History and Freedom Lectures 1964-1965

, by Tiedemann, Rolf; Adorno, Theodor W.

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ISBN: 9780745630137 | 0745630138
Cover: Paperback
Copyright: 10/16/2006

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This book gives us an overview of all the themes and motifs of Adornos 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 idea of truth as something permanent and ahistorical.

Editor's Foreword

xii

PART I History

Progress or Regression?

(7)

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

Universal and Particular

(9)

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

Constitution Problems

(10)

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

The Concept of Mediation

(10)

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

The Totality on the Road to Self-Realization

(10)

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

Conflict and Survival

(10)

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

Spirit and the Course of the World

(10)

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

Psychology

(10)

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 self-destruction; concretism; psychology as cement

The Critique of Universal History

(10)

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

`Negative' Universal History

(10)

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

The Nation and the Spirit of the People in Hegel

(6)

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

The Principle of Nationality

105

(10)

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 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

The History of Nature (I)

115

(5)

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

The History of Nature (II)

120

(13)

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

On Interpretation: the Concept of Progress (I)

133

(9)

The history of nature, allegory, criticism

Secularized melancholy; theory of interpretation; Holderlin'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'

On Interpretation: the Concept of Progress (II)

142

(11)

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

On Interpretation: the Concept of Progress (III)

153

(11)

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

On Interpretation: the Concept of Progress (IV)

164

(13)

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

Transition to Moral Philosophy

177

(10)

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

What is Free Will?

187

(3)

Notes: Inside and outside reciprocally mediated; will and freedom not to be hypostasized; on pseudo-problems [Scheinproblem]; will and freedom synthesize individual impulses

Freedom and Bourgeois Society

190

(10)

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

Freedom in Unfreedom

200

(9)

Freedom as problem and cliche

Auschwitz as absolute negation of freedom

Guilt

Freedom and excessive demands

`Evil' as unfreedom

The ageing of moral categories; society and the individual

Antinomies of Freedom

209

(10)

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 ego-alien ego

Rationality and the Additional Factor

219

(10)

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

Consciousness and Impulse

229

(10)

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

Kant's Theory of Free Will

239

(10)

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

Will and Reason

249

(9)

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' [Aufgeloste]

Will and reason

Moral Uncertainties

258

(9)

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

(67)

References

334

(3)

Index of Names

337

(6)

Index of Subjects

343

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History and Freedom Lectures 1964-1965

Summary

Author Biography

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials