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Ontology and Dialectics
1960-61
Theodor W. Adorno (Author), Nick Walker (Translated by)
9780745693125, Polity Press
Hardback, published 23 November 2018
384 pages
22.6 x 15 x 3 cm, 0.658 kg
‘Ontology and Dialectics is a work of the highest importance. These lectures allow us not only to gain a clearer understanding of Adorno’s critique of Heidegger but also to understand more fully the project of a German-Jewish thinker who, having returned to Germany after the Second World War, wonders if philosophy “after Auschwitz” is still possible. The course shows Adorno developing and assembling many of the major concepts that would inform the mature phase of his thinking, right up to his untimely death in August 1969.’
Gerhard Richter, Brown University
“Adorno’s wider remarks about heteronomous thinking and the inimical socio-political effects this can have are of vital importance.”
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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.
the meaning of rigour in philosophy and the positive sciences – the plan of these lectures
immanent critique – ‘What being really is’
ontology as structural interconnection – the doctrine of being contra idealism and methodology – the concept of meaning
the being of beings
the meaning of being – being and essence – categorial intuition versus abstraction
regional ontologies and fundamental ontology – on the problem of ontological difference (I) – ontic questions and ontological questions – questions concerning the meaning of being – question of origin as petitio principii – circular reasoning (I) – critique of origins – circular reasoning (II) – fusion of mysticism and the claim to rationality –historical dimension of ‘the question of being’
being as product of abstraction – being and thought in Parmenides
abstraction and vital powers not distinguished for archaic thought
the most ancient not the truest – philosophy and the particular sciences
dialectic of enlightenment
residual character of being – two kinds of truth
ontology as counter-enlightenment – a double front against realism and conceptualism – fundamental ontology as hermeneutics
being and language
nominalist critique of language – analysis of the concept of being
positivism and language – conceptuality as domination of nature
inadequacy of concept and thing
thing in itself and being – functional understanding of concepts
double sense of being as concept and anti-concept
Kant versus Spinoza - ambiguity of the concept of being (II) – ambiguity of the concept of being (III) – subjectivity as constitutive for ontology – substantial character of language
borrowing from theology – on the analysis of language
obligations regarding linguistic form – the wavering character of being
on Aristotle’s terminology
the priority of the tode ti – genesis and validity
Heidegger’s being as third possibility
on Heidegger’s concept of origin – archaic dimension of Heidegger’s ontology
against genetic explanation
phenomenology and history – phenomenological method
red and redness
the inference to being-in-itself in Scheler and Heidegger – Husserl’s return to transcendentalism
on Cartesian dualism –phenomenological reduction of the subject
objectivity of the second level
shutting out beings – philosophical compulsion for cleanliness – allergy towards beings
an aura borrowed from theology
the story of Snow White – ontology as counterpart to nominalism and positivism
fundamental ontology and the loss of tradition
the ‘unintelligibility of Heidegger – oblivion of the numinous
material stuff and abstraction in the Pre-Socratics – ontology or dialectics
‘being’ as ‘the wholly other’ – critique as differentiation
original non-differentiation
Heidegger’s anti-intellectualism – against postponement – Heidegger’s trick: ontologizing the ontic
philosophy of being and idealism, Heidegger and Hegel – ontologizing existence – spurious appeal of the new
fascination through ignorance Ð subreption of the nominalized verb ‘being’ – Dasein as being and a being – ‘Be who you are!’ – eidetic science and ontology – subjectivity as the site of being
Kant’s ultimate intention – Heidegger’s thought as the site of being
a diminished concept of subject: absence of labour and spontaneity – initial observations on the ontological need – a sociological interjection – the ‘elevated tone’
Heidegger’s language and Adorno’s great grandfather
fundamental ontology as index of a lack
distracting effect of Marxism
the relevance of morality – philosophy and the natural sciences
philosophy and art – Kant’s abdication before God, freedom, and immortality – the ‘resurrection of metaphysics’
impotence of philosophy in the face of the essential – Schelling, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
accepted heresies – an anti-academic academy – licensed audacity – relation to Kierkegaard – ‘subjectivity is truth’ – history of the concept of ontology
how questions vanish – the problem of relativism (II)
‘to the things themselves’ – transcendental subjectivism and egoity – the acosmism of post-Kantian idealism
the unreason of the world - the crisis of subjectivity and the development of cosmology – critique of the domination of nature
fundamental ontology and dialectical materialism
changes in the concept of reason
Heidegger and Lukács – need and truth
question and answer – the philosophical structure of the question
hypostasis of the question in Heidegger – the question as surrogate answer
the mechanism of subreption – the ideology of ‘man’
phenomenology of ‘wisdom’
loss of historical continuity, America – antiques business and abstract time
ontologizing the concept of substance – time and being as complementary concepts
disenchantment of the world and the creation of meaning – raiding poetry
feigned origins
primordial history and petit bourgeois mentality – social presuppositions of ontology – ontology as philosophical neo-classicism – impossibility of ontology today – Heidegger’s strategy
sympathy with barbarism – phenomenological caprice – ‘project’
relation to religion – National Socialism and the homeland
National Socialism and the relation to history – the indeterminacy of myth and the longing for the concrete
the most concrete as the most abstract – being as ‘itself’
purity in Husserl
scholasticism and empiricism in Brentano – the method of eidetic intuition – intuition and the a priori – on the concept of ontological difference (II) – purity and immediacy irreconcilable
conceptuality as the Fall – idle talk and the forgetfulness of being
the experience of being, the language of nature and music
being as ens realissimum - the question of constitution versus the priority of being
synthesis and the synthesized
the physiognomic gaze – the particular transparent to its universal – being – the meaning of being (I)
the problem of relativism (III) – structure of the lectures – the copula (I)
language and truth – the question of being (I)
‘authenticity’ and the decline of civilisation – the question of being (II)
the concept of ontological difference (III) – the mythology of being
archaism – function of the concept of existence – ‘Dasein is ontological in itself’ – ‘existence’ as authoritarian – ‘historicity’ – against the ontology of the non-ontological – history as the medium of philosophy – critique
against hierarchy
Subject Areas: Philosophy [HP]
