No More Learning

. With the onset of this culmination of metaphysics begins the preparation, unrecognized by and inherently inaccessible to metaphysics, of a first manifestation of the duality of Being and existence. In this manifestation is concealed the first intimation of the truth of Being, which takes back into itself the precedence regarding the workings of Being. (Martin Heidegger, Vortriige und Aufsiitze, Pfullingen 1954, pp. 72 and 78)
10 Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London 1973, pp. 310ff (A 313ff, B 370ff).
11 Adorno repeatedly discusses Kant's twofold aim of critique and rescue in his lectures 'Kants "Kritik der reinen Vernunft"'; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 54, 132f, 143 and passim.
12 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A 1, 980 a 2l.
13 Cf. Aristoteles, Die Lehrschriften, hrsg. , iibertragen und in ihrer
Entstehung erliiutert von Paul Gohlke, Bd. V: Metaphysik, 3rd edn,
Paderborn 1972, p. 35.
14 Heidegger, Being and Time, Tiibingen 1963, p. 215.
15 This wording [German: uberhaupt erst das Thema) appears in the ori-
ginal. An alternative reading which might seem plausible [uberhaupt nicht das Thema) is incorrect, as seems to be proved by the formulation repeated in the penultimate sentence of this paragraph, concerning die Ontologie, die hier [i. e. in Aristotle) erst thematisch ist. 'Theme' and 'thematic', as used by Adorno in this context, are likely to be associated with the idea of a theme touched on for the first time but not yet developed.
16 See p. 16 above.
17 In the text source the German wording has been amended to clarify the
sense.
18 This [Liebe zur Weisheit) is the original wording. It cannot be ruled
out that the usual translation of cpLAoaocp{a represents a slip in this case, as the aocp{a of the Socratic-Platonic tradition fails to express what Aristotle meant, knowledge in the sense of science; in that case Adorno would have wanted to say 'love of knowledge' or, better, 'striving for knowledge', an expression he uses at the end of the lecture (see p. 23 above).
? 19 Adorno may possibly be thinking of ? 6 of Being and Time, in which Heidegger writes that Aristotle, in whose work 'the ancient ontology as developed by Plato turns into "dialectic" ', 'no longer has any under- standing' of it, 'for he has put it on a more radical footing and raised it to a new level [aufhob)' (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 47-8 );
while this does relate syntactically to the dialectic, it implicitly applies equally to ontology. Moreover, Adorno's and Heidegger's concepts of ontology are hardly compatible without further qualification. Whereas Adorno
?
? ?
156
NOTES TO PAGES 24-26
? ? 1
2
3 4 5
6
understands it to mean a thinking which, like that of the Pre-Socratics, 'posits and presupposes the essential' and while he uses it in this sense when speaking of Heidegger's ontology, for Heidegger ontology is al- ways something 'decomposed' by rationality which actually blocks the
desired path towards 'Being itself' . Even in Being and Time, which was still relatively undecided on this issue, the 'title ontology' is 'explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities' (ibid. , p. 32). 'Ontological interpreta- tion,' and therefore Aristotle's as well, 'projects the entity presented to it upon the Being which is that entity's own, so as to conceptualize it with regard to its structure' (ibid. , p. 359), to which conceptualization the truth of Being cannot be reduced, since, according to the 'Letter on Humanism', it calls rather for a thinking 'which is stricter than concep- tual thought' (Heidegger, Wegmarken, Frankfurt/Main 1967, p. 187). Because Aristotle remained within the framework of discursive philo- sophizing, Adorno maintains, he fell victim to Heidegger's criticism as
an ontologist; that Heidegger rejected discursivity and fell back on an archaic murmuring about Being is the persistent thrust of Adorno's critique of Heidegger.
Lecture Five
See the bibliographical reference, in Lecture 1 , n. 1 3 . Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung was first published in 1 844-52 in three volumes, and later editions in six volumes. Adorno owned the second edition of 1 856-68. Zeller also wrote a Grundri(5 der
Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (1883), but this was not used by Adorno.
Cf. the beginning of Lecture 2 in Adorno's keywords, p. 10 and n. 3.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, pp. 51ff (A 1, 982 b 8f).
Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 303ff.
Regarding the recent status of Aristotle scholarship on this point d. Klaus Oehler, Die Lehre vom noetischen und dianoetischen Denken bei Platon und Aristoteles. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Bewu(5tseinsproblems in der Antike, Munich 1962, and the review of Oehler's book by Ernst Tugendhat (Tugendhat, Philosophische Aufsatze, Frankfurt/Main 1992, pp. 402ff).
Adorno here follows Zeller, who always translates Aristotle's oua{a as substance (Substanz) (d. Zeller 11. 2, p. 305). Whereas, at the beginning of Book A, for example, Adolf Lasson and Eugen Rolfes followed Zeller in this, most other German translators prefer Wesenheit (essence, essen-
tiality) (Hermann Bonitz) or Wesen (being, entity) (Paul Gohlke, Franz F. Schwarz); Gadamer follows Heidegger's usage and translates it by: 'Dber das Sein geht die Untersuchung. ' Adorno did not want, of course, to assert a 'derivation' in the etymological sense.
Husserl's expression; d. GS 5, p. 128.
7
? NOTES TO PAGES 27-29
157
? ? 8
9 10
11
12 13
Adorno deals with this problem above all in Lecture 8 of Probleme der Moralphilosophie, d. NaS IV. 10, pp. 117ff.
Cf. Alexandre Koyre, Descartes und die Scholastik, Bonn 1923.
'Per substantiam nihil aliud intelligere possumus, quam rem quae existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum' (Oeuvres de Descartes, publies par Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, vol. VIII- 1 : Principia Philosophiae, Paris 1964, p. 24 [Pars Prima, LI]). 'By substance we can only understand a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing for its existence' (Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valen- tine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1 983,
p. 23).
'Per substantiam intelligo id, quod in se est, et per se concipitur: hoc est id, cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei, a quo formari debeat' ('By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived
through itself, i. e. that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed' (The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, Princeton NJ 1985, p. 408 [Ethics, I, 3]). Reference not traced.
In his brief notes Adorno gives as the reference Kateg. 5 (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10789), i. e. Ch. 5 of The Categories, which begins: 'Substance, in its strictest, first, and chief sense, is that which is neither predicated of any subject, nor is in any; as "a certain man," or "a certain horse'" ? ( The Organon, or Logical Treatises of Aristotle, trans.
Octavius Freire Owen, London/New York 1893, vol. 1, p. 6). Zeller also takes this as his basis when interpreting as follows:
If the universal is not something existing for itself, it cannot be substance. . . . Originally, the term substance . . . was only properly applied to that which can neither be stated as a determination of the nature of something else, nor as something attached to something else as a derivative; in other words, to that which i, only subject and never predicate. Substance is being in the original sense, the substratum by which all other existence is carried. But for Aristotle only the single being is of that kind. The univer- sal, as he himself demonstrated against Plato, is not something existing for itself: everything universal, including the universality of the species, derives its existence only from the single being; it is always stated to be of something else, it refers only to a certain property, not to a 'this'. The single being alone belongs only to itself, is not carried by something else, is what it is through itself, and not merely by reason of some other being.
(Zeller 11. 2, pp. 305? ? ).
The name of the dialogue is missing in the text source, probably because the transcriber was not familiar with it. In the Theaetetus Socrates (St. 152bff) speaks of the relativity of sense perceptions; but Po/iteia,
St. 523bff may also be relevant.
The secretary seems also to have understood this title only partially, as the text source has the words: '. . . de la conscience'. Adorno frequently mentioned Bergson's first book in similar contexts.
ita
? 1 4
15
?
158
NOTES TO PAGES 29-38
? 1 6
17 18 19
1 2
3
4 5
6
7 8
Cf. the Science of L ogic: 'In the sphere of the Notion there can be no other immediacy than one in which mediation is essentially and expli- citly a moment and which has come to be only through the sublating of that mediation' (Hegel's Science of Logic, p. 63 1 ) . Or: '. . . immediacy in general proceeds only from mediation, and must therefore pass over
into mediation' (ibid. , p. 800).
It is unlikely that Adorno was thinking of a specific proof which could
be identified by page numbers; rather, the whole of the logic relating to concepts should be seen as such a 'proof'.
On the concept of the thing in Hume and Kant d. Adorno's lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft', especially Lectures 9 and 10, NaS IVA, pp. 143ff.
Cf. The Categories, Ch. 5, 2 a 15: 'But secondary substances are they,
as species, those primarily-named substances are inherent, that is to say, both these and the genera of these species; as "a certain man" exists in "man", as in a species, but the genus of this species is
"animal'" (Aristotle, The Organon, vol. I, p. 6). According to Zeller the expression 8EVTEpat ovu{at only appears in Ch. 5 of The Categories
(d. Zeller 11. 2, p. 307, n. 1).
Lecture Six
See p. 8 passim above.
Cf. Analytica posteriora, Book I, Ch. 1 1 , 77 a 8 : 'one thing of the many' (Aristotle, The Organon, vol. I, p. 269).
On the Kantian concept of unity in diversity d. Adorno's lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft', especially Lecture 13 (NaS IVA,
pp. 210ff).
See pp. 1 6f above.
Regarding Adorno's discussions of form and matter, EVEpynu and 8vvu/-w;, d. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 313ff.
Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 238ff (A 2 1 8ff, B 265ff).
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.