Theodor W. Adorno

History and Freedom (eBook, PDF)

Lectures 1964-1965
Redaktion: Tiedemann, Rolf

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

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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Produktdetails

• Verlag: John Wiley & Sons
• Seitenzahl: 368
• Erscheinungstermin: 5. November 2014
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780745692722
• Artikelnr.: 41827145

Autorenporträt

T. Adorno, Frankfurt School Translated by R.Livingstone

Inhaltsangabe

Editor's Foreword xii Part I History Lecture 1: Progress or Regression? 3 Notes: The relationship of the lectures to Negative Dialectics; the concept of freedom in Kant and Hegel; the diminishing consciousness of freedom; the meaning of history refuted by Auschwitz; the philosophy of history implies that there is a meaning; cultural morphology (Spengler) and idealism Lecture 2: Universal and Particular 10 Trend and individual fact
Distance from and closeness to detail; progress as a particular
Rationality as a universal; rationality as the mastering of nature
The concept of universal history; rationality as a form of conflict; 'Faustian technology' and modes of production
Hegel's concept of spirit [Geist]; spirit and technical rationality; spirit not primary, but a product
The immediate experience of the universal and the universal itself denounced as metaphysics; negativity as a universal Lecture 3: Constitution Problems 19 The truth of facts
Immediacy and mediation; individuality and the 'untrue' universal
Simmel's philosophy of history; the problem of constitution (I)
The problem of constitution (II)
De Maistre; the grounds of knowledge and grounds of reality
Hegel's 'world spirit' and the spirit of the age
The logic of things and heteronomy Lecture 4: The Concept of Mediation 29 Facts as a cloak
The experience of the speculative; experience of committees
Formal sociology; group opinion and social totality
French Revolution (I)
French Revolution (II); underlying cause and proximate cause: course of history and individual moment
French Revolution (III); primacy of the course of history: 'economy based on expenditure' instead of 'economy based on acquisition'; the theory of historical categories Lecture 5: The Totality on the Road to Self-Realization 39 Philosophy of history and historiography
Parti pris for the universal
Hegel's class standpoint
In defence of Hegel
Reason as unreason; individual interest and species; humanity: 'public company for the exploitation of nature'
Conflict in the concept of reason
The odious totality Lecture 6: Conflict and Survival 49 Ambivalence of totality; Marx's optimistic view of history
Conflict and totality
Theodicy of conflict
Conflict and the reproduction of life
Conflict and prehistory; the economy or relations of domination
Contemplative and revolutionary conceptions of history; the problem of anarchism
Defence of nonconformism Lecture 7: Spirit and the Course of the World 59 The concept of conformism
Critique of the hypostasization of concepts; the concept of reason; the irrationality of reason
Law and 'emotional warmth' in Hegel; universality in the particular
The course of the world and individual conscience; methesis [participation] of the spirit
Theodicy of rupture and concrete possibility Lecture 8: Psychology 69 The concept of the character mask
Individuation and socialization
Identity and the semblance of reconciliation
'Sowing one's wild oats'
Intellectual forms of self-preservation and human breakdown; identification with the aggressor
Acquiescing in selfdestruction; concretism; psychology as cement Lecture 9: The Critique of Universal History 79 The course of the argument
The concept of universal history (I)
The concept of universal history (II)
False mastery and vindication of induction; Hegel's theory of history
Freedom and the individual in Hegel
The individuality in antiquity and the early modern age
History from the standpoint of the victor Lecture 10: 'Negative' Universal History 89 Benjamin's XVIIth thesis
Temporal core and non-identity
Continuity and discontinuity
History as a gigantic exchange relationship
The total state and the rule of competing cliques
Dialectic of the particular
The concept of chance; the utopia of knowledge
Hegel's critique of the totality; course of the argument Lecture 11: The Nation and the Spirit of the People in Hegel 99 Notes: Spirit of the people and universal spirit; universal history as universal tribunal; pseudo-concreteness; repressive archaisms; anti-Cartesian elements in Vico, Montesquieu, Herder and Hegel; cult of the nation Lecture 12: The Principle of Nationality 105 The nation: a bourgeois form of organization; departure from natural forms of association
The path to delusions of race
Progressive aspects of the nation
The principle of nationality and natural history
The equality of the organization of life today
Hegel's theory of national spirit viii contents obsolete; decentralization through technology
Germany 'the belated nation'
Predominance of the universal over the individual; objective reason split off from subjective reason
'Infernal machine'; natural history in Hegel Lecture 13: The History of Nature (I) 115 Notes: Nature and history; history as spirit; the history of nature as a critical concept; Marx, the ironical Social Darwinist; mythical nature of history; first and second nature Lecture 14: The History of Nature (II) 120 The concept of second nature
Nature and history mediated
Critique of 'historicity'; meaning and chance
Philosophy as interpretation (I); transience and allegory; philosophy's transition to the concrete; history as secularized metaphysics
Philosophy as interpretation (II); hermeneutics
Practice thwarted; critique of the metaphysics of time Part II Progress Lecture 15: On Interpretation: the Concept of Progress (I) 133 The history of nature, allegory, criticism
Secularized melancholy; theory of interpretation; Hölderlin's The Shelter at Hardt
Immediacy as the product of history; Hegel and Marx; art
The pleasures of interpretation
The concept of progress as a link between philosophy of history and the theory of freedom
Critique of nominalism
'Whether progress exists' Lecture 16: On Interpretation: the Concept of Progress (II) 142 Towards conceptual synthesis
Progress as a way of averting catastrophe; the global social subject
Kant's idea of humanity
Benjamin's critique of progress
Progress and redemption in St Augustine
Escaping the trammels of the past
Progress mediated by society
Reconciliation and conflict in Kant; progress as absolutely mythical and anti-mythical Lecture 17: On Interpretation: the Concept of Progress (III) 153 Jugendstil, Ibsen
Decadence and utopia; bourgeois coldness and privileged happiness; dialectics of individuation
Decadence and the defamation of sex; Jugendstil and expressionism
The domination of nature and the flowering of reason; Kant and Hegel's concepts of reason; myth and demythologization in one
The idea of progress in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Two concepts of progress
The dialectics of inwardness; critique of the decisionism of existentialist spontaneity
Spirit as the repository of progress Lecture 18: On Interpretation: the Concept of Progress (IV) 164 Static elements of the spirit
Progress and mastery of material
Philosophical progress
Programme of reflection on the nature of philosophy
The concept of exchange; exchange and myth
Correcting progress
Speaking on my own behalf Part III Freedom The concepts of freedom and the spell; concentration on free will; freedom as the epitome of resistance to the spell Lecture 19: Transition to Moral Philosophy 177 Non-existence of freedom in history
Individual freedom, social unfreedom
Freedom as a historical concept
The possibility of freedom in unfreedom
The current state of the forces of production
Reason and freedom
Model and constellation; free will and interiority Lecture 20: What is Free Will? 187 Notes: Inside and outside reciprocally mediated; will and freedom not to be hypostasized; on pseudo-problems [Scheinproblem]; will and freedom synthesize individual impulses Lecture 21: Freedom and Bourgeois Society 190 Towards a definition of will: the substratum of freedom
Will as the ordered unity of spontaneous and rational impulses; will and a strong ego; non-ego as model of the ego
Freedom and emancipation of the bourgeoisie; freedom and psychology
The scientific impulse versus demystification; bourgeois ambivalence
Theory of freedom as Sunday sermon
Freedom in the service of oppression; the psychoanalysis of the super-ego Lecture 22: Freedom in Unfreedom 200 Freedom as problem and cliché
Auschwitz as absolute negation of freedom
Guilt
Freedom and excessive demands
'Evil' as unfreedom
The ageing of moral categories; society and the individual Lecture 23: Antinomies of Freedom 209 The narcissistic interest in freedom
Conformity as the dark side of freedom
Impulse, mimesis, irrationality
Kant's concept of spontaneity
Spontaneity as something transcendental
The dialectics of spontaneity; Marx, Rosa Luxemburg
Obsessional neurosis; the egoalien ego Lecture 24: Rationality and the Additional Factor 219 Freud's theory of repression; blindness of the ego
Ideology of inwardness
The 'sphere of absolute origins' and the subject
Critique of the experimenta crucis
Kant's 'gallows in front of the house'
Kant's card-sharp
A priorism or the empirical as determining factor; the construction of the intelligible character Lecture 25: Consciousness and Impulse 229 Consciousness versus causality
Without consciousness, no will
Hamlet (I)
The medieval ordo: critique of Romanticism; Hamlet (II)
Hamlet (III); the additional or the irrational factor
The archaic element of the will
The archaic transformed
Reason and impulse Lecture 26: Kant's Theory of Free Will 239 Evidence of impulse
The problem of theory and practice in Kant; lectures as a genre
Kant's historicization of reflections on the moral law
Freedom as the determinate negation of unfreedom; Kant's doctrine of freedom as fiction
Freedom a paradox in Kant; natura naturans and natura naturata
Kant's 'borrowed' ideas of goodness; mediation repressive in Kant
Freedom as consciousness of the law Lecture 27: Will and Reason 249 The dual character of Kant's concept of reason
The ontologizing of the will in Kant
Kant's false definition of will
Defence of formalism, misuse of the concrete; Scheler
The concept of character
Character and the 'dissolute' [Aufgelöste]
Will and reason Lecture 28: Moral Uncertainties 258 Ontological validity and ontic genesis mediated
Voluntarist and intellectual elements
Morality as self-evident; good and evil
Will and violence; no moral certainty
Solidarity and heteronomy in matters of conscience
Universal and individual in moral philosophy
Free and unfree
Lectures on 'Metaphysics' Notes 267 References 334 Index of Names 337 Index of Subjects 343