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Informationen zum Autor T. Adorno , Frankfurt School Translated by R.Livingstone Klappentext Despite all of humanitys 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 Hlderlin-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 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 traditional idea of truth as something permanent, unchanging and ahistorical. Zusammenfassung 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. Inhaltsverzeichnis 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 ¿ Rea...
