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. As for the future, the course of events was to
remain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to a
Hölderlin-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 Adorno’s 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.
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T. Adorno, Frankfurt School
Translated by R.Livingstone
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