Just as socially the means replace the ends,
metaphysically
the lack
replaces what is lacking.
replaces what is lacking.
Adorno-Metaphysics
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.
Concept and Problems', contained in the present volume and relating to the last 'model' in Negative Dialectics, the 'Meditations on Meta- physics', followed in the summer semester of 1965. The last lecture series, held in the winter semester of 1965/6, developed the idea of a
dialectic of non-identity from a certain distance; Adorno gave this idea the name 'negative dialectics', and used the same title for the lectures as for the book. Adorno's intention in these lectures was to provide 'a kind of methodological reflection on what I do' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 1 0 8 1 3 ) - a definition corresponding to that of the 'methodology of the author's material works' in the preface of Negative Dialectics (p. XIX).
On the relationship between his lectures and the book with which they are associated Adorno made some remarks at the beginning of
his lectures entitled 'Negative Dialectics' which throw light on the climate in which he was then having to teach:
As you know, the traditional definition of a university calls for a unity of research and teaching. As you also know, the realization of this idea, which is still upheld, is very problematic. My own work suffers badly from this problematic, since the quantity of teaching and admin- istrative tasks I have to contend with makes it almost impossible for me to attend to my so-called research tasks - if one wishes to speak of philosophy as research - during term time in the way which is not only objectively called for but which, above all, matches my own inclina- tion and disposition. In such a situation, and under such compulsion and pressure, one develops certain characteristics which can best be described as peasant cunning. I try to make the best of this situation
by . . . deriving a substantial part of my lectures from the copious and quite onerous book I have been working on for the last six years and which will bear the title Negative Dialectics. . . . I am aware that one might object to such a procedure, as those with a positivist outlook will be particularly inclined to do, that an academic teacher ought only to serve up finished, valid, watertight results. While I do not wish to make a virtue of necessity, I do not think that this view quite fits the concept of philosophy; that philosophy is thought in a permanent status nascendi; and that, as the great founder of the dialectic, Hegel, said, what matters in philosophy is the process as much as the result; that process and result . . . are even the same thing. Beyond that, I think that philosophical thinking has an inherent moment of trying out, experimenting, of non-conclusiveness, which distinguishes it from
? ? EDITOR'S AFTERWORD 193
-
? ? the positive sciences, and to investigate this further will be not the least of my concerns in these lectures. Accordingly, the reflections I am presenting to you here will have such experimental traits as long as they have not reached the definitive linguistic form attainable to me, as far as my strength allows. And I would really like to encourage you . . . by what I have to say to think with me and to conduct your own reflections, rather than handing you a piece of certain knowledge that you can confidently take home. (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo
10812f)
An important feature of the lecture series relating to Negative Dialectics is that all three or - if we include 'Ontology and Dialectics' - all four were held at a time when the parallel texts in the book version had not yet reached their final form, so that the lectures stemmed, as Adorno liked to put it, from work in progress or, better, reflected a specific stage in the still continuing evolution of Negative Dialectics. The reader may find confirmed in them what was said of the lectures on 'Kant's Critique ofPure Reason':
To be able to accompany Adorno's thinking in its detours and byways reveals aspects in which the closed and conclusive form characteristic of Adorno's writings is broken open, giving rise to possibilities the author was unable to follow up in his finished works. . . . Only the transcripts of his lectures enable us to watch him in his exertions of thought, to get a glimpse into the workshop where, like Siegfried forging his sword in Mime's cave, the philosopher was fashioning his concepts . . . . (NaS IV. 4, pp. 420f)
Adorno himself, as can be easily gathered from his comments, had a very indecisive attitude towards the experimental character of his lectures. On the one hand the experimental aspect was supposed to represent an integrating moment of philosophical thinking, for which, on the other, Adorno nevertheless hoped to achieve the binding, de- finitive formulation which would 'dispose of' the provisional quality of the experimental stage, in keeping with Hofmannsthal's dictum
that 'the form disposes of the problem'. In the tension between the linguistic form in the strong sense and the thought which cannot be concluded, the special character of Adorno's philosophy is probably to be sought, a character which emerges far more clearly from his lectures than from the finished writings.
The course on 'Metaphysics' differs from the directly preceding and succeeding lecture series in that its contents go beyond the scope of 'Meditations on Metaphysics' and Negative Dialectics. Two-thirds of it are devoted to Aristotle's Metaphysics. As far as can be seen
? ?
? 194 EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
? from our present knowledge of Adorno's teaching activities, he only lectured twice on Greek philosophy. In the winter semester of 1953/ 4 and in the following summer semester of 1954 he gave a two-part series on 'The Problem of Idealism'; while the second part was an 'Introduction to Kant's Critique ofPure Reason', the first dealt with the pre-Socratics, especially Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato's doc- trine of Forms and the critique of it by Aristotle. Only Adorno's brief notes for the lectures have been preserved, and while the outline of the lectures can be precisely reconstructed from these, little of the argumentation can be gleaned (d. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Das Problem des Idealismus. Stichworte zur Vorlesung', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter V, Munich 1998). The discussion of the Aristotelian categories in the lectures on 'Metaphysics' from the summer semester of 1965 is the only extensive treatment of a theme from ancient philosophy by Adorno which has been preserved. The relevance of these discussions
lies not so much in the fact that they concern one of the key works in the history of philosophy as in the context in which Adorno placed them: with the question 'whether after Auschwitz you can go on living' (Negative Dialectics, p. 363), the last third of the lectures on 'Metaphysics' poses the most serious question faced by philosophy today. Although the part devoted to Aristotle seems to be somewhat self-contained and unconnected to the freely improvised commentary on 'Meditations on Metaphysics', Adorno's reflections are not motiv- ated by an historical interest in Aristotle's philosophy, but are guided rather by problems arising from his own thought. Thus, they do not need to be based on Aristotle's text itself, but can largely make do with Eduard Zeller's account of it. The identity and difference of Aristotle's categories in relation to those of a 'negative' metaphysics, which is only possible after Kant, are not a philological problem. Unlike Paul Tillich, for example, who explicitly took over Aristotle's distinction between 8vvu/u<; and EVEpYELU as 'principal qualities of being' in his discussion of the so-called 'life-dimensions' in his Systematische Theologie - especially in the third volume, which Adorno asked the
author to lend him while writing 'Meditations on Metaphysics' - Adorno seeks to find out what history has made of such supra- temporal categories in the meantime; whether and how far Aristotle's categories still hold good in the utterly administered world. That the discussion of Aristotle's Metaphysics has no counterpart in the book version of Negative Dialectics does not mean that antiquity is not ubiquitously present in it - or for that matter, in Adorno's philosophy as a whole. It is present, and to a far higher degree than the relatively rare mentions of Greek philosophers in Adorno's writings might sug- gest. Even if there is no work by him which is explicitly devoted to
? ? ". " . ?
? ? ? EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
? ancient philosophy, Adorno's thought presupposed Plato and Aris- totle just as much as any other great philosophy has done, at least up to the threshold at which positivism silenced it. For Adorno, 'as far back as we can trace it, the history of thought has been a dialectic of enlightenment'. In Negative Dialectics he traced it back to its origins in archaic thought, in which he did not differ from Heidegger, except in opposing the archaic and favouring demythologization. 'The toil and trouble of the metaphysicists of antiquity - from Parmenides, who had to split thinking and Being so that he might identify them, down to Aristotle - consisted in forcing the division.
Demythologization is division; the myth is the deceptive unity of the undivided' (Negative Dialectics, p. 118). Because identity and unity, without which no thought can be thought, terminated in the catas- trophe of modernity, Adorno's 'thinking after Auschwitz', in its solid- arity with the multiple, the non-identical, enquires once again into the categorial distinctions of Aristotle, a 'last philosophy' enquiring into the 'first'. However suspect the proximity of apx? , the mythical concept of origin, may have been to that of the fatherland for Adorno,
he would nevertheless have agreed with Hegel, who 'always felt at home when [he] heard the word Greece'.
To meditate on metaphysics was already as untimely in the mid- 1960s, when Adorno gave his lectures, at it seems thirty years later, at the time of their publication. For Adorno metaphysics was more
than a 'conversation' in which the participants are more concerned with each other than with the content of the conversation, the prob- lems traditionally called metaphysical; he persisted in believing that philosophy had to do with the perception of truth, and could not be dissolved into such casual contexts as a 'conversation of mankind' (d. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oxford 1980, pp. 389ff). If metaphysics is to be understood, with Aristotle, as a 'thinking of thinking', as the 'concept which has become aware of itself', with which thinking itself and its forms are elevated to categories of being, to something absolute, then, with Adorno, metaphysics today can be 'nothing other than a thinking about meta-
physics', about 'whether thinking and its constitutive forms are in fact the absolute' (p. 99 above). In the 'Metaphysics' lectures, as in Negative Dialectics, this question receives an unqualified 'no', in which Adorno is in agreement with the Horkheimer of Dammerung: 'There is no metaphysics; no positive statement on anything abso- lute is possible' (Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2: Philosophische Fruhschriften 1 922-J 932, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Frankfurt/Main 1987, p. 430), although he added: 'Metaphysics can-
? not be a positive doctrine about any ontological content which might
?
195
? ?
196 EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
? be proclaimed as metaphysical; it consists of the questions relating to such entities. . . . To put it trenchantly: negative metaphysics is meta- physics no less than positive metaphysics' (Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie. Zur Einleitung, ed. Rudolf zur Lippe, vol. 2, Frankfurt/Main 1974, p. 166). Adorno, in his recorded com- ments on 'metaphysical experience', would like to insist that experience of the metaphysical, the sphere which, since Kant, cannot in principle be fulfilled by experience, is nevertheless possible. It is, nevertheless,
an incontrovertible experience of contingency, of death, of loss of meaning, that metaphysics, throughout history the quintessence of the spiritual, has 'slipped into material questions of existence' (Neg- ative Dialectics, p. 366) in the era of Auschwitz. For Adorno, meta- physics - of which he might have said, as Benjamin said of theology, that it is small and ugly and should not show its face today - has withdrawn into the relation of thought to need, to the material want
of human beings; this need 'survives' only as negation.
Represented in the inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought. The smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the abso- lute, for the micrological view cracks the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is helplessly isolated and explodes its
identity, the delusion that it is but a specimen. There is solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall. (ibid. , p. 408)
Metaphysics no longer leads into any Platonic heaven of Forms, it is no longer guaranteed any K6af-to? xwpwT6? , it is only a last refuge both against the ideology of 'the metaphysics that has risen nowadays' (ibid. , p. 372) and against the cult of 'that which is the case'. In the only place where Adorno brought himself to offer a kind
of definition of metaphysics, he gave it the form of a negation of the first proposition of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus: metaphysics, he wrote, stood
against scientism, for example Wittgenstein's position that funda- mentally consciousness has to do only with that which is the case. That might call forth another definition: metaphysics is the form of consciousness in which it attempts to know what is more than the case, or is not merely the case, and yet must be thought, because that which, as one says, is the case compels us to do so. (Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, vol. 2, p. 167; on Wittgenstein's dictum
also cf. GS 8, pp. 337f)
It was Adorno's hope that reflection on the limits within which thought is blocked might open the prison a little: '[the ability of
? ? ? EDITOR'S AFTERWORD 197
? philosophy] to think beyond itself, into openness - that, precisely, is metaphysics' (p. 68 above). Adorno refused to an extent to share in the pessimism of his friend Horkheimer, in his materialist grief that past suffering could not be made good, when he wrote that 'if thought is not decapitated it will flow into transcendence, down to the idea of
a world that would not only abolish extant suffering but revoke the suffering that is irrevocably past' (Negative Dialectics, p. 403). It may be that such revocation in all its impotence represents the meta- physical minimum which is left to a negative dialectics.
The edited text of the lectures is based on a transcript of the tape- recording - a transcript which was made in the Institut fur Sozialforschung, usually directly after the individual lectures. The transcribed tapes were erased at that time so that they could be reused.
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.
Concept and Problems', contained in the present volume and relating to the last 'model' in Negative Dialectics, the 'Meditations on Meta- physics', followed in the summer semester of 1965. The last lecture series, held in the winter semester of 1965/6, developed the idea of a
dialectic of non-identity from a certain distance; Adorno gave this idea the name 'negative dialectics', and used the same title for the lectures as for the book. Adorno's intention in these lectures was to provide 'a kind of methodological reflection on what I do' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 1 0 8 1 3 ) - a definition corresponding to that of the 'methodology of the author's material works' in the preface of Negative Dialectics (p. XIX).
On the relationship between his lectures and the book with which they are associated Adorno made some remarks at the beginning of
his lectures entitled 'Negative Dialectics' which throw light on the climate in which he was then having to teach:
As you know, the traditional definition of a university calls for a unity of research and teaching. As you also know, the realization of this idea, which is still upheld, is very problematic. My own work suffers badly from this problematic, since the quantity of teaching and admin- istrative tasks I have to contend with makes it almost impossible for me to attend to my so-called research tasks - if one wishes to speak of philosophy as research - during term time in the way which is not only objectively called for but which, above all, matches my own inclina- tion and disposition. In such a situation, and under such compulsion and pressure, one develops certain characteristics which can best be described as peasant cunning. I try to make the best of this situation
by . . . deriving a substantial part of my lectures from the copious and quite onerous book I have been working on for the last six years and which will bear the title Negative Dialectics. . . . I am aware that one might object to such a procedure, as those with a positivist outlook will be particularly inclined to do, that an academic teacher ought only to serve up finished, valid, watertight results. While I do not wish to make a virtue of necessity, I do not think that this view quite fits the concept of philosophy; that philosophy is thought in a permanent status nascendi; and that, as the great founder of the dialectic, Hegel, said, what matters in philosophy is the process as much as the result; that process and result . . . are even the same thing. Beyond that, I think that philosophical thinking has an inherent moment of trying out, experimenting, of non-conclusiveness, which distinguishes it from
? ? EDITOR'S AFTERWORD 193
-
? ? the positive sciences, and to investigate this further will be not the least of my concerns in these lectures. Accordingly, the reflections I am presenting to you here will have such experimental traits as long as they have not reached the definitive linguistic form attainable to me, as far as my strength allows. And I would really like to encourage you . . . by what I have to say to think with me and to conduct your own reflections, rather than handing you a piece of certain knowledge that you can confidently take home. (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo
10812f)
An important feature of the lecture series relating to Negative Dialectics is that all three or - if we include 'Ontology and Dialectics' - all four were held at a time when the parallel texts in the book version had not yet reached their final form, so that the lectures stemmed, as Adorno liked to put it, from work in progress or, better, reflected a specific stage in the still continuing evolution of Negative Dialectics. The reader may find confirmed in them what was said of the lectures on 'Kant's Critique ofPure Reason':
To be able to accompany Adorno's thinking in its detours and byways reveals aspects in which the closed and conclusive form characteristic of Adorno's writings is broken open, giving rise to possibilities the author was unable to follow up in his finished works. . . . Only the transcripts of his lectures enable us to watch him in his exertions of thought, to get a glimpse into the workshop where, like Siegfried forging his sword in Mime's cave, the philosopher was fashioning his concepts . . . . (NaS IV. 4, pp. 420f)
Adorno himself, as can be easily gathered from his comments, had a very indecisive attitude towards the experimental character of his lectures. On the one hand the experimental aspect was supposed to represent an integrating moment of philosophical thinking, for which, on the other, Adorno nevertheless hoped to achieve the binding, de- finitive formulation which would 'dispose of' the provisional quality of the experimental stage, in keeping with Hofmannsthal's dictum
that 'the form disposes of the problem'. In the tension between the linguistic form in the strong sense and the thought which cannot be concluded, the special character of Adorno's philosophy is probably to be sought, a character which emerges far more clearly from his lectures than from the finished writings.
The course on 'Metaphysics' differs from the directly preceding and succeeding lecture series in that its contents go beyond the scope of 'Meditations on Metaphysics' and Negative Dialectics. Two-thirds of it are devoted to Aristotle's Metaphysics. As far as can be seen
? ?
? 194 EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
? from our present knowledge of Adorno's teaching activities, he only lectured twice on Greek philosophy. In the winter semester of 1953/ 4 and in the following summer semester of 1954 he gave a two-part series on 'The Problem of Idealism'; while the second part was an 'Introduction to Kant's Critique ofPure Reason', the first dealt with the pre-Socratics, especially Parmenides and Heraclitus, Plato's doc- trine of Forms and the critique of it by Aristotle. Only Adorno's brief notes for the lectures have been preserved, and while the outline of the lectures can be precisely reconstructed from these, little of the argumentation can be gleaned (d. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Das Problem des Idealismus. Stichworte zur Vorlesung', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter V, Munich 1998). The discussion of the Aristotelian categories in the lectures on 'Metaphysics' from the summer semester of 1965 is the only extensive treatment of a theme from ancient philosophy by Adorno which has been preserved. The relevance of these discussions
lies not so much in the fact that they concern one of the key works in the history of philosophy as in the context in which Adorno placed them: with the question 'whether after Auschwitz you can go on living' (Negative Dialectics, p. 363), the last third of the lectures on 'Metaphysics' poses the most serious question faced by philosophy today. Although the part devoted to Aristotle seems to be somewhat self-contained and unconnected to the freely improvised commentary on 'Meditations on Metaphysics', Adorno's reflections are not motiv- ated by an historical interest in Aristotle's philosophy, but are guided rather by problems arising from his own thought. Thus, they do not need to be based on Aristotle's text itself, but can largely make do with Eduard Zeller's account of it. The identity and difference of Aristotle's categories in relation to those of a 'negative' metaphysics, which is only possible after Kant, are not a philological problem. Unlike Paul Tillich, for example, who explicitly took over Aristotle's distinction between 8vvu/u<; and EVEpYELU as 'principal qualities of being' in his discussion of the so-called 'life-dimensions' in his Systematische Theologie - especially in the third volume, which Adorno asked the
author to lend him while writing 'Meditations on Metaphysics' - Adorno seeks to find out what history has made of such supra- temporal categories in the meantime; whether and how far Aristotle's categories still hold good in the utterly administered world. That the discussion of Aristotle's Metaphysics has no counterpart in the book version of Negative Dialectics does not mean that antiquity is not ubiquitously present in it - or for that matter, in Adorno's philosophy as a whole. It is present, and to a far higher degree than the relatively rare mentions of Greek philosophers in Adorno's writings might sug- gest. Even if there is no work by him which is explicitly devoted to
? ? ". " . ?
? ? ? EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
? ancient philosophy, Adorno's thought presupposed Plato and Aris- totle just as much as any other great philosophy has done, at least up to the threshold at which positivism silenced it. For Adorno, 'as far back as we can trace it, the history of thought has been a dialectic of enlightenment'. In Negative Dialectics he traced it back to its origins in archaic thought, in which he did not differ from Heidegger, except in opposing the archaic and favouring demythologization. 'The toil and trouble of the metaphysicists of antiquity - from Parmenides, who had to split thinking and Being so that he might identify them, down to Aristotle - consisted in forcing the division.
Demythologization is division; the myth is the deceptive unity of the undivided' (Negative Dialectics, p. 118). Because identity and unity, without which no thought can be thought, terminated in the catas- trophe of modernity, Adorno's 'thinking after Auschwitz', in its solid- arity with the multiple, the non-identical, enquires once again into the categorial distinctions of Aristotle, a 'last philosophy' enquiring into the 'first'. However suspect the proximity of apx? , the mythical concept of origin, may have been to that of the fatherland for Adorno,
he would nevertheless have agreed with Hegel, who 'always felt at home when [he] heard the word Greece'.
To meditate on metaphysics was already as untimely in the mid- 1960s, when Adorno gave his lectures, at it seems thirty years later, at the time of their publication. For Adorno metaphysics was more
than a 'conversation' in which the participants are more concerned with each other than with the content of the conversation, the prob- lems traditionally called metaphysical; he persisted in believing that philosophy had to do with the perception of truth, and could not be dissolved into such casual contexts as a 'conversation of mankind' (d. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Oxford 1980, pp. 389ff). If metaphysics is to be understood, with Aristotle, as a 'thinking of thinking', as the 'concept which has become aware of itself', with which thinking itself and its forms are elevated to categories of being, to something absolute, then, with Adorno, metaphysics today can be 'nothing other than a thinking about meta-
physics', about 'whether thinking and its constitutive forms are in fact the absolute' (p. 99 above). In the 'Metaphysics' lectures, as in Negative Dialectics, this question receives an unqualified 'no', in which Adorno is in agreement with the Horkheimer of Dammerung: 'There is no metaphysics; no positive statement on anything abso- lute is possible' (Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2: Philosophische Fruhschriften 1 922-J 932, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Frankfurt/Main 1987, p. 430), although he added: 'Metaphysics can-
? not be a positive doctrine about any ontological content which might
?
195
? ?
196 EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
? be proclaimed as metaphysical; it consists of the questions relating to such entities. . . . To put it trenchantly: negative metaphysics is meta- physics no less than positive metaphysics' (Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie. Zur Einleitung, ed. Rudolf zur Lippe, vol. 2, Frankfurt/Main 1974, p. 166). Adorno, in his recorded com- ments on 'metaphysical experience', would like to insist that experience of the metaphysical, the sphere which, since Kant, cannot in principle be fulfilled by experience, is nevertheless possible. It is, nevertheless,
an incontrovertible experience of contingency, of death, of loss of meaning, that metaphysics, throughout history the quintessence of the spiritual, has 'slipped into material questions of existence' (Neg- ative Dialectics, p. 366) in the era of Auschwitz. For Adorno, meta- physics - of which he might have said, as Benjamin said of theology, that it is small and ugly and should not show its face today - has withdrawn into the relation of thought to need, to the material want
of human beings; this need 'survives' only as negation.
Represented in the inmost cell of thought is that which is unlike thought. The smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the abso- lute, for the micrological view cracks the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is helplessly isolated and explodes its
identity, the delusion that it is but a specimen. There is solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the time of its fall. (ibid. , p. 408)
Metaphysics no longer leads into any Platonic heaven of Forms, it is no longer guaranteed any K6af-to? xwpwT6? , it is only a last refuge both against the ideology of 'the metaphysics that has risen nowadays' (ibid. , p. 372) and against the cult of 'that which is the case'. In the only place where Adorno brought himself to offer a kind
of definition of metaphysics, he gave it the form of a negation of the first proposition of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus: metaphysics, he wrote, stood
against scientism, for example Wittgenstein's position that funda- mentally consciousness has to do only with that which is the case. That might call forth another definition: metaphysics is the form of consciousness in which it attempts to know what is more than the case, or is not merely the case, and yet must be thought, because that which, as one says, is the case compels us to do so. (Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie, vol. 2, p. 167; on Wittgenstein's dictum
also cf. GS 8, pp. 337f)
It was Adorno's hope that reflection on the limits within which thought is blocked might open the prison a little: '[the ability of
? ? ? EDITOR'S AFTERWORD 197
? philosophy] to think beyond itself, into openness - that, precisely, is metaphysics' (p. 68 above). Adorno refused to an extent to share in the pessimism of his friend Horkheimer, in his materialist grief that past suffering could not be made good, when he wrote that 'if thought is not decapitated it will flow into transcendence, down to the idea of
a world that would not only abolish extant suffering but revoke the suffering that is irrevocably past' (Negative Dialectics, p. 403). It may be that such revocation in all its impotence represents the meta- physical minimum which is left to a negative dialectics.
The edited text of the lectures is based on a transcript of the tape- recording - a transcript which was made in the Institut fur Sozialforschung, usually directly after the individual lectures. The transcribed tapes were erased at that time so that they could be reused.
