Theodor W. Adorno
Against the philosophy of standpoints and philosophical world-views; 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
The structure of being and being itself; 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’
Circular reasoning (III) • The unreflected ‘question of being’ • Being in the pre-Socratics, in Plato and Aristotle • Experience of being is not ‘prior’; 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
Prehistory of the new ontologies: Franz Brentano; 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
Ambiguity of the concept of being (I) • Arbitrariness in concept formation; 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
Examples from antiquity; 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
‘Priority’ as petitio principii • Critique of the possibility of ontology; 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
The subject–object division not permanent; 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
Conceptualizing the non-conceptual; philosophy of being and idealism, Heidegger and Hegel • Ontologizing existence • Spurious appeal of the new; fascination through ignorance • 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
Heidegger and Kant; 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
On the sociology of the ontological need • Philosophy and society; 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
Science versus philosophy; accepted heresies • An anti-academic academy • Licensed audacity • Relation to Kierkegaard • ‘Subjectivity is truth’ • History of the concept of ontology
The anti-subjectivism of modern ontology • The problem of relativism (I); 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
The crucial role of subjectivity in Heidegger’s early thought; 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’
‘Man’, ‘tradition’, ‘life’: indices of loss • Philosophy of existence and philosophy of life • Labour and the consciousness of time; 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
Heidegger’s archaic language; 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’
Regression to mythology • Fate and hubris in the concept of being • Blindness, anxiety, death; 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’
Tautological determination of being; 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
Pro domo • Indeterminacy as determination • The ‘overcoming’ of nihilism; 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 θέσει • The meaning of being (I)
The meaning of being (II) • Ontology as prescription • Protest against reification; the problem of relativism (III) • Structure of the lectures • The copula (I)
The copula (II) • The copula (III) • No transcendence of being • The childish question; language and truth • The question of being (I); ‘authenticity’ and the decline of civilization • The question of being (II); θαυμάζειν
Heidegger’s turn; 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
‘Peep-hole metaphysics’ and negative dialectics • Left Hegelianism and the ban on images • Priority of the object • Reversing the subjective reduction • Interpreting the transcendental • ‘Transcendental illusion’; against hierarchy
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