Adorno had once considered employing the title ‘Is Metaphysics Possible after Auschwitz?’ for the section of Negative Dialectics which undoubtedly formed the heart of the work and was eventually entitled ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’ (NaS IV.13, p. 462). And this initial formulation, which alluded to the central question posed by Kant in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, could well be applied to the book as a whole: the idea of a negative dialectic searches after some kind of answer to the question of whether philosophy can be pursued at all after all that has happened in the meantime. Whereas the traditional notion of a critique of reason could once ask how truth in an emphatic sense is possible – Kant himself had spoken of synthetic a priori judgements – without having to put this very possibility into question, for the philosopher who had returned to Germany after the era of fascism, and after everything that a German mass industry of destruction had unleashed upon the world, it was anything but self-evident that one could simply carry on the business of philosophy as if nothing essential had changed. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in the 1940s under the immediate impact of the events in Germany, Adorno and Horkheimer admitted that what ‘we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ (GS 3, p. 11; Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Stanford University Press, 2002, p. xiv). This question, in relation to which the traditional problems of philosophy had come to appear irrelevant, would never cease to haunt Adorno and constituted the centre of his thinking to a degree that was paralleled only in the case of Günther Anders. Towards the end of Negative Dialectics Adorno asks ‘whether after Auschwitz one can go on living’; rather than a simply rhetorical question, this was actually the gravest question of all, and Adorno specifically asked in relation to his own life ‘whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. For his mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz’ (GS 6, pp. 355f.; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, Routledge, 1973, p. 363). After he returned from exile to Germany, Adorno composed numerous essays and investigations which addressed a whole range of different themes and subjects, yet they were all basically concerned with deciphering what he called ‘the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity’; and in the seven years between 1959 and 1966 he was principally engaged with the composition of Negative Dialectics, which represents a kind of summation of all his specific material studies. Here Adorno undertakes to traverse ‘the frozen wastes of abstraction’ (GS 6, p. 9; Negative Dialectics, Ashton, p. xix) to see what has become of the traditional philosophical categories under the conditions of society after Auschwitz. With reference to specific ‘models’, Adorno provides a substantive indication of how moral philosophy and the philosophy of history have to be transformed if they are to remain possible for us at all. Thus Negative Dialectics had no ultimate ‘pronouncement’ or definitive solution to offer beyond the exposed and vulnerable doctrine that something resembling philosophy could only be salvaged if it can make itself good in materialist terms. Just after the book was published Adorno wrote to Gershom Scholem in the following terms:
What I describe in an immanent epistemological context as the priority of the object, and what can actually only be conceived in an extremely delicate way rather than simply as a crude assertion – or only in a dialectical way – is precisely what does justice to the concept of materialism, so it seems to me, once we have escaped the spell of identity. The convincing arguments which I believe I have brought against idealism thus appear, beyond this spell, and indeed stringently I think, as materialist in character. But this implies that such a materialism is not simply fixed or conclusive, is not some kind of world-view. It is this path towards materialism, quite remote from all dogmatism, which seems to harbour that affinity to metaphysics, or I might almost have said to theology, which you have rightly recognized as the central motif here. (Letter to Scholem dated 14 March 1967)
It is this concept of materialism, the centre around which Adorno's Negative Dialectics turns, that prevents philosophy from stopping its ears against the cries of the victims, a concept which attempts, on the contrary, to think with such ears. For this approach ‘the need to lend voice to suffering is a condition of all truth’ (GS 6, p. 29; Negative Dialectics, Ashton, pp. 17–18). It is only in this context that the final sentence of Adorno's book acquires its full significance: ‘There is solidarity between such thinking and metaphysics at the moment of its fall’ (GS 6, p. 400; Ashton, p. 408).
Adorno generally pursued his academic commitments as a teacher without constant or direct connection with his own activity as a writer, but in the case of Negative Dialectics he proceeded in a different way. Between 1964 and 1966 he presented three successive lecture courses on the subject matter specifically treated in this book, which, for all the author's critical reservations about the idea of a masterpiece or the ‘genre chef-d’oeuvre’, still surely represents Adorno's own masterpiece. The first of these lecture series was offered in the winter semester of 1964/65 under the title The Doctrine of History and Freedom and addressed the complex of issues that would be taken up in the chapter on Kant and Hegel in Negative Dialectics. In the summer semester of 1965 Adorno went on to deliver the lectures on Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, which was concerned with the last of the ‘models’ presented in Negative Dialectics, namely the ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’ which we have already mentioned. The last series of lectures, delivered in the winter semester of 1965/66, undertook to develop, in close connection with the recently composed ‘Introduction’ to his book, the idea of a dialectic of negativity which provided Adorno with the name ‘negative dialectics’, and this was the title he gave to the lectures in question as well as to the published book. What the three lecture series have in common is the fact that each was delivered at a point of time well before the corresponding sections of the published version had assumed their definitive form. Thus the lectures arose while Adorno was still working on the book and emerged from what he liked to describe as ‘work in progress’, and when it was still unclear what precise form the resulting work would take. Adorno's intention in these lecture series was to develop ‘something like a methodical reflection with regard to what’ he was ‘fundamentally doing’ (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Vo 10813) – an observation which corresponds to his remarks about ‘the methodology of the author's material works’ in the Preface to Negative Dialectics (GS 6, p. 9; Ashton, p. xix). It is quite possible that this methodological aspect, the immanent categorial analysis which holds the book at least partly in the regions of what Benjamin called ‘the frozen wastes of abstraction’, has contributed to the reputation which soon attached to Negative Dialectics as a particularly difficult work. It may be that the author anticipated this and hoped through the freely improvised form of the corresponding lecture courses to make things a little easier for his future readers, at least amongst the students involved – even if the primary intention, as Adorno himself repeatedly pointed out, was the different one of avoiding the need to prepare entirely new lecture material and thus giving himself enough time to complete the book. Anyone who reads the lecture course on negative dialectics today will be able to confirm what the present editor has pointed out in connection with another lecture course:
To accompany Adorno along the roads and the byways of his thought is to find oneself in situations in which the sense of the fully rounded and conclusive form that always predominates in his writings is constantly broken up, and possibilities emerge that Adorno was unable to resolve in his authoritative works … But it is only the record of his lectures that allows us to see the effort of thought that went into them and gives us a glimpse of the workshop in which the philosopher hones his concepts like Siegfried forging his sword in Mime's cave. (NaS IV.4, pp. 420f.; Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Polity, 2001, p. 285)
It is clear at any rate that the lectures on negative dialectics provide a welcome propaedeutic to a work which is indeed hardly easy to approach, which made a name like no other work of the time, and which could also help us to understand the present time precisely ‘as critique, as a form of resistance to growing heteronomy, even as a vain attempt on the part of thought to keep hold on itself’ (GS 10.2, p. 464).
The three lecture courses we have mentioned were in fact preceded by a fourth one, the series of lectures on Ontology and Dialectics which is published here. They were delivered in the winter semester of 1960/61 before Adorno had conceived the plan for Negative Dialectics, an idea which crystallized in his mind only as a consequence of these lectures. We might almost say that Negative Dialectics derived from a specific occasion, namely a conversation with the French Germanist Robert Minder, who at Adorno's invitation had given a lecture at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research on 25 July 1959. Minder had spoken from a sociological angle about issues connected with the cultural history of Swabia and had coupled his discussion with some reflections on Heidegger (which Minder himself apparently did not regard as particularly successful). Adorno and Minder had long shared a similar antipathy to the ontological grumblings emanating from the Black Forest and to its fatal political implications. Minder, who held the chair ‘de langues et littératures d’origine germanique’ at the Collège de France, invited Adorno to Paris in return. In his letter of thanks for this invitation Adorno wrote:
I hardly need to tell you what a great honour and satisfaction that would be for me. Now I believe that it would be good, for certain intellectual and strategic reasons which also emerged clearly enough in the course of our conversations, to expose the cult of Heidegger for once in its principal character. In order not to accord Heidegger an objective honour which in my deepest conviction he does not deserve, the discussion should not of course be centred upon him and his person but be formulated more in terms of principle, while leaving enough room to say what is necessary about him. I would therefore suggest ‘Ontology and Dialectics’ as my topic. (Letter to Robert Minder dated 25 March 1959)
Immediately after he had written the letter Adorno began writing down his initial thoughts on the theme of ontology and dialectics in his notebook. And it was these thoughts which then resulted in the lecture course of 1960/61 as well as the three lectures which Adorno delivered at the Collège de France in March 1961. His earliest notes on the subject, the embryo as it were from which the book on Negative Dialectics would eventually emerge, are reproduced here.
The main issue: that ontology cannot be regarded as divorced from history and is not divorced from history.
We cannot just overleap nominalism.
It is to be transcended from within (as already in Kant)
The compulsion towards ontology is to be understood.
- 1) the self-dissolution of reason, its crisis
- 2) overcoming the reification of s[ubject] and o[bject]
- 3) the impossibility of idealism, of grounding in spirit
But o[ntology] falls back into all this: arbitrariness, rigidity, hypostasis of spirit (abstract being = spirit)
O[ntology] is correct false consciousness, i.e. appropriate to a (pre- or post-) fascistic situation, yet as untrue as the latter
The ontologization of history: what persists is transience – already in Hegel. Difference. But this needs criticism in both [i.e. Hegel and Heidegger].
The abstract character of ontology. What is decisive here not the abstractness as such but its function. The original pseudos: that a lack, an omission is supposed to signify a greater truth.
O[ntology] as idealism in disguise, unconscious of itself, and thus all the more malignant idealism. Being, without any further determination, is the same as thought. Hegel is right here.
Bring out the aspect of arbitrariness. The talk of the forgetfulness of being corresponds to the worst features of the idealist tradition: anyone who names what is base is base. ‘The kind of philosophy one has depends on the kind of human being one is.’
Ideology in the strictest sense: a necessary false consciousness. Transferring the closed character of the administered world onto metaphysics. [Inserted here:] (To be developed. Principal thing is deception: but it is posited as necessary by unreflective dominatory thinking.)
Duplication of what is as being amounts to its justification.
In Hegel too transience = historicity is ontologized in a certain sense. Showing up difference: negativity. (going much further here: in H[egel] no ‘being’.
Hegel's doctrine of the dialectic of self-undermining essence to be applied critically to ontology.
If ontology really wishes to get back before the split between s[ubject] + o[bject] – why should it have to exclude content.
After Hegel every philosophy that lacks content is regression. O[ntology] conceals this. Pseudo-concreteness, when it passes into the substantive, becomes arbitrary, as with all idealism. (Existentialism).
Archaism dressed up as modernity. The objectivism is subjectivistic … [Added later:] subject/object to be criticized but no going back behind them!) en attendant, 27. VI. 59.
(Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Notebook E, pp. 59ff.)
The fact that Negative Dialectics could spring from such beginnings may remind us of Adorno's interpretation of Beethoven, where he attests that the composer's themes and motifs often arise from ‘the insignificance of the particular and the arbitrary character of first thoughts’ (NaS I.1, p. 34). Just as the composer of the Eroica, in a thoroughly Hegelian way, frequently ‘develops its musical being out of nothing’ (GS 12, p. 77; Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster, Sheed & Ward, 1987, p. 77), so in Adorno the theoretical whole not infrequently emerges out of barely developed things which in their disparate state may strike us as irrelevant or unpromising. The initial remarks on ontology and dialectics which we have just cited were followed in Adorno's notebooks over the succeeding weeks and months by numerous further observations, most of which were also not particularly helpful or illuminating at first sight. When Adorno began to deliver the corresponding lectures a year and a half later in Frankfurt, at the start of October 1960, it seems that he had not yet composed the three lectures to be given in Paris. It was only on 19 December 1960, when ten of the Frankfurt lectures had already been delivered, that he reported in a letter to Minder that ‘I am deep in the midst of writing the original German version of the three lectures for you which I shall be presenting in March. The first one is finished, and the other two have already been largely sketched out.’ The corrected version of the first lecture, on ‘The Ontological Need’, is dated 18 December, the day before. On 2 January Adorno wrote again to Minder in relation to the second lecture, on ‘Being and Existence’, the manuscript of which was completed on 9 January, to tell him: ‘In the meantime I am basically finished with the second of the Paris lectures, which just needs some clearing up so that it is ready to be translated in the middle of January, and that only leaves the last one to be done, which would need to arrive in Paris by the middle of February.’ At the moment it is not possible to provide a precise date for the completion of the last Paris lecture, on ‘Negative Dialectics’. Once the lecture course in Frankfurt was concluded at the end of February, Adorno set out, on 13 March, on a lecturing trip to Paris and then Italy, which lasted until 17 April. In a report to the German Research Council, which had provided financial support for the trip, Adorno wrote:
In Paris … I delivered the three lectures on ontology and dialectics at the Collège de France under the respective titles of ‘Le besoin d’une ontology’, ‘Être et existence’, and ‘Vers une dialectique negative’. Numerous members of the Faculty of Philosophy were present … including the academic colleagues Minder and Merleau-Ponty. The lectures gave rise to some extremely fruitful discussions … From Paris we flew on to Rome. There I delivered two lectures which were concerned with the aesthetics of music … and, at the invitation of academic colleague Lombardi, I repeated two of the Paris lectures at the university. (Report to the DFG dated 18 April 1961)
In his diary Adorno entered only a few sparse remarks on the Paris lectures; thus he writes on 15 March: ‘Gave my lecture, too difficult, Merleau-Ponty shocked. God and everyone was there’; on 18 March: ‘Lecture was packed; went much better’; on 21 March: ‘Final lecture went very well, roared like an ox. Merleau-Ponty and Jean Wahl were present but didn't say anything’ (Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Notizheft J, pp. 5, 12f., 17). Maurice Merleau-Ponty (who from 1952 onwards held Bergson's chair at the Collège de France), the friend and later something of an opponent of Sartre's, was clearly the natural and, as it were, ideal addressee for Adorno's Paris lectures; in fact Adorno was unable to establish a real dialogue with him, and it proved too late to do so since Merleau-Ponty died only a few weeks later. It is certainly not particularly easy to imagine precisely how a conversation might have unfolded between this student of Husserl's, intent as he was on developing a kind of ‘indirect ontology’, and the proponent of a ‘negative dialectic’, yet it should not have been impossible in principle. In an impressive testimony to his humanity, Adorno subsequently wrote to Minder, on 16 May 1961, regarding the death of Merleau-Ponty:
Let me just add how much the death of Merleau-Ponty has deeply disturbed me. When you were kind enough to introduce us nothing would have led me to think that I was talking to a man on the brink of death. Without question he revealed a quite remarkable intellectual power – especially in view of the deep theoretical differences between us, as I believe I can justifiably and am also duty bound to say. And in view of this irrevocable loss I do feel a certain guilt in his regard insofar as, so shortly before his death, I attacked in very fundamental ways positions which were essential to him. Yet how we are entangled in life; if we wish to speak the truth, this also turns to the worse; Ibsen already saw all this so clearly.
Adorno repeated the three Paris lectures on several occasions, although he never published them as such. But they formed the initial basis of the new book that was now germinating in his mind and that would take another five years to reach completion. The first outlines which he considered in this connection (see Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Notizheft E, p. 59, and the letter to Stefan Burger of 18 April 1961) do not yet reveal that much similarity to the plan which ultimately provided the structure for Negative Dialectics. In the final book the two Paris lectures on ‘The Ontological Need’ and ‘Being and Existence’ were reworked to form the first part of the text, which bears the title ‘Relation to Ontology’, while the third Paris lecture, on ‘Negative Dialectics’, was incorporated into the second part of the book, which is entitled ‘Negative Dialectics: Concept and Categories’. But the Frankfurt lectures which are presented here must stand – and can stand – for the book on Heidegger that Adorno neither wrote nor wished to write. They represent the belated realization, as it were, of a project which Brecht and Benjamin had already begun to pursue around 1930, not long after the appearance of Heidegger's Being and Time, but had never completed, namely the project of ‘demolishing Heidegger’ [den Heidegger zu zertrümmern] (Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, III: 1925–1930, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, Suhrkamp, 1997, p. 522; The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, trans. M. R. Jacobson and E. M. Jacobson, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 365). Adorno hardly needed to be reminded of this plan on the part of his friend who had fallen victim to the Nazis, amongst whom Heidegger belonged. When one of Heidegger's students, anxious to establish some kind of communication, contacted Adorno directly after the publication of his book The Jargon of Authenticity, the latter replied that he had ‘already reacted in exactly the same way as today immediately after the appearance of Being and Time, thus long before Heidegger's open commitment to fascism’ (Letter to Hermann Mörchen dated 13 September 1965). This attitude is also documented in Adorno's inaugural lecture of 1931 (GS 1, p. 329 passim) and in the lecture he gave at a meeting of the Kant Society in the following year (ibid., p. 351), as well as in his Habilitationsschrift on Kierkegaard, which appeared in 1933 (see GS 2, pp. 100, 119). After his return to Germany from exile, Adorno was widely regarded as the pre-eminent intellectual opponent of Heidegger, and indeed he concerned himself more intensely with Heidegger than with any other contemporary philosopher. The index to Adorno's Complete Writings turns up almost 600 references to the name of Heidegger, exceeded in number only by those to his friend Benjamin. But that certainly does not imply that Adorno overestimated Heidegger's significance, for he actually regarded his gifts as far more modest in character, yet as a thinker who was all the more dangerous for that. Heidegger's Holzwege [Forest Paths] came out in 1951, one of his first publications to appear after the end of the Third Reich, and it created something of a furore in philosophical circles at the time. Adorno was not slow to read the book in which the philosopher, who, along with Carl Schmitt, Arnold Gehlen and others, had formed the intellectual avant-garde of the Nazi state, chose to announce his continued presence, as it were, in the re-established democracy. But this was not actually the first occasion in this regard, for in 1949, when Heidegger was still subject to the teaching ban imposed at the end of the war, he had already uttered the unspeakable statement which seemed the only thing he could think of to say about Auschwitz: ‘Agriculture has now become a mechanized industry of food production, in essence the same as the fabrication of corpses in gas chambers and concentration camps, the same as the blockades and the starvation inflicted on countries, the same as the fabrication of hydrogen bombs’ (quoted in Wolfgang Schirmacher, Technik und Gelassenheit: Zeitkritik nach Heidegger, Alber, 1983, p. 25). And in 1953 he was even prepared to publish the other statement about National Socialism in which he speaks of ‘the inner truth and greatness of this movement’ (Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Niemeyer, 1953, p. 152; Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 213).
Before the publication of Jargon of Authenticity in 1964 and that of Negative Dialectics two years later, Adorno had already frequently engaged with Heidegger and his writings. He never did so in the form of political denunciation, however, but always in an attempt to reveal the relationship between the philosophical and the political content. If the first part of Negative Dialectics took its point of departure from ‘the situation of the ontology which still prevails in Germany’ (Typescript 53504), we cannot really say that much has changed today as far as this domination on the part of ontology is concerned. On the contrary, despite the insistence of Adorno's philosophy on remembering the implications of the recent past, we witness the triumph of a renewed interest in chthonic origins, of the ideology of another ‘new’ mythology which finds expression in the combination of a misunderstood Nietzsche and a renaissance of Heidegger which had long seemed inconceivable, so that ‘Brother Heidegger’ is finally brought home in this new empire to join other comrades and brothers from Ernst Jünger to Carl Schmitt. On all fronts, whether right, left or centre, ontology seems to have triumphed over dialectics. The return of philosophy to a kind of pre-Socratic irrationalism corresponds to a retreat from actual history which extinguishes memory and eliminates experience: a ratification of tendencies which contemporary society is already effectively following. Given this state of things, the publication of the only lecture course which Adorno dedicated to the thought of his antipode in philosophy may not prove to be entirely obsolete and perhaps not even without a certain advantage – as a plea for reason and enlightenment, which – to adapt a formulation of Benjamin's – clearly look small and ugly today and thus have to make themselves scarce.
This edition of Adorno's lecture course is based on the transcripts from tape recordings produced in the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, usually in immediate connection with the particular lectures as they were delivered. The tapes themselves were then wiped in order to be reused. The transcripts in question are now lodged in the Theodor W. Adorno Archive with the classification numbers Vo 5688–5972.
In preparing the text the editor has attempted to follow Adorno's own example in editing the texts of lectures that he had given extempore if he subsequently agreed for them to be published. A particular effort has been made to preserve the informal character of the lecturing situation. The editor has intervened in the text as little as possible but as much as seemed necessary. After his previous experience in editing Adorno's lectures the editor felt freer in the case of the present lectures to retouch the transcripts here and there, materials which did not come directly from the hand of Adorno and were not authorized by him in their present form. Anacoluthons, ellipses and grammatical slips have been corrected. In addition to the cautious deletion of over-obtrusive repetitions, occasional attempts have been made to disentangle particularly obscure syntactical constructions. Adorno tended to speak relatively quickly and individual words not infrequently became garbled in the process; corrections have been inserted whenever it was possible to ascertain his meaning precisely. Filler words, especially particles such as ‘now’, ‘so’, ‘indeed’, and a somewhat inflationary use of ‘actually’, have been cut where it was clear that he was searching for the right word or thought. The frequently repeated address to Adorno's audience – ‘Ladies and gentlemen’ – has often been omitted when it merely sounded redundant. Since the question of punctuation naturally had to be decided by the editor, he felt most at liberty to impose his own practice here to achieve maximum clarity and comprehensibility without regard to the rules Adorno followed in preparing his own texts. No attempt has been made to ‘improve’ Adorno's lectures; the aim was always to present his text to the best of the editor's abilities.
In the editorial notes the quotations occurring in the lectures have been identified where possible, and the passages to which Adorno alludes or appears to allude have been cited and references supplied. Wherever English translations of the works quoted by Adorno, or of Adorno's own writings, are available, the relevant details and page references have been provided (although the translation in question has sometimes been adapted or not employed at all). In addition parallel passages from Adorno's other writings have occasionally been added or referred to wherever they can shed light on something mentioned or discussed in the lectures. These also help to underline the varied and abundant connections between the lectures and the published works. As Adorno writes: ‘One needs to develop a capacity for discerning the emphases and accents peculiar to that philosophy in order to uncover their relationships within the philosophical context, and thus to understand the philosophy itself – that is at least as important as knowing unequivocally: such and such is metaphysics’ – or indeed ontology, or dialectic (see NaS IV.14, p. 81; Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Polity, 2000, p. 51). The editorial notes aim likewise to facilitate a reading that takes Adorno's injunction seriously. It is hoped that the notes in their entirety will help to furnish some idea of the cultural sphere, the univers imaginaire, within which Adorno's activities as a lecturer unfolded, a world which can no longer be taken for granted today.
All that remains for me here is to express my thanks to Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Michael Schwarz for their assistance in the work of editing the text of these lectures.