Metaphysics: Concept and Problems [Paperback]

In Plato, Adorno shows, there is no conception of the reality of matter as opposed to Form; in Platonism, matter is merely Maya and illusion. Aristotle's insight was that the Form implies that we have to take an interest in matter because Form is always a Form-of with a material content. A square is in this picture filled with matter of some color; the perfect man has a material biography including encounters with the material (such as the Wedding Feast at Cana: marriage's sanctity is this transit of Venus.)

Nor, in Aristotle-Adorno, would the Form be at all improved by removing, in a Platonic spirit, as much matter as possible in a retreat from the world in search of "pure" form. Most mystics in the Hellenist period were consciously or unconsciously, Platonists who sought through reduction in contact with the material access to a mystical. As the twentieth century Islamic philosopher Sayyid Qutb has shown, this creates a cleavage or schizophrenia in Western thought: a divorce.

Western mental reservations about the goodness of the received, material, world result from the fact that (as Adorno shows) Aristotle quite straighforwardly prized the Form over the Content, preserving the Platonic value structure. Adorno shows that Aristotle did so because ancient philosophers had no clear conception of the dialectic.

Now, this is a claim of the sort that Adorno's very critics hunt for in the thicket of his prose like Indiana Jones, and, once they find this fool's gold, they fail to read on; for is it not the case that dialectic comes from the Greek?

Dialectic did come from the Greek but Continental philosophers don't mean by "dialectic" its root meaning of conversation, instead something more like talking to oneself in which the philosopher is literally sundered by the overpowering structure of his thought at the point where he realizes that as a part of the historical world he must self-apply his philosophy, treating himself as Other.

It is at this point that contradictions emerge which point the way not to collapse but to a new structure.

Adorno's dialectic, which he found absent in Aristotle, was one in which the Concept makes its own demands upon the thinker who winds up, not compromising with the World Spirit but in wholehearted agreement with its necessity.

We have to cultivate Adorno's remarkable ability to think in three dimensions here and historically; for thanks to Orwell, the very phrase, "wholeheartedly in agreement with the necessity of the World Spirit" becomes Winston Smith at the end of 1984. In fact, Adorno, despite the simple-minded demonology of the American right, was not at all wholeheartedly in agreement with the NOWS after the Holocaust and his negativity, also a matter of paradoxical scorn in American circles, generated his thought after 1945.

The canard of the American right is that European intellectuals of the 1950s like Adorno somehow manufactured the Stalinism of the 1930s (sic.: if you're going to lie, lie big: it is unexplained how the future influenced the past.)

Another canard of the American right is the attempt to pin responsibility for the Holocaust, ahistorically, on European intellectuals, and Adorno is usually in the round-up of the usual suspects. The Hegelian belief in the reality of moral progress is portrayed as generating schemes, for social improvement, which generate schemes, for mass murder, as if privatized schemes do not also have their own potential, almost by default.

For Adorno, there was no empirically attainable way to attain redemption after the death camps. For the Anglo-American philosopher, who Adorno represents in this book as the deracinated Wittgenstein, "die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist" (the world is what happens), the Holocaust as a fact therefore closes the matter: we find an echo of this in the facticity of interviews, on horror, of The Guy in the Bar...s seen, for example, in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah.

The Guy says "get over it,... don't bring it up, Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist." Adorno's nemesis (like the Guy on the Weimar street-car who yelled at young Ted for his pretentious speech, pretentious speech being close to the language of redemption: like the knucklehead on the El who yelled at my kid for reading a book), the Guy is unconsciously influenced by Positivism and concludes from the empirical horror of Stalinism and the Holocaust that there is no "redemption", only revenge, only Tony Soprano, bada-bing.

The Guy in the Bar, an irresponsible philosopher in the sense that this clown witlessly inherits philosophy without examination, is, in his schizophrenic willingness to divorce form from content, in charge of modern American media...in which the form of facticity and polls drive what passes for political thought. Die Welt ist Alles, was Herr Gallup sprachen.

Adorno's ghost is needed to exorcise Guys in Bars, including those with tenure.

Adorno realized that form and content exist in an organic unity. Language that witlessly forgets this is the sort of political language that takes upon a favored form such as "freedom" without bothering to fill the form with content such as free men and women, and instead, in the Name of the Form, fills America's jails.

Half-educated, half-indoctrinated bien pensants are then systematically gulled into support for crime following the empty signifier of the Form. This has in my experience reduced and brutalized smart people to Guys in Bars.

Metaphysics is not palmistry, nor theology, nor the posit of supernatural entities. Nor is it restricted by any known law to the mulish rejection of an excess over der Fall. It is instead an ongoing critique of the very attempt to grope beyond and this critique itself is evidence for the Unseen: it is a rumor of redemption, and that is all we need: that is all we deserve.