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.
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.
Adorno-Metaphysics
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. The transcript is now kept in the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv
and numbered Vo 10347-10808.
In establishing the text the editor has tried to proceed in the same
way as Adorno when editing extempore lectures, if indeed he re- leased them for publication; in particular, he has tried to retain their character as lectures. As the text of the transcript has deteriorated
badly, an unusually large number of interventions had to be made, in comparison, for example, with the lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft'. The transcript was clearly made by someone who was neither familiar with Adorno's peculiarities nor remotely able to un- derstand the subject matter of the lectures. It not infrequently shows omissions from the text, Greek words have always been omitted and names often misunderstood; in addition, there are numerous factual errors when the transcriber failed to hear properly. Nevertheless,
it was, as a rule, not difficult to surmise and tacitly insert what was said or at least intended. In view of the necessity to make frequent emendations to the text, the editor believed himself authorized to retouch it further in a way which would not have been appropriate in a more authentic original, and was not done, for example, in the case of the Kant lectures just mentioned. Clear violations of gram- matical rules have been corrected, and superfluous words, especially the particles nun, also, ja have been removed where they merely filled awkward gaps. Adorno's use of the definite article before names, following a peculiarity of the Hessian dialect ('der Aristoteles'), was deleted where it occurred over-frequently. Any too-distracting repeti- tions were discreetly removed, and cumbersome syntactical construc- tions were occasionally modified. The editor felt most free in inserting missing punctuation, attempting to articulate the spoken text as clearly
? and unambiguously as possible, regardless of the rules applied by
?
198 EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
? Adorno to written texts. However, he never attempted to 'improve' Adorno's text, but only to establish his text, as far as the editor was able. The notes give references to the quotations used in the lectures, and cite passages to which Adorno refers or might have referred. addition, parallel passages from Adorno's writings are adduced both to clarify what is said in the lectures and to demonstrate that manifold connections exist between the author's lectures and writings. 'One needs to develop a faculty for discerning the emphases and accents peculiar to that philosophy in order to uncover their relationships within the philosophical context, and thus to understand the philo- sophy itself - that is at least as important as knowing unequivocally:
such and such is metaphysics' (p. 51 above). The notes are intended to assist a reading which follows this inj unction of Adorno's. In their totality they are meant to help the reader gain an awareness of the context of learning in which Adorno's lecturing took place, and which cannot be taken for granted now. If the notes here and there give the impression of verging on a commentary, it should be borne in mind that this impression is not unintentional.
In
GLOSSARY OF GREEK TERMS
? TO dya&6v (the good) dKtV'TJTO? , -ov (unmoved)
? dVaYK1] (necessity)
o av&pw7To? (man)
? dv8pEta (courage) d6pWTO? , -ov (indefinite)
TO a7TELpOV (the infinite)
? dpX? (principle, beginning) TO aVT6f-taTOV (chance)
yap (for)
8dJTEpO? , -a, -ov (secondary), see ovaLa, 8dJTEpa ? 8LKaWaVV1] (justice)
? 8vVaf-tL? (power, potentiality)
El8EvaL (to know)
TO El8o? (form)
ElvaL (to be)
EKaaTo? , -1], ov (each, each individual) Ev8EX0f-taL (to be possible, to admit)
? EVEpYELa (actuality)
E'V KaTu 7TO'\'\WV (one in the many) ? EVTEMxELU (realization)
EaTLV (is, is the case)
200 GLOSSARY OF GREEK TERMS
? "
EGxaTO? , -Y], -ov (1ast), see Vlly], EGXaTY]
? ? w? (life) ? f-tEt? (we)
Ot {}EO{ (the gods)
o {}EO? (God)
{}EGH (by position)
? {}Ewp{a (study, speculation)
? lSEa (the idea)
LStO? , -a, -ov (personal, private)
Ka{ (and)
? KaTy]yop{a (category)
TO (dKLV'ryTOV] KtVOVV (the (unmoved] mover) o KOGf-tO? (world, order)
o '\oyo? (speech, reason, definition)
? f-tE{}Egt? (participation)
? f-tEaOTry? (mean state)
f-tETU (after)
f-tETuf3aGt? El? &'\'\0 YEVO? (transition to another kind) f-t? (not)
TO f-t? OV (what is not the case) ? f-tY]xav? (device)
? f-t0PCP? (form)
VOEtV (to think, perceive) VOY]TO? , -? , OV (mental)
? voY]at? (thought, perception) o vov? (intellect, mind)
? olK{a (house)
TO OV, Ttl OVTa (that which is the case, existing things) OVTW? (really)
opEYWf-tat (to desire, reach for)
? OPf-t? (impulse)
TO 015 EVEKa (final cause, purpose)
? ova{a (substance)
ouata, 7TPWTry (primary substance)
ova{a, ckuTEpa (secondary substance)
? "\',
? ? ? GLOSSARY OF GREEK TERMS
201
? miS', miaa, miv, pI. mlvTES' (aU, every) TO 1TELpap (end, boundary, bounding) 1TOLELV (to make, do, act)
? 1To{YJaLS' (creation, poetry)
? 1T(SALS' (city-state)
? 1TpagLS' (action)
1TPUTTHV (to do)
1TpOS' (with regard to)
1TPOTEPOS', -a, -ov (former, prior)
TO 1TPWTOV (the first) 1TPWTOS', -YJ, -ov (first)
? aocp{a (wisdom)
? aTEpYJaLS' (privation)
TO TEAOS' (end)
TO T{ ? V E? VaL (essence)
TOSE TL (individual thing)
TOWVTOS', TOLaUTYJ, TOWVTO(V) (such) o T01TOS' (place, topic)
? TUXYJ (fate, chance)
? VAYJ (matter)
VAYJ' EaxuTYJ (last matter)
VAYJ' 1TPWTYJ (primary matter)
TO lJ1TOKE{/-tEVOV (the substratum) vaTEpoS', -a, -ov (later)
cpLAoaocp{a (philosophy)
cpLAoaocp{a, 1TPWTYJ (first philosophy) cpuaH (by nature)
Tel cpvaLKu (physics)
? cpuaLS' (nature)
XpOVl{J (in time) xwp{S' (separately)
o xwpw/-toS' (separation) XWPWTOS' (separable)
? ? ? ?
?
a priori 164-5n contingent and valid logic 54-5
matter 53-5
53-4
antinomies, doctrine of 57 Antisthenes 16, 153n Aquinas, St Thomas 73, 105
Christian metaphysical speculation 6
justification of metaphysics 8
occultism 3 Arendt, Hannah 115 Aristotle 4, 12
absolute indetermination of matter 52-3
absolute perfection equated with absolute reality 89
Adorno's reflection 194-5 bringing together two spheres
37-8
Categories 25 cause 73-4, 169n
change and the unchangeable 56-8, 60, 87
Christian metaphysical speculation 6
conflicting approach to primary being 80-1
detemporalization of concepts 69-71
the dialectic 47, 48
the absolute demonized Hegel 1 22
121
183n anti-system 191
Adler, H. G. Adorno, Theodor W.
Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer) 108
The Jargon ofAuthenticity
131
Kleine Proust-Kommentare Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie
95, 99
Minima Maralia 140 Negative Dialectics 191-5
Aesthetics (Hegel) 1 10 Amery, Jean 106, 109
torture 1 79n Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
Anaximander of Miletus 1 66n
12 St Anselm of Canterbury
Andronicus of Rhodes
INDEX
? 91 57, 74,
89
106,
136
'human urge to know' hylozoism 14, 85, 1 53n hypostasis of form and
21-3
immortality 73
imperfection arises from matter
individuation 79-80 intervening activity of God legacy of dualism 77-83 matter 64, 167-8n, 17ln mediation 45-7, 161-2n metaphysics begins with motion 81-4, 171-2n
no subjective reflection
not a nominalist 19, 26, 38 objective idealism 48-9, 62-4
the One in the Many ontology 22-3
Organon 25, 28
overlooks abstractive quality of
concepts 55-6
the particular and the universal
25-6, 39-41
and Plato 17-18, 20, 154n Politics 47
primary status of form over
matter 36-41, 42, 52, 61, 63 principle of moderation (W(J6T'T/")
science of first principles and causes 24-6
spirits 3, 4
the static and dynamic 172n substance 28-30, 31-2, 66-7 synthesis 6 5 - 6
The Authoritarian Personality
(Adorno) 3
Bachofen, Johann Jakob 78 'back world' 2-3, 8, 147n Bacon, Francis
liberated from tradition 139 Barth, Karl
metaphysics and culture 121-2 Beck, Maximilian
Psychology. The Nature and
93 33-5
71-3 Beckett, Samuel 114, 117-18
1 5
INDEX
203
? ? divine action 173n
Jv? pYHa (actuality) and 8vvaJL"
(potentiality) 36-7 essence in things themselves
tension and difficulty in concept of VA'T/ 74
theology and thought 88-90 thinking of thinking (v6'T/(Jt,
? 26-32
ethics 47, 163n
first matter (7TpWT'T/ VA'T/)
form (JLOpf('? ) and matter (VA'T/)
35-6
genesis and validity
vO? (J"w,,) 94-5 transience 170n the unmoved mover
76, 88, 172-3n
see also Metaphysics
42, 44, Heidegger's interpretation of
Aristotlean Peripatetics
ataraxy 1 12
St Augustine 78
Auschwitz see extermination camps
160-1n
66-7
40, 5 8-9, 97
Reality ofthe Soul
negation and truth 124, 135-6, 186n
Being and Time (Heidegger) 21, 107, 177n
Benjamin, Walter 133, 163n Berg, Alban 143-4
Berkeley, Bishop George 4 Black Banners (Strindberg) 126 Bloch, Ernst 132, 170n Bolzano, Bernard 39
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
(Moliere) 78, 1 69-70n Bradley, Francis Herbert 164n Brecht, Bertolt 1 07, 1 08, 1 1 6-17
palace of dogshit 1 1 8, 1 80n
Brentano, Franz Brunner, Emil Buber, Martin
39
121, 182n 108
the Cabbala 138 Capital ( Marx) 1 1 8
? 77-9
97
47
?
204
INDEX
? categones
abstractions produced by the
mind 48
ancient philosophy and
cosmology 1 3
The Critique ofJudgement (Kant)
63, 125-6, 1 83n
The Critique of Practical Reason
(Kant) 143
moral law acting upon empirical
world 27-8
The Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)
and Plato 20 culture
death 130-1 demolishing 1 2 7 failure 1 2 7- 8 industry of 177-8n man-made 1 3 0
and metaphysics 121-8 narrow-mindedness 1 1 8 resurrection and abolition 119 self-preservation 129 suppression of nature 1 1 8
Curtius, Ludwig 168n
death
different meanings 106-7 Heidegger's metaphysics 184n and metaphysics 130-8
old age and identity 134-5 reconciliation to 133-6 Schopenhauer 1 85n
time 133
Democritus 9 Descartes, Rene
dualism of body and soul 83 liberated from tradition 139 nominalist protest against
?
hylozoism 85-6 form and matter 66 internal development
Categories (Aristotle) causality
97 25
avaYK"l 74-5
and chance (TlJX"l) formal 74
freedom 76
goals (-dAoS')
identity 75
inherent in the world moving 74
sensible appearance
chance ('TVX"l) 75 change 8 1
Aristotle's interest in
and ontology 87 presupposes unchangeability
57 Christianity
Aristotle's dualism in heaven and earth 78
metaphysical speculation monotheism 90
mysticism 100, 138
need for good/divine re-emergence of metaphysics
19-20 cognition 34
common sense Comte, Auguste concepts
84
63
5-6, 148-9n
scholasticism 60
Principles ofPhilosophy
substance 28 the dialectic
63
75
52 33
abiding 72-3
abstraction 55-6
are themselves in the objects conclusion drawn from pure detemporalization of meaning
70-1
divinity 88
drawing conclusions from
of the non-conceptual 67-8
56 82
28 57
Dialectic ofEnlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer) 108
Duns Scotus, John 8
88 The Confessions ( Rousseau) 1 77n
56-8
? 6-7
antinomies, doctrine of Aristotle and 47, 48 positive moments 142 problem of mediation 69 synthesis 65-6
Ebner, Ferdinand 121, 182n education 132
1 1 2
form (fLOPfPTJ)
abstractions produced by the
mind 48
Aristotle 3 5 - 6
autonomy used in immortality
argument 71-3
and being 61
change confined to 81
EVEpYEW 83
eternal relationship with matter
8 6 - 8 goal 62-3
immanent not transcendent 33 logic 99
made into true reality 61
matter yearns towards 83-4 necessity in antithesis with matter
Platonic Ideas 3, 15-19, 61
pnmary status over matter 36-41, 42, 49-50, 52
related to matter in moments 41
social origin 45 France, Anatole 135-6 freedom
causality 76
and guilt 1 12-13
Hegel 178n
unmediated antitheses of vATJ and
16, 81 deadening of affect
165n
Eleatic school
emotIOns
a priori of
?
emplnclsm
mediation
sacrificed in self-reflection
Epicureanism 97 epistemology 44
? ? ?
43
antithesis between tradition and cognition 138-9
attempt to reconcile concepts of form and matter 42
entwined with metaphysics
5
123
see also knowledge essences
Husserl's region of
within or without Ethics (Spinoza) 28 evil
27 26-7
?
95
INDEX
205
? ? appropriation of language
and triviality
eXIstence absurdity
115
103-4, 1 10-1 1
?
force
10
95
existence/non-existence 17-18, 87
?
1 09
affirmation
death as the meaning of guilt 1 1 3
Hamlet and transience non-existence (fL? QV) time 133
existentialism 106
expenence
relation to Platonic Idea restriction on thinking about
truth 124-5
extermination camps 101, 104,
? 115-16, 178n poetry after Auschwitz
179n
faith
and knowledge 164n
Feuerbach, Ludwig A.
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. The transcript is now kept in the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv
and numbered Vo 10347-10808.
In establishing the text the editor has tried to proceed in the same
way as Adorno when editing extempore lectures, if indeed he re- leased them for publication; in particular, he has tried to retain their character as lectures. As the text of the transcript has deteriorated
badly, an unusually large number of interventions had to be made, in comparison, for example, with the lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft'. The transcript was clearly made by someone who was neither familiar with Adorno's peculiarities nor remotely able to un- derstand the subject matter of the lectures. It not infrequently shows omissions from the text, Greek words have always been omitted and names often misunderstood; in addition, there are numerous factual errors when the transcriber failed to hear properly. Nevertheless,
it was, as a rule, not difficult to surmise and tacitly insert what was said or at least intended. In view of the necessity to make frequent emendations to the text, the editor believed himself authorized to retouch it further in a way which would not have been appropriate in a more authentic original, and was not done, for example, in the case of the Kant lectures just mentioned. Clear violations of gram- matical rules have been corrected, and superfluous words, especially the particles nun, also, ja have been removed where they merely filled awkward gaps. Adorno's use of the definite article before names, following a peculiarity of the Hessian dialect ('der Aristoteles'), was deleted where it occurred over-frequently. Any too-distracting repeti- tions were discreetly removed, and cumbersome syntactical construc- tions were occasionally modified. The editor felt most free in inserting missing punctuation, attempting to articulate the spoken text as clearly
? and unambiguously as possible, regardless of the rules applied by
?
198 EDITOR'S AFTERWORD
? Adorno to written texts. However, he never attempted to 'improve' Adorno's text, but only to establish his text, as far as the editor was able. The notes give references to the quotations used in the lectures, and cite passages to which Adorno refers or might have referred. addition, parallel passages from Adorno's writings are adduced both to clarify what is said in the lectures and to demonstrate that manifold connections exist between the author's lectures and writings. 'One needs to develop a faculty for discerning the emphases and accents peculiar to that philosophy in order to uncover their relationships within the philosophical context, and thus to understand the philo- sophy itself - that is at least as important as knowing unequivocally:
such and such is metaphysics' (p. 51 above). The notes are intended to assist a reading which follows this inj unction of Adorno's. In their totality they are meant to help the reader gain an awareness of the context of learning in which Adorno's lecturing took place, and which cannot be taken for granted now. If the notes here and there give the impression of verging on a commentary, it should be borne in mind that this impression is not unintentional.
In
GLOSSARY OF GREEK TERMS
? TO dya&6v (the good) dKtV'TJTO? , -ov (unmoved)
? dVaYK1] (necessity)
o av&pw7To? (man)
? dv8pEta (courage) d6pWTO? , -ov (indefinite)
TO a7TELpOV (the infinite)
? dpX? (principle, beginning) TO aVT6f-taTOV (chance)
yap (for)
8dJTEpO? , -a, -ov (secondary), see ovaLa, 8dJTEpa ? 8LKaWaVV1] (justice)
? 8vVaf-tL? (power, potentiality)
El8EvaL (to know)
TO El8o? (form)
ElvaL (to be)
EKaaTo? , -1], ov (each, each individual) Ev8EX0f-taL (to be possible, to admit)
? EVEpYELa (actuality)
E'V KaTu 7TO'\'\WV (one in the many) ? EVTEMxELU (realization)
EaTLV (is, is the case)
200 GLOSSARY OF GREEK TERMS
? "
EGxaTO? , -Y], -ov (1ast), see Vlly], EGXaTY]
? ? w? (life) ? f-tEt? (we)
Ot {}EO{ (the gods)
o {}EO? (God)
{}EGH (by position)
? {}Ewp{a (study, speculation)
? lSEa (the idea)
LStO? , -a, -ov (personal, private)
Ka{ (and)
? KaTy]yop{a (category)
TO (dKLV'ryTOV] KtVOVV (the (unmoved] mover) o KOGf-tO? (world, order)
o '\oyo? (speech, reason, definition)
? f-tE{}Egt? (participation)
? f-tEaOTry? (mean state)
f-tETU (after)
f-tETuf3aGt? El? &'\'\0 YEVO? (transition to another kind) f-t? (not)
TO f-t? OV (what is not the case) ? f-tY]xav? (device)
? f-t0PCP? (form)
VOEtV (to think, perceive) VOY]TO? , -? , OV (mental)
? voY]at? (thought, perception) o vov? (intellect, mind)
? olK{a (house)
TO OV, Ttl OVTa (that which is the case, existing things) OVTW? (really)
opEYWf-tat (to desire, reach for)
? OPf-t? (impulse)
TO 015 EVEKa (final cause, purpose)
? ova{a (substance)
ouata, 7TPWTry (primary substance)
ova{a, ckuTEpa (secondary substance)
? "\',
? ? ? GLOSSARY OF GREEK TERMS
201
? miS', miaa, miv, pI. mlvTES' (aU, every) TO 1TELpap (end, boundary, bounding) 1TOLELV (to make, do, act)
? 1To{YJaLS' (creation, poetry)
? 1T(SALS' (city-state)
? 1TpagLS' (action)
1TPUTTHV (to do)
1TpOS' (with regard to)
1TPOTEPOS', -a, -ov (former, prior)
TO 1TPWTOV (the first) 1TPWTOS', -YJ, -ov (first)
? aocp{a (wisdom)
? aTEpYJaLS' (privation)
TO TEAOS' (end)
TO T{ ? V E? VaL (essence)
TOSE TL (individual thing)
TOWVTOS', TOLaUTYJ, TOWVTO(V) (such) o T01TOS' (place, topic)
? TUXYJ (fate, chance)
? VAYJ (matter)
VAYJ' EaxuTYJ (last matter)
VAYJ' 1TPWTYJ (primary matter)
TO lJ1TOKE{/-tEVOV (the substratum) vaTEpoS', -a, -ov (later)
cpLAoaocp{a (philosophy)
cpLAoaocp{a, 1TPWTYJ (first philosophy) cpuaH (by nature)
Tel cpvaLKu (physics)
? cpuaLS' (nature)
XpOVl{J (in time) xwp{S' (separately)
o xwpw/-toS' (separation) XWPWTOS' (separable)
? ? ? ?
?
a priori 164-5n contingent and valid logic 54-5
matter 53-5
53-4
antinomies, doctrine of 57 Antisthenes 16, 153n Aquinas, St Thomas 73, 105
Christian metaphysical speculation 6
justification of metaphysics 8
occultism 3 Arendt, Hannah 115 Aristotle 4, 12
absolute indetermination of matter 52-3
absolute perfection equated with absolute reality 89
Adorno's reflection 194-5 bringing together two spheres
37-8
Categories 25 cause 73-4, 169n
change and the unchangeable 56-8, 60, 87
Christian metaphysical speculation 6
conflicting approach to primary being 80-1
detemporalization of concepts 69-71
the dialectic 47, 48
the absolute demonized Hegel 1 22
121
183n anti-system 191
Adler, H. G. Adorno, Theodor W.
Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer) 108
The Jargon ofAuthenticity
131
Kleine Proust-Kommentare Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie
95, 99
Minima Maralia 140 Negative Dialectics 191-5
Aesthetics (Hegel) 1 10 Amery, Jean 106, 109
torture 1 79n Anaxagoras of Clazomenae
Anaximander of Miletus 1 66n
12 St Anselm of Canterbury
Andronicus of Rhodes
INDEX
? 91 57, 74,
89
106,
136
'human urge to know' hylozoism 14, 85, 1 53n hypostasis of form and
21-3
immortality 73
imperfection arises from matter
individuation 79-80 intervening activity of God legacy of dualism 77-83 matter 64, 167-8n, 17ln mediation 45-7, 161-2n metaphysics begins with motion 81-4, 171-2n
no subjective reflection
not a nominalist 19, 26, 38 objective idealism 48-9, 62-4
the One in the Many ontology 22-3
Organon 25, 28
overlooks abstractive quality of
concepts 55-6
the particular and the universal
25-6, 39-41
and Plato 17-18, 20, 154n Politics 47
primary status of form over
matter 36-41, 42, 52, 61, 63 principle of moderation (W(J6T'T/")
science of first principles and causes 24-6
spirits 3, 4
the static and dynamic 172n substance 28-30, 31-2, 66-7 synthesis 6 5 - 6
The Authoritarian Personality
(Adorno) 3
Bachofen, Johann Jakob 78 'back world' 2-3, 8, 147n Bacon, Francis
liberated from tradition 139 Barth, Karl
metaphysics and culture 121-2 Beck, Maximilian
Psychology. The Nature and
93 33-5
71-3 Beckett, Samuel 114, 117-18
1 5
INDEX
203
? ? divine action 173n
Jv? pYHa (actuality) and 8vvaJL"
(potentiality) 36-7 essence in things themselves
tension and difficulty in concept of VA'T/ 74
theology and thought 88-90 thinking of thinking (v6'T/(Jt,
? 26-32
ethics 47, 163n
first matter (7TpWT'T/ VA'T/)
form (JLOpf('? ) and matter (VA'T/)
35-6
genesis and validity
vO? (J"w,,) 94-5 transience 170n the unmoved mover
76, 88, 172-3n
see also Metaphysics
42, 44, Heidegger's interpretation of
Aristotlean Peripatetics
ataraxy 1 12
St Augustine 78
Auschwitz see extermination camps
160-1n
66-7
40, 5 8-9, 97
Reality ofthe Soul
negation and truth 124, 135-6, 186n
Being and Time (Heidegger) 21, 107, 177n
Benjamin, Walter 133, 163n Berg, Alban 143-4
Berkeley, Bishop George 4 Black Banners (Strindberg) 126 Bloch, Ernst 132, 170n Bolzano, Bernard 39
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme
(Moliere) 78, 1 69-70n Bradley, Francis Herbert 164n Brecht, Bertolt 1 07, 1 08, 1 1 6-17
palace of dogshit 1 1 8, 1 80n
Brentano, Franz Brunner, Emil Buber, Martin
39
121, 182n 108
the Cabbala 138 Capital ( Marx) 1 1 8
? 77-9
97
47
?
204
INDEX
? categones
abstractions produced by the
mind 48
ancient philosophy and
cosmology 1 3
The Critique ofJudgement (Kant)
63, 125-6, 1 83n
The Critique of Practical Reason
(Kant) 143
moral law acting upon empirical
world 27-8
The Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)
and Plato 20 culture
death 130-1 demolishing 1 2 7 failure 1 2 7- 8 industry of 177-8n man-made 1 3 0
and metaphysics 121-8 narrow-mindedness 1 1 8 resurrection and abolition 119 self-preservation 129 suppression of nature 1 1 8
Curtius, Ludwig 168n
death
different meanings 106-7 Heidegger's metaphysics 184n and metaphysics 130-8
old age and identity 134-5 reconciliation to 133-6 Schopenhauer 1 85n
time 133
Democritus 9 Descartes, Rene
dualism of body and soul 83 liberated from tradition 139 nominalist protest against
?
hylozoism 85-6 form and matter 66 internal development
Categories (Aristotle) causality
97 25
avaYK"l 74-5
and chance (TlJX"l) formal 74
freedom 76
goals (-dAoS')
identity 75
inherent in the world moving 74
sensible appearance
chance ('TVX"l) 75 change 8 1
Aristotle's interest in
and ontology 87 presupposes unchangeability
57 Christianity
Aristotle's dualism in heaven and earth 78
metaphysical speculation monotheism 90
mysticism 100, 138
need for good/divine re-emergence of metaphysics
19-20 cognition 34
common sense Comte, Auguste concepts
84
63
5-6, 148-9n
scholasticism 60
Principles ofPhilosophy
substance 28 the dialectic
63
75
52 33
abiding 72-3
abstraction 55-6
are themselves in the objects conclusion drawn from pure detemporalization of meaning
70-1
divinity 88
drawing conclusions from
of the non-conceptual 67-8
56 82
28 57
Dialectic ofEnlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer) 108
Duns Scotus, John 8
88 The Confessions ( Rousseau) 1 77n
56-8
? 6-7
antinomies, doctrine of Aristotle and 47, 48 positive moments 142 problem of mediation 69 synthesis 65-6
Ebner, Ferdinand 121, 182n education 132
1 1 2
form (fLOPfPTJ)
abstractions produced by the
mind 48
Aristotle 3 5 - 6
autonomy used in immortality
argument 71-3
and being 61
change confined to 81
EVEpYEW 83
eternal relationship with matter
8 6 - 8 goal 62-3
immanent not transcendent 33 logic 99
made into true reality 61
matter yearns towards 83-4 necessity in antithesis with matter
Platonic Ideas 3, 15-19, 61
pnmary status over matter 36-41, 42, 49-50, 52
related to matter in moments 41
social origin 45 France, Anatole 135-6 freedom
causality 76
and guilt 1 12-13
Hegel 178n
unmediated antitheses of vATJ and
16, 81 deadening of affect
165n
Eleatic school
emotIOns
a priori of
?
emplnclsm
mediation
sacrificed in self-reflection
Epicureanism 97 epistemology 44
? ? ?
43
antithesis between tradition and cognition 138-9
attempt to reconcile concepts of form and matter 42
entwined with metaphysics
5
123
see also knowledge essences
Husserl's region of
within or without Ethics (Spinoza) 28 evil
27 26-7
?
95
INDEX
205
? ? appropriation of language
and triviality
eXIstence absurdity
115
103-4, 1 10-1 1
?
force
10
95
existence/non-existence 17-18, 87
?
1 09
affirmation
death as the meaning of guilt 1 1 3
Hamlet and transience non-existence (fL? QV) time 133
existentialism 106
expenence
relation to Platonic Idea restriction on thinking about
truth 124-5
extermination camps 101, 104,
? 115-16, 178n poetry after Auschwitz
179n
faith
and knowledge 164n
Feuerbach, Ludwig A.
