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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factors that prevented him from identifying a definitive plan for the future course of history was his feelings of solidarity with the victims and losers. As for the future, the course of events was to remain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to a Hölderlin-like openness. This trace of the messianic has what he called the colour of the concrete as opposed to mere abstract possibility.

Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on the road leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. The second of these was concerned with the topics of history and freedom. In terms of content, these lectures represented an early version of the chapters in Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant and Hegel. In formal terms, these were improvised lectures that permit us to glimpse a philosophical work in progress.

The text published here gives us an overview of all the themes and motifs of Adorno's philosophy of history: the key notion of the domination of nature, his criticism of the existentialist concept of a historicity without history and, finally, his opposition to the traditional idea of truth as something permanent, unchanging and ahistorical.

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TITLE PAGE

EDITOR'S FOREWORD

Note

PART I: HISTORY

LECTURE 1: PROGRESS OR REGRESSION?

Notes

LECTURE 2: UNIVERSAL AND PARTICULAR

Notes

LECTURE 3: CONSTITUTION PROBLEMS

Notes

LECTURE 4: THE CONCEPT OF MEDIATION

Notes

LECTURE 5: THE TOTALITY ON THE ROAD TO SELF-REALIZATION

Notes

LECTURE 6: CONFLICT AND SURVIVAL

Notes

LECTURE 7: SPIRIT AND THE COURSE OF THE WORLD

Notes

LECTURE 8: PSYCHOLOGY

Notes

LECTURE 9: THE CRITIQUE OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY

Notes

LECTURE 10: ‘NEGATIVE’ UNIVERSAL HISTORY

Notes

LECTURE 11: THE NATION AND THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE IN HEGEL

Notes

LECTURE 12: THE PRINCIPLE OF NATIONALITY

Notes

LECTURE 13: THE HISTORY OF NATURE (I)

Notes

LECTURE 14: THE HISTORY OF NATURE (II)

Notes

PART II: PROGRESS

LECTURE 15: ON INTERPRETATION: THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS (I)

Notes

LECTURE 16: ON INTERPRETATION: THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS (II)

Notes

LECTURE 17: ON INTERPRETATION: THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS (III)

Notes

LECTURE 18: ON INTERPRETATION: THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS (IV)

Notes

PART III: FREEDOM

LECTURE 19: TRANSITION TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY

Notes

LECTURE 20: WHAT IS FREE WILL?

Notes

LECTURE 21: FREEDOM AND BOURGEOIS SOCIETY

Notes

LECTURE 22: FREEDOM IN UNFREEDOM

Notes

LECTURE 23: ANTINOMIES OF FREEDOM

Notes

LECTURE 24: RATIONALITY AND THE ADDITIONAL FACTOR

Notes

LECTURE 25: CONSCIOUSNESS AND IMPULSE

Notes

LECTURE 26: KANT'S THEORY OF FREE WILL

Notes

LECTURE 27: WILL AND REASON

Notes

LECTURE 28: MORAL UNCERTAINTIES

Notes

REFERENCES

Theodor W. Adorno

Other sources

INDEX OF NAMES

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Start Reading

CHAPTER 1

Index

Pages

iii

vii

viii

First published in German as Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit (1964/65) by Theodor W. Adorno © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2001.

Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-07456-3012-0

ISBN-13: 978-07456-3013-7 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-07456-9450-4 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-07456-9357-6 (mobi)

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The publication of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.

EDITOR'S FOREWORD

Towards the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche produced his ‘observations out of season’ in order to register his abandonment of history in favour of ‘life’. It may appear to be similarly ‘unseasonal’ now to publish a course of lectures of Adorno's in which he insists on the importance of history and its philosophy, as if for the sake of survival in the future. Once it became obvious that the communist project of mapping out the future path of history had collapsed, books began to pile up whose authors took it more or less for granted that history was now at an end and that the human race had now arrived at an ominous-sounding post-histoire. Not infrequently it was assumed that Adorno's name would be found among those who shared this conservative contempt for history. In fact he was not to be discovered there, as can be seen from the course of lectures he gave in the middle of the 1960s on History and Freedom. Admittedly, like Adorno's philosophy as a whole, these lectures convey the message that hitherto the concept of history as progress had been a failure and that consequently the historical process represented a continuation of the same thing, a stasis that was still the stasis of myth. However, to Adorno's mind this insight did not imply an apologia for the immutability of the mythic state: post-history cannot exist where there has not even been any history because prehistory still persists.

The end of history had already been announced once before, in Hegel's theory of universal history, although with a slightly different emphasis. In the last part of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel had said that ‘the Christian world was the world of completion; the grand principle of being is realized, consequently the end of days is fully come. The Idea’ (by which he means philosophy) ‘can discover in Christianity no point in the aspirations of Spirit that is not satisfied’ (The Philosophy of History, p. 342). For this reason, Hegel understood his own study as a ‘Theodicæa, a justification of the ways of God … so that the ill that is found in the World may be comprehended, and the thinking Spirit reconciled with the fact of the existence of evil. Indeed, nowhere is such a harmonizing view more pressingly demanded than in Universal History’ (ibid., p. 15). For Adorno's philosophy ‘after Auschwitz’ this way of thinking was no longer viable. Just as Voltaire had been cured of Leibniz's theodicy by the natural catastrophe [of the Lisbon earthquake] (cf. Negative Dialectics, p. 361), Adorno was cured of Hegel's version of theodicy by the social catastrophes of the twentieth century. Adorno defined his own thought as an anti-system, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to regard it as a complete anti-theodicy. Where Hegel had declared that truth and history were one and the same, that the rational was actual and the actual rational, Marx had maintained that it was the insulted and the injured, their existence and sufferings, that signified the negation of Hegel's theory. However, while today Hegel's actualized reason seems like sheer mockery, Marx's ‘realization of philosophy’ has not taken place, the opportunity has been ‘missed’, to use Adorno's term (ibid., p. 3). The catastrophes that have occurred and those that are to come make any further waiting seem absurd. There is no ‘reconciling knowledge’ of history: ‘the One and All that keeps rolling on to this day – with occasional breathing spells – [would] teleologically [be] the absolute of suffering. … The world spirit, a worthy object of definition, would have to be defined as permanent catastrophe’ (ibid., p. 320).

Once he had returned from exile, and after all that had taken place in Auschwitz and elsewhere, it was anything but obvious to Adorno that philosophy could continue as before, as if nothing had changed. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment that he and Horkheimer had written in the 1940s, the authors had set themselves the task of discovering ‘why humanity instead of entering into a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism’ (Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xiv). This question never ceased to trouble them; it became the focal point of their thinking, by the side of which the traditional problems of philosophy had become irrelevant. Philosophy, which in Hegel's words is supposed to ‘grasp its own age in thought’, fails abjectly in the attempt to comprehend the rupture in civilization that has taken place. To a great extent it does not even bother trying, but contents itself either with vague reflections on the meaning of Being or with the analysis of the linguistic assumptions of thought as such and in general. Adorno criticized both these trends, both Heidegger and his associates and positivism. His criticism was by no means free of emotion. Recently we have seen the emergence of thinkers who see themselves as part of a post-metaphysical trend or who assume the vague role of a discussant, but who in fact are concerned with the abolition of their own role as philosophers. Adorno declined to play any of these games, but doggedly continued to reflect the actual processes of history and its rejects. In Negative Dialectics he inquired whether it is still possible to live after Auschwitz. The impossibility of an authoritative answer coincided in his thought with the impossibility of philosophy after Auschwitz.

Nevertheless, this does not mean that he ceased to be a philosopher; indeed, he insisted that philosophy was an indispensable activity, even if he had no illusions about the indifference with which it is commonly regarded by the rest of the world. What was crucial to Adorno's philosophy was the intention of memorialization, of taking things to heart [Eingedenken], something it shared with modern works of art such as Picasso's Guernica, Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, or Beckett's The Unnameable, works wrested from their own historical and philosophical impossibility. Books such as Negative Dialectics and the Aesthetic Theory have their legitimate place alongside these. If Adorno's practice of memorializing the recent past during the two decades after 1945 was not entirely without effect, its place meanwhile has since been occupied by a renewed interest in chthonic origins, the ideology of a ‘new’ mythology resurrected once again, as this was expressed in the revival of a misunderstood Nietzsche and in the impressive comeback of Heideggerian ideas. This return of theory to the Pre-Socratics went hand in hand with a retreat from actual history that blots out memory and negates experience. It ratifies trends that were anyway becoming prevalent in society. But the end of history celebrated or bewailed by the postmodernists has failed to arrive; instead it is historical consciousness that appears programmed to disappear. This will deprive philosophy not just of its best part, but of everything. From Adorno, in contrast, we could still learn today that without memory, without Kant's ‘reproduction in the imagination’, there can be no knowledge worth having. Memory, however, in contradiction of a theory that had been dominant ever since Plato and which Kant too accepted, is no transcendental synthesis, but something that possesses the ‘kernel of time’ of which Walter Benjamin was the first to speak. For philosophy in the age after Auschwitz, this ‘kernel of time’ is to be found in the screams of the victims. Since then, as Adorno has written, ‘the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth’ (Negative Dialectics, p. 17f.). If philosophy is still possible today, then – and this is the message of Adorno's own – it can only be one that retains in every one of its statements the memory of the sufferings of human beings in the death camps. It will be a philosophy that recalls not the shadow of the tall plane trees on the banks of the Ilissos, like Plato's Phaedrus, but the ‘shadow / of the scar up in the air’ of which Paul Celan speaks.*

Adorno's philosophy constantly worked away at the interpretation of history so that one day the moment of its fulfilment might arrive. From almost the very beginning of his philosophical labours he displayed this interest in history and the historical. In the summer semester of 1932 he gave a seminar on Lessing's ‘Education of the Human Race’ together with Paul Tillich, who had supervised his second doctoral dissertation, his Habilitation. In Lessing's essay the res cogitans no longer stands opposed to the resextensa, but instead reason becomes conscious of itself through the unfolding of history. Even earlier, in his inaugural lecture of 1931, Adorno had declared that the question of Being as the idea of existing things was ‘impervious to questioning’, and floated the suggestion that ‘it has perhaps faded from view for all time … ever since the images of our lives have been guaranteed through history alone’ (‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, in The Adorno Reader, p. 24). From that time on Adorno's material works were dedicated to the interpretation of such ‘historical images’ as he called them, borrowing the term from Benjamin. His method, if we can call it that, was very close to Lessing's own, one that Ernst Cassirer had described as a ‘“micrological” immersion in the smallest detail’ – this too a description that Adorno liked to use to characterize Benjamin but which fits his own writing even better.

As a topic, Adorno lectured on the philosophy of history on two occasions, in courses that he gave in Frankfurt in 1957 and then again in 1964–5. The first, the ‘Introduction to the Philosophy of History’, has survived only as the fair copy, probably made by Gretel Adorno, of a shorthand record. Although hardly complete, it nevertheless gives us a good idea of his lectures. His intention had been, he says, to attempt ‘to establish the history of philosophy as the centre of philosophy in a radical sense’ (Theodor W. Adorno Archive, Vo 1941). Although still slightly academic when treating traditional philosophies of history, from St Augustine via Vico and Condorcet to Dilthey and Simmel, the lecture course of 1957 presents all the important motifs and themes of Adorno's own philosophy of history: the key phenomenon of the domination of nature, the criticism of the existentializing of ‘historicity’, the mystical relevance of inner temporality for the Absolute and, lastly, the opposition to a conception of truth as something permanent, immutable, ahistorical. Everything which philosophy concerns itself with under the primacy of the philosophy of history remains, ‘a changing, virtually transient thing’ (NegativeDialectics, p. 307). These ideas are only fully developed eight years later in the present lecture series, as well as in the first two ‘models’ of NegativeDialectics, where they are given their final form.

History in the sense used by Adorno is not the abstract other of nature, but what human beings make of nature. As long as this ‘making’ is unplanned and anarchic, humans remain in the ‘kingdom of necessity’ and there is no such a thing as a consciously created history alone worthy of the name. Freedom is one of the preconditions of such history: the free will of mankind to dispose of their own circumstances as they wish. It is this factor that has justified the inclusion of freedom in the philosophy of history, rather than in moral philosophy where it has traditionally been found. Adorno remarks halfway through these lectures, not entirely tongue in cheek, that ‘almost without my having been fully aware of this when I set out – the concept that has turned out to be crucial for the theory of history, and incidentally also for the theory of progress, has been that of the spell’ (p. 172f.). And he defines this spell that governs life as a whole as ‘the eternal sameness of the historical process’ (p. 183). History, however, was not an eternal sameness, but a process in which the new constantly begins. In the view of antiquity and its myths, eternal sameness was history seen as cyclical, the idea that history does not progress, but that, when it has run its course, it is back where it started. Cyclical views of history have repeatedly returned to haunt the history of the philosophy of history. They can be found in Vico and Spengler, and even in Toynbee, as well as dominating the theories of contemporary diagnosticians of the end of history. Opposed to such ideas is the Christian view, expounded most powerfully by St Augustine, that history represents a progress towards Christ, and that in Him there is redemption and history will be fulfilled. If cyclical theories are ruled out by the hopes of human beings who are unwilling to accept that Sisyphus is the last man, redemption through Christ is refuted by that ‘immediate view’ of history as a ‘slaughterhouse in which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed’, as Hegel, a good Christian, summed it up (The Philosophy of History, p. 21).

Marx thought of the history that, strictly speaking, had not yet begun as ‘prehistory’. Adorno adopted this term. ‘What Marx with a mixture of melancholy and hope calls prehistory is nothing less than the epitome of all known history up to now, the kingdom of unfreedom’ (GS, vol. 8, p. 234). The spell that still presides over everything is prehistorical in nature, it is the spell of myth. Adorno's subject, one that he pursued with infinite persistence, is the afterlife of this mythical dimension in a world that seems to have been entirely denuded of myth, the ‘prehistorical world of the present’ that he rediscovered throughout the works of someone such as Goethe. At the heart of the persistence of myth Adorno discerned the exchange relation of a commodity-producing society, and in this respect too he follows Marx, who on occasion described the sphere of circulation as an archaic fate, as ‘a power over … individuals which has become autonomous, whether conceived as a natural force, as chance or in whatever other form’ (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, p. 197). Adorno refused to abandon the belief that, despite all the frustrations of the past, history was not doomed to remain futile for all eternity. Not least, it was the catacombs of the victims that prevented him from finalizing the construction of history in his philosophy once and for all. He held open the door for history to enter into the future; instead of an ending he believed that history should flow into a Hölderlinesque openness. For all the differences that separated him from Ernst Bloch, he agreed with him on one point; he never played off a wretched reality against the idea of utopia, nor did he ever show the least desire to sabotage the concept of utopia. In his thought, utopia, the trace of the messianic, had what he called ‘the colour of the concrete’ (see p. 253) not that of abstract possibility.

In the winter of 1964, when Adorno gave his last series of lectures on the philosophy of history, the first signs of future disagreements with his students could already be seen on the horizon. The general disquiet of the post-Adenauer years was symbolized by the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, the proposed legislation on the Emergency Laws and, most acutely, the American war in Vietnam. Against the background of these restorative, reactionary developments, a powerful opposition, dominated by students, emerged for the first time in the history of Germany. Admittedly, from 1967 on this opposition in part adopted forms of protest that Adorno was to condemn emphatically as ‘pseudo-activity’ (cf. the contributions in FrankfurterAdornoBlätter VI, Munich, 2000). Not content with merely interpreting the world, the students called for social change, and Adorno's lectures represented something of an attempt to provide a theoretical analysis of this situation by refocusing attention on the relations between theory and practice. At the time, this aspect of his lecture course passed more or less unnoticed. The idea that the philosophy of history should be studied in the interests of practical intervention had always been implicit in Adorno's philosophy. As a programme, it could be derived from Marxist theory. However, Adorno dates what might be regarded as its anticipated critique back to the early modern age and, more specifically, to the problematic situation of Hamlet, whom he often called upon in support of his argument. In Shakespeare's hero ‘we find the divergence of insight and action paradigmatically laid down’ (NegativeDialectics, p. 228). And Adorno found himself confronted by the same divergence when the students demanded guidance for political practice. It was for this reason that he wanted to discuss the question of theory and practice yet again, quite explicitly, in the summer semester of 1969, at the height of the student protest movement. This was to have been in a course with the title ‘Introduction to Dialectical Thinking’, but he never gave more than a few lectures because it was repeatedly disrupted and he was finally forced to cancel it. All that survives of the course is his notes for three lectures (cf. Frankfurter Adorno Blätter VI, p. 173ff.). Nevertheless, at least some of what he would have said to the students, had they let him, has survived in two essays: ‘On Subject and Object’ and ‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis’ (in CriticalModels, pp. 245–78). These essays preserve his thoughts; they are a kind of epilogue to the student movement and at the same time an epitaph that the philosopher wrote for himself.

The text of the present lecture course is based on tape recordings that were transcribed in the Institute of Social Research directly after each lecture. Once the lectures had been transcribed, the tapes were erased and reused. The transcriptions are lodged today in the Theodor W. Adorno Archive with the classification numbers Vo 9735–10314.

In order to produce the present text, the editor has attempted to adopt the same methods as those used by Adorno when editing talks given spontaneously. Where, that is, he agreed to publish them at all. In particular, the attempt has been made to preserve their spontaneous character. The editor has introduced as few or as many changes into the text as were essential. Anacolutha and elliptical formulations have been eliminated, as well as other errors of grammar and excessive repetitions, and a number of syntactical constructions have been simplified. Adorno used to speak fairly quickly and this often led to slips of the tongue; wherever it has been possible to make definite decisions about which words belonged where, the syntax has been retouched. Fillers, particularly particles such as ‘nun’, ‘also’, ‘ja’, have been omitted where they added nothing to the meaning. Punctuation of course had to be inserted, and the editor felt that here he had the greatest licence to ignore the rules Adorno normally applied to his own written texts and to concentrate on making sure that Adorno's spoken words should be rendered as unambiguously and clearly as possible. Needless to say, no attempt has been made to ‘improve’ the original, but only to convey his text as faithfully as the editor knew how.

The notes provide sources for the quotations used in the lectures as well as citing texts that Adorno was referring to or might have had in mind. In addition, parallel passages from his writings have been provided where they help to clarify what he was saying in the lectures, but also to show the close links between his lectures and his published writings. ‘One needs to develop a faculty for discerning the emphases and accents peculiar to a philosophy in order to discover 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 …’ – let us say, the philosophy of history or freedom (Metaphysics, p. 51). The notes are provided to assist a reading in the spirit of Adorno's remarks. In general, they are intended to bring to life the cultural sphere that is inhabited by Adorno's lectures but that can hardly be taken for granted any more today. Wherever they give the impression that they are coming close to offering an interpretation, this is entirely in tune with the editor's intentions.

Thanks are due to Michael Schwarz for his help in dealing with all sorts of problems that arose during editing.

July 2000