Metaphysics

Concept and Problems

Theodor W. Adorno

• Éditeur: Polity
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780745694382
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Philosophy
• Sous-sujet: Philosophical Metaphysics

This volume makes available in English for the first time Adorno's lectures on metaphysics. It provides a unique introduction not only to metaphysics but also to Adorno's own intellectual standpoint, as developed in his major work Negative Dialectics.

Metaphysics for Adorno is defined by a central tension between concepts and immediate facts. Adorno traces this dualism back to Aristotle, whom he sees as the founder of metaphysics. In Aristotle it appears as an unresolved tension between form and matter. This basic split, in Adorno's interpretation, runs right through the history of metaphysics. Perhaps not surprisingly, Adorno finds this tension resolved in the Hegelian dialectic.

Underlying this dualism is a further dichotomy, which Adorno sees as essential to metaphysics: while it dissolves belief in transcendental worlds by thought, at the same time it seeks to rescue belief in a reality beyond the empirical, again by thought. It is to this profound ambiguity, for Adorno, that the metaphysical tradition owes its greatness.

The major part of these lectures, given by Adorno late in his life, is devoted to a critical exposition of Aristotle's thought, focusing on its central ambiguities. In the last lectures, Adorno's attention switches to the question of the relevance of metaphysics today, particularly after the Holocaust. He finds in 'metaphysical experiences', which transcend rational discourse without lapsing into irrationalism, a last precarious refuge of the humane truth to which his own thought always aspired.

This volume will be essential reading for anyone interested in Adorno's work and will be a valuable text for students and scholars of philosophy and social theory.

EDITOR’S NOTES

Abbreviations

Adorno’s writings, when translated, are quoted from the English-language editions. When no English translation is available, the references are to the German editions, Gesammelte Schriften (edited by Rolf Tiedemann in collaboration with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz, Frankfurt/Main 1970-) and Nachgelassene Schriften (edited by Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt/Main 1993-), when included there. The following abbreviations are used:

GS 1	Philosophische Frühschriften, 3rd edn, 1996
GS 3	Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung. Philosophische Fragmente, 3rd edn, 1996
GS 5	Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie/Drei Studien zu Hegel, 4th edn, 1996
GS 6	Negative Dialektik/Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, 5th edn, 1996
GS 8	Soziologische Schriften I, 4th edn, 1996
GS 9.1	Soziologische Schriften I. Erste Hälfte, 4, 1975
GS 10.1	Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I: Prismen/Ohne Leitbild, 2nd edn, 1996
GS 10.2	Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft II: Eingriffe/Stichworte/Anhang, 1977
GS 11	Noten zur Literatur, 4th edn, 1996
GS 20.1	Vermischte Schriften I, 1986
GS 20.2	Vermischte Schriften II, 1986
NaS 1.1	Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2nd edn, 1994
NaS IV.4	Kants ‘Kritik der reinen Vernunft’ (1959), ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 1995
NaS IV. 10	Probleme der Moralphilosophie (1963), ed. Thomas Schröder, 1995
NaS IV. 15	Einleitung in die Soziologie (1968), ed. Christoph Gödde, 1993

Lecture One

1 Adorno is referring to Negative Dialectics, written between 1959 and 1966; in his lecture series in the summer semester of 1965 he is thinking in particular of ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’ (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton, London 1990, pp. 36lff; cf. GS 6, pp. 354ff), on which he was working intensively in May 1965 and to which he referred in Lectures 13–18, held in July 1965 (see n. 9 below).

2 Apart from the discussion in ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’, Adorno deals with Kant’s attitude to metaphysics above all in Lectures 4 and 5 in the series Kants ‘Kritik der reinen Vernunf’ of 1959 (cf. NaS IV.4, pp. 57ff). The most lucid account of Kant’s renewal of the foundations of metaphysics known to the Editor is to be found in an early lecture by Horkheimer, from the winter semester 1925/6 (cf. Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Alfred Schmidt and Gunzelin Schmidt Noerr, vol. 10: Nachgelassene Schriften 1914–1931, 2. Vorlesung über die Geschichte der deutschen idealistischen Philosophie [u. a.], Frankfurt/ Main 1990, pp. 24ff); Adorno is likely to have taken over Horkheimer’s account without questioning it.

3 Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zaratbustra, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth 1961, p. 58 (although the term is translated here as ‘afterworld’); a direct equation between metaphysics and the ‘back-world’ is to be found, for example, in Human, All Too Human: ‘When we hear the subtle talk of the metaphysicians and backworldsmen, we certainly feel that we are the “poor in spirit”; but we also feel that ours is the heaven of change, with spring and autumn, winter and summer, while theirs is the backworld, with its grey, frosty, endless mists and shadows’ (Nietzsche, Sämtlicbe Werke, vol. 2, Munich 1993, p. 386). Regarding this metaphor of Nietzsche’s which Adorno was fond of quoting see NaS IV.4, p. 165 and pp. 382f, and NaS IV. 15, p. 38, and finally Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie. Zur Einleitung, ed. Rudolf zur Lippe, vol. 2, 5th edn, Frankfurt/Main 1989, p. 162.

4 Cf. GS 9.1, p. 446 – Adorno also cites this statement by the test subject in ‘Theses against occultism’ in Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott, London 1974, pp. 238–44; dealing primarily with occultism in contemporary society, the ‘Theses’ nevertheless contain nothing less than Adorno’s theory of the relationship of occultism to metaphysics, of the ‘contamination of mind and existence, the latter becoming itself an attribute of mind’ (ibid., p. 243). Adorno’s aphorism Occultism is the metaphysic of dunces’ (ibid., p. 241) has meanwhile appeared in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie as an example of his ‘radical antagonism’ to occultism, which, in fact, the authors find rather too radical (cf. H. Bender and W. Bonin, Okkultismus’, in Hist. Wb. Philos., vol. 6, Basle, Stuttgart 1984, col. 1144f).

5 See Lecture 4.

6 Most probably an allusion to the book by Heimsoeth (present in Adorno’s library), which deals with the dispute over universals under the title ‘Das Individuum’; cf. Heinz Heimsoeth, Die sechs großen Themen der abendländischen Metaphysik und der Ausgang des Mittelalters, 4th edn, Darmstadt 1958, pp. 172ff.

7 See Lecture 6, p., 38 above

8 See Part 1 of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences of 1830: ‘Thoughts can be called … objective thoughts and these include the forms which are considered in ordinary logic and are used only as forms of conscious thought. Logic therefore coincides with metaphysics, the science of things couched as thoughts which were supposed to express the essences of things’ (trans. from Hegel, Werke in 20 Bänden, Frankfurt/Main 1969–71, vol. 8, pp. 80f). Or in the Introduction to ‘The Objective Logic’: ‘The objective logic … takes the place … of former metaphysics which was intended to be the scientific construction of the world in terms of thoughts alone’ (Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller, London/New York 1969, p. 63).

9 Adorno seldom expressed himself as explicitly on the systematic importance of this motif as in the lectures on ‘Aesthetics’ of 1958/9. Here he spoke of the necessity of gaining access to ‘something like a philosophical prehistory of concepts which, in our view [i.e. his and Horkheimer’s] should replace mere verbal definitions, which are always arbitrary and non-binding’; as an example he mentions ‘the theory of art as mimetic behaviour, developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment’ (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 3539f). The lecture series on Philosophische Terminologie, held by Adorno over two semesters in 1962 and 1963, is his most extensive treatment of the ‘prehistory’ of philosophical concepts (cf. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie. Zur Einleitung, 2 vols, Frankfurt/Main 1973, 1974). For other aspects of his idea of philosophical prehistory cf. Rolf Tiedemann, ‘ “Nicht die Erste Philosophie sondern eine letzte”. Anmerkungen zum Denken Adornos’, in Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Ob nach Auschwitz noch sich leben lasse\ Ein philosophisches Lesebuch, Frankfurt/Main 1997, pp. 16f.

10 Adorno dealt with Comte’s ‘law of three stages’ again in Introduction to Sociology, the lecture series held in the summer semester of 1968 (cf. Adorno, Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge 2000, p. 131).

11 Comte characterizes the transition from fetishism to polytheism as follows: ‘The transformation of fetishes into gods endows each thing with an abstract peculiarity, instead of the life attributed to it. This makes it susceptible to animation by a supernatural power. Each god assumes a quality common to many fetishes, and such a concept demands a metaphysical manner of thinking’ (Auguste Comte, Die Soziologie. Die positive Philosophie im Auszug, ed. Friedrich Blaschke, Leipzig 1933, p. 193).

12 On Aristotelianism in Islamic philosophy and the revival of Aristotle in the Christian Middle Ages, cf. Otfried Höffe, Aristóteles, Munich 1996, pp. 269ff; on the former especially Ernst Bloch, ‘Avicenna und die Aristotelische Linke’, in E. Bloch, Das Materialismusproblem, seine Geschichte und Substanz, Frankfurt/Main 1972 (Gesamtausgabe vol. 7), pp. 479ff.

13 On the closing of the school of Proclus in Athens by an edict of Justinian in AD 529 one should consult Zeller, who was also Adorno’s favourite authority in other matters of Greek philosophy (cf. Eduard Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung [henceforth ‘Zeller,’] 3. Teil, 2. Abt., Die nacharistotelische Philosophie. 2. Hälfte, Hildesheim, Zurich, New York 1990 [2nd reprint of the 5th edn], pp. 915f); for more detai...