3 On 1
November
1755 the Portuguese capital was devastated by an
earthquake in which a quarter of its inhabitants lost their lives.
earthquake in which a quarter of its inhabitants lost their lives.
Adorno-Metaphysics
It is no accident that in the basic text of western philosophy, Aristotle's Metaphysics, the idea of universal dynamism could be combined directly with an unmoved prime mover.
The circumstance that the blind development of technology heightens social repression and exploitation threatens at each stage to turn progress into its opposite, total barbarism.
(Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol.
6, Frankfurt!
Main 1991, pp.
140f)
Hardly anywhere more clearly than in Metaphysics, A 3, 1069 b 35ff; Gohlke's commentary on this is as follows:
This must be followed by a demonstration that neither matter nor form comes into being as an ultimate raw material. Everything is transformed from something through something into something. It is transformed 'through' the prime mover, 'from' matter 'into' form. If not only the bronze sphere, but also bronze and sphericality, came into being, that would go on for ever. So there must be a stopping point somewhere. (Aristoteles, Metaphysik, iibertr. von Paul Gohlke, p. 357)
See esp. Lecture 1, pp. 3f above.
See p. 53 above.
See pp. 30f above.
Metaphysics, A 7, 1072 b 15, 18H contains argumentation on the life of the unmoved mover:
8
9 10 1 1 12
? NOTES TO PAGES 90-92 173
? It is a life which is always the noblest and the happiest that we can live. . . . Thought . . . must be thought of what is best in itself; i. e. that which is thought in the fullest sense must be occupied with that which is best in the fullest sense. Now thought does think itself, because it shares in the intelligibility of its object. It becomes intelligible by contact with the intelligible, so that thought and object of thought are one. (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 346). Also see Lecture 13, n. 3.
13 TO yap alho VOELV EUT{V TE Kat Elva! ; translated as: 'for thinking and being are the same thing' (Diels/Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
vol. 1, p. 231).
14 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Das Problem des Idealismus. Stichworte zur
Vorlesung 1 953/54', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter V, Munich 1 998. Karl Reinhardt's book Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (4th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1985) was especially important for Adorno's understanding of Parmenides, although it touches only peripherally on the proposition of the identity of thinking and being.
15 Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 368f, n. 1:
Aristotle states frequently and with great force that neither a 7TOtT/O', nor a 7Tpag" can be attributed to the divinity. . . . Rather, he says very gener- ally that . . . both 7TpaTTEtV and 7TO'EtV must be seen as foreign to the divinity, that the perfection manifested in action (practical virtue) finds room only in human intercourse and among creatures subject to human passions . . . and that all action is a means to an end different to it, and cannot therefore be attributed to the divinity, for which there is no goal still to be attained.
16 For the recent position of Aristotle scholarship on this question d. Joachim Ritter's essay of 1 953, 'Die Lehre vom Ursprung und Sinn der Theorie bei Aristotle', in Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu
? 1 7
1 8 19
Aristoteles und Hegel, Frankfurt/Main 1 969, pp. 9ff.
A sharply divergent historical-philosophical interpretation is to be found in Horkheimer's essay 'Die gesellschaftliche Funktion der Philosophie'
of 1940:
Although Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, regards the self-contemplation of the soul, the theoretical attitude, as the highest happiness, he says explicitly that this happiness is only possible on a specific material basis, that is, under certain social and economic conditions. Plato and Aristotle do not believe, like Antisthenes and the Cynics, that reason is capable of constant development to a higher level in people who literally lead a dog's life, or that wisdom could go hand in hand with penury. For them, just conditions were a prerequisite for the unfolding of the intellectual powers of human beings, and this idea underlies the whole of western
humanism. (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Frankfurt/Main 1988, p. 346)
Not traced.
See Lecture 1, n. 8.
? ?
174
1
2
NOTES TO PAGES 94-95 Lecture Thirteen
? 3
In the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt/Main the granite sculpture Empedocles ( 1 954) stood in the entrance hall of the main building, in front of the Rector's office.
Cf. Remark 3 in Chapter 1 of the Science of Logic:
With this wholly abstract purity of continuity, that is, indeterminateness and vacuity of conception, it is indifferent whether this abstraction is called space, pure intuiting, or pure thinking; it is altogether the same as what the Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, physically motion- less and equally unmoved in sensation, conception, fantasy, desire and so on, looking only at the tip of his nose, he says inwardly only Om, Om,
Om, or else nothing at all. (Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London 1969, p. 97)
Cf. Aristotle: 'Therefore, since the supreme intellect is the best thing in the world, it must think itself; its thinking is a thinking of thinking' (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 349). On this question Zeller writes:
God is . . . the activity of absolute intellect, and to this extent he is that which is absolutely real and living, and the primal source of all life. But what is the content of this thinking? All thinking derives its value from what is thought, but divine thinking can derive it from nothing lying outside itself, and can have no content other than what is best; but it alone is the best. God therefore thinks himself, and his thinking is a thinking of thinking, so that in divine thinking, as cannot be otherwise for pure intellect, thinking and its object coincide absolutely. This immut- able abiding of thinking in itself, this indivisible unity of the thinker and the thought, is the absolute bliss of God. (Zeller 11. 2, pp. 366f)
In his lecture series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vemunft' Adorno attaches his own definition of philosophy to that of Aristotle when he says that philosophy 'is really concerned with the "thinking of thinking", as Aristotle has defined it - in which the thought processes of logic and the
positive sciences must review themselves critically' (NaS IV. 4, p. 127). Cf. the paragraph with this title in 'Kritik des logischen Absolutismus':
The necessity of the contingency of the factual in idealism is made by Husser! into the virtue of the purity of the idea. The ideas remain behind as the caput mortuum of a life deserted by spirit. The various material
sciences are conceived in a totally empiricist way. . . . In his conception of 'absolutely strict regularity' he is too free with the 'thousands of accidents' which are not accidents. For the scientist, chance is the unwelcome re- sidue which settles at the bottom of his concepts, while for the 'common man', whose name Husserl utters without any compunction, it is what befalls him and against which he is defenceless. The scientist fancies that he can prescribe laws to the world; the 'common man' must obey each law in practical terms. He can do nothing about this, and may rightly
? 4
5
? NOTES TO PAGES 96-98
175
? consider it fortuitous; but that the world is made up of those who are exposed to such accidents and others who, though they may not make the law, can console themselves with its existence, is no accident, but is itself the law of real society. No philosophy which considers the 'world's conception' should ignore this. For Husserl, however, the sacrifice of empiricism does not open unrestricted insight to such connections, but he simply repeats the shoulder-shrugging prejudice that it all depends on one's point of view. Knowledge of the factual need not be too punctili- ous, since it in any case bears the taint of fortuitousness. Reality becomes an object of mere opinion. This modesty is as false as its complement, the hubris of the absolute. (GS 5, pp. 92f)
6 Cf. the preface to the Phenomenology ofSpirit: 'To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfilment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black - this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity' (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford 1 977, p. 9).
7 Which text of Lessing's Adorno was thinking of here, and whether he was thinking of a particular text, has not been ascertained. Behind it is probably Lessing's realization that the 'gratuitous truths of history
. . . can never become proofs of necessary truths of reason'; Lessing called this the 'wretched wide ditch . . . that I can never get across, no matter how often and earnestly I have attempted the leap' (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gesammelte Werke in 10 Banden, ed. Paul Rilla, vol. 8: Philosophische und theologische Schriften II, Berlin 1956, pp. 12, 14) - a ditch which, according to Ernst Cassirer, had been overleapt in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), with its discovery of the truth of the historical; as a young lecturer Adorno gave one of his first seminars on Lessing's last work on the philosophy of religion.
8 Cf. for example, the report by Hippolytos (AD c. 220) in his Refutatio omnium haeresium:
Epicurus assures us that God is eternal and immortal, but that he troubles himself about nothing, in short, that there is neither solicitude nor fate, for everything takes place by itself (mechanically). The god abides in what he calls the World-Between . . . There he enjoys a feeling of supreme happiness in tranquil unconcern, has no difficulties himself and causes none to others. (Griechische Atomisten. Texte und Kommentare zum materialistischen Denken der Antike, ed. Fritz Jiirss et ai. , Leipzig 1977,
9 Adorno is referring to Negative Dialectics, especially the last section,
'Meditations on Metaphysics'; the first edition of the book came out in
1966. The 'reflections on metaphysics which seem [to Adorno] timely
and unavoidable today', which are set out in the foIlowing pages, draw
on the first five (of the total of twelve) 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (see Lecture 1, n. 1), a 'second intermediate copy' of which is dated
? ?
? p. 333)
176
NOTES TO PAGES 98-105
? 7. 7. 1965 (cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Ts 15813ff). Adorno prob- ably drew on this intermediate copy for the notes on which he based the last lectures, which were given extempore: a kind of improvised variation on what had already been fixed in writing, which, after fur- ther revision, was finally published for the first time in Negative Dialektik the following year. The notes relate, with some omissions, to the text running from p. 361 to p. 376 in Negative Dialectics; whereas the
lecture notes conclude with 'The totum is the totem' (cf. ibid. , p. 376), Adorno had to end the lecture somewhat earlier through lack of time
(see Lecture 18, n. 16).
10 See p. 20 passim above.
11 Cf. the quotations from the Encyclopaedia and the Logic in Lecture 1,
n. 8.
12 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Studien
uber Husserl und die phanomenologischen Antinomien, Stuttgart 1 956; now GS 5, pp. 48-95.
Lecture Fourteen
1 See p. 101 above.
2 Schopenhauer's 'doctrine of the denial of the Will to Live', which forms
part of his system relating to moral philosophy, is to be found in Book 4 of The World as Will and Representation, in ? 68 of vol. 1 and in Chapter 48 of vol. 2; also see Chapter 14 of vol. 2 of Parerga and Paralipomena (cf. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representa- tion, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, New York 1958, vol. 1, pp. 378ff, vol. 2, pp. 603ff; Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, Oxford
1974, vol. 2, pp. 312ff).
3 On 1 November 1755 the Portuguese capital was devastated by an
earthquake in which a quarter of its inhabitants lost their lives. Voltaire, deeply shaken, wrote his 'Poeme sur Ie desastre de Lisbonne, ou examen de cet axiome: tout est bien':
o malheureux mortels! {) terre deplorable! o de tous les fleaux assemblage effroyable! D'inutiles douleurs eternel entretien!
? ? ?
Quel crime, quelie faute ont commis ces enfans Sur Ie sein maternel ecrases et sanglans? Lisbonne qui n'est plus eut-elle plus de vices
Que Londres, que Paris, plonges dans les delices? Lisbonne est abimee, et l'on danse ii Paris.
? ? ?
Ce monde, ce theatre et d'orgueil et d'erreur, Est plein d'infortunes qui parlent de bonheur.
? ? ?
Nos chagrins, nos regrets, nos pertes sont sans nombre.
NOTES TO PAGES 106-108 177
? Le passe n'est pour nous qu'un triste souvenir; Le present est affreux s'il n'est point d'avenir, Si la nuit du tombeau detruit l'etre qui pense.
Un jour tout sera bien, voila votre esperance: Tout est bien au;ourd'hui, voila l'illusion.
Voltaire's 'Poeme', which, with another 'sur la loi naturelle' was pub- lished as a book, was condemned and burned in 1759. Rousseau's 'Letter on Providence' is dated 18. 8. 1756; he later commented rather aptly on it in his Confessions:
Struck by seeing that poor man, weighed down, so to speak, by fame and prosperity. Bitterly complaining, nevertheless, against the wretchedness of this life and finding everything invariably bad, I formed the insane plan of bringing him back to himself and proving to him that all was well. Though Voltaire has always appeared to believe in God, he has really only believed in the Devil, because his so-called God is nothing but a malicious being who, according to his belief, only takes pleasure in doing
harm. (Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen, Harmondsworth 1953, pp. 399f)
And: 'In the meantime Voltaire has published the reply that he promised
me. It is nothing less than his novel Candide . . . ' (ibid. , p. 400).
4 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut
Tarnowski and Frederic Will, Evanston 1 973.
5 Cf. Jean Amery, 'Die Tortur', in Merkur 208, vol. 19 (1965), pp. 623ff
(Issue 7, July 1965); now in a revised version in Amery, Jenseits von Schuld und Siihne. Bewiiltigungsversuche eines Oberwiiltigten, 2nd edn, Stuttgart 1980, pp. 46ff.
6 Cf. Ch. 1 : 'Dasein's Possibility of Being-a-Whole, and Being-Towards- Death' of Division 2 on 'Dasein and Temporality' (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 279ff), 'The "end" of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to the potentiality-for-Being - that is to say, to existence - limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein,' and 'When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its "there'" ? (ibid. , pp. 276-7 and 281); also Adorno's critique in TheJargon ofAuthenticity, pp. 130ff.
7 Cf. Brecht, A Man's A Man, in Baal, A Man's A Man and The Elephant Calf, trans. Eric Bentley, New York 1 964, pp. 1 1 7ff; on the status of the text of the play, written in 1 924-6, cf. Brecht, Gesammelte Werke
in acht Biinden, Frankfurt/Main 1 976, vol. 1 , pp. 363, n. and p. 4 * . Cf. , for example, the chapter on the 'culture industry':
Whenever the culture industry still issues an invitation naively to identify, it is immediately withdrawn. No one can escape from himself any more. Once a member of the audience could see his own wedding in the one shown in the film. Now the lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as every member of the public, but such equality only
? 8
?
178
NOTES TO PAGES 108-109
? ? 9
1 0
demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human elements. The perfect similarity is the absolute difference. The identity of the category forbids that of the individual cases. Ironically, man as a member of a species has been made a reality by the culture industry. Now any person signifies only those attributes by which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a copy. As an individual he is completely expendable and utterly insignificant, and this is just what he finds out when time deprives him of this similarity. (Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London/New York
1997, pp. 145-6)
The reduction of the individual to the mere specimen of its species is one of the central ideas in Dialectic af Enlightenment. In 'Elements . . of Anti-Semitism', where the theory of logic is traced right to the exter- mination camps, the formulation 'specimen' is, however, lacking:
In the world of mass series production, stereotypes replace individual categories. . . . If, even within the framework of logic, the concept en- counters the particular only on an external plane, everything which stands for difference in society is threatened. Everyone is either a friend or an enemy; there are no half measures. The lack of concern for the subject makes things easy for administration. Ethnic groups are forced to move to a different region; individuals are branded as Jews and sent to the gas
chamber. (ibid. , pp. 201? )
Regarding the text of the lecture see the parallel passage in Negative Dialectics: That in the concentration camps it was no longer an indi- vidual who died but a specimen - this is a fact bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure' (ibid. , p. 362), and especially the conclusion of the book: The smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute, for the micrological view cracks the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is help-
lessly isolated and explodes its identity, the delusion that it is but a specimen' (ibid. , p. 408).
Cf. Brecht's poem 'On the Suicide of the Refugee W. B. ': 'So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right / Are weak. All this was plain to you / When you destroyed a torturable body' (Brecht, Paems 1913-
1 956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, London 1 976, p. 363). Cf. the section 'Absolute Freedom and Terror':
The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. (Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, p. 360)
11 Cf. Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Kanzentratians! ager, 2nd edn, Berlin 1947. The quotation, also to be
? 1 3
NOTES TO PAGES 109-110
? 12
found, though not attributed, in Negative Dialectics (d. p. 362), has not been traced; however, a similar passage has been found: 'Someone called out to a Jew: "It's now 12 o'clock. At 12. 05 you'll be with Jehovah! " It didn't take even five minutes' (translated from Kogon, Der SS-Staat, p. 94).
Amery describes being tortured:
Now there was a cracking and splintering in my shoulders which I have not forgotten to this day. . . . Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured. The torture is burnt into him inextinguishably, even if no clin- ical or objective traces can be found. . . . Finally I became unconscious - and it was over for once. It is still not over. . . . You cannot rid yourself of torture any more than you can rid yourself of the question about the possibilities and limits of the power to resist it. (Amery, in Merkur 208,
pp. 632, 634 and 636)
And at the end of the essay he writes:
As far as any knowledge remains from the experience of torture beyond that of mere nightmare, it is that of a great amazement, and of being a stranger in the world, which cannot be compensated by any later human communication. Astonishment at the existence of the Other which asserts itself boundlessly in torture, and at what one can oneself become: flesh and death. That life is fragile, and that it can be ended 'with a mere needle' - that truism has always been known. But that a living human being can be made half-and-half the prey of death while still alive is only experienced under torture. The shame of such annihilation can never be effaced. Anyone who has been tormented remains defencelessly exposed to fear. It henceforth wields its sceptre over him. It - and also what is called ressentiment, which remains behind and has not even the chance to condense into a desire for revenge - and to be purged. From there, no one
looks out onto a world in which the principle of hope holds sway. (ibid. , p. 638)
That is the text to which Adorno refers. Amery later intensified it still further in a book version: 'Anyone who has been subjected to torture cannot again feel at home in the world. The shame of annihilation cannot be expunged. The trust in the world, which collapses partly with the first blow but only fully under torture, is never regained' (Amery,
Jenseits von Schuld und Suhne, p. 73).
First in the essay 'Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft' of 1 949:
Even the most extreme awareness of calamity threatens to degenerate into chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself facing the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes even the knowledge which states why it has become impossible to write poetry today. The critical mind, as long as it remains comfortably ensconced in contemplation, . . . is no match for absolute reification. (GS 10. 1, p. 30)
? ? ,,
?
179
180
NOTES TO
PAGES 110-120
? 14 1 5
Adorno later came back repeatedly to his dictum, for the last time in 'Meditations on Metaphysics', where he seems to revoke it (d. Neg- ative Dialectics, p. 362); for an<interpretation d. Tiedemann, 'Nicht
die Erste Philosophie sondern eine letzte', pp. 1 1 ff.
On the proposition in question, d. NaS IV. 4, p. 400, n. 234. Cf. Sartre, Morts sans sepulture, Tableau IV, scene III:
HENRI: Est-ce que I,;a garde un sens de vivre quand il y a des hommes qui vous tapent dessus jusqu'a vous casser les os? Tout est noir. (II regarde par la fenetre. ) Tu as raison, la pluie va tomber. ['Do you still feel alive while men beat you until they break your bones? It's very dark. (He looks
out of the window. ) You are right, it's going to rain. '}
(Jean-Paul Sartre, La p . . . respectueuse . . . suivi de Morts sans sepulture.
Piece en deux actes et quatre tableaux, Paris 1972, p. 210) Lecture Fifteen
The title of Beckett's last novel (Paris 1961), frequently quoted by
Adorno in Aesthetic Theory.
Cf. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Munich 1 964.
Hardly anywhere more clearly than in Metaphysics, A 3, 1069 b 35ff; Gohlke's commentary on this is as follows:
This must be followed by a demonstration that neither matter nor form comes into being as an ultimate raw material. Everything is transformed from something through something into something. It is transformed 'through' the prime mover, 'from' matter 'into' form. If not only the bronze sphere, but also bronze and sphericality, came into being, that would go on for ever. So there must be a stopping point somewhere. (Aristoteles, Metaphysik, iibertr. von Paul Gohlke, p. 357)
See esp. Lecture 1, pp. 3f above.
See p. 53 above.
See pp. 30f above.
Metaphysics, A 7, 1072 b 15, 18H contains argumentation on the life of the unmoved mover:
8
9 10 1 1 12
? NOTES TO PAGES 90-92 173
? It is a life which is always the noblest and the happiest that we can live. . . . Thought . . . must be thought of what is best in itself; i. e. that which is thought in the fullest sense must be occupied with that which is best in the fullest sense. Now thought does think itself, because it shares in the intelligibility of its object. It becomes intelligible by contact with the intelligible, so that thought and object of thought are one. (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 346). Also see Lecture 13, n. 3.
13 TO yap alho VOELV EUT{V TE Kat Elva! ; translated as: 'for thinking and being are the same thing' (Diels/Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker,
vol. 1, p. 231).
14 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, 'Das Problem des Idealismus. Stichworte zur
Vorlesung 1 953/54', in Frankfurter Adorno Blatter V, Munich 1 998. Karl Reinhardt's book Parmenides und die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie (4th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1985) was especially important for Adorno's understanding of Parmenides, although it touches only peripherally on the proposition of the identity of thinking and being.
15 Cf. Zeller 11. 2, pp. 368f, n. 1:
Aristotle states frequently and with great force that neither a 7TOtT/O', nor a 7Tpag" can be attributed to the divinity. . . . Rather, he says very gener- ally that . . . both 7TpaTTEtV and 7TO'EtV must be seen as foreign to the divinity, that the perfection manifested in action (practical virtue) finds room only in human intercourse and among creatures subject to human passions . . . and that all action is a means to an end different to it, and cannot therefore be attributed to the divinity, for which there is no goal still to be attained.
16 For the recent position of Aristotle scholarship on this question d. Joachim Ritter's essay of 1 953, 'Die Lehre vom Ursprung und Sinn der Theorie bei Aristotle', in Ritter, Metaphysik und Politik. Studien zu
? 1 7
1 8 19
Aristoteles und Hegel, Frankfurt/Main 1 969, pp. 9ff.
A sharply divergent historical-philosophical interpretation is to be found in Horkheimer's essay 'Die gesellschaftliche Funktion der Philosophie'
of 1940:
Although Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, regards the self-contemplation of the soul, the theoretical attitude, as the highest happiness, he says explicitly that this happiness is only possible on a specific material basis, that is, under certain social and economic conditions. Plato and Aristotle do not believe, like Antisthenes and the Cynics, that reason is capable of constant development to a higher level in people who literally lead a dog's life, or that wisdom could go hand in hand with penury. For them, just conditions were a prerequisite for the unfolding of the intellectual powers of human beings, and this idea underlies the whole of western
humanism. (Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, Frankfurt/Main 1988, p. 346)
Not traced.
See Lecture 1, n. 8.
? ?
174
1
2
NOTES TO PAGES 94-95 Lecture Thirteen
? 3
In the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universitat in Frankfurt/Main the granite sculpture Empedocles ( 1 954) stood in the entrance hall of the main building, in front of the Rector's office.
Cf. Remark 3 in Chapter 1 of the Science of Logic:
With this wholly abstract purity of continuity, that is, indeterminateness and vacuity of conception, it is indifferent whether this abstraction is called space, pure intuiting, or pure thinking; it is altogether the same as what the Indian calls Brahma, when for years on end, physically motion- less and equally unmoved in sensation, conception, fantasy, desire and so on, looking only at the tip of his nose, he says inwardly only Om, Om,
Om, or else nothing at all. (Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller, London 1969, p. 97)
Cf. Aristotle: 'Therefore, since the supreme intellect is the best thing in the world, it must think itself; its thinking is a thinking of thinking' (Aristotle's Metaphysics, p. 349). On this question Zeller writes:
God is . . . the activity of absolute intellect, and to this extent he is that which is absolutely real and living, and the primal source of all life. But what is the content of this thinking? All thinking derives its value from what is thought, but divine thinking can derive it from nothing lying outside itself, and can have no content other than what is best; but it alone is the best. God therefore thinks himself, and his thinking is a thinking of thinking, so that in divine thinking, as cannot be otherwise for pure intellect, thinking and its object coincide absolutely. This immut- able abiding of thinking in itself, this indivisible unity of the thinker and the thought, is the absolute bliss of God. (Zeller 11. 2, pp. 366f)
In his lecture series Kants 'Kritik der reinen Vemunft' Adorno attaches his own definition of philosophy to that of Aristotle when he says that philosophy 'is really concerned with the "thinking of thinking", as Aristotle has defined it - in which the thought processes of logic and the
positive sciences must review themselves critically' (NaS IV. 4, p. 127). Cf. the paragraph with this title in 'Kritik des logischen Absolutismus':
The necessity of the contingency of the factual in idealism is made by Husser! into the virtue of the purity of the idea. The ideas remain behind as the caput mortuum of a life deserted by spirit. The various material
sciences are conceived in a totally empiricist way. . . . In his conception of 'absolutely strict regularity' he is too free with the 'thousands of accidents' which are not accidents. For the scientist, chance is the unwelcome re- sidue which settles at the bottom of his concepts, while for the 'common man', whose name Husserl utters without any compunction, it is what befalls him and against which he is defenceless. The scientist fancies that he can prescribe laws to the world; the 'common man' must obey each law in practical terms. He can do nothing about this, and may rightly
? 4
5
? NOTES TO PAGES 96-98
175
? consider it fortuitous; but that the world is made up of those who are exposed to such accidents and others who, though they may not make the law, can console themselves with its existence, is no accident, but is itself the law of real society. No philosophy which considers the 'world's conception' should ignore this. For Husserl, however, the sacrifice of empiricism does not open unrestricted insight to such connections, but he simply repeats the shoulder-shrugging prejudice that it all depends on one's point of view. Knowledge of the factual need not be too punctili- ous, since it in any case bears the taint of fortuitousness. Reality becomes an object of mere opinion. This modesty is as false as its complement, the hubris of the absolute. (GS 5, pp. 92f)
6 Cf. the preface to the Phenomenology ofSpirit: 'To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfilment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black - this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity' (Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford 1 977, p. 9).
7 Which text of Lessing's Adorno was thinking of here, and whether he was thinking of a particular text, has not been ascertained. Behind it is probably Lessing's realization that the 'gratuitous truths of history
. . . can never become proofs of necessary truths of reason'; Lessing called this the 'wretched wide ditch . . . that I can never get across, no matter how often and earnestly I have attempted the leap' (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Gesammelte Werke in 10 Banden, ed. Paul Rilla, vol. 8: Philosophische und theologische Schriften II, Berlin 1956, pp. 12, 14) - a ditch which, according to Ernst Cassirer, had been overleapt in Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (The Education of the Human Race), with its discovery of the truth of the historical; as a young lecturer Adorno gave one of his first seminars on Lessing's last work on the philosophy of religion.
8 Cf. for example, the report by Hippolytos (AD c. 220) in his Refutatio omnium haeresium:
Epicurus assures us that God is eternal and immortal, but that he troubles himself about nothing, in short, that there is neither solicitude nor fate, for everything takes place by itself (mechanically). The god abides in what he calls the World-Between . . . There he enjoys a feeling of supreme happiness in tranquil unconcern, has no difficulties himself and causes none to others. (Griechische Atomisten. Texte und Kommentare zum materialistischen Denken der Antike, ed. Fritz Jiirss et ai. , Leipzig 1977,
9 Adorno is referring to Negative Dialectics, especially the last section,
'Meditations on Metaphysics'; the first edition of the book came out in
1966. The 'reflections on metaphysics which seem [to Adorno] timely
and unavoidable today', which are set out in the foIlowing pages, draw
on the first five (of the total of twelve) 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (see Lecture 1, n. 1), a 'second intermediate copy' of which is dated
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? p. 333)
176
NOTES TO PAGES 98-105
? 7. 7. 1965 (cf. Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Ts 15813ff). Adorno prob- ably drew on this intermediate copy for the notes on which he based the last lectures, which were given extempore: a kind of improvised variation on what had already been fixed in writing, which, after fur- ther revision, was finally published for the first time in Negative Dialektik the following year. The notes relate, with some omissions, to the text running from p. 361 to p. 376 in Negative Dialectics; whereas the
lecture notes conclude with 'The totum is the totem' (cf. ibid. , p. 376), Adorno had to end the lecture somewhat earlier through lack of time
(see Lecture 18, n. 16).
10 See p. 20 passim above.
11 Cf. the quotations from the Encyclopaedia and the Logic in Lecture 1,
n. 8.
12 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Studien
uber Husserl und die phanomenologischen Antinomien, Stuttgart 1 956; now GS 5, pp. 48-95.
Lecture Fourteen
1 See p. 101 above.
2 Schopenhauer's 'doctrine of the denial of the Will to Live', which forms
part of his system relating to moral philosophy, is to be found in Book 4 of The World as Will and Representation, in ? 68 of vol. 1 and in Chapter 48 of vol. 2; also see Chapter 14 of vol. 2 of Parerga and Paralipomena (cf. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representa- tion, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, New York 1958, vol. 1, pp. 378ff, vol. 2, pp. 603ff; Parerga and Paralipomena, trans. E. F. ]. Payne, Oxford
1974, vol. 2, pp. 312ff).
3 On 1 November 1755 the Portuguese capital was devastated by an
earthquake in which a quarter of its inhabitants lost their lives. Voltaire, deeply shaken, wrote his 'Poeme sur Ie desastre de Lisbonne, ou examen de cet axiome: tout est bien':
o malheureux mortels! {) terre deplorable! o de tous les fleaux assemblage effroyable! D'inutiles douleurs eternel entretien!
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Quel crime, quelie faute ont commis ces enfans Sur Ie sein maternel ecrases et sanglans? Lisbonne qui n'est plus eut-elle plus de vices
Que Londres, que Paris, plonges dans les delices? Lisbonne est abimee, et l'on danse ii Paris.
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Ce monde, ce theatre et d'orgueil et d'erreur, Est plein d'infortunes qui parlent de bonheur.
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Nos chagrins, nos regrets, nos pertes sont sans nombre.
NOTES TO PAGES 106-108 177
? Le passe n'est pour nous qu'un triste souvenir; Le present est affreux s'il n'est point d'avenir, Si la nuit du tombeau detruit l'etre qui pense.
Un jour tout sera bien, voila votre esperance: Tout est bien au;ourd'hui, voila l'illusion.
Voltaire's 'Poeme', which, with another 'sur la loi naturelle' was pub- lished as a book, was condemned and burned in 1759. Rousseau's 'Letter on Providence' is dated 18. 8. 1756; he later commented rather aptly on it in his Confessions:
Struck by seeing that poor man, weighed down, so to speak, by fame and prosperity. Bitterly complaining, nevertheless, against the wretchedness of this life and finding everything invariably bad, I formed the insane plan of bringing him back to himself and proving to him that all was well. Though Voltaire has always appeared to believe in God, he has really only believed in the Devil, because his so-called God is nothing but a malicious being who, according to his belief, only takes pleasure in doing
harm. (Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen, Harmondsworth 1953, pp. 399f)
And: 'In the meantime Voltaire has published the reply that he promised
me. It is nothing less than his novel Candide . . . ' (ibid. , p. 400).
4 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut
Tarnowski and Frederic Will, Evanston 1 973.
5 Cf. Jean Amery, 'Die Tortur', in Merkur 208, vol. 19 (1965), pp. 623ff
(Issue 7, July 1965); now in a revised version in Amery, Jenseits von Schuld und Siihne. Bewiiltigungsversuche eines Oberwiiltigten, 2nd edn, Stuttgart 1980, pp. 46ff.
6 Cf. Ch. 1 : 'Dasein's Possibility of Being-a-Whole, and Being-Towards- Death' of Division 2 on 'Dasein and Temporality' (Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 279ff), 'The "end" of Being-in-the-world is death. This end, which belongs to the potentiality-for-Being - that is to say, to existence - limits and determines in every case whatever totality is possible for Dasein,' and 'When Dasein reaches its wholeness in death, it simultaneously loses the Being of its "there'" ? (ibid. , pp. 276-7 and 281); also Adorno's critique in TheJargon ofAuthenticity, pp. 130ff.
7 Cf. Brecht, A Man's A Man, in Baal, A Man's A Man and The Elephant Calf, trans. Eric Bentley, New York 1 964, pp. 1 1 7ff; on the status of the text of the play, written in 1 924-6, cf. Brecht, Gesammelte Werke
in acht Biinden, Frankfurt/Main 1 976, vol. 1 , pp. 363, n. and p. 4 * . Cf. , for example, the chapter on the 'culture industry':
Whenever the culture industry still issues an invitation naively to identify, it is immediately withdrawn. No one can escape from himself any more. Once a member of the audience could see his own wedding in the one shown in the film. Now the lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as every member of the public, but such equality only
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178
NOTES TO PAGES 108-109
? ? 9
1 0
demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human elements. The perfect similarity is the absolute difference. The identity of the category forbids that of the individual cases. Ironically, man as a member of a species has been made a reality by the culture industry. Now any person signifies only those attributes by which he can replace everybody else: he is interchangeable, a copy. As an individual he is completely expendable and utterly insignificant, and this is just what he finds out when time deprives him of this similarity. (Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming, London/New York
1997, pp. 145-6)
The reduction of the individual to the mere specimen of its species is one of the central ideas in Dialectic af Enlightenment. In 'Elements . . of Anti-Semitism', where the theory of logic is traced right to the exter- mination camps, the formulation 'specimen' is, however, lacking:
In the world of mass series production, stereotypes replace individual categories. . . . If, even within the framework of logic, the concept en- counters the particular only on an external plane, everything which stands for difference in society is threatened. Everyone is either a friend or an enemy; there are no half measures. The lack of concern for the subject makes things easy for administration. Ethnic groups are forced to move to a different region; individuals are branded as Jews and sent to the gas
chamber. (ibid. , pp. 201? )
Regarding the text of the lecture see the parallel passage in Negative Dialectics: That in the concentration camps it was no longer an indi- vidual who died but a specimen - this is a fact bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure' (ibid. , p. 362), and especially the conclusion of the book: The smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute, for the micrological view cracks the shells of what, measured by the subsuming cover concept, is help-
lessly isolated and explodes its identity, the delusion that it is but a specimen' (ibid. , p. 408).
Cf. Brecht's poem 'On the Suicide of the Refugee W. B. ': 'So the future lies in darkness and the forces of right / Are weak. All this was plain to you / When you destroyed a torturable body' (Brecht, Paems 1913-
1 956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, London 1 976, p. 363). Cf. the section 'Absolute Freedom and Terror':
The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water. (Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, p. 360)
11 Cf. Eugen Kogon, Der SS-Staat. Das System der deutschen Kanzentratians! ager, 2nd edn, Berlin 1947. The quotation, also to be
? 1 3
NOTES TO PAGES 109-110
? 12
found, though not attributed, in Negative Dialectics (d. p. 362), has not been traced; however, a similar passage has been found: 'Someone called out to a Jew: "It's now 12 o'clock. At 12. 05 you'll be with Jehovah! " It didn't take even five minutes' (translated from Kogon, Der SS-Staat, p. 94).
Amery describes being tortured:
Now there was a cracking and splintering in my shoulders which I have not forgotten to this day. . . . Anyone who has been tortured remains tortured. The torture is burnt into him inextinguishably, even if no clin- ical or objective traces can be found. . . . Finally I became unconscious - and it was over for once. It is still not over. . . . You cannot rid yourself of torture any more than you can rid yourself of the question about the possibilities and limits of the power to resist it. (Amery, in Merkur 208,
pp. 632, 634 and 636)
And at the end of the essay he writes:
As far as any knowledge remains from the experience of torture beyond that of mere nightmare, it is that of a great amazement, and of being a stranger in the world, which cannot be compensated by any later human communication. Astonishment at the existence of the Other which asserts itself boundlessly in torture, and at what one can oneself become: flesh and death. That life is fragile, and that it can be ended 'with a mere needle' - that truism has always been known. But that a living human being can be made half-and-half the prey of death while still alive is only experienced under torture. The shame of such annihilation can never be effaced. Anyone who has been tormented remains defencelessly exposed to fear. It henceforth wields its sceptre over him. It - and also what is called ressentiment, which remains behind and has not even the chance to condense into a desire for revenge - and to be purged. From there, no one
looks out onto a world in which the principle of hope holds sway. (ibid. , p. 638)
That is the text to which Adorno refers. Amery later intensified it still further in a book version: 'Anyone who has been subjected to torture cannot again feel at home in the world. The shame of annihilation cannot be expunged. The trust in the world, which collapses partly with the first blow but only fully under torture, is never regained' (Amery,
Jenseits von Schuld und Suhne, p. 73).
First in the essay 'Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft' of 1 949:
Even the most extreme awareness of calamity threatens to degenerate into chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself facing the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes even the knowledge which states why it has become impossible to write poetry today. The critical mind, as long as it remains comfortably ensconced in contemplation, . . . is no match for absolute reification. (GS 10. 1, p. 30)
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?
179
180
NOTES TO
PAGES 110-120
? 14 1 5
Adorno later came back repeatedly to his dictum, for the last time in 'Meditations on Metaphysics', where he seems to revoke it (d. Neg- ative Dialectics, p. 362); for an<interpretation d. Tiedemann, 'Nicht
die Erste Philosophie sondern eine letzte', pp. 1 1 ff.
On the proposition in question, d. NaS IV. 4, p. 400, n. 234. Cf. Sartre, Morts sans sepulture, Tableau IV, scene III:
HENRI: Est-ce que I,;a garde un sens de vivre quand il y a des hommes qui vous tapent dessus jusqu'a vous casser les os? Tout est noir. (II regarde par la fenetre. ) Tu as raison, la pluie va tomber. ['Do you still feel alive while men beat you until they break your bones? It's very dark. (He looks
out of the window. ) You are right, it's going to rain. '}
(Jean-Paul Sartre, La p . . . respectueuse . . . suivi de Morts sans sepulture.
Piece en deux actes et quatre tableaux, Paris 1972, p. 210) Lecture Fifteen
The title of Beckett's last novel (Paris 1961), frequently quoted by
Adorno in Aesthetic Theory.
Cf. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Munich 1 964.
