Negative Dialectics (Negative Dialectics Ppr)
Theodor W. Adorno
Language: English
Pages: 440
ISBN: 0826401325
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The major work and Adorno's culminating achievement. Negative Dialectics is a critique of the philosophies of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, and a visionary elaboration of the author's own vision of dialectics.
apologetic ideology. Rather, the current motives are diluted and rendered unrecognizable to such an extent that actual experience is hard put to refute them. If the flashbacks and other tricks of philosophy project an entity upon Being, the entity is satisfactorily justified; if it is treated with disdain, as “a mere entity,” it may go on making mischief outside, without hindrance. There is little difference from the sensibility of dictators who avoid visits to concentration camps whose staff is
itself and held to injure the solid work of thinking—as if real history were not stored up in the core of each possible object of cognition; as if every cognition that seriously resists reification did not bring the petrified things in flux and precisely thus make us aware of history. On the other hand, the ontologization of history permits one without a glance to attribute the power of Being to historical powers, and thus to justify submission to historical situations as though it were commanded
dogmatization and thought taboos contributed to the bad practice; the recovery of theory’s independence lies in the interest of practice itself. The interrelation of both moments is not settled once for all but fluctuates historically. Today, with theory paralyzed and disparaged by the all-governing bustle, its mere existence, however impotent, bears witness against the bustle. This is why theory is legitimate and why it is hated; without it, there would be no changing the practice that
because it will not be appeased by the derivative, by ideology—is itself an ideological principle. Karl Kraus’s line “The origin is the goal” sounds conservative, but it also expresses something that was scarcely meant wh en the line was uttered: namely, that the concept “origin” ought to be stripped of its static mischief. Understood this way, the line does not mean that the goal had better make its way back to the origin, to the phantasm of “good” nature; it means that nothing is original
qualified—for to be separate is their very essence—they achieve a kind of existence. Even more, however, do the essential laws of society and of its motion come to exist. They are more real than the facts in which they appear, the facts which deceive us about them. But they discard the traditional attributes of their essentiality. They might be called 168 CONCEPT AND CATEGORIES the reduction to a concept of the negativity that makes the world the way it is. Nietzsche, the irreconcilable