No More Learning

Cf. the section 'The Child's Question' in Negative Dialectics (pp. 1 1 0f). This again refers to 'Meditations on Metaphysics', from which Adorno derived his last six lectures on metaphysics in an 'evolving variation'; see n. 1 above.
? i
, ,,
,'
? 5 6
? 7
Hylozoism is the name given since the seventeenth century to the doctrine of the Ionian Pre-Socratics according to which life (? ? w? ) emerges from a basic substance (? vATJ) - water, air, fire etc. ; on the critique of this by Aristotle (d. Metaphysics, pp. 7ff [A 3ff, 983 a 24ff]) and Zeller's interpretation:
In the earlier Ionian philosophers he censured . . . their neglect of the prime mover and the superficiality with which they made any element they chose into the basic substance, whereas, according to him, the sensible properties and the changes of bodies were conditioned by the opposition of the ele- ments. The same applies to Heraclitus, insofar as he agreed with them in setting up a basic substance. (Zeller, 2. Teil, 2. Abt. , Aristoteles und die alten Peripatetiker, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of 4th edn], p. 284)
Here Adorno probably gave references to the editions of Aristotle to be used - certainly to the recent translation of the Metaphysics by Paul Gohlke (see Lecture 4, n. 13) and possibly also to Zeller's history of ancient philosophy (see Lecture 1, n. 13).
Lecture Four
See Lecture 2, n. 3.
Adorno knew of the dispute between Plato and the Cynic Antisthenes primarily through Zeller:
Whereas Plato derived a clearly realistic system from the Socratic demand for conceptual knowledge, Antisthenes drew from it an equally thorough- going nominalism: universal concepts, he maintained, were mere things of thought; he saw people and horses, not peopleness and horseness. From this standpoint he launched against his fellow disciples a polemic not lacking in coarseness, which was answered robustly enough from the
other side. (Zeller, 2. Teil, 1. Abt. , Sokrates und die Sokratiker, Plato und die alte Akademie, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of 5th edn], pp. 295f)
Cf. Poiiteia, Book 7; St. 514ff.
Locke's theory of the primary and secondary qualities of bodies is to be found in Book 2 of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Ch. VIII, ? 8ff:
The power to produce any idea in our mind, I call quality of the subject, wherein that power is. . . . Qualities . . . are first such as are utterly inseparable from the body, in what estate soever it be. - These I call original or primary qualities of body. . . . Secondly, the power that is in any body, by reason of its insensible primary qualities to . . . produce in US the different ideas of several colours, sounds, smells, tastes etc. These
8
1 2
3 4
NOTES TO PAGES 14-16 153
? ?
?
154
NOTES TO PAGES 17-19
? are usually called sensible qualities. . . . These I call secondary qualities. (John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, vol. 1, New
York 1959, p. 169)
5 For Adorno, who saw causality as replaced in a certain sense by 'par- ticipation' in Plato, the doctrine of fLE{}EgLS was particularly important in the version in which it is put forward in the Phaedo (d. Negative Dialectics, St. 99ff).
6 Recent Plato scholarship, as represented by a treatise by Christian Iber, for example, sees in the Parmenides dialogue a dialectical 'rescue' of the 'Many' in Plato against Parmenides's critique of Zeno: 'Many presup- poses One and One produces Many. It is this double thesis which the Parmenides sets out to prove. Plato therefore agrees to a considerable extent with Zeno's critique of multiplicity, but regards the Eleatic's monistic conclusion as false' (Christian Ibers, 'Platons eigentliche philosophische Leistung im Dialog "Parmenides " ', in Dialektischer Negativismus. Michael Theunissen zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Emil Angehrn et aI. , Frankfurt/Main 1992, p. 188).
7 The reference is to the section 'Oberliefertes' from Part 3 of the 'Historischer Teil' of the Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours):
Plato's attitude to the world is that of a blessed spirit who is pleased to sojourn in it for a while. Since he already knows it; he is not so much concerned with getting to know the world as with kindly imparting to it what he has brought with him, and what it needs so badly. . . . Aristotle's attitude, by contrast, is that of a man, a master-builder. Now that he is here he has to set about his business. He enquires about the soil, but only until he has found firm ground. (Goethe, Siimtliche Werke, vol. 10, Munich 1989, p. 573)
8 The text source incorrectly has 'Aristotle'.
9 Heidegger argues this in, for example, the Introduction to the 5th edi-
tion of 'What is Metaphysics? ':
Such thinking, which recalls the truth of Being, is no longer satisfied with metaphysics, to be sure, but it does not oppose and think against metaphysics either. To return to our image, it does not tear up the root of philosophy. It tills the ground and plows the soil for this root. Meta- physics remains what comes first in philosophy. What comes first in thinking, however, it does not reach. When we think the truth of Being, metaphysics is overcome. We can no longer accept the claim of meta- physics to preside over our fundamental relation to 'Being' or to decisively determine every relation to beings as such. ('Introduction to "What is Metaphysics? " ', trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Heidegger, Pathmarks, Cam-
bridge, Mass. , 1998, p. 279)
And in 'Oberwindung der Metaphysik' in his notes wntten between 1936 and 1946 we read:
, ,
? ? NOTES TO PAGES 20-23
155
? The truth of being decays necessarily as the culmination of metaphysics. Its decay is hastened by the collapse of the world shaped by metaphysics and the devastation of the earth originating in metaphysics. This collapse and this devastation have their fitting executor in metaphysical man un- derstood as the rational animal, the working animal. . . . With the onset of this culmination of metaphysics begins the preparation, unrecognized by and inherently inaccessible to metaphysics, of a first manifestation of the duality of Being and existence. In this manifestation is concealed the first intimation of the truth of Being, which takes back into itself the precedence regarding the workings of Being. (Martin Heidegger, Vortriige und Aufsiitze, Pfullingen 1954, pp. 72 and 78)
10 Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London 1973, pp. 310ff (A 313ff, B 370ff).
11 Adorno repeatedly discusses Kant's twofold aim of critique and rescue in his lectures 'Kants "Kritik der reinen Vernunft"'; d. NaS IV. 4, pp. 54, 132f, 143 and passim.
12 Aristotle, Metaphysics, A 1, 980 a 2l.
13 Cf. Aristoteles, Die Lehrschriften, hrsg. , iibertragen und in ihrer
Entstehung erliiutert von Paul Gohlke, Bd. V: Metaphysik, 3rd edn,
Paderborn 1972, p. 35.
14 Heidegger, Being and Time, Tiibingen 1963, p. 215.
15 This wording [German: uberhaupt erst das Thema) appears in the ori-
ginal. An alternative reading which might seem plausible [uberhaupt nicht das Thema) is incorrect, as seems to be proved by the formulation repeated in the penultimate sentence of this paragraph, concerning die Ontologie, die hier [i. e. in Aristotle) erst thematisch ist. 'Theme' and 'thematic', as used by Adorno in this context, are likely to be associated with the idea of a theme touched on for the first time but not yet developed.
16 See p. 16 above.
17 In the text source the German wording has been amended to clarify the
sense.
18 This [Liebe zur Weisheit) is the original wording. It cannot be ruled
out that the usual translation of cpLAoaocp{a represents a slip in this case, as the aocp{a of the Socratic-Platonic tradition fails to express what Aristotle meant, knowledge in the sense of science; in that case Adorno would have wanted to say 'love of knowledge' or, better, 'striving for knowledge', an expression he uses at the end of the lecture (see p. 23 above).
? 19 Adorno may possibly be thinking of ? 6 of Being and Time, in which Heidegger writes that Aristotle, in whose work 'the ancient ontology as developed by Plato turns into "dialectic" ', 'no longer has any under- standing' of it, 'for he has put it on a more radical footing and raised it to a new level [aufhob)' (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 47-8 );
while this does relate syntactically to the dialectic, it implicitly applies equally to ontology. Moreover, Adorno's and Heidegger's concepts of ontology are hardly compatible without further qualification. Whereas Adorno
?
? ?
156
NOTES TO PAGES 24-26
? ? 1
2
3 4 5
6
understands it to mean a thinking which, like that of the Pre-Socratics, 'posits and presupposes the essential' and while he uses it in this sense when speaking of Heidegger's ontology, for Heidegger ontology is al- ways something 'decomposed' by rationality which actually blocks the
desired path towards 'Being itself' . Even in Being and Time, which was still relatively undecided on this issue, the 'title ontology' is 'explicitly devoted to the meaning of entities' (ibid. , p. 32). 'Ontological interpreta- tion,' and therefore Aristotle's as well, 'projects the entity presented to it upon the Being which is that entity's own, so as to conceptualize it with regard to its structure' (ibid. , p. 359), to which conceptualization the truth of Being cannot be reduced, since, according to the 'Letter on Humanism', it calls rather for a thinking 'which is stricter than concep- tual thought' (Heidegger, Wegmarken, Frankfurt/Main 1967, p. 187). Because Aristotle remained within the framework of discursive philo- sophizing, Adorno maintains, he fell victim to Heidegger's criticism as
an ontologist; that Heidegger rejected discursivity and fell back on an archaic murmuring about Being is the persistent thrust of Adorno's critique of Heidegger.
Lecture Five
See the bibliographical reference, in Lecture 1 , n. 1 3 . Zeller's Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung was first published in 1 844-52 in three volumes, and later editions in six volumes. Adorno owned the second edition of 1 856-68. Zeller also wrote a Grundri(5 der
Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (1883), but this was not used by Adorno.
Cf. the beginning of Lecture 2 in Adorno's keywords, p. 10 and n. 3.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, pp. 51ff (A 1, 982 b 8f).
Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 303ff.
Regarding the recent status of Aristotle scholarship on this point d. Klaus Oehler, Die Lehre vom noetischen und dianoetischen Denken bei Platon und Aristoteles. Ein Beitrag zur Erforschung der Geschichte des Bewu(5tseinsproblems in der Antike, Munich 1962, and the review of Oehler's book by Ernst Tugendhat (Tugendhat, Philosophische Aufsatze, Frankfurt/Main 1992, pp. 402ff).
Adorno here follows Zeller, who always translates Aristotle's oua{a as substance (Substanz) (d. Zeller 11. 2, p. 305). Whereas, at the beginning of Book A, for example, Adolf Lasson and Eugen Rolfes followed Zeller in this, most other German translators prefer Wesenheit (essence, essen-
tiality) (Hermann Bonitz) or Wesen (being, entity) (Paul Gohlke, Franz F. Schwarz); Gadamer follows Heidegger's usage and translates it by: 'Dber das Sein geht die Untersuchung. ' Adorno did not want, of course, to assert a 'derivation' in the etymological sense.
Husserl's expression; d. GS 5, p. 128.
7
? NOTES TO PAGES 27-29
157
? ? 8
9 10
11
12 13
Adorno deals with this problem above all in Lecture 8 of Probleme der Moralphilosophie, d. NaS IV. 10, pp. 117ff.
Cf. Alexandre Koyre, Descartes und die Scholastik, Bonn 1923.
'Per substantiam nihil aliud intelligere possumus, quam rem quae existit, ut nulla alia re indigeat ad existendum' (Oeuvres de Descartes, publies par Charles Adam & Paul Tannery, vol. VIII- 1 : Principia Philosophiae, Paris 1964, p. 24 [Pars Prima, LI]).
'By substance we can only understand a thing which so exists that it needs no other thing for its existence' (Rene Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valen- tine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller, Dordrecht/Boston/London 1 983,
p. 23).
'Per substantiam intelligo id, quod in se est, et per se concipitur: hoc est id, cujus conceptus non indiget conceptu alterius rei, a quo formari debeat' ('By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived
through itself, i. e. that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed' (The Collected Works of Spinoza, trans. Edwin Curley, Princeton NJ 1985, p. 408 [Ethics, I, 3]). Reference not traced.
In his brief notes Adorno gives as the reference Kateg. 5 (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10789), i. e. Ch. 5 of The Categories, which begins: 'Substance, in its strictest, first, and chief sense, is that which is neither predicated of any subject, nor is in any; as "a certain man," or "a certain horse'" ? ( The Organon, or Logical Treatises of Aristotle, trans.
Octavius Freire Owen, London/New York 1893, vol. 1, p. 6). Zeller also takes this as his basis when interpreting as follows:
If the universal is not something existing for itself, it cannot be substance. . . . Originally, the term substance . . . was only properly applied to that which can neither be stated as a determination of the nature of something else, nor as something attached to something else as a derivative; in other words, to that which i, only subject and never predicate. Substance is being in the original sense, the substratum by which all other existence is carried. But for Aristotle only the single being is of that kind. The univer- sal, as he himself demonstrated against Plato, is not something existing for itself: everything universal, including the universality of the species, derives its existence only from the single being; it is always stated to be of something else, it refers only to a certain property, not to a 'this'. The single being alone belongs only to itself, is not carried by something else, is what it is through itself, and not merely by reason of some other being.
(Zeller 11. 2, pp. 305? ? ).
The name of the dialogue is missing in the text source, probably because the transcriber was not familiar with it. In the Theaetetus Socrates (St. 152bff) speaks of the relativity of sense perceptions; but Po/iteia,
St. 523bff may also be relevant.
The secretary seems also to have understood this title only partially, as the text source has the words: '. . . de la conscience'. Adorno frequently mentioned Bergson's first book in similar contexts.
ita
? 1 4
15
?
158
NOTES TO PAGES 29-38
? 1 6
17 18 19
1 2
3
4 5
6
7 8
Cf. the Science of L ogic: 'In the sphere of the Notion there can be no other immediacy than one in which mediation is essentially and expli- citly a moment and which has come to be only through the sublating of that mediation' (Hegel's Science of Logic, p. 63 1 ) . Or: '. . . immediacy in general proceeds only from mediation, and must therefore pass over
into mediation' (ibid. , p. 800).
It is unlikely that Adorno was thinking of a specific proof which could
be identified by page numbers; rather, the whole of the logic relating to concepts should be seen as such a 'proof'.
On the concept of the thing in Hume and Kant d. Adorno's lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft', especially Lectures 9 and 10, NaS IVA, pp. 143ff.
Cf. The Categories, Ch. 5, 2 a 15: 'But secondary substances are they,
as species, those primarily-named substances are inherent, that is to say, both these and the genera of these species; as "a certain man" exists in "man", as in a species, but the genus of this species is
"animal'" (Aristotle, The Organon, vol. I, p. 6). According to Zeller the expression 8EVTEpat ovu{at only appears in Ch. 5 of The Categories
(d. Zeller 11. 2, p. 307, n. 1).
Lecture Six
See p. 8 passim above.
Cf. Analytica posteriora, Book I, Ch. 1 1 , 77 a 8 : 'one thing of the many' (Aristotle, The Organon, vol. I, p. 269).
On the Kantian concept of unity in diversity d. Adorno's lectures on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft', especially Lecture 13 (NaS IVA,
pp. 210ff).
See pp. 1 6f above.
Regarding Adorno's discussions of form and matter, EVEpynu and 8vvu/-w;, d. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 313ff.
Cf. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 238ff (A 2 1 8ff, B 265ff).
Cf. p. 19 above.
At the 12th conference of German sociologists, held in Heidelberg on
15-17 October 1954, Adorno read a paper 'Zum Ideologie-Problem' (GS 8, pp. 457ff, under the title Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre); according to the proceedings, published in the KaIner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie, vol. 6, no. 3/4 (1953/4), Alfred Weber did not read a paper, but made several contributions to a 'round-table discussion on the problem of ideology'. The remarks by Weber to which Adorno refers, which unfor-
tunately are reported only briefly by Leopold von Wiese, seem to have been made in this discussion. Only one reference to them, in a contribu- tion to the discussion by Arnold Hauser, has survived ( 'But to come back to the example of the dispute over universals given by Herr Weber - it is probably the best example of how elements conditioned by existence
in which
? ? " ,
NOTES TO PAGES 38-39 159
? permeate thought. Nominalism, too, would never have come into being through its own intrinsic logic, had not the individual as such been striving to emancipate himself' [ibid. , p. 395] ).
9 Alfred Weber was born in 1868.
10 In 1965 Karl Heinz Haag (b. 1924), whose doctorate had been awarded
by Horkheimer and Adorno in 1951, taught philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt/Main, where he had quali- fied as a lecturer in 1956. His most recent publication had been a contribution to the Adorno Festschrift of 1963; it touches on Adorno's discussions many times, but does not contain the exact formulation in question (for similar formulations ef. Haag, 'Das Unwiederholbare', in Zeugnisse. Theodor W. Adorno zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Max Horkheimer, Frankfurt/Main 1963, pp. 152ff; also Haag,
Philosophischer Idealismus. Untersuchungen zur Hegelschen Dialektik mit Beispielen aus der Wissenschaft der Logik, Frankfurt/Main 1967, pp. 7ff); it is also possible that Adorno was referring here to an oral contribution that Haag may have made at Adorno's advanced seminar in philosophy, which he attended regularly.
11 'The relationship of genesis to validity [Genesis und Geltung] is dis- cussed frequently by Adorno, for example, at length with reference to Husserl in Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie [ef. GS 5, pp. 79ff], and also in his introduction to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology
[trans. G. Adey and D. Frisby, London 1976], one of his most recent works' (NaS IV. 4, p. 397). On genesis and validity in Kant ef. Lecture
15 on Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft' (ibid. , pp. 242ff).
12 Max Scheler (1874-1928) was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Frankfurt/Main as successor to Hans Cornelius early in 1928, but died
there on 19 May the same year. Adorno briefly played with the idea of qualifying as a lecturer under Scheler, as we learn from a letter to Alban Berg of 14 May 1928:
The question now is whether Max Scheler, freshly appointed to the Chair at Frankfurt, and of whom you must know through Franz Blei or through essays by Hermann Bahr, and who is certainly an exceptional man, will supervise my Habilitation. There are some reasons to suppose he will, as many of the influential people here will support me; but it is far from certain, as Scheler will bring his own candidates with him from Cologne. Whether my present, not exactly Schelerian work (an epistemology of psychoanalysis) will be suitable is still quite uncertain, and it would be highly inconvenient for me if this book, written primarily with this pur- pose in mind, should completely miss its objective and if I had to write
something else - although with Scheler I could get by with fewer conces-
sions. All the same, to be frank, I really worry very little about all this,
and if my whole Habilitation - which for me is a social affair but not a
practical or economic necessity - were to come to nothing, I should be
heartily indifferent and even, au fond, glad. (Theodor W. Adorno and
Alban Berg, BriefwechseI 1 925-1 935, ed. Henri Lonitz, Frankfurt/Main 1997, p. 169)
? ? ( . ,j,
?
? 160
1 3
NOTES TO PAGES 39-40
That Adorno always regarded Scheler as an 'exceptional man' is also
shown by a dissertation report of 1965, in which he defends the philo-
sopher against his critics: 'The wealth of philosophical experience which animates Scheler's work and which he strives to organize is dismissed
? 14
too readily. The author ought to have recognized the obvious dictions and rifts in Scheler's doctrine as reflections of objective ones, and interpreted them as such' (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, 'Amtliche
Schriften' ) .
Adorno probably had in mind Scheler's switch to a materialist phenom- enology, for which the eidetic sphere of Husserl's phenomenology, which was content to remain within the merely logical sphere, had been aban- doned in favour of a 'renewal of intuitive Platonism . . . though one from which the Platonic reification of Ideas and all mythical adjuncts had been completely eliminated' (Scheler, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7:
Wesen und Formen der Sympathie. Die deutsche Philosophie der
Gegenwart, ed. Manfred S. Frings, Berne, Munich 1973, p. 310). Scheler sought to erect on intuitively perceived essences, which were strictly distinguished from the species of logic, a dualistic metaphysics, a 'realm of being' organized hierarchically on scholastic principles, to which finite things stood in a 'relationship of being' as 'participants' in the Platonic fLE{}EtL<;. 'Knowledge is a relationship of being,' he writes in Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, using formulations he repeated in his last book, Die philosophische Weltanschauung, 'it is a relation- ship of participation by an existent in the thusness (Sosein) of another existent, through which no change in this thusness is posited' (Scheler,
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8: Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, 3rd edn, Berne, Munich 1980, p. 203; also d. vol. 9: Spate Schriften, p. 111). Such knowledge, which would represent a validity in itself, would indeed be separated from its genesis by a xwpwfL6<;. However, the late Scheler seems to want to move away from this position again, as in texts published posthumously under the title Zusatze aus den nachgelassenen Schriften:
'Eternal truths' are . . . not assumed by US - even with regard to the truths which touch on genuine relationships of being. According to our doc- trine, the supra-singular spirit has no idea ante res (which, as in the theistic system, would only realize its creative will), but actively produces the essentialities which are represented through the world only in and with the realization of the world in absolute time, so that temporality, not eternity, obtains . . . even in the realm of essentialities. (ibid. , p. 289)
Cf. Edmund Husser! , Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, vol. 1, Prolegomena to Pure Logic, London/New York 1970. Also see the discussions in Adorno's Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie referred to in n. 11.
Gunter Ralfs comments as follows on the relationship of genesis and validity in Aristotle from the philological viewpoint:
contra-
15
NOTES TO PAGES 40-41
161
? ? 16
17 1 8
Aristotle was convinced that the temporal genesis and development of human knowledge was the exact inverse of the metaphysical and logical relationship of things: what I first perceive sensibly in things, the 1Tp6TEPOV
1TpO> ? fLiis, is, in the metaphysical structure of the phenomenon exam- ined, the vaTEpov <plJaE! and '\6ycp; what is before our eyes points back to what it was originally. Aristotle therefore formulates the principle that the 1Tp6TEPOV <pDa? ! is the vaTEpov 1TpO> ? fLii> . . . ; i. e. the original being is perceived last. Aristotle therefore distinguishes between the origin and the grounds of knowledge. He thus arrives at the deep insight that the highest and first principles reveal themselves last, as principles, at the very end of the temporal development: the 1TPWTOV '\6ycp is the vaTEpov Xp6vcp. (Gunter Ralfs, 'Was bedeutet die Aristotelische Formel TO T{ ? v Elva!