in Being and Nothingness, London 1 972.
15 Meaning: with the idea of the negation of the negation as a positivity
attained.
16 At the conclusion of his last lecture Adorno had reached page 20 of his
notes (d. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10806) and thus almost the end of the fourth of the 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (d. Negative Dialectics, p. 375). However, the notes for the lecture continue some way beyond this point, including the first third of the fifth 'Meditation' (d. ibid. , pp. 376f); as Adorno clearly meant to take the lecture to at least that point, the remaining notes - some of which Adorno had, however, already dealt with outside the planned sequence at the end of the lecture - will be listed here, as they were noted down (the small type clearly indicates later additions, as distinct from the main text):
The despair at what is is spreading to the transcendental ideas.
Paradox is passing over into slander (a tendency already found in
Kierkegaard, in his attitude to poverty).
In Kant the - unrealizable - metaphysical ideas were supposed, at
least, not to collide with reason; absurd today. NB. Their anthropocentrism and cosmology. Ambiguity of the Copernican revolution.
? NOTES TO PAGE 145 189
? False elevation of the fate of metaphysical ideas to a metaphysics. The deception that despair guarantees the existence of what is hope-
lessly lost. The howls of religious joy over despair. Alleluia!
Just as socially the means replace the ends, metaphysically the lack
replaces what is lacking.
The truth of what is absent is becoming indifferent; it is asserted
because it is good for people, as a heart-warmer. A curious inversion, in relation to the situation of Epicureanism; that too is subject to a histor- ical dialectic.
Metaphysics is turning into pragmatism.
The truth of negation must not be subverted as positivity.
The real criticism of Hegel: it is untrue that the negation of the nega-
tion is the positive. (Projection of consequential logic on to the absolute. Dissolution of the non-identical into identity. )
The question of the 'meaning of life'.
The associated idea that it is what the questioner gives to life.
But meaning ought to be objectively beyond all doing; otherwise false,
a mere duplication.
All metaphysics aims at something objective.
Subjects imprisoned in their constitution; metaphysics means reflec-
tion on how far they can see beyond the prison of their selves.
Any other question about meaning is an advertisement for the world.
The Nazis: the world has a meaning. The terrorist element in this idealism's lapse into the question of meaning condemns it retrospectively: it already contained the untruth of the mirroring.
Mirroring is the primary phenomenon of ideology. The totality of the question of meaning as a spell.
Ifa suicidal person asks about the meaning oflife, the helpless helper will be unable to name one.
Ifhe attempts to do so he can be convicted oftalking rubbish.
Life which had meaning would not ask about it; it shuns the question. But abstract nihilism just as untrue.
It would have no answer to the question: Why, in that case, are you
yourself alive?
To aim at the whole, to calculate the net profit of life is precisly the
death which calculation seeks to evade.
Where there is meaning, it is in the open, not in what is closed in on
itself
The thesis that life has no meaning is, as a positive statement, as false
as its antithesis; true only as a blow against empty affirmation.
The close affinity of Schopenhauer to the German idealists.
The rekindling of nature religions; the blind will as demon.
The truth in monotheism against Schopenhauerian irrationalism. Regression to the stage before the awakening ofgenius amid the mute
world.
Denial offreedom; this makes the escape by the back door in Book 4
[ofThe World as Will and Representation] so feeble.
Total determinism no less mythical than the totalities in Hegelian
logic.
The tatum is the totem.
(Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, VA 10806-10808)
? 190
NOTES TO PAGE 145
? 17 Regarding Adorno's paradox of the 'impossibility of thinking that which must nevertheless be thought', cf. Kierkegaard: 'The paradox is not an admission, but a category, an ontological determination, which expresses the relationship between an existing, cognizant mind and the eternal truth' (source: S0ren Kierkegaard, Die Tagebiicher, ed. Hayo Gerdes, vol. 2, Dusseldorf, Cologne 1963, p. 80 [VIII, A 11]). But also see
Adorno's critique in Negative Dialectics: 'The theological conception of the paradox, that last, starved-out bastion, is past rescuing - a fact ratified by the course of the world in which the skandalon that caught Kierkegaard's eye is translated into outright blasphemy' (ibid. , p. 375).
? ? ? ? EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
As a rule, Adorno's academic teaching and his writing proceeded separately side-by-side, but not always. Hardly qualified as a lecturer in the summer semester of 1932, he devoted one of his first lecture series to the philosophy of Kierkegaard, the subject of his still unprinted doctoral thesis. Later, after their return from emigration, Adorno and Horkheimer covered the content of both Dialectic of Enlightenment and Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie in their joint philosophy seminars between 1956 and 1958. But the most striking
exception to the rule is Negative Dialectics, of which Adorno wrote in 1968, when it had already been published, that it represented 'what [he] had to put on the scales' (cf. GS 7, p. 537). This book which, despite Adorno's reservations about the genre, one can hardly help calling his magnum opus, crystallized during a lecture series entitled 'Ontology and Dialectics' that he gave in the winter semester of 196011. The lecture with the same title that Adorno gave at the College de France in March 1961 was the first version of the first
part of Negative Dialectics - the systematic, critical discussion of Heidegger's philosophy which formed the starting point of Adorno's 'anti-system'. Then, from 1 964 to 1 966, no fewer than three successive lecture series by Adorno had themes which are central to Negative Dialectics, on which he was working intensively at that time. In the summer semester of 1 967 and in the following winter semester, when the book was already finished, it was discussed in the philosophy
seminar. The lectures on Negative Dialectics are the only evidence of the courses which Adorno held in conjunction with his own writings,
192 EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
? and even they have not been completely preserved. The first was announced for the winter semester of 1964/5 with the title 'Theories of History and Freedom', and dealt with the thematic complexes to which the studies of Kant and Hegel in Negative Dialectics are de- voted - the first two 'models' in Part 3. The lecture series 'Metaphysics.