Theodor W. Adorno - History and freedom: lectures 1964-1965

First published in German as Zur Lehre von der Geschichte und von der Freiheit (1964/65) by Theodor W. Adorno Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2001.

This English edition first published in 2006 Polity Press

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Towards the end of the nineteenth century Nietzsche produced his observations out of season in order to register his abandonment of history in favour of life. It may appear to be similarly unseasonal now to publish a course of lectures of Adorno's in which he insists on the importance of history and its philosophy, as if for the sake of survival in the future. Once it became obvious that the communist project of mapping out the future path of history had collapsed, books began to pile up whose authors took it more or less for granted that history was now at an end and that the human race had now arrived at an ominous-sounding post-histoire. Not infrequently it was assumed that Adorno's name would be found among those who shared this conservative contempt for history. In fact he was not to be discovered there, as can be seen from the course of lectures he gave in the middle of the 1960s on History and Freedom. Admittedly, like Adorno's philosophy as a whole, these lectures convey the message that hitherto the concept of history as progress had been a failure and that consequently the historical process represented a continuation of the same thing, a stasis that was still the stasis of myth. However, to Adorno's mind this insight did not imply an apologia for the immutability of the mythic state: post-history cannot exist where there has not even been any history because prehistory still persists.

The end of history had already been announced once before, in Hegel's theory of universal history, although with a slightly different emphasis. In the last part of his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, Hegel had said that the Christian world was the world of completion; the grand principle of being is realized, consequently the end of days is fully come. The Idea (by which he means philosophy) can discover in Christianity no point in the aspirations of Spirit that is not satisfied (The Philosophy of History, p. 342). For this reason, Hegel understood his own study as a Theodica, a justification of the ways of God so that the ill that is found in the World may be comprehended, and the thinking Spirit reconciled with the fact of the existence of evil. Indeed, nowhere is such a harmonizing view more pressingly demanded than in Universal History (ibid., p. 15). For Adorno's philosophy after Auschwitz this way of thinking was no longer viable. Just as Voltaire had been cured of Leibniz's theodicy by the natural catastrophe [of the Lisbon earthquake] (cf. Negative Dialectics, p. 361), Adorno was cured of Hegel's version of theodicy by the social catastrophes of the twentieth century. Adorno defined his own thought as an anti-system, and it is scarcely an exaggeration to regard it as a complete anti-theodicy. Where Hegel had declared that truth and history were one and the same, that the rational was actual and the actual rational, Marx had maintained that it was the insulted and the injured, their existence and sufferings, that signified the negation of Hegel's theory. However, while today Hegel's actualized reason seems like sheer mockery, Marx's realization of philosophy has not taken place, the opportunity has been missed, to use Adorno's term (ibid., p. 3). The catastrophes that have occurred and those that are to come make any further waiting seem absurd. There is no reconciling knowledge of history: the One and All that keeps rolling on to this day with occasional breathing spells [would] teleologically [be] the absolute of suffering. The world spirit, a worthy object of definition, would have to be defined as permanent catastrophe (ibid., p. 320).

Once he had returned from exile, and after all that had taken place in Auschwitz and elsewhere, it was anything but obvious to Adorno that philosophy could continue as before, as if nothing had changed. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment that he and Horkheimer had written in the 1940s, the authors had set themselves the task of discovering why humanity instead of entering into a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism (Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. xiv). This question never ceased to trouble them; it became the focal point of their thinking, by the side of which the traditional problems of philosophy had become irrelevant. Philosophy, which in Hegel's words is supposed to grasp its own age in thought, fails abjectly in the attempt to comprehend the rupture in civilization that has taken place. To a great extent it does not even bother trying, but contents itself either with vague reflections on the meaning of Being or with the analysis of the linguistic assumptions of thought as such and in general. Adorno criticized both these trends, both Heidegger and his associates and positivism. His criticism was by no means free of emotion. Recently we have seen the emergence of thinkers who see themselves as part of a post-metaphysical trend or who assume the vague role of a discussant, but who in fact are concerned with the abolition of their own role as philosophers. Adorno declined to play any of these games, but doggedly continued to reflect the actual processes of history and its rejects. In Negative Dialectics he inquired whether it is still possible to live after Auschwitz. The impossibility of an authoritative answer coincided in his thought with the impossibility of philosophy after Auschwitz.

Nevertheless, this does not mean that he ceased to be a philosopher; indeed, he insisted that philosophy was an indispensable activity, even if he had no illusions about the indifference with which it is commonly regarded by the rest of the world. What was crucial to Adorno's philosophy was the intention of memorialization, of taking things to heart [Eingedenken], something it shared with modern works of art such as Picasso's Guernica, Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, or Beckett's The Unnameable, works wrested from their own historical and philosophical impossibility. Books such as Negative Dialectics and the Aesthetic Theory have their legitimate place alongside these. If Adorno's practice of memorializing the recent past during the two decades after 1945 was not entirely without effect, its place meanwhile has since been occupied by a renewed interest in chthonic origins, the ideology of a new mythology resurrected once again, as this was expressed in the revival of a misunderstood Nietzsche and in the impressive comeback of Heideggerian ideas. This return of theory to the Pre-Socratics went hand in hand with a retreat from actual history that blots out memory and negates experience. It ratifies trends that were anyway becoming prevalent in society. But the end of history celebrated or bewailed by the postmodernists has failed to arrive; instead it is historical consciousness that appears programmed to disappear. This will deprive philosophy not just of its best part, but of everything. From Adorno, in contrast, we could still learn today that without memory, without Kant's reproduction in the imagination, there can be no knowledge worth having. Memory, however, in contradiction of a theory that had been dominant ever since Plato and which Kant too accepted, is no transcendental synthesis, but something that possesses the kernel of time of which Walter Benjamin was the first to speak. For philosophy in the age after Auschwitz, this kernel of time is to be found in the screams of the victims. Since then, as Adorno has written, the need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth (