Catchwords may be considered the second part of Interventions. If possible, there is here an even greater tension between so-called philosophical and currently topical subjects, if that traditional distinction still has any meaning at all.
The “Notes on Philosophical Thinking” offer reflection upon the procedure that can provide an introduction to the content of thought.1 “Reason and Revelation” formed the basis for a discussion with Eugen Kogon in Münster; its theses help to protect the author’s critique of positivism from reactionary misunderstanding. “Progress,” with all the deficiencies of a preliminary study, belongs within the complex of Negative Dialectics.2 The “Gloss on Personality” sketches a concise model of the relationship of traditional categories to their downfall; it is connected with the text on progress. “Free Time” is a résumé, comparable to that on the culture industry in Ohne Leitbild.3
The two essays on pedagogy were freely improvised and do not try to deny it. What was said about the teaching vocation in 1965 has only now gained its full relevance. The author was unable to revise the essay on Auschwitz and had to content himself with removing the crudest deficiencies of expression. Where the text speaks of the most extreme things, of harrowing death, the form arouses shame, as though it were sinning against the suffering by unavoidably reducing it to so much available material. Many phenomena of neobarbarism could be understood under this aspect: the invasion of inhumanity into sequestered culture transforms culture itself—which must defend its sublimations—into something brutish as soon as it takes up the defense: by remaining gentle, culture denies the real brutality. With a logic immanent to spirit, the terror that temporarily culminated in Auschwitz brings about the regression of spirit. It is impossible to write stylistically well about Auschwitz; one must renounce subtle nuances in order to remain faithful to the emotional impulses underlying them, and yet with this renunciation one in turn falls in with the universal regression.
It must be strongly emphasized that education after Auschwitz can succeed only in a global situation that no longer produces the conditions and the people that bear the responsibility for Auschwitz. This global situation has not yet changed, and it is unfortunate that those who desire the transformation obstinately refuse this idea.
In “On the Question: ‘What Is German?’” the author attempted, to use the currently all-too-popular Brechtian expression, to refunction a question that was put to him.4 This work should be considered together with the essay on “Scientific Experiences in America.” The latter concerns the subjective side of the author’s controversy with positivism as well.
The “Dialectical Epilegomena,” which directly pertain to Negative Dialectics, were intended for a lecture course in the summer semester of 1969, which was disrupted and had to be discontinued.5 What is said about theory and praxis brings together, intentionally, philosophical speculation and drastic experience.
The title Catchwords alludes to the encyclopedic form that, unsystematically, discontinuously, presents what the unity of experience crystallizes into a constellation. Thus the technique of a small volume with somewhat arbitrarily chosen catchwords perhaps might make conceivable a new Dictionnaire philosophique. The association with polemics that the title conveys is a welcome one to the author.
June 1969