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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Adorno's lectures on ontology and dialectics from 1960-61 comprise his most sustained and systematic analysis of Heidegger's philosophy. They also represent a continuation of a project that he shared with Walter Benjamin - 'to demolish Heidegger'. Following the publication of the latter's magnum opus Being and Time, and long before his notorious endorsement of Nazism at Freiburg University, both Adorno and Benjamin had already rejected Heidegger's fundamental ontology. After his return to Germany from his exile in the United States, Adorno became Heidegger's principal intellectual adversary, engaging more intensively with his work than with that of any other contemporary philosopher. Adorno regarded Heidegger as an extremely limited thinker and for that reason all the more dangerous. In these lectures, he highlights Heidegger's increasing fixation with the concept of ontology to show that the doctrine of being can only truly be understood through a process of dialectical thinking. Rather than exploiting overt political denunciation, Adorno deftly highlights the connections between Heidegger's philosophy and his political views and, in doing so, offers an alternative plea for enlightenment and rationality. These seminal lectures, in which Adorno dissects the thought of one of the most influential twentieth-century philosophers, will appeal to students and scholars in philosophy and critical theory and throughout the humanities and social sciences.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Editor's Foreword
Lecture 1
Notes
Lecture 2
Notes
Lecture 3
Notes
Lecture 4
Notes
Lecture 5
Notes
Lecture 6
Notes
Lecture 7
Notes
Lecture 8
Notes
Lecture 9
Notes
Lecture 10
Notes
Lecture 11
Notes
Lecture 12
Notes
Lecture 13
Notes
Lecture 14
Notes
Lecture 15
Notes
Lecture 16
Notes
Lecture 17
Notes
Lecture 18
Notes
Lecture 19
Notes
Lecture 20
Notes
Lecture 21
Notes
Lecture 22
Notes
Lecture 23
Notes
Editor's Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Ontology and Dialectics
1960/61
Theodor W. Adorno
Edited by Rolf Tiedemann
Translated by Nicholas Walker
polity
First published in German as Ontologie und Dialektik(1960/61), © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2002
This English edition © Polity Press, 2019
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Work in the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association)
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9312-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7946-4 (pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969, author.
Title: Ontology and dialectics : 1960/61 / Theodor W. Adorno.
Other titles: Ontologie und Dialektik, 1960-61. English
Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, [2018] | Originally published: Ontologie und Dialektik, 1960-61. Frankfurt am Main : Suhrkamp, 2002. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018010019 (print) | LCCN 2018021553 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745694900 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745693125 | ISBN 9780745679464 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Ontology. | Dialectic.
Classification: LCC BD313 (ebook) | LCC BD313 .A3613 2018 (print) | DDC 111–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010019
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Lecture 1
8 November 1960
Ladies and gentlemen,1
It is well known that Gustav Mahler was passionately interested in Dostoyevsky, who stood for something quite different in the years around 1890 than he does in the age of Moeller van den Bruck.2 On one occasion, during an excursion with Schoenberg and his pupils, Mahler is said to have advised them to spend less time studying counterpoint and more time reading Dostoyevsky. And Webern is supposed to have responded with heroic timidity: ‘Pardon, Herr Direktor, but we have Strindberg.’ The story is probably apocryphal, but it may aptly be applied to the relationship between ontology and the dialectic. For the last thing we want to say here is ‘We have Strindberg’, or ‘We have the dialectic’. It might be tempting to adopt this approach in attempting to offer some initial orientation for those who are not professionally involved in the study of philosophy. But in these lectures I specifically want to get beyond anything resembling a ‘philosophy of standpoints’.3 In other words, I want us to relinquish the idea that we can endorse the position of ontology on the one hand or that of the dialectic on the other. For then we would already feel as though the task were to choose between such standpoints. Yet amongst the philosophers who have anything to do with the specific directions of thought we have indicated – and I believe I can say this without exaggeration – no one on either side has ever had any time for the concept of a philosophical ‘standpoint’, or, as we could perhaps also put it, for philosophy as a ‘world-view’. Indeed all those who have given any serious thought to these things have always rightly scorned the idea of a world-view that could be selected from a range of others or be regarded as a sort of supplement to life, and have abandoned this approach to the dilettante. Yet this attitude is actively encouraged by the cultural climate in which we find ourselves; and the power of this cultural climate is so great that it is perhaps advisable for you to stop and think about it for a moment. In other words, to think about the way in which everything between heaven and earth, and most certainly everything in the realm of the mind, is constantly presented in such reified and congealed forms and simply laid out for you to choose from. This is what I generally describe as the reified consciousness that is expressed in such commodified brands of thought. As it happens, I read only recently about a discussion about the radio where someone with a supposedly theoretical interest in the role of radio in contemporary culture – his name is Maletzke4 – claimed that people emphatically have a right to be presented with a range of images which they can proceed to choose from. And, God knows, that all sounds very democratic – sounds as though we had a free choice between high and low. But in reality this already presents the world of mind and culture like a range of cars for sale, where you can get something cheap, like a tiny Volkswagen (if any are still to be found), or something extremely expensive, like a Cadillac imported from America. I think it is a good idea for you to reflect upon these things so that you will have some idea in advance about what these lectures will really be concerned with. On the one hand, I certainly do want to satisfy your curiosity about what stands behind the alternative we are talking about here; in other words, I want to address this need in the sense that you may really learn why it is that I and my friend Horkheimer assume such a critical position towards ontology and attempt to defend a dialectical philosophy. That is precisely what I want to show in the lectures that follow. But at the same time I also want to show you that the opposition between these two philosophies is not itself an unmediated one – in other words, that we are not talking about two brands of thought between which you are supposed to choose, in the way that you might choose to vote for the Christian Democratic Party or the Social Democratic Party. For the approach I am offering you here is intended as a well-motivated and well-grounded approach rather than one that is based in an arbitrary fashion on a so-called decision. For the approach presented here must be understood as one that springs from the matter itself. Thus, instead of a choice between what are merely world-views, you may get a genuine sense – if I succeed in what I am trying to do – of what we might describe as philosophically motivated thought, in contrast to the kind of thought that is interested merely in establishing a ‘standpoint’. But let me also qualify this somewhat straight away, since I certainly have no desire to rouse any false expectations amongst you. For the rigour which the following considerations may claim for themselves is not the same as that with which you are familiar in the field of the positive sciences, for example, or of the mathematically oriented natural sciences. The structural rigour which belongs to philosophy, and which allows philosophical thoughts to acquire their own plausibility and justification, is very different from that of the natural sciences. Above all, for the kind of fundamental philosophical controversies with which we shall be concerned in the coming months, we cannot presuppose or appeal to the structure of the positive sciences because the form and character of scientific thought itself is something that is first constituted by reference to those constitutive questions of philosophy which need to be addressed in their own right. We would therefore fall victim to a ὕστερον πρώτερον [husteron prōteron]5 if we tried to turn science, and the procedures associated with science, into the criterion of those considerations which for their part also precede science and are supposed to provide a critical investigation of science itself. And this is a point, incidentally, where I may say at once – although this may well astonish many of you – that I find myself in agreement with Heidegger.
First of all I would just like to outline the path which I hope to follow in these lectures. In general, of course, I am not very sympathetic to such announcements in advance. But since we shall have to concern ourselves here with what are indeed essentially systematic – that is to say, essentially interconnected processes – of thought, which are often by no means simple in themselves, it may be as well for you to know how I intend to proceed; and the way I shall proceed derives from the fact that I have no intention of presenting one position in an external manner in counter-position to another; on the contrary, I wish to show precisely how this position necessarily emerges for its own part out of the treatment of the other. In other words, the path that is meant to bring you to dialectical thinking, to the consideration of certain dialectical models, is the path of immanent critique (as it is generally called in the dialectical tradition).6 I begin, therefore, from the need for ontology that appears in the present. And there is surely no doubt that ontology would not prove as influential as it is unless there was some corresponding need for it amongst thinking individuals and indeed more generally. And I would like to consider this need in both positive and negative terms. In other words, I would like to try and present for you both the justifiable and the questionable character of this need, or rather of these needs. For I shall attempt to resolve this complex of ontological need into its various aspects; and I shall try, through immanent critique, to lead us beyond certain of the motivations behind ontology; and I shall undertake to show you, precisely by taking ontology at its word, by measuring it against its own claims, that it fails to redeem this claim. And what is known as dialectic, fundamentally speaking, is nothing more than this very procedure. We could also express this by saying that, in our present situation, dialectic is mediated by ontology; and the analyses which lead us towards dialectical statements are, in a certain sense, by no means unrelated to the kind of phenomenological analyses which originally led towards ontology. I could reveal this affinity by direct reference to Hegel himself, and specifically to his Logic. Later on in the course of these lectures, once I have said at least something about the texture and structure of Hegelian thought, we may be able to go into this point in a little more detail. This is dialectic: that the transition to dialectic consists precisely in the self-reflection of ontology. Or, to rephrase this in more Hegelian terms, dialectic is mediated in itself precisely through ontology. That I am not simply declaiming empty words here, or simply indulging in idle speculation, and that these very considerations emerge from the philosophical tradition itself, is something you may readily and trenchantly confirm for yourselves. For one of the most fundamental texts of dialectical thought, Hegel's Greater Logic, namely the Science of Logic, opens with the doctrine of Being, and the dialectical movement itself only gets going through an analysis of the concept of being – that is to say, through an analysis of what ‘being’ really means. Yet it is entirely characteristic that modern ontology, inasmuch as it is a philosophy of being, specifically ignores this dialectical movement which is involved in its own concept. Once I have unfolded this transition to dialectic in what I hope is a fairly convincing manner, I shall then attempt, in the closing lectures, to develop and present certain categories and models of dialectical thinking itself.
But before I begin to talk to you about the ontological need,7 about its justifiable or unjustifiable character, I think I ought first to say something about what ‘ontology’ actually is. But that is easier said than done. For the concept of ontology – like every philosophical concept, which is never just an arbitrarily stipulated piece of terminology – only really unfolds its wealth in and through the investigation of the matter itself. Now it is particularly difficult in this case to begin with a universally accepted definition of ontology, since (as people like to say) there is no scholarly consensus regarding the meaning of this concept. You will probably know that there is a whole range of supposedly ‘ontological’ approaches in philosophy, of which Nicolai Hartmann8 was one of the first representatives in Germany. And if you read the writings, and especially the later writings, of the most famous ontological philosopher in Germany, namely Martin Heidegger, you will find that what Hartmann understands by ontology, namely a return to ‘realism’, the doctrine which affirms the existence of the external world independently of consciousness, is rejected as an authentic criterion of ontology by Heidegger, at least implicitly, and is described as a far too superficial view of the matter. And again Heidegger is quite right here. Now in these lectures I have no intention of offering you a history of philosophy, or providing an overview of contemporary movements in philosophy, but want simply to bring out the substantive questions involved, so I shall not go into all this in any detail. But I wish at least to make one thing clear to you here. Ontology, in the first and simplest meaning of the word, is the doctrine of being. I am asking, therefore, what ‘being’ properly means. Now it is evident (and I think this hardly requires further elucidation) that nothing is served by a merely verbal definition of being, by simply staring as it were at this single concept. It is quite true, in the later phase of Heidegger's thought, that it is often difficult to avoid the impression that the somewhat richer vein of existential ontology which he started has actually increasingly contracted to the single concept of being, has turned into an insistent meditation upon this one concept, has become something that can now hardly be described as a thinking through of this concept, but resembles a kind of obsessed and fascinated staring at the same. Remarkably enough, this attitude to the concept of being was anticipated and scorned by Hegel himself. For he had already recognized and sharply criticized this attitude to the concept of being in the work of Jacobi.9 But if we ignore all that for the moment, and for the purpose of our introductory observations today simply consider what has been influential under the name of ontology, then it is clear we are not merely talking about, or not simply about, what Heidegger pointedly calls the question or the problem of being, the question concerning being which seems to require a conclusive answer. For we also find an attempt to unfold a structure in which this very ‘being’ presents itself – I am thinking of the way that the older traditional forms of ontology, especially the ontology of Aristotle and that of Aquinas which was so closely connected with it, presented ontology as an articulated structure of fundamental concepts. In the earlier, original stages of ontological thought there was also talk of the ‘articulation of being’, something which served only to magnify the pathos of the concept of ‘being’. For this concept cannot simply be pinned down at a stroke, as if it were just like any other concept. In order to get a hold upon the concept of being it was also necessary to develop an entire network of concepts which alone was capable of yielding what the concept of being really signifies. When Heidegger introduced the concept of ‘framework’10 in one of his later texts, something which sounds terribly concrete but also reveals the same ontological intention, you can see that this attempt to answer the so-called question of being, the question of what being really is, by reference to some kind of structure is just as clearly at work in the ontological schools of today as it was in the past.
Ontology, then, is meant to be the doctrine of being. I am well aware that such an assertion, which looks very much like a definition – and which can indeed be derived from certain passages in Aristotle to which I shall return later on11 – will not initially be very helpful. But this is just how it is with philosophical concepts and doctrines: when we encounter them in this isolated form, above all without that characteristic difference that marks them off from what they are actually challenging or contesting, from what they are responding to, then they say very little to us. And I can imagine that, when you hear that ontology is the doctrine of being, or the doctrine of those structures which together constitute being, you may well react by saying: Well, then, these are simply the concerns of philosophers, and of course they want to tell us a story about being, but what is the point of this talk of being as such? I shall turn more closely to what I should like to call the historical significance of this entire problematic when I come to talk about the ‘ontological need’ in the next few sessions. But I should like at least to open up this perspective for you here and point out that the ontological philosophy that arose in response to Husserl's phenomenology was first expressly formulated as ontology by Max Scheler and then became especially influential through Heidegger – that this ontology owes its effect and possesses its force through opposition to neo-Kantianism in particular and the position of idealism in general. If I remember correctly, Heidegger says in his essay On the Essence of Ground that the difference between ontological thinking and idealism is not the decisive thing.12 And let me say right away that the relationship between ontology and idealism is an extraordinarily complex one, and that the thesis which I myself shall present to you in this regard is directly opposed to the usual views, at least, which place idealism in straightforward opposition to ontology. But first it is necessary to understand the pathos which belongs to the so-called question concerning being, why people become so enormously excited about the problem of being, why this whole issue has proved so influential, and terms such as ‘attunement’, ‘situation’ and other such expressions13 have almost seeped down into radio announcements and toothpaste advertisements. But in this connection it is good for you to realize what lies behind this entire philosophical movement, which is by no means internally unified and whose representatives are constantly at one another's throats, and that is the thought that the question concerning being is emphasized or prioritized over the question regarding the status of knowledge. Indeed I believe that we can identify this as the fundamental motif of ontology, and thereby recognize its essential distaste for a philosophy that had basically become nothing but methodology – had been reduced, in other words, to the question of how we think, or of how objects are constituted by thought or consciousness. And such thinking no longer seems to redeem what philosophy is there for, namely to discover something, if I may put this quite simply, about the things that are really essential.
Now this tendency which ontology specifically rebels against is very evident in Kant. And when Heidegger emphatically claims Kant for ontology, it certainly has to be admitted – and we shall come back to this in detail later14 – that there are indeed ontological aspects in Kant, and that Kant was anything but a simple subjectivist. Yet in the first instance Kant specifically prohibited us from making absolutely binding claims about being, God, freedom and immortality – in other words, about the ultimate objects of metaphysics. And the need to say something really binding about these essential things, rather than just abandoning them to some kind of Sunday world-view, is surely one of the essential needs that have motivated this question concerning being. Ontology is thus a philosophy concerned with being in pointed opposition to a philosophy which remains essentially dedicated to a preliminary question, namely the question of how knowledge is possible at all, but which generally no longer gets to what is supposed to be known, to what knowledge is essentially concerned about. Now at one point in Being and Time Heidegger expressly defines ontology as the ‘explicit theoretical questioning concerning the meaning of beings’.15 This formulation is difficult and in a certain sense is also easily misunderstood. And I believe you should not simply take this statement (which will surely be familiar to all of you who have read Heidegger) as naively as it may here appear – as if we were talking about any beings you care to mention and were supposed to try, in a kind of mystical speculation, to interpret their meaning in terms of some secret divine meaning of creation or of metaphysical processes somehow hidden or concealed within the creation. For the expression ‘meaning’ – and I should say this right away, since we will have a lot to say about this – is ambiguous in all the ontological schools of today. And any critique of the concept of ontology must pay particular attention to this concept of meaning. On one side it derives from phenomenology, which is essentially the analysis of meaning, an attempt to clarify and determine the meaning of concepts. But it also possesses a certain metaphysical quality: What is the meaning of all this? What does this really mean for us? But even this is not the decisive thing here. If ontology is defined by Heidegger in this context as the question concerning the meaning of beings, this actually already harbours the answer which those of you who have not yet specifically engaged with all this will hardly expect – namely that the meaning of beings is precisely supposed to be being. And here I come right to the central complex of issues which is essential for the whole problem of being, namely the question of the relationship between being and beings. Or, to describe this opposition in the Greek terminology from which indeed it derives, the distinction between τὸ ὄν [to on] where the neuter singular form of the participle corresponds to our ‘being’, and tὰ ὄντα [ta onta], where the plural form corresponds to the concept of many and various individual beings. Now you might initially think (and grammar only encourages this) that ‘being’ is nothing but the most general concept that covers all beings; so that all ὄντα, taken together, would specifically comprise ‘being’. But what is decisive here, and contains the entire problematic of ontology in a nutshell, is that at least the leading formulations of the programme of ontology expressly contest this. Thus, for ontology, ‘being’ is not simply the most universal concept that subsumes all particular beings, for ‘being’ itself is alleged to be something qualitatively other than what it covers.
That may all sound rather mystical to you. But it is relatively easy to understand what it means when you reflect on a concept which in an everyday context is expressly opposed to the concept of being, and which is expressly opposed to it in Hegel too, namely the concept of essence. Essence signifies that which first really allows any and every being to be what it is in accordance with its concept. Whatever has being is supposed to have an essence. Thus when we perceive all the items of clothing in this room which exhibit shades of red, then the relevant essence is the red itself, which reveals itself in its various ‘adumbrations’, as the phenomenologists say, in these particular items.16 The distinction between the two – and it is imperative that you understand this from the start, if only terminologically, if you are to grasp what is involved in this discussion about being – is supposed to be this: τὰ ὄντα [ta onta] are the beings that exist in fact, namely that which is individuated in space and time, as Schopenhauer and indeed Husserl would put it. That which is individual and particular in space and time is therefore what corresponds to the expression τὰ ὄντα [ta onta]. Then, in contrast to this, there is the purely conceptual essence that is supposed to possess validity as something abstract that is independent of such individuation. This essence, at the very highest level of abstraction, is supposed to be τὸ ὄν [to on]. This is therefore the concept of being that you are dealing with here. And I have elucidated this concept of being quite simply in the way you may encounter it in everyday consciousness, namely through abstraction: there is an essence ‘red’ independently of the particular individuations of red that are to be found.17
