No More Learning

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GS 1 GS 3
GS 5
GS 6 GS 8 GS 9. 1 GS 10. 1
GS 10. 2
GS 1 1 GS 20. 1 GS 20. 2 NaS 1. 1
Philosophische Fruhschriften, 3rd edn, 1996
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklarung. Philosophische Fragmente, 3rd edn, 1996
Zur Metakritik der ErkenntnistheorielDrei Studien zu Hegel, 4th edn, 1996
Negative DialektiklJargon der Eigentlichkeit, 5th edn, 1996 Soziologische Schriften I, 4th edn, 1 996
Soziologische Schriften 1. Erste Halfte, 4, 1975
Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I: PrismenlOhne Leitbild, 2nd edn, 1996
Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II: EingriffelStichworteiAnhang,
1977
Noten zur Literatur, 4th edn, 1996
Vermischte Schriften I, 1986
Vermischte Schriften II, 1986
Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2nd edn, 1994
EDITOR'S NOTES
? Abbreviations
Adorno's writings, when translated, are quoted from the English-language editions. When no English translation is available, the references are to the German editions, Gesammelte Schriften (edited by Rolf Tiedemann in collaboration with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz,
Frankfurt/Main 1970- ) and Nachgelassene Schriften (edited by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt/Main 1993- ), when included there. The follow- ing abbreviations are used:
? ? NOTES TO PAGES 1-3
147
? Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' ( 1 959), ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 1995
NaS IV. 4
NaS IV. 10
NaSIV. 15 EinleitungindieSoziologie(1968),ed. ChristophGodde,1993
Lecture One
1 Adorno is referring to Negative Dialectics, written between 1959 and 1966; in his lecture series in the summer semester of 1965 he is thinking in particular of 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (Adorno, Negative Dia-
lectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London 1990, pp. 361ff; cf. GS 6, pp. 354ff), on which he was working intensively in May 1965 and to which he referred in Lectures 13-18, held in July 1965 (see n. 9 below).
2 Apart from the discussion in 'Meditations on Metaphysics', Adorno deals with Kant's attitude to metaphysics above all in Lectures 4 and 5 in the series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' of 1 959 (cf. NaS IV. 4, pp. 57? ? ). The most lucid account of Kant's renewal of the foundations of metaphysics known to the Editor is to be found in an early lecture by Horkheimer, from the winter semester 1925/6 (cf. Max Horkheimer,
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, vol. 10: Nachgelassene Schriften 1914-1931, 2. Vorlesung iiber die Geschichte der deutschen idealistischen Philosophie [u. a. j, Frankfurt! Main 1990, pp. 24? ? ); Adorno is likely to have taken over Horkheimer's
account without questioning it.
3 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. R. ]. Hollingdale,
Harmondsworth 1961, p. 58 (although the term is translated here as 'afterworld'); a direct equation between metaphysics and the 'back- world' is to be found, for example, in Human, All Too Human: 'When we hear the subtle talk of the metaphysicians and backworldsmen, we certainly feel that we are the "poor in spirit"; but we also feel that ours is the heaven of change, with spring and autumn, winter and summer, while theirs is the backworld, with its grey, frosty, endless mists and shadows' (Nietzsche, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 2, Munich 1993, p. 386). Regarding this metaphor of Nietzsche's which Adorno was fond of quoting see NaS IV. 4, p. 165 and pp. 382f, and NaS IV. 15, p. 38, and finally Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie.
Zur Einleitung, ed. Rudolf zur Lippe, vol. 2, 5th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1989, p. 162.
4 Cf. GS 9. 1, p. 446 - Adorno also cites this statement by the test subject in 'Theses against occultism' in Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott, London 1974, pp. 238-44; dealing primarily with occultism in contem- porary society, the 'Theses' nevertheless contain nothing less than
Adorno's theory of the relationship of occultism to metaphysics, of the 'contamination of mind and existence, the latter becoming itself an attribute of mind' (ibid. , p. 243 ). Adorno's aphorism 'Occultism is the
Probleme der Moralphilosophie (1963), ed. Thomas Schroder, 1995
? ?
148
NOTES TO PAGES 4-5
? metaphysic of dunces' (ibid. , p. 241) has meanwhile appeared in the Historisches Worterbuch der Philosophie as an example of his 'radical antagonism' to occultism, which, in fact, the authors find rather too
radical (d. H. Bender and W. Bonin, 'Okkultismus', in Hist. Wb. Philos. , vo! ' 6, Basle, Stuttgart 1984, co! . 1144f).
See Lecture 4.
6 Most probably an allusion to the book by Heimsoeth (present in
Adorno's library), which deals with the dispute over universals under the title 'Das Individuum'; d. Heinz Heimsoeth, Die sechs gro(5en Themen der abendlandischen Metaphysik und der Ausgang des
Mittelalters, 4th edn, Darmstadt 1958, pp. 172f? .
7 See Lecture 6, p. 38 above
8 See Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences of
1830: 'Thoughts can be called . . . objective thoughts and these include the forms which are considered in ordinary logic and are used only as forms of conscious thought. Logic therefore coincides with metaphysics, the science of things couched as thoughts which were supposed to ex- press the essences of things' (trans. from Hegel, Werke in 20 Banden, Frankfurt/Main 1969-71, vo! ' 8, pp. 80f). Or in the Introduction to
'The Objective Logic': 'The objective logic . . . takes the place . . . of former metaphysics which was intended to be the scientific construc- tion of the world in terms of thoughts alone' (Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London/New York 1969, p. 63).
9 Adorno seldom expressed himself as explicitly on the systematic import- ance of this motif as in the lectures on 'Aesthetics' of 1958/9. Here he spoke of the necessity of gaining access to 'something like a philosophical prehistory of concepts which, in our view [i. e. his and Horkheimer's] should replace mere verbal definitions, which are always arbitrary and
non-binding'; as an example he mentions 'the theory of art as mimetic behaviour, developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 3539f). The lecture series on Philosophische Terminologie, held by Adorno over two semesters in 1962 and 1963, is his most extensive treatment of the 'prehistory' of philosophical concepts
(d. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie. Zur Einleitung, 2 vols, Frank-
furt/Main 1973, 1974). For other aspects of his idea of philosophical prehistory d. Rolf Tiedemann, ' ''Nicht die Erste Philosophie sondern eine letzte " . Anmerkungen zum Denken Adornos', in Theodor W. Adorno, 'Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse'. Ein philosophisches
Lesebuch, Frankfurt/Main 1997, pp. 16f.
10 Adorno dealt with Comte's 'law of three stages' again in Introduction
5
to Sociology, the lecture series held in the summer semester of 1968 (d. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund ]ephcott, Cambridge 2000, p. 131).
Comte characterizes the transition from fetishism to polytheism as fol-
11
lows: 'The transformation of fetishes into gods endows each thing with an abstract peculiarity, instead of the life attributed to it. This makes it susceptible to animation by a supernatural power. Each god assumes a
NOTES TO PAGES 6-10
149
? quality common to many fetishes, and such a concept demands a metaphysical manner of thinking' (Auguste Comte, Die Soziologie. Die positive Philosophie im Auszug, ed. Friedrich Blaschke, Leipzig 1933, p. 193).
12 On Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy and the revival of Aristotle in the Christian Middle Ages, d. Otfried H6ffe, Aristoteles, Munich 1996, pp. 269ff; on the former especially Ernst Bloch, 'Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke', in E. Bloch, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz, Frankfurt/Main 1972 (Gesamtausgabe vol. 7),
pp. 479ff.
13 On the closing of the school of Proclus in Athens by an edict of Justinian
in AD 529 one should consult Zeller, who was also Adorno's favourite authority in other matters of Greek philosophy (d. Eduard Zeller, Die Philosophie der Criechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung [hence- forth 'Zeller,'] 3. Teil, 2. Abt. , Die nacharistotelische Philosophie. 2. Halfte, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of the 5th edn], pp. 915f); for more details on the Persian exile chosen by Simplikios and six other philosophers see Ueberweg-Praechter (d. Friedrich Ueberweg, Crundri(5 der Geschichte der Philosophie, 1. Teil: Die Philosophie des Altertums, 12th edn, ed. Karl Praechter, Berlin 1926, pp. 634f).
14 As a means of 'noting' what metaphysics was, as understood by Adorno, the reader is referred definitively to Lecture 33 in Philosophische Terminologie, his most concise 'explanation of the term metaphysics', which also defines its subject matter (d. Adorno, Philosophische Ter- minologie, vol. 2, pp. 160ff).
Lecture Two
1 No transcriptions of the lectures on 13 and 18 May have been pre- served; instead the brief notes on which Adorno based the lecture are reproduced.
2 This passage connects with the discussion of the formalization of the concept of metaphysics at the end of the first lecture (pp. 8f above).
3 This characterization of the 'usual definition' of metaphysics already contains a clear allusion to Aristotle's Metaphysics, to which two-thirds of the lecture are devoted: the science which investigates the ultimate ground or cause of existing things (d. Aristotle's Metaphysics, trans.
John Warrington, London 1956, p. 54 [A 2, 982 b 8f]) is intrinsically a 'fundamental science', and in Aristotle's terminology is called the 'primary science' (d. ibid. , pp. 155ff [E 1, 1026 a 24]). IIpw'T'Y) ovala, 'primary substance', is used by Aristotle as a synonym for ElSa,: 'By "form" I mean a thing's essence and primary substance' (ibid. , p. 181
[Z 7, 1032 b If]): metaphysics, according to Aristotle, is the science of forms; according to Adorno, it 'is essentially concerned with concepts, and with concepts in a strong sense' (p. 5 above).
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NOTES TO PAGE 10
? 4 Adorno always had a strong interest in gnostic ideas, although he men- tioned this mainly in conversations; when he was trying to persuade Hans Jonas to give a lecture on Marcionian gnosticism in 1959, he characterized his interest in the philologist from Sinope: 'Moreover, Valentinus' gnosticism is just as important to me as Marcion's, in which only a very specific motif interests me specially: the denunciation of the demiurge' (Letter to Hans Jonas, 12. 10. 1959). If it is remembered that the question 'whether one can still live after Auschwitz' (cf. Negative Dialectics, p. 362) is central to the 'Meditations on Metaphysics', the connection with the accusation of the 'just', cruel and malevolent God
by Marcion is obvious enough.
5 With the doctrine of the 'divinity as a coming-to-be' in his late meta-
physics, from the early 1920s, Scheler parted company with the per- sonal concept of God he had advocated earlier, in his Catholic phase: 'Man - a brief festival in the immense span of universal evolution - signifies . . . something with regard to the becoming of the divinity itself. His history is not a mere spectacle for an eternally perfected divine spectator and judge, but is woven into the evolution of the divinity itself' (Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9: Spate Schriften, ed. Manfred Frings, Bonn 1995, pp. 101? ). With the idea of the 'becoming of God', Scheler returned to mystical speculation:
It is the old idea of Spinoza, Hegel and many others: primal being be- comes aware of itself in the same act by which man sees himself as founded in it. We only need to reformulate this idea, which up to now has been presented in far too one-sided and intellectualist a way, to mean that man's knowing himself to be founded is a consequence of the active commitment of the centre of our being to the ideal demand of the deity, and the attempt to accomplish it, and in this accomplishment to help to engender for the first time the evolving 'God' as the increasing interpen- etration of spirit and urge. (ibid. p.
70)
However, the doctrine of the evolving God is only fully developed in Scheler's notes on metaphysics published from his posthumous papers, which remained a fragment and of which Adorno cannot have known; cf. the sections 'Weltwerden' and 'Deitas' in 'Manuskripte zur Lehre
vom Grunde aller Dinge' in Scheler, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1 1 : Schriften aus dem Nachla(5, Bd. II: Erkenntnislehre und Metaphysik, ed. Manfred S. Frings, Berne, Munich 1979, pp. 201ff.
6 Adorno was thinking above all of speculations he had found in the 'Weltalter' fragments, which he discussed in the winter semester 1960/ 1, for example, the sentence: 'Scarcely had the first steps been taken in
reuniting philosophy with nature when the great age of the physical world had to be acknowledged, and the fact that, far from being the
last thing, it was the first, from which all others, even the development of divine life, took their beginning' (Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Die Weltalter. Fragmente, in den Urfassungen von 1 8 1 1 und
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1 813, ed. Manfred Schroter, Munich 1946, p. 9). While Adorno saw the
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NOTES TO PAGES 10-13 151
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? ? ? traditional doctrine 'that what has become cannot be true' advocated in the 'Weltalter' fragments (Theodor W. Adorno, marginal note at ibid. , p. 4), he noted in the margin beside the sentence quoted: 'Turning point: God as something which evolves' (ibid. , p. 9). And below the keywords in his lecture notes we read: 'the past in God = the absolute
as a process. Distinction between moments within the absolute' (Theodor
W. Adorno Archiv, Zur Einleitung in die 'Weltalter', Stichworte, Bl. 1).
7 'This concept' appears to refer to metaphysics as the doctrine of the enduring, in which, according to Adorno's fundamental critique, metaphysics and epistemology converge: 'With this substitution of the enduring for the truth, the beginning of truth becomes the beginning
of deception' (GS 5, p. 25; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 45ff and passim).
8 The sentence interrupted by this insertion is continued in the first sen-
tence of the 'Notes for Lecture Three'; see p. 12 above.
9 One exception, however, is Heidegger, who in the summer semester of 1 93 1 gave a lecture on 'Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft' concerning
Book e of Aristotle's Metaphysics, subsequently published (d. Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, II. Abt. , Bd. 33: Aristoteles, Metaphysik e 1-3, 'Von Wesen und Wirklichkeit der Kraft', ed. Heinrich Hiini, 2nd
edn, Frankfurt/Main 1990).
10 Wolfgang Kohler ( 1 887-1967), a representative of the Berlin school of
Gestalt theory. Adorno discusses the relationship of Gestalt theory to Kant's concept of synthesis, though without addressing the problem of psycho-physical parallelism, in Lecture Nine on the Critique of Pure Reason; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 153f.
11 In the manuscript this is followed by a sentence which should possibly be read as: 'Phil[osophische] Fragen hangen weitab von dem ab was einem [einen? ] schwant [trennt? ], die Hexenfeuer [? ]' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 1 07882v). The reading of the sentence is extremely uncertain, and its meaning entirely unclear; the German editor has there-
fore omitted it from the text.
Lecture Three
1 The idea of substituting constellations and models for verbal definitions had been fundamental to Adorno's philosophy since his inaugural lecture in 1931; d. GS 1, p. 341 and Rolf Tiedemann, 'Begriff Bild Name. Ober Adornos Utopie der Erkenntnis', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter II, Munich 1993, pp. 103ff.
2 'Inductive metaphysics' refers, above all, to philosophers of the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Fechner, Lotze or Eduard von Hartmann, who sought to arrive at speculative propositions on the basis of the inductive procedures of the natural sciences. According to Marx it is 'the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation' which
'corresponds' to 'an accumulation of misery' (Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth 1979, pp. 798f); the theory of
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152
NOTES TO PAGE 13
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4
'relatively increasing misery' was created in order to rescue Marx's law of the increasing impoverishment of the proletariat, which appeared to be contradicted by the facts. As early as 1942, in Reflexionen zur Klassentheorie, Adorno had noted that 'the traditional construction of
increasing misery' had 'fallen into ruin'; 'to patch it up with the make- shift concept of relative misery, as was done at the time of the revision- ist dispute, could only suit social-democrat counter-apologists whose ears had been so dulled by their own clamour that they could not even detect the mocking echoes which the phrase "relative misery" sent back to them' (GS 8, p. 384). And in one of Adorno's last works, the lecture 'Spatkapitalismus oder Industriegesellschaft? ' he writes laconically: 'Prognoses of the class theory, such as those of increasing misery or the collapse of capitalism, have not been fulfilled as drastically as they must be understood if they are not to be deprived of their content; talk of relative misery can only be comic' (GS 8, p. 355).
The two preceding sentences sum up Heidegger's fundamental onto- logy, as developed in Being and Time, and Adorno's critique of it, in the briefest formula; Adorno developed his critique in the first part of Negative Dialectics (d. pp. 61ff).
What the name Luderbach stood for in Adorno's metaphysical experience is revealed in 'Meditations on Metaphysics', written a few days before the lecture:
The course of history forces materialism on metaphysics, traditionally the direct antithesis of materialism. . . . The point of no return has been reached in the process which irresistibly forced metaphysics to join what it was once conceived against. Not since the youthful Hegel has philosophy - unless selling out for authorized cerebration - been able to repress how very much it slipped into material questions of existence. Children sense some of this in the fascination that issues from the ? layer's zone, from carcasses, from the repulsively sweet odor of putrefaction, and from the opprobrious terms used for that zone. The unconscious power of that realm may be as great as that of infantile sexuality; the two intermingle in the anal fixation, but they are scarcely the same. An unconscious know- ledge whispers to the child what is repressed by civilized education; this is what matters, says the whispering voice. And the wretched physical exist- ence strikes a spark in the supreme interest that is scarcely less repressed; it kindles a 'What is that? ' and 'Where is it going? ' The man who man- aged to recall what used to strike him in the words 'dung hill' and 'pig sty' might be closer to absolute knowledge than Hegel's chapter in which readers are promised such knowledge only to have it withheld with a superior mien. (Negative Dialectics, pp. 365-6)
Also see pp. 1 1 6ff above, where Adorno takes up this idea again.
Cf. the section 'The Child's Question' in Negative Dialectics (pp. 1 1 0f). This again refers to 'Meditations on Metaphysics', from which Adorno derived his last six lectures on metaphysics in an 'evolving variation'; see n. 1 above.
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Hylozoism is the name given since the seventeenth century to the doctrine of the Ionian Pre-Socratics according to which life (? ? w? ) emerges from a basic substance (? vATJ) - water, air, fire etc. ; on the critique of this by Aristotle (d. Metaphysics, pp. 7ff [A 3ff, 983 a 24ff]) and Zeller's interpretation:
In the earlier Ionian philosophers he censured . . . their neglect of the prime mover and the superficiality with which they made any element they chose into the basic substance, whereas, according to him, the sensible properties and the changes of bodies were conditioned by the opposition of the ele- ments. The same applies to Heraclitus, insofar as he agreed with them in setting up a basic substance. (Zeller, 2. Teil, 2. Abt. , Aristoteles und die alten Peripatetiker, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of 4th edn], p. 284)
Here Adorno probably gave references to the editions of Aristotle to be used - certainly to the recent translation of the Metaphysics by Paul Gohlke (see Lecture 4, n. 13) and possibly also to Zeller's history of ancient philosophy (see Lecture 1, n. 13).
Lecture Four
See Lecture 2, n. 3.
Adorno knew of the dispute between Plato and the Cynic Antisthenes primarily through Zeller:
Whereas Plato derived a clearly realistic system from the Socratic demand for conceptual knowledge, Antisthenes drew from it an equally thorough- going nominalism: universal concepts, he maintained, were mere things of thought; he saw people and horses, not peopleness and horseness. From this standpoint he launched against his fellow disciples a polemic not lacking in coarseness, which was answered robustly enough from the
other side. (Zeller, 2. Teil, 1. Abt. , Sokrates und die Sokratiker, Plato und die alte Akademie, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of 5th edn], pp. 295f)
Cf. Poiiteia, Book 7; St. 514ff.
Locke's theory of the primary and secondary qualities of bodies is to be found in Book 2 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Ch. VIII, ? 8ff:
The power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject, wherein that power is. . . . Qualities . . . are first such as are utterly inseparable from the body, in what estate soever it be. - These I call original or primary qualities of body. . . . Secondly, the power that is in any body, by reason of its insensible primary qualities to . . . produce in US the different ideas of several colours, sounds, smells, tastes etc. These
8
1 2
3 4
NOTES TO PAGES 14-16 153
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154
NOTES TO PAGES 17-19
? are usually called sensible qualities. . . . These I call secondary qualities. (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, New
York 1959, p. 169)
5 For Adorno, who saw causality as replaced in a certain sense by 'par- ticipation' in Plato, the doctrine of fLE{}EgLS was particularly important in the version in which it is put forward in the Phaedo (d. Negative Dialectics, St. 99ff).
6 Recent Plato scholarship, as represented by a treatise by Christian Iber, for example, sees in the Parmenides dialogue a dialectical 'rescue' of the 'Many' in Plato against Parmenides's critique of Zeno: 'Many presup- poses One and One produces Many. It is this double thesis which the Parmenides sets out to prove. Plato therefore agrees to a considerable extent with Zeno's critique of multiplicity, but regards the Eleatic's monistic conclusion as false' (Christian Ibers, 'Platons eigentliche philosophische Leistung im Dialog "Parmenides " ', in Dialektischer Negativismus. Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Emil Angehrn et aI. , Frankfurt/Main 1992, p. 188).
7 The reference is to the section 'Oberliefertes' from Part 3 of the 'Historischer Teil' of the Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours):
Plato's attitude to the world is that of a blessed spirit who is pleased to sojourn in it for a while. Since he already knows it; he is not so much concerned with getting to know the world as with kindly imparting to it what he has brought with him, and what it needs so badly. . . . Aristotle's attitude, by contrast, is that of a man, a master-builder. Now that he is here he has to set about his business. He enquires about the soil, but only until he has found firm ground. (Goethe, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 10, Munich 1989, p. 573)
8 The text source incorrectly has 'Aristotle'.
9 Heidegger argues this in, for example, the Introduction to the 5th edi-
tion of 'What is Metaphysics? ':
Such thinking, which recalls the truth of Being, is no longer satisfied with metaphysics, to be sure, but it does not oppose and think against metaphysics either. To return to our image, it does not tear up the root of philosophy. It tills the ground and plows the soil for this root. Meta- physics remains what comes first in philosophy. What comes first in thinking, however, it does not reach. When we think the truth of Being, metaphysics is overcome. We can no longer accept the claim of meta- physics to preside over our fundamental relation to 'Being' or to decisively determine every relation to beings as such. ('Introduction to "What is Metaphysics? " ', trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Heidegger, Pathmarks, Cam-
bridge, Mass. , 1998, p. 279)
And in 'Oberwindung der Metaphysik' in his notes wntten between 1936 and 1946 we read:
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? ? NOTES TO PAGES 20-23
155
? The truth of being decays necessarily as the culmination of metaphysics. Its decay is hastened by the collapse of the world shaped by metaphysics and the devastation of the earth originating in metaphysics. This collapse and this devastation have their fitting executor in metaphysical man un- derstood as the rational animal, the working animal. . . .