Lectures on Negative Dialectics

Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966

Theodor W. Adorno

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780745635101, 9780745635095
• eBook ISBN: 9780745694573
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

This volume comprises one of the key lecture courses leading up to the publication in 1966 of Adorno's major work, Negative Dialectics. These lectures focus on developing the concepts critical to the introductory section of that book. They show Adorno as an embattled philosopher defining his own methodology among the prevailing trends of the time. As a critical theorist, he repudiated the worn-out Marxist stereotypes still dominant in the Soviet bloc – he specifically addresses his remarks to students who had escaped from the East in the period leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. Influenced as he was by the empirical schools of thought he had encountered in the United States, he nevertheless continued to resist what he saw as their surrender to scientific and mathematical abstraction. However, their influence was potent enough to prevent him from reverting to the traditional idealisms still prevalent in Germany, or to their latest manifestations in the shape of the new ontology of Heidegger and his disciples. Instead, he attempts to define, perhaps more simply and fully than in the final published version, a 'negative', i.e. critical, approach to philosophy. Permeating the whole book is Adorno's sense of the overwhelming power of totalizing, dominating systems in the post-Auschwitz world. Intellectual negativity, therefore, commits him to the stubborn defence of individuals – both facts and people – who stubbornly refuse to become integrated into 'the administered world'.

These lectures reveal Adorno to be a lively and engaging lecturer. He makes serious demands on his listeners but always manages to enliven his arguments with observations on philosophers and writers such as Proust and Brecht and comments on current events. Heavy intellectual artillery is combined with a concern for his students' progress.

LECTURE 1
9 November 1965
The Concept of Contradiction

Notes

Begun on

25 October 65¹

The special relationship of research and teaching.

The lecture course derived from work in progress.

Plan:

1. Introduction to the concept of a negative dialectics
2. Transition to neg[ative] dial[ectics] from a critique of present-day philosophy, especially the ontological approach
3. Some categories of a negative dialectics.

What is meant by neg[ative] dial[ectics] – the dialectics not of identity but of non-identity. Not the triadic form, too superficial. In particular, the emphasis on the so-called synthesis is absent. Dial[ectics] refers to the fibre of thought, the inner structure, not an architectonic pattern.

Basic conception: structure of contradiction, in a twofold sense:

1. the contradictory nature of the concept, i.e. the concept in contradiction to the thing to which it refers (explain: what is missing in the concept and in what respect it is something more. Contradiction = discrepancy. But with the emphatic sense of concept this becomes contradiction. Contradiction in the concept, not merely between concepts.[)]
2. the contradictory character of reality: model: antagonistic society. (Explain, life + catastrophe; today society survives by means of what tears it apart.)

This twofold character is no miracle. It shall have to be shown that the elements that shape reality in an antagonistic fashion are those that predispose the mind, the concept, to a state of antagonism. The principle of the mastery of nature intellectualized to the point of identity.

1. This implies that dialectics is no arbitrary invention, no world-view. My task will be to demonstrate the rigour of the dialectical method; that is what this is really all about.
2. Two versions of dial[ectics]: idealist and materialist.
3. So why negative dialectics.

The expert objection. Negation the dialectical salt (cite the Preface to Phen[omenology of Spirit], 13.² Subject: thought itself is initially the simple negation of the given.

All dialectics are negative: if so, why use the term? Tautology?

9 November 65

Transcript of the lecture

Dear colleagues, a few weeks ago Paul Tillich³ died. He had occupied the only chair in philosophy at this university from 1929 to 1933, in other words until we were all driven out by Hitler. (Horkheimer's chair was not established until 1932.) It is not my place, nor am I entitled, to speak about the subject that was crucial to both the life and the work of my late friend Paul Tillich, namely theology. Arrangements have been made for Professor Philipp to give a public lecture on his work.⁴ I do not wish to make use of this hour, or a significant part of it, to speak about Tillich. I believe that I am relieved of that necessity by the fact that it is our intention to devote the first hour of the senior philosophy seminar, i.e. the first session next Thursday, to the relationship between philosophy and theology and, in particular, to focus on the problems that were of importance to Tillich.⁵ Nevertheless, I think I owe it to you and also to myself to say that Paul Tillich, who I am sure is no more than a name to many of you, was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met in my life and I owe him the most profound debt of gratitude for having approved of my Habilitation thesis in 1931, in other words, at a time when fascism with all that this meant was on the rise. It is a debt such as I owe to few others. Had he not exerted himself on my behalf, something he did despite the differences in our respective theoretical points of view, differences that we frankly declared to one another from the very outset, it is very questionable whether I would be able to speak to you today; it is even questionable whether I would have survived. This is no mere private reminiscence but something integral to Tillich's unprecedented and truly unique qualities of character: an openness and open-mindedness such as I have never encountered in anyone else. I am fully aware that precisely these qualities in Tillich provoked criticism, and I myself was among those who made such criticisms early on. But I should like to take the opportunity to say here and now that Tillich's liberal-mindedness set an example of enduring worth. This is because his almost boundless willingness to entertain every intellectual experience – and I know of no one who could equal him in this respect – combined a genuinely irenic temperament with the greatest resoluteness in his personal conduct. His extraordinary charisma went hand in hand with what can only be called ‘leadership’ qualities. It goes without saying that the National Socialists made overtures to him – and I know as a fact that they did so. As late as the summer of 1933 when we spent time together in Rügen he told me a good deal about these matters. He unhesitatingly rejected all such temptations – although they must have appeared tempting even to him. His open-mindedness did not prevent him from drawing the necessary conclusions when what was at stake was the need to show whether or not he was a decent human being. And in that particular historical context, the plain statement that a person is a decent human being gains an emphasis that it perhaps does not otherwise possess. If I may say a few more things about Tillich, particularly at the beginning of these lectures which are attended by so many young people, I do so because I am mindful of his gifts as a teacher, gifts that are related to his open-mindedness. I do not exaggerate when I say that I have never seen a man with greater pedagogic gifts than his. In particular, thanks to the boundless humanity with which he treated students' reactions, he was able to draw the maximum out of very modest and even minimal abilities. If one had the opportunity to be present at Tillich's seminars – and I was unofficially his assistant for a number of years before I became a privatdozent – one had the feeling that the way he conducted himself with young people went some way towards anticipating a situation in which the usual distinctions of ability, intelligence and so on were of no account. It was as if these distinctions were somehow negated by actual human contact, so that even a limited and repressed mind could blossom in a way that has been almost entirely ruled out everywhere nowadays. I should like to add that whatever I have myself acquired in the way of pedagogic expertise and whatever may have encouraged you to place some confidence in me, namely this ability to encourage the growth of objectivity in other people's minds, as far as that is possible, and to achieve a meeting of minds; that whatever of this I have learned – even though I am very aware how far I lag behind Paul Tillich in this respect – I owe to him and the years of our seminars and junior seminars together.⁶ You may take my word for it that not only are there very few people who have meant so much to me but that I attribute an influence to them that far surpasses anything that is contained in their writings. Tillich belongs in the ranks of those thinkers who give far more through personal acquaintance and living initiative than is to be found in their writings. And you who have not known him or have perhaps only seen him once or twice in one of our joint discussions⁷ will really struggle to form any conception of this. – I would be grateful if you would all stand out of respect for Paul Tillich.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, you are aware that the traditional definition of a university calls for the union of teaching and research. You know likewise just how problematic it can be to achieve the fulfilment of this idea despite the fact that it is still generally upheld. My own work has had to suffer a great deal from this situation: the quantity of teaching and administrative chores that I have gradually accumulated render it almost impossible to continue with my research during term time – if indeed we can speak of research in connection with philosophy – with the diligence that is not only objectively indicated but would above all reflect my own inclination and disposition. In such a situation, and given such compulsion and pressure, one tends to develop qualities that are best described by the words ‘peasant cunning’. My solution to this problem, one that I have had recourse to during the last two semesters and shall do so again this semester, is to take the material for my lectures from a voluminous and somewhat burdensome book that I have been working on for six years now with the title ‘Negative Dialectics’, the same title I have given to this lecture course. I am very aware that objections may be raised to this procedure, in particular those of a positivist cast of mind will be quick to argue that as a university teacher my duty is to produce nothing but completed, cogent and watertight results. I shall not pretend to make a virtue of necessity, but I do believe that this view does not properly fit our understanding of the nature of philosophy; that philosophy is thought in a perpetual state of motion; and that, as Hegel, the great founder of dialectics, has pointed out, in philosophy the process is as important as the result; that, as he asserts in the famous passage in the Phenomenology, process and result are actually one and the same thing.⁸ Moreover, I believe that what characterizes philosophical thinking is an element of the tentative, experimental and inconclusive, and this is what distinguishes it from the positive sciences. Not the least of the tasks I propose in this course of lectures is to explore this question. In consequence, what I shall present to you here are reflections which will retain this experimental quality until, in so far as my own energies will allow it, they have acquired their appropriate linguistic form, their definitive shape. And I can only encourage you – I am reminded here once again of Paul Tillich – to think your own way through what I have to say to you and to assemble your own ideas on the subject rather than for me to transmit definite knowledge for you to take home with you. The plan that I have in mind is roughly as follows. I tell you this as a guide to finding your way around these perhaps rather convoluted lines of thought. I should like to introduce you to the concept of negative dialectics as such. I should like then to move on to negative dialectics in the light of certain critical considerations drawn from the present state of philosophy. I should like, in short, to unpack the idea of a negative dialectics and to present it in all its rigour, as far as I am able. I should then like to give you some of the categories of such a negative dialectics. Perhaps I should add that, in external, crudely architectonic terms, the plan I envisage corresponds roughly to a methodical account of what I do in general. In other words, what you will find here are some of the fundamental ideas that you will find repeated in very many other studies with different material, with different subject matter. I should like simply to try and answer the question that must have occurred to those who are familiar with my other writings: how does he actually arrive at this? What is at the bottom of all this? I want to try and put my cards on the table – in so far as I know what my own cards are, and in so far as any thinker knows what cards he holds. Such things are not as obvious as you might imagine. On the other hand – and this too is a matter I shall treat in the course of these lectures – what I have just outlined is made difficult and even problematic by the fact that I do not recognize the usual distinction between method and content. In particular, I maintain that so-called methodological questions are themselves dependent upon questions of content. A feature of the themes we shall be discussing is that you may well become confused about the customary distinctions that you have learnt in your subject disciplines, which are in the habit of placing method on the one side and subject matter on the other.

Now I should probably start by anticipating my entire enterprise and telling you what I mean by the concept of negative dialectics, and I should do so in a manner that calls for a resolution of the issues it raises. A rather meagre, formal definition is that it sets out to be a dialectics not of identity but of non-identity. We are concerned here with a philosophical project that does not presuppose the identity of being and thought, nor does it culminate in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Translator's Note
• Editor's Foreword
• LECTURE 1: The Concept of Contradiction
• LECTURE 2: The Negation of Negation
• LECTURE 3: Whether Negative Dialectics is Possible
• LECTURE 4: Whether Philosophy is Possible without System
• LECTURE 5: Theory and Practice
• LECTURE 6: Being. Nothing. Concept
• LECTURE 7: ‘Attempted Breakouts’
• LECTURE 8: The Concept of Intellectual Experience
• LECTURE 9: The Element of Speculation
• LECTURE 10: Philosophy and ‘Depth’
• LECTURE 11: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 12: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 13: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 14: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 15: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 16: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 17: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 18: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 19: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 20: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 21: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 22: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 23: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 24: Negative Dialectics
• LECTURE 25: Negative Dialectics
• Additional Notes
• Appendix
• Bibliographical Sources
• Index