No More Learning

PHILOSOPHER: Certainly, sir.
MR JORDAIN: Well, my goodness! Here I've been talking prose for forty
years and never known it, and mighty grateful I am to you for telling me! (trans. John Wood, London 1 953)
3 Adorno discusses Augustine's philosophy of history in the text Fortschritt, cf. GS 10. 2, pp. 620ff.
4 Regarding the gradual character of the Aristotelian concept of devel- opment cf. Ernst Bloch, who finds 'an element of the transient' within Aristotle's logic:
the element of development, which for us cries out for the dialectic, does not proceed by leaps in Aristotle. Development contains no revolutionary element, but is exclusively evolutionary. . . . Development for him is a gradually evolving entelechy, Neptunic, forming like water over long, long periods, not Vulcanic, coming into being with sudden violence, abrupt transitions. Thus the dialectic is eliminated from Aristotle's concept of development. (Ernst Bloch, Leipziger Vorlesungen zur Geschichte der Philosophie 1 950-56, vol. 1 : Antike Philosophie, Frankfurt/Main 1 985, p. 229)
5 In Schopenhauer's philosophy the concept of the urge or yearning (Drang) refers to 'the objectivity of the Will on the lowest rung'; he depicts the Will as 'a blind urge, a dark, dull drive, remote from any- thing directly perceptible'. But
we are presented with the very peculiar phenomenon that the blind action of the Will, and the action illuminated by knowledge, cross over into each other's spheres in a very surprising way. . . . Knowledge in general, whether of reason or merely of perception . . . stems originally from the Will, forming part of the higher stages of its objectification as a mere fL7Jxav? , a means of survival for the individual and the species, like any other organ of the body. (Arthur Schopenhauer, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 1 , Darmstadt 1982, pp. 221ff)
? ? ? NOTES TO PAGES 79-84 171
? Just as Schopenhauer establishes a lineage between urge and cognition, Scheler identifies an unconscious 'urge of feeling' even in plants which, through participating in the 'primal phenomenon of expression', rep- resent 'a kind of yearning towards the highest principle'; plants, he main- tains, have 'a certain physiognomy expressing their inner states, their urges of feeling . . . such as listlessness, vigour, luxuriance, poverty' (Max Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9, p. 15).
6 A problematic passage which cannot be emended with certainty. (Cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10461? ).
7 In the winter semester 1 964/5 Adorno was lecturing on 'the doctrine of history and freedom', d. NaS IV. 13 (in preparation).
8 Zeller concludes from the Aristotelian definitions of matter that
one might think that matter could not be distinguished from form solely by a lack, by a not-being-there-yet, but must add to it something of its own. But we shall rate this significance of matter even more highly if we recall that the philosopher regards only the individual entity as something substantial in the full sense. If only the individual thing is substance, while form . . . is always something universal, and if the ground of the individual thing therefore resides in matter, it is hard to avoid the conclu- sion that the ground of substantial being must also lie in matter, and that substance is not pure form, but only an entity composed of form and matter. Indeed, as substance is defined as the substratum (V7TOKEl/LEVOV), while matter is supposed to be the substratum of all being, matter alone, it seems, could claim to be recognized as the original substance of all things. This, however [Zeller goes on], Aristotle could not possibly con- cede. (Zeller 11. 2, p. 344)
9 This passage is based on an emendation in the edited text of which the editor is far from certain. (Cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10463. )
10 Cf. the Introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy ofHistory: 'World
history is progress in consciousness of freedom - a progress which we have to recognize in its necessity' (Hegel, Werke, vol. 12, Vorlesungen uber die Philosophie der Geschichte, p. 32).
11 Cf. the preface to the Philosophy of Right: 'What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational' (Hegel's Philosophy ofRight, trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford 1 967, p. 10).
12 Physica III 1, 201 a 10; quoted in Zeller II, p. 351. 'The final coming- to-reality of something present merely as possibility, as far as it is such, is (evolutionary) change. ' (Cf. Aristotle, Philosophische Schriften in sechs Banden, vol. 6, p. 51. )
13
14 Cf. the passages cited as support by Zeller 11. 2, p. 356, n. 2, esp. from
See p. 63 above and Lecture 9, n. 2. the Physics; Zeller concludes:
Aristotle imagines the effect of the mover [i. e. form] on the moved [i. e. matter] to be conditioned by a continuous touching of the twO, and this condition seems to him all the more necessary since he maintains that the
?
? 172 NOTES TO PAGES 85-90
? purely incorporeal also has its effect through touching: even thinking is supposed to assimilate what is thought through touching it; the thought thus stands in the same relation to the thinker as form to matter. And the divinity is supposed likewise to touch the world as the prime mover.
(ibid. , pp. 356f)
Lecture Twelve
1 Cf. pp. 80f above.
2 See Lecture 3, p. 14, and esp. n. 7.
3 See p. 36 above.
4 Seep. 81above.
5
6
7
On Heidegger's concept of historicity and Adorno's critique of it, d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 394f, n. 204, but esp. Negative Dialectics, pp. 128f? .
Cf. 'Wenn im Unendlichen', from Zahme Xenien: 'Und alles Driingen, alles Ringen / 1st ewige Ruh' in Gott dem Herrn. ' [All yearning and struggle is everlasting peace in the Lord] (Goethe, Samtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebucher und Gesprache, hrsg. von Hendrik Birus [u. a. ], I.
Abt. , Bd. 2: Gedichte 1 800-1 832, Frankfurt/Main 1 988, p. 680).
On the inversion of dynamic and static with reference to Aristotle, Horkheimer writes:
Movement as such, detached from its social context and its human aim, becomes the mere appearance of movement, the bad infinity of mech- anical repetition. . . . It is no accident that in the basic text of western philosophy, Aristotle's Metaphysics, the idea of universal dynamism could be combined directly with an unmoved prime mover. The circumstance that the blind development of technology heightens social repression and exploitation threatens at each stage to turn progress into its opposite, total barbarism. (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, Frankfurt! Main 1991, pp. 140f)
Hardly anywhere more clearly than in Metaphysics, A 3, 1069 b 35ff; Gohlke's commentary on this is as follows:
This must be followed by a demonstration that neither matter nor form comes into being as an ultimate raw material. Everything is transformed from something through something into something. It is transformed 'through' the prime mover, 'from' matter 'into' form. If not only the bronze sphere, but also bronze and sphericality, came into being, that would go on for ever. So there must be a stopping point somewhere. (Aristoteles, Metaphysik, iibertr. von Paul Gohlke, p. 357)
See esp. Lecture 1, pp. 3f above.
See p. 53 above.
See pp. 30f above.
Metaphysics, A 7, 1072 b 15, 18H contains argumentation on the life of the unmoved mover:
8
9 10 1 1 12
? NOTES TO PAGES 90-92 173
? It is a life which is always the noblest and the happiest that we can live. . . . Thought . . . must be thought of what is best in itself; i. e. that which is thought in the fullest sense must be occupied with that which is best in the fullest sense. Now thought does think itself, because it shares in the intelligibility of its object. It becomes intelligible by contact with the intelligible, so that thought and object of thought are one. (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 346). Also see Lecture 13, n. 3.
13 TO yap alho VOELV EUT{V TE Kat Elva! ; translated as: 'for thinking and being are the same thing' (Diels/Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
vol. 1, p. 231).
14 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Das Problem des Idealismus. Stichworte zur
Vorlesung 1 953/54', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter V, Munich 1 998. Karl Reinhardt's book Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (4th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1985) was especially important for Adorno's understanding of Parmenides, although it touches only peripherally on the proposition of the identity of thinking and being.
15 Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 368f, n. 1:
Aristotle states frequently and with great force that neither a 7TOtT/O', nor a 7Tpag" can be attributed to the divinity. . . . Rather, he says very gener- ally that . . . both 7TpaTTEtV and 7TO'EtV must be seen as foreign to the divinity, that the perfection manifested in action (practical virtue) finds room only in human intercourse and among creatures subject to human passions . . . and that all action is a means to an end different to it, and cannot therefore be attributed to the divinity, for which there is no goal still to be attained.
16 For the recent position of Aristotle scholarship on this question d. Joachim Ritter's essay of 1 953, 'Die Lehre vom Ursprung und Sinn der Theorie bei Aristotle', in Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu
? 1 7
1 8 19
Aristoteles und Hegel, Frankfurt/Main 1 969, pp. 9ff.
A sharply divergent historical-philosophical interpretation is to be found in Horkheimer's essay 'Die gesellschaftliche Funktion der Philosophie'
of 1940:
Although Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, regards the self-contemplation of the soul, the theoretical attitude, as the highest happiness, he says explicitly that this happiness is only possible on a specific material basis, that is, under certain social and economic conditions. Plato and Aristotle do not believe, like Antisthenes and the Cynics, that reason is capable of constant development to a higher level in people who literally lead a dog's life, or that wisdom could go hand in hand with penury.
For them, just conditions were a prerequisite for the unfolding of the intellectual powers of human beings, and this idea underlies the whole of western
humanism. (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Frankfurt/Main 1988, p. 346)
Not traced.
See Lecture 1, n. 8.
? ?
174
1
2
NOTES TO PAGES 94-95 Lecture Thirteen
? 3
In the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt/Main the granite sculpture Empedocles ( 1 954) stood in the entrance hall of the main building, in front of the Rector's office.
Cf. Remark 3 in Chapter 1 of the Science of Logic:
With this wholly abstract purity of continuity, that is, indeterminateness and vacuity of conception, it is indifferent whether this abstraction is called space, pure intuiting, or pure thinking; it is altogether the same as what the Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, physically motion- less and equally unmoved in sensation, conception, fantasy, desire and so on, looking only at the tip of his nose, he says inwardly only Om, Om,
Om, or else nothing at all. (Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London 1969, p. 97)
Cf. Aristotle: 'Therefore, since the supreme intellect is the best thing in the world, it must think itself; its thinking is a thinking of thinking' (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 349). On this question Zeller writes:
God is . . . the activity of absolute intellect, and to this extent he is that which is absolutely real and living, and the primal source of all life. But what is the content of this thinking? All thinking derives its value from what is thought, but divine thinking can derive it from nothing lying outside itself, and can have no content other than what is best; but it alone is the best. God therefore thinks himself, and his thinking is a thinking of thinking, so that in divine thinking, as cannot be otherwise for pure intellect, thinking and its object coincide absolutely. This immut- able abiding of thinking in itself, this indivisible unity of the thinker and the thought, is the absolute bliss of God. (Zeller 11. 2, pp. 366f)
In his lecture series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vemunft' Adorno attaches his own definition of philosophy to that of Aristotle when he says that philosophy 'is really concerned with the "thinking of thinking", as Aristotle has defined it - in which the thought processes of logic and the
positive sciences must review themselves critically' (NaS IV. 4, p. 127). Cf. the paragraph with this title in 'Kritik des logischen Absolutismus':
The necessity of the contingency of the factual in idealism is made by Husser! into the virtue of the purity of the idea. The ideas remain behind as the caput mortuum of a life deserted by spirit. The various material
sciences are conceived in a totally empiricist way. . . . In his conception of 'absolutely strict regularity' he is too free with the 'thousands of accidents' which are not accidents. For the scientist, chance is the unwelcome re- sidue which settles at the bottom of his concepts, while for the 'common man', whose name Husserl utters without any compunction, it is what befalls him and against which he is defenceless. The scientist fancies that he can prescribe laws to the world; the 'common man' must obey each law in practical terms. He can do nothing about this, and may rightly
? 4
5
? NOTES TO PAGES 96-98
175
? consider it fortuitous; but that the world is made up of those who are exposed to such accidents and others who, though they may not make the law, can console themselves with its existence, is no accident, but is itself the law of real society. No philosophy which considers the 'world's conception' should ignore this. For Husserl, however, the sacrifice of empiricism does not open unrestricted insight to such connections, but he simply repeats the shoulder-shrugging prejudice that it all depends on one's point of view. Knowledge of the factual need not be too punctili- ous, since it in any case bears the taint of fortuitousness. Reality becomes an object of mere opinion. This modesty is as false as its complement, the hubris of the absolute. (GS 5, pp. 92f)
6 Cf. the preface to the Phenomenology ofSpirit: 'To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfilment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black - this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity' (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford 1 977, p. 9).
7 Which text of Lessing's Adorno was thinking of here, and whether he was thinking of a particular text, has not been ascertained. Behind it is probably Lessing's realization that the 'gratuitous truths of history
. . . can never become proofs of necessary truths of reason'; Lessing called this the 'wretched wide ditch . . . that I can never get across, no matter how often and earnestly I have attempted the leap' (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gesammelte Werke in 10 Banden, ed. Paul Rilla, vol. 8: Philosophische und theologische Schriften II, Berlin 1956, pp. 12, 14) - a ditch which, according to Ernst Cassirer, had been overleapt in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), with its discovery of the truth of the historical; as a young lecturer Adorno gave one of his first seminars on Lessing's last work on the philosophy of religion.
8 Cf. for example, the report by Hippolytos (AD c. 220) in his Refutatio omnium haeresium:
Epicurus assures us that God is eternal and immortal, but that he troubles himself about nothing, in short, that there is neither solicitude nor fate, for everything takes place by itself (mechanically). The god abides in what he calls the World-Between . . . There he enjoys a feeling of supreme happiness in tranquil unconcern, has no difficulties himself and causes none to others. (Griechische Atomisten. Texte und Kommentare zum materialistischen Denken der Antike, ed. Fritz Jiirss et ai. , Leipzig 1977,
9 Adorno is referring to Negative Dialectics, especially the last section,
'Meditations on Metaphysics'; the first edition of the book came out in
1966. The 'reflections on metaphysics which seem [to Adorno] timely
and unavoidable today', which are set out in the foIlowing pages, draw
on the first five (of the total of twelve) 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (see Lecture 1, n. 1), a 'second intermediate copy' of which is dated
? ?
? p. 333)
176
NOTES TO PAGES 98-105
? 7. 7. 1965 (cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Ts 15813ff). Adorno prob- ably drew on this intermediate copy for the notes on which he based the last lectures, which were given extempore: a kind of improvised variation on what had already been fixed in writing, which, after fur- ther revision, was finally published for the first time in Negative Dialektik the following year. The notes relate, with some omissions, to the text running from p. 361 to p. 376 in Negative Dialectics; whereas the
lecture notes conclude with 'The totum is the totem' (cf. ibid. , p. 376), Adorno had to end the lecture somewhat earlier through lack of time
(see Lecture 18, n. 16).
10 See p. 20 passim above.
11 Cf. the quotations from the Encyclopaedia and the Logic in Lecture 1,
n. 8.
12 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Studien
uber Husserl und die phanomenologischen Antinomien, Stuttgart 1 956; now GS 5, pp. 48-95.
Lecture Fourteen
1 See p. 101 above.
2 Schopenhauer's 'doctrine of the denial of the Will to Live', which forms
part of his system relating to moral philosophy, is to be found in Book 4 of The World as Will and Representation, in ? 68 of vol. 1 and in Chapter 48 of vol. 2; also see Chapter 14 of vol. 2 of Parerga and Paralipomena (cf. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representa- tion, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, New York 1958, vol. 1, pp. 378ff, vol. 2, pp. 603ff; Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, Oxford
1974, vol. 2, pp. 312ff).
3 On 1 November 1755 the Portuguese capital was devastated by an
earthquake in which a quarter of its inhabitants lost their lives. Voltaire, deeply shaken, wrote his 'Poeme sur Ie desastre de Lisbonne, ou examen de cet axiome: tout est bien':
o malheureux mortels! {) terre deplorable! o de tous les fleaux assemblage effroyable! D'inutiles douleurs eternel entretien!
? ? ?
Quel crime, quelie faute ont commis ces enfans Sur Ie sein maternel ecrases et sanglans? Lisbonne qui n'est plus eut-elle plus de vices
Que Londres, que Paris, plonges dans les delices? Lisbonne est abimee, et l'on danse ii Paris.
? ? ?
Ce monde, ce theatre et d'orgueil et d'erreur, Est plein d'infortunes qui parlent de bonheur.
? ? ?
Nos chagrins, nos regrets, nos pertes sont sans nombre.
NOTES TO PAGES 106-108 177
? Le passe n'est pour nous qu'un triste souvenir; Le present est affreux s'il n'est point d'avenir, Si la nuit du tombeau detruit l'etre qui pense.
Un jour tout sera bien, voila votre esperance: Tout est bien au;ourd'hui, voila l'illusion.
Voltaire's 'Poeme', which, with another 'sur la loi naturelle' was pub- lished as a book, was condemned and burned in 1759. Rousseau's 'Letter on Providence' is dated 18. 8. 1756; he later commented rather aptly on it in his Confessions:
Struck by seeing that poor man, weighed down, so to speak, by fame and prosperity. Bitterly complaining, nevertheless, against the wretchedness of this life and finding everything invariably bad, I formed the insane plan of bringing him back to himself and proving to him that all was well. Though Voltaire has always appeared to believe in God, he has really only believed in the Devil, because his so-called God is nothing but a malicious being who, according to his belief, only takes pleasure in doing
harm. (Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen, Harmondsworth 1953, pp. 399f)
And: 'In the meantime Voltaire has published the reply that he promised
me. It is nothing less than his novel Candide . . . ' (ibid. , p. 400).
4 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut
Tarnowski and Frederic Will, Evanston 1 973.
5 Cf. Jean Amery, 'Die Tortur', in Merkur 208, vol. 19 (1965), pp. 623ff
(Issue 7, July 1965); now in a revised version in Amery, Jenseits von Schuld und Siihne. Bewiiltigungsversuche eines Oberwiiltigten, 2nd edn, Stuttgart 1980, pp. 46ff.
6 Cf. Ch. 1 : 'Dasein's Possibility of Being-a-Whole, and Being-Towards- Death' of Division 2 on 'Dasein and Temporality' (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 279ff), 'The "end" of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to the potentiality-for-Being - that is to say, to existence - limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein,' and 'When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its "there'" ? (ibid. , pp. 276-7 and 281); also Adorno's critique in TheJargon ofAuthenticity, pp. 130ff.
7 Cf. Brecht, A Man's A Man, in Baal, A Man's A Man and The Elephant Calf, trans. Eric Bentley, New York 1 964, pp. 1 1 7ff; on the status of the text of the play, written in 1 924-6, cf. Brecht, Gesammelte Werke
in acht Biinden, Frankfurt/Main 1 976, vol. 1 , pp. 363, n. and p. 4 * . Cf. , for example, the chapter on the 'culture industry':
Whenever the culture industry still issues an invitation naively to identify, it is immediately withdrawn.