1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:02,279 Welcome to the Deep Dive, the place where we 2 00:00:02,279 --> 00:00:05,139 take the most complex intellectual confrontations, 3 00:00:05,139 --> 00:00:08,300 stack up the sources, and emerge with absolute 4 00:00:08,300 --> 00:00:11,199 clarity. Today, we are undertaking what you could 5 00:00:11,199 --> 00:00:14,800 call a meticulous philosophical excavation. That's 6 00:00:14,800 --> 00:00:16,800 right. We're deep diving into Peter E. Gordon's 7 00:00:16,800 --> 00:00:20,039 work Adorno and Existence, which charts the intellectual 8 00:00:20,039 --> 00:00:22,960 trajectory of Theodore W. Adorno through his 9 00:00:22,960 --> 00:00:25,420 most persistent philosophical sparring matches. 10 00:00:25,699 --> 00:00:27,460 And sparring matches is definitely the right 11 00:00:27,460 --> 00:00:30,109 term. Our mission today is... Well, it's ambitious. 12 00:00:30,370 --> 00:00:33,350 We're going to meticulously track Adorno's lifelong, 13 00:00:33,670 --> 00:00:37,109 fiercely critical, yet strangely dependent relationship 14 00:00:37,109 --> 00:00:39,649 with the giants of existential philosophy. We're 15 00:00:39,649 --> 00:00:42,250 talking Søren Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl, and 16 00:00:42,250 --> 00:00:43,909 of course, Martin Heidegger. These are the figures 17 00:00:43,909 --> 00:00:47,670 Adorno criticized relentlessly, but their very 18 00:00:47,670 --> 00:00:50,710 systems provided the necessary resistance, the 19 00:00:50,710 --> 00:00:52,829 friction that really defined his own radical 20 00:00:52,829 --> 00:00:55,070 critical theory. It's like he needed them to 21 00:00:55,070 --> 00:00:57,899 push against. Exactly. We are tracking an intellectual 22 00:00:57,899 --> 00:01:01,039 drama, what the Germans call an assenendersatzung, 23 00:01:01,179 --> 00:01:04,480 a sustained confrontation, that Gordon argues 24 00:01:04,480 --> 00:01:07,579 reveals more about Adorno, the critic, than the 25 00:01:07,579 --> 00:01:10,280 philosophy he set out to criticize. That framing 26 00:01:10,280 --> 00:01:12,959 is just essential because Gordon's central thesis 27 00:01:12,959 --> 00:01:16,420 here is that Adorno's critique functions as a 28 00:01:16,420 --> 00:01:19,769 via negativ. A negative path. A way of defining 29 00:01:19,769 --> 00:01:22,069 something by what it's not. Exactly. A negative 30 00:01:22,069 --> 00:01:24,530 path toward a complete understanding of Adorno 31 00:01:24,530 --> 00:01:26,930 himself. It's an exercise in defining the critic 32 00:01:26,930 --> 00:01:29,489 by what he opposes, which in the end creates 33 00:01:29,489 --> 00:01:32,549 this philosophical physiognomy of Adorno's mind. 34 00:01:32,750 --> 00:01:35,250 And the fascinating part is that Adorno saw a 35 00:01:35,250 --> 00:01:38,090 shared, unified target across all these thinkers, 36 00:01:38,349 --> 00:01:41,170 Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, despite their 37 00:01:41,170 --> 00:01:43,530 very different historical moments. Yes. This 38 00:01:43,530 --> 00:01:45,709 unified enemy is what Gordon terms the philosophy 39 00:01:45,709 --> 00:01:48,519 of bourgeois interiority. Okay, let's not just 40 00:01:48,519 --> 00:01:50,439 glide over that phrase, bourgeois interiority. 41 00:01:50,439 --> 00:01:52,379 That's dense. It sounds a bit like a sociological 42 00:01:52,379 --> 00:01:54,480 insult. It does, but it's actually the philosophical 43 00:01:54,480 --> 00:01:57,760 bedrock Adorno spent his life attempting to shatter. 44 00:01:57,900 --> 00:02:00,280 So what does bourgeois interiority actually look 45 00:02:00,280 --> 00:02:03,359 like in philosophical terms? At its core, it's 46 00:02:03,359 --> 00:02:06,159 a systematic bias. It's a preference for the 47 00:02:06,159 --> 00:02:09,500 isolated interior contents of consciousness over 48 00:02:09,500 --> 00:02:12,800 the external. material world. This philosophy 49 00:02:12,800 --> 00:02:15,659 consistently elevates the subjective realm, whether 50 00:02:15,659 --> 00:02:18,060 you call it authentic selfhood, transcendental 51 00:02:18,060 --> 00:02:19,979 subjectivity, whatever, and it systematically 52 00:02:19,979 --> 00:02:23,080 withdraws from the degraded objective world outside 53 00:02:23,080 --> 00:02:25,639 the self. So the outside world is dismissed as, 54 00:02:25,780 --> 00:02:29,439 what, just noise? Pretty much. Mere everydayness, 55 00:02:29,580 --> 00:02:32,599 the natural attitude, or simply publicity. The 56 00:02:32,599 --> 00:02:35,900 real drama, drama of truth, happens inside the 57 00:02:35,900 --> 00:02:38,770 private self, safely guarded. So it's a philosophy 58 00:02:38,770 --> 00:02:41,069 of self -fortification, a retreat, and I'm guessing 59 00:02:41,069 --> 00:02:43,949 the term bourgeois is key here. It ties this 60 00:02:43,949 --> 00:02:46,389 retreat directly to social and economic conditions, 61 00:02:46,509 --> 00:02:48,330 right? This isn't just about abstract ideas. 62 00:02:48,629 --> 00:02:50,889 Absolutely not. For Adorno and for the Frankfurt 63 00:02:50,889 --> 00:02:53,449 School generally, philosophy can never be an 64 00:02:53,449 --> 00:02:55,889 independent realm of pure thought. It just can't. 65 00:02:55,909 --> 00:02:58,330 Adorno famously echoed Hegel on this, stating 66 00:02:58,330 --> 00:03:01,830 that philosophy is its own time comprehended 67 00:03:01,830 --> 00:03:04,750 in thought. So if we want to critique a philosophical 68 00:03:04,750 --> 00:03:07,500 doctrine, We have to understand it as one moment 69 00:03:07,500 --> 00:03:10,599 within a larger socioeconomic critique of the 70 00:03:10,599 --> 00:03:13,500 social whole. So the bourgeois private person 71 00:03:13,500 --> 00:03:17,210 isolated in their apartment, that's not just 72 00:03:17,210 --> 00:03:19,750 a metaphor for him. Not at all. It's the historical 73 00:03:19,750 --> 00:03:22,210 context that makes that philosophy possible in 74 00:03:22,210 --> 00:03:24,009 the first place. Which makes Adorno's project 75 00:03:24,009 --> 00:03:26,689 so much harder to execute because he's rejecting 76 00:03:26,689 --> 00:03:29,129 the whole idea of a philosophy existing in some 77 00:03:29,129 --> 00:03:32,169 undamaged mind split off from the chaos of social 78 00:03:32,169 --> 00:03:34,979 reality. That's it. Philosophical concepts, even 79 00:03:34,979 --> 00:03:37,240 the most abstract ones, are shaped by the social 80 00:03:37,240 --> 00:03:40,240 totality. But here's the unexpected nuance Gordon 81 00:03:40,240 --> 00:03:42,719 pulls out, and this is so important. Adorno didn't 82 00:03:42,719 --> 00:03:44,900 believe existentialism was wrong in its direction. 83 00:03:45,180 --> 00:03:47,960 He thought it was a brilliant failure. A brilliant 84 00:03:47,960 --> 00:03:51,599 failure. How so? Adorno saw existentialism as 85 00:03:51,599 --> 00:03:55,659 attempting, but, you know, unsuccessfully, to 86 00:03:55,659 --> 00:03:59,189 achieve his own philosophical goal. The existentialists 87 00:03:59,189 --> 00:04:02,069 recognized the sterility of late German idealism. 88 00:04:02,129 --> 00:04:05,009 They knew they had to break free, to turn, as 89 00:04:05,009 --> 00:04:07,550 the phrase goes, toward the concrete. They knew 90 00:04:07,550 --> 00:04:09,710 the old systems of identity theory were failing 91 00:04:09,710 --> 00:04:12,430 to grasp the actual conditions of life. Precisely, 92 00:04:12,430 --> 00:04:14,409 but they couldn't pull it off. They tried to 93 00:04:14,409 --> 00:04:16,610 be concrete, but remained hopelessly abstract. 94 00:04:17,209 --> 00:04:19,970 And Adorno admits this. Even Martin Heidegger, 95 00:04:20,029 --> 00:04:22,170 in the final stages of his critique, reaches 96 00:04:22,170 --> 00:04:24,769 the very borders of the dialectical insight into 97 00:04:24,769 --> 00:04:27,990 the non -identity in identity. Heidegger sensed 98 00:04:27,990 --> 00:04:30,670 the problem, this ontological need, but he suppressed 99 00:04:30,670 --> 00:04:33,470 the solution. So his philosophy promises the 100 00:04:33,470 --> 00:04:35,750 satisfaction of concrete materiality, but stays 101 00:04:35,750 --> 00:04:38,350 stuck at a level of idealistic abstraction. You've 102 00:04:38,350 --> 00:04:40,990 got it. So Adorno's great task then was to take 103 00:04:40,990 --> 00:04:43,170 up this tradition he criticized and through that 104 00:04:43,170 --> 00:04:45,649 contestatory dialogue, define the parameters 105 00:04:45,649 --> 00:04:48,290 of his own materialist philosophy of non -identity. 106 00:04:48,410 --> 00:04:50,089 All right, so let's start that journey. Chronologically, 107 00:04:50,290 --> 00:04:52,730 it begins with the figure Adorno called the grandfather 108 00:04:52,730 --> 00:04:55,970 of all existential philosophy. Sirin Kierkegaard. 109 00:04:56,290 --> 00:04:58,430 And this is crucial because Adorno tackles him 110 00:04:58,430 --> 00:05:00,870 very early in his career, right in the shadow 111 00:05:00,870 --> 00:05:03,850 of rising fascism. And that initial choice of 112 00:05:03,850 --> 00:05:06,689 Kierkegaard is immediately paradoxical. I mean, 113 00:05:06,709 --> 00:05:09,870 Kierkegaard was famously an opponent of Hegelian 114 00:05:09,870 --> 00:05:12,610 dialectics. He saw it as this massive abstract 115 00:05:12,610 --> 00:05:15,490 machine that just swallowed individual existence 116 00:05:15,490 --> 00:05:18,649 whole. Yet Adorno, the champion of negative dialectics, 117 00:05:18,709 --> 00:05:21,370 found an affinity there. Yes, in that very resistance 118 00:05:21,370 --> 00:05:24,290 to Hegel's totalizing philosophy of reconciliation. 119 00:05:25,040 --> 00:05:28,379 They were, in a way, united in their critique 120 00:05:28,379 --> 00:05:30,839 of the Hegelian attempt to make all contradiction 121 00:05:30,839 --> 00:05:34,379 just disappear into a final harmonious system. 122 00:05:34,579 --> 00:05:36,279 And we have to acknowledge the critical historical 123 00:05:36,279 --> 00:05:39,399 context. Adorno completed his habilitation, his 124 00:05:39,399 --> 00:05:41,720 big postdoctoral work, Kierkegaard, construction 125 00:05:41,720 --> 00:05:44,660 of the aesthetic in early 1933. Just months before 126 00:05:44,660 --> 00:05:46,800 the Nazi takeover cemented his forced exile. 127 00:05:47,139 --> 00:05:49,860 The work itself, therefore, stands as this kind 128 00:05:49,860 --> 00:05:52,139 of prophetic intellectual document. It must have 129 00:05:52,139 --> 00:05:54,790 been seen as monumental. Oh, it was foundational. 130 00:05:55,470 --> 00:05:58,389 Walter Benjamin, no less, praised it profusely. 131 00:05:58,689 --> 00:06:01,889 He saw in it the emergence of everything Adorno 132 00:06:01,889 --> 00:06:04,170 would write later, and the fact that Adorno returned 133 00:06:04,170 --> 00:06:08,089 to Kierkegaard again and again in 1940 and 1963, 134 00:06:08,490 --> 00:06:11,550 it confirms that the Danish philosopher was this 135 00:06:11,550 --> 00:06:14,910 persistent, necessary challenge to his own thinking. 136 00:06:15,209 --> 00:06:17,389 He couldn't shake him. He really couldn't. So 137 00:06:17,389 --> 00:06:19,529 let's delve into Adorno's method in this early 138 00:06:19,529 --> 00:06:22,310 work. It's highly unusual, materialist inversion. 139 00:06:23,759 --> 00:06:25,879 How do you perform a materialist inversion on 140 00:06:25,879 --> 00:06:28,480 a theologian like Kierkegaard? It's essentially 141 00:06:28,480 --> 00:06:30,939 reading the text against its author's own intentions. 142 00:06:31,560 --> 00:06:33,819 Adorno argued that you can only penetrate to 143 00:06:33,819 --> 00:06:36,459 the true core of Kierkegaard's philosophy by 144 00:06:36,459 --> 00:06:38,579 paying attention to the text's poetic register, 145 00:06:38,860 --> 00:06:41,980 its striking metaphors, its images, its aesthetic 146 00:06:41,980 --> 00:06:44,860 presentations. Not the ethical or religious stages 147 00:06:44,860 --> 00:06:47,160 that Kierkegaard himself championed as the whole 148 00:06:47,160 --> 00:06:49,279 point of his writing. Exactly. Kierkegaard saw 149 00:06:49,279 --> 00:06:51,730 the aesthetic stage. the world of the seducer, 150 00:06:51,730 --> 00:06:54,009 the pleasure seeker, as the lowest, most dangerous 151 00:06:54,009 --> 00:06:56,310 stage, something to be overcome by the ethical 152 00:06:56,310 --> 00:06:58,310 and then finally the religious. But Adorno says, 153 00:06:58,389 --> 00:07:00,389 no, that lowest stage is the most telling part. 154 00:07:00,610 --> 00:07:03,509 That's it. Adorno refused to accept the aesthetic 155 00:07:03,509 --> 00:07:06,189 subordination. For him, the aesthetic served 156 00:07:06,189 --> 00:07:08,629 as the hidden, though debased infrastructure 157 00:07:08,629 --> 00:07:12,170 for the entire philosophical argument. Figures 158 00:07:12,170 --> 00:07:14,470 like the literary esthete or the flaneur were 159 00:07:14,990 --> 00:07:17,649 primitive signs for philosophical concepts that 160 00:07:17,649 --> 00:07:19,990 Kierkegaard, in his rush to get to the religious 161 00:07:19,990 --> 00:07:23,410 stuff, failed to elaborate philosophically. So 162 00:07:23,410 --> 00:07:26,209 when Kierkegaard describes the isolated aspete 163 00:07:26,209 --> 00:07:29,470 staring at the world, Adorno is saying that image 164 00:07:29,470 --> 00:07:32,310 is the truth of the social reality, and your 165 00:07:32,310 --> 00:07:34,629 philosophy that comes after is just a response 166 00:07:34,629 --> 00:07:37,750 to that historical moment. Absolutely. The aesthetic 167 00:07:37,750 --> 00:07:39,569 categories reveal the historical conditioning 168 00:07:39,569 --> 00:07:42,629 that the later philosophy tries to deny. The 169 00:07:42,629 --> 00:07:44,769 philosophical categories only make sense as an 170 00:07:44,769 --> 00:07:46,870 abstract reflection of that material condition. 171 00:07:47,129 --> 00:07:48,910 And there's a personal element here, too, isn't 172 00:07:48,910 --> 00:07:51,430 there, with music? There is. Adorno, himself 173 00:07:51,430 --> 00:07:54,370 a composer and a devoted lover of music, added 174 00:07:54,370 --> 00:07:57,009 this fascinating, almost personal barb to his 175 00:07:57,009 --> 00:07:59,689 critique. He interrupts his dense philosophical 176 00:07:59,689 --> 00:08:03,829 argument just once to express his profound disdain 177 00:08:03,829 --> 00:08:06,490 for Kierkegaard's opinions on music. He called 178 00:08:06,490 --> 00:08:09,410 them absurd and said the Dane couldn't have appreciated 179 00:08:09,410 --> 00:08:12,769 a single phrase of Beethoven. That's a striking 180 00:08:12,769 --> 00:08:15,389 moment of passion in a very abstract text. It 181 00:08:15,389 --> 00:08:18,649 is. And it just reinforces Adorno's core materialist 182 00:08:18,649 --> 00:08:22,029 point. True philosophy is only achieved where 183 00:08:22,029 --> 00:08:25,689 the real has entered into concepts. If Kierkegaard's 184 00:08:25,689 --> 00:08:27,870 argument failed to integrate the concrete reality 185 00:08:27,870 --> 00:08:30,470 of music or the reality of the social condition, 186 00:08:30,750 --> 00:08:33,309 then Adorno just rejects its claim to truth. 187 00:08:33,470 --> 00:08:35,669 This leads us directly to the core of his criticism 188 00:08:35,669 --> 00:08:37,850 in The Habilitation. Kierkegaard's problem of 189 00:08:37,850 --> 00:08:40,529 innerlichkeit, or inwardness. This inwardness 190 00:08:40,529 --> 00:08:42,990 is Kierkegaard's survival strategy. It tries 191 00:08:42,990 --> 00:08:46,149 to still the external world that crowds in on 192 00:08:46,149 --> 00:08:48,730 it by anathematizing history. It asserts that 193 00:08:48,730 --> 00:08:51,330 internal history is the only true history. But 194 00:08:51,330 --> 00:08:53,470 for Adorno, this strategy fails because it can't 195 00:08:53,470 --> 00:08:55,950 undo its own historical conditions. It's an escape 196 00:08:55,950 --> 00:08:58,409 attempt that only confirms the prison. And this 197 00:08:58,409 --> 00:09:00,750 is where the charge of inverted Hegelianism comes 198 00:09:00,750 --> 00:09:03,889 from. Adorno argues that Kierkegaard didn't overcome 199 00:09:03,889 --> 00:09:07,080 Hegel's system of identity. He just... took it 200 00:09:07,080 --> 00:09:09,519 and flipped it, offering an interiorized version. 201 00:09:09,740 --> 00:09:12,779 So where Hegel projected the drama of reconciliation 202 00:09:12,779 --> 00:09:16,080 outward into the world, toward the synthesis 203 00:09:16,080 --> 00:09:18,759 of geist or spirit. Kierkegaard moved the whole 204 00:09:18,759 --> 00:09:21,080 drama inward into the changeless space of the 205 00:09:21,080 --> 00:09:23,879 soul. And the result is a non -dialectical solipsism. 206 00:09:24,120 --> 00:09:26,379 The subject cleaves to the eternal, achieving 207 00:09:26,379 --> 00:09:29,139 this interior serenity that looks suspiciously 208 00:09:29,139 --> 00:09:31,100 like the self -satisfaction of Hegelian absolute 209 00:09:31,100 --> 00:09:33,399 spirit. But now it's all confined to a private, 210 00:09:33,519 --> 00:09:36,409 changeless space. So he just substituted subjective 211 00:09:36,409 --> 00:09:39,350 spirit for Hegel's objective spirit. The underlying 212 00:09:39,350 --> 00:09:41,970 problem of identity, the concept's insistence 213 00:09:41,970 --> 00:09:45,090 on reducing the object to the subject, it's still 214 00:09:45,090 --> 00:09:47,889 there. It's still there. And this abstract interior 215 00:09:47,889 --> 00:09:50,549 isolation is captured perfectly by the physical 216 00:09:50,549 --> 00:09:53,750 symbol Adorno uses, the window mirror. The reflection, 217 00:09:53,870 --> 00:09:56,490 Spiegel, that is such a powerful image. It is 218 00:09:56,490 --> 00:09:58,750 perhaps the most memorable anecdote in the whole 219 00:09:58,750 --> 00:10:02,110 book. You have to imagine the typical 19th century 220 00:10:02,110 --> 00:10:06,039 bourgeois apartment. The window mirror, a standard 221 00:10:06,039 --> 00:10:08,820 piece of furniture, reflects the endless, uniform 222 00:10:08,820 --> 00:10:11,539 row of external apartment buildings, the social 223 00:10:11,539 --> 00:10:14,360 world back into the private living room. So the 224 00:10:14,360 --> 00:10:17,179 interior space, the site of the self, always 225 00:10:17,179 --> 00:10:19,559 looms larger than the exterior world you glimpse 226 00:10:19,559 --> 00:10:23,639 beyond it. Exactly. The private person, solitary 227 00:10:23,639 --> 00:10:26,360 and inactive in the living room, looks out and 228 00:10:26,360 --> 00:10:28,860 confronts only his own isolation reflected back 229 00:10:28,860 --> 00:10:31,899 at him. The mirror subordinates the entire social 230 00:10:31,899 --> 00:10:33,960 situation to the viewing subject. It's a testament 231 00:10:33,960 --> 00:10:36,700 to the imprisonment of mere spirit in itself. 232 00:10:37,080 --> 00:10:39,519 The world is just a confirmation of the self's 233 00:10:39,519 --> 00:10:42,379 isolated private existence. This is the philosophical 234 00:10:42,379 --> 00:10:44,740 manifestation of the bourgeois private property 235 00:10:44,740 --> 00:10:47,179 owner. That's the one. But Adorno's view softened 236 00:10:47,179 --> 00:10:49,679 significantly, especially while he was in exile 237 00:10:49,679 --> 00:10:52,179 in the 1940s. What changed? Why did he return 238 00:10:52,179 --> 00:10:54,539 to Kierkegaard with more sympathy? The rise of 239 00:10:54,539 --> 00:10:57,889 fascism and the experience of displacement. It 240 00:10:57,889 --> 00:11:00,870 fundamentally altered his perspective. By 1940, 241 00:11:01,330 --> 00:11:03,789 Adorno wasn't just critiquing academic philosophy. 242 00:11:04,070 --> 00:11:07,309 He was confronting totalitarianism and mass culture 243 00:11:07,309 --> 00:11:10,509 head -on. And he started to see Kierkegaard differently. 244 00:11:10,950 --> 00:11:13,309 He began to see him as a kind of clairvoyant, 245 00:11:13,330 --> 00:11:15,990 an early critic of incipient high capitalism 246 00:11:15,990 --> 00:11:19,129 and the dehumanizing effects of mass society. 247 00:11:19,629 --> 00:11:22,350 So Kierkegaard's intense critique of the leveling 248 00:11:22,350 --> 00:11:25,090 effect of public life was reinterpreted as an 249 00:11:25,090 --> 00:11:27,070 anticipation of the Frankfurt School's critique 250 00:11:27,070 --> 00:11:29,789 of reification. Absolutely. The famous line is 251 00:11:29,789 --> 00:11:31,970 that Adorno implied Kierkegaard wasn't just speaking 252 00:11:31,970 --> 00:11:34,909 against 19th century Denmark, but that he seems 253 00:11:34,909 --> 00:11:37,370 to have heard those loud speakers which filled 254 00:11:37,370 --> 00:11:40,549 the Berlin Spurtspelast 100 years later. Wow. 255 00:11:40,870 --> 00:11:43,110 So Kierkegaard's resistance to the masses now 256 00:11:43,110 --> 00:11:45,429 looked like an intellectual's capacity to think 257 00:11:45,429 --> 00:11:47,629 against the prevailing reality. And this shift 258 00:11:47,629 --> 00:11:49,769 allowed Adorno to salvage. a critical element 259 00:11:49,769 --> 00:11:52,330 from Kierkegaard's religious framework. Yes. 260 00:11:53,070 --> 00:11:55,450 Kierkegaard's idea of hope, which he defined 261 00:11:55,450 --> 00:11:58,929 as the sense for possibility, was reinterpreted. 262 00:11:58,950 --> 00:12:01,529 It preserved a critical, even utopian meaning. 263 00:12:01,769 --> 00:12:04,330 It sustained the possibility of a better world 264 00:12:04,330 --> 00:12:06,289 against the mere existence of the administered 265 00:12:06,289 --> 00:12:09,529 one. This radical hope against despair. It drew 266 00:12:09,529 --> 00:12:12,269 Kierkegaard away from contemporary existentialism 267 00:12:12,269 --> 00:12:14,610 and lined him with Adorno's ultimate commitment. 268 00:12:15,009 --> 00:12:17,350 Which is the core message of Minima Moralia. 269 00:12:17,529 --> 00:12:20,289 Precisely. This reinterpretation foreshadowed 270 00:12:20,289 --> 00:12:22,809 that famous concluding passage of Minima Moralia, 271 00:12:22,929 --> 00:12:25,529 where Adorno discusses contemplating all things 272 00:12:25,529 --> 00:12:28,610 from the standpoint of redemption. Adorno concluded 273 00:12:28,610 --> 00:12:30,850 that Kierkegaard's hope is nothing but the hope 274 00:12:30,850 --> 00:12:33,509 of the reality of redemption. It's an immense 275 00:12:33,509 --> 00:12:35,950 philosophical pivot that acknowledges this shared, 276 00:12:36,009 --> 00:12:38,210 desperate need for transcendence. Even if they 277 00:12:38,210 --> 00:12:41,049 disagreed radically on how to get there, materialism 278 00:12:41,049 --> 00:12:43,820 versus the leap of faith. Exactly. A shared problem, 279 00:12:43,919 --> 00:12:46,340 completely different solutions. So having established 280 00:12:46,340 --> 00:12:48,940 the idealism hidden beneath Kierkegaard's religious 281 00:12:48,940 --> 00:12:51,919 interiority, Adorno then had to confront the 282 00:12:51,919 --> 00:12:55,000 two central pillars of 20th century German philosophy, 283 00:12:55,360 --> 00:12:58,159 Husserl and Heidegger. Right. We're shifting 284 00:12:58,159 --> 00:13:00,980 now to the early 1930s, around Adorno's inaugural 285 00:13:00,980 --> 00:13:04,500 lecture in 1931, written just as Horkheimer was 286 00:13:04,500 --> 00:13:06,580 taking charge of the Institute for Social Research. 287 00:13:06,940 --> 00:13:09,360 This was the moment Adorno really set the stage 288 00:13:09,360 --> 00:13:12,090 for critical theory. It was. And his central 289 00:13:12,090 --> 00:13:14,809 challenge was explaining how these thinkers who 290 00:13:14,809 --> 00:13:17,950 were explicitly hostile to German idealism were, 291 00:13:18,009 --> 00:13:20,509 in fact, just partisans of it. They all inflated 292 00:13:20,509 --> 00:13:22,990 constitutive subjectivity, this idea that the 293 00:13:22,990 --> 00:13:25,470 self is the ground or foundation of the world. 294 00:13:25,610 --> 00:13:27,990 OK, so let's start with the critique of Heidegger. 295 00:13:28,350 --> 00:13:30,970 Adorno famously called it crypto idealism. That's 296 00:13:30,970 --> 00:13:33,549 a heavy term. Break that down for us. It just 297 00:13:33,549 --> 00:13:36,909 means hidden idealism. Adorno argued that Heidegger's 298 00:13:36,909 --> 00:13:39,350 fundamental ontology, his philosophy of being 299 00:13:39,350 --> 00:13:41,990 offered only an illusory reconciliation between 300 00:13:41,990 --> 00:13:44,370 nature and history. How so? Well, Heidegger used 301 00:13:44,370 --> 00:13:46,590 this deeply resonant historical language terms 302 00:13:46,590 --> 00:13:48,809 like Dasein, being unto death, and talk about 303 00:13:48,809 --> 00:13:51,129 existence. But Adorno claimed that underneath 304 00:13:51,129 --> 00:13:53,769 this historical, seemingly concrete language, 305 00:13:54,029 --> 00:13:57,190 there lay nothing more than an old idealist category. 306 00:13:57,509 --> 00:13:59,690 So the concepts are just dressed up in the language 307 00:13:59,690 --> 00:14:03,330 of history and concreteness. Exactly. For Adorno, 308 00:14:03,450 --> 00:14:06,370 the philosophical problem was tautological. It 309 00:14:06,370 --> 00:14:09,350 was merely new camouflage for the old classical 310 00:14:09,350 --> 00:14:12,370 thesis of an identity between subject and object. 311 00:14:12,690 --> 00:14:14,629 So Heidegger was just assorting that thought, 312 00:14:14,830 --> 00:14:17,629 the subject, and being, the object, are fundamentally 313 00:14:17,629 --> 00:14:20,409 the same thing. Even while pretending to champion 314 00:14:20,409 --> 00:14:22,389 the difference, the finitude, and the otherness 315 00:14:22,389 --> 00:14:25,190 of being. Why is this identity so problematic 316 00:14:25,190 --> 00:14:27,169 for Adorno? Why is it considered a philosophical 317 00:14:27,169 --> 00:14:31,340 sin? Because identity theory reduces the object 318 00:14:31,340 --> 00:14:34,100 to the concept the subject has generated for 319 00:14:34,100 --> 00:14:37,399 it. It fails to grasp the non -identical reality. 320 00:14:37,720 --> 00:14:40,639 It confuses the linguistic expression. the word 321 00:14:40,639 --> 00:14:43,100 existence, or the concept of Dassing, with the 322 00:14:43,100 --> 00:14:45,580 non -conceptual reality it's supposed to designate. 323 00:14:45,620 --> 00:14:47,940 Okay, got it. It treats non -identity as merely 324 00:14:47,940 --> 00:14:50,679 an instrument for affirming identity. And Dorno 325 00:14:50,679 --> 00:14:53,320 argues that both Heidegger and, ironically, Hegel, 326 00:14:53,399 --> 00:14:55,960 commit this sin. They assert a false identity 327 00:14:55,960 --> 00:14:58,539 between being and thought, and in doing so, they 328 00:14:58,539 --> 00:15:01,559 demote the reality of difference. So, the accusation 329 00:15:01,559 --> 00:15:03,799 isn't just that Heidegger is wrong, it's that 330 00:15:03,799 --> 00:15:06,840 he's repackaging the very idealist sin he claimed 331 00:15:06,840 --> 00:15:10,110 he was fixing. He sounds modern. but he's fundamentally 332 00:15:10,110 --> 00:15:12,830 stuck in the 19th century. He's using a modern 333 00:15:12,830 --> 00:15:16,009 existential vocabulary to perform an ancient 334 00:15:16,009 --> 00:15:19,690 idealist move, subordinating reality to the commanding 335 00:15:19,690 --> 00:15:22,529 power of the concept. And to really understand 336 00:15:22,529 --> 00:15:25,389 this critique, we need to turn to Adorno's preparatory 337 00:15:25,389 --> 00:15:28,230 work on Husserl. which he saw as the philosophical 338 00:15:28,230 --> 00:15:31,809 prelude to negative dialectics. This is the Metacritique 339 00:15:31,809 --> 00:15:34,590 of Phenomenology, written across the mid -1930s 340 00:15:34,590 --> 00:15:37,789 but published much later, in 1956. This is where 341 00:15:37,789 --> 00:15:40,529 Adorno gets technical. It is. Adorno treated 342 00:15:40,529 --> 00:15:43,450 Husserl's transcendental phenomenology and Heidegger's 343 00:15:43,450 --> 00:15:45,950 existential phenomenology as mere variants of 344 00:15:45,950 --> 00:15:48,230 the same problem, the bourgeois idealist tradition 345 00:15:48,230 --> 00:15:51,340 seeking security. Husserl aimed for philosophy 346 00:15:51,340 --> 00:15:53,899 as a rigorous science, which required performing 347 00:15:53,899 --> 00:15:56,440 the transcendental reduction, or epichet. The 348 00:15:56,440 --> 00:15:58,419 epichet, the bracketing of the external world, 349 00:15:58,500 --> 00:16:00,720 is the crucial technique here. It's meant to 350 00:16:00,720 --> 00:16:02,799 suspend judgment on the existence of the outside 351 00:16:02,799 --> 00:16:05,360 world, allowing the subject to arrive at a sphere 352 00:16:05,360 --> 00:16:08,600 of untroubled absolute immediacy. And this is 353 00:16:08,600 --> 00:16:11,659 where Adorno delivers the fatal blow. He argues 354 00:16:11,659 --> 00:16:14,600 the epichet fails precisely because the subject 355 00:16:14,600 --> 00:16:17,350 is already thoroughly socially mediated. You 356 00:16:17,350 --> 00:16:20,309 cannot simply bracket away the external historical 357 00:16:20,309 --> 00:16:22,850 economic world. Because that world constitutes 358 00:16:22,850 --> 00:16:24,889 the consciousness trying to do the bracketing 359 00:16:24,889 --> 00:16:27,309 in the first place. Exactly. The subjective consciousness 360 00:16:27,309 --> 00:16:29,950 trying to withdraw is already marked by the social 361 00:16:29,950 --> 00:16:33,730 compulsion of unfreedom. Adorno argued that thought 362 00:16:33,730 --> 00:16:37,330 submits to the real compulsion of societal debt 363 00:16:37,330 --> 00:16:40,769 relations and, deluded, claims this compulsion 364 00:16:40,769 --> 00:16:43,500 as its own. The attempt to achieve untroubled 365 00:16:43,500 --> 00:16:46,059 immediacy fails because the subject is already 366 00:16:46,059 --> 00:16:48,600 an alienated component of the social totality. 367 00:16:48,700 --> 00:16:51,220 It's not autonomous. That's it. Which leads to 368 00:16:51,220 --> 00:16:53,860 this remarkable concept of the antinomy of idealism. 369 00:16:53,919 --> 00:16:56,600 It's a classic dialectical move. It is. Adorno 370 00:16:56,600 --> 00:16:59,620 says idealism, this monotological ego's assertion 371 00:16:59,620 --> 00:17:02,799 of primacy, is clearly an illusion. But this 372 00:17:02,799 --> 00:17:05,259 illusion is simultaneously the correct appearance 373 00:17:05,259 --> 00:17:07,680 of a false world. Wait, how can an illusion be 374 00:17:07,680 --> 00:17:09,640 a correct appearance? Because the monological 375 00:17:09,640 --> 00:17:12,720 structure of Hussle's ego perfectly expresses 376 00:17:12,720 --> 00:17:16,420 the truth of the bourgeois world. In an alienated, 377 00:17:16,460 --> 00:17:19,299 competitive capitalist society, everyone does 378 00:17:19,299 --> 00:17:21,960 relate only to their particular interests, even 379 00:17:21,960 --> 00:17:24,000 while those interests get elevated as universal 380 00:17:24,000 --> 00:17:27,200 laws. So the alienated subject isn't transcendent. 381 00:17:27,200 --> 00:17:30,019 It's a candid truth of an untruthful social order. 382 00:17:30,430 --> 00:17:32,970 The philosophical error of assigning primacy 383 00:17:32,970 --> 00:17:35,869 to the subjective Edo reflects the concrete social 384 00:17:35,869 --> 00:17:39,170 reality of individual isolation. This is a profound 385 00:17:39,170 --> 00:17:42,460 shift. He's moving the critique from epistemology, 386 00:17:42,619 --> 00:17:44,640 how we know to political economy, how we live, 387 00:17:44,779 --> 00:17:47,859 which anchors this stunning concept of idealism 388 00:17:47,859 --> 00:17:50,680 as possession. Yes, this is where the socioeconomic 389 00:17:50,680 --> 00:17:52,660 critique truly merges with the philosophical 390 00:17:52,660 --> 00:17:55,519 one. Husserl's Cartesianism seeks the absolute 391 00:17:55,519 --> 00:17:58,019 security of knowledge. The entire project is 392 00:17:58,019 --> 00:18:00,160 about establishing fences around what this subject 393 00:18:00,160 --> 00:18:02,440 possesses intellectually. And Adorno explicitly 394 00:18:02,440 --> 00:18:05,400 connects this ideal of security, absolute certainty, 395 00:18:05,539 --> 00:18:08,079 guaranteed knowledge to the anxious desire for 396 00:18:08,079 --> 00:18:11,240 private property, for besitz. So idealism is 397 00:18:11,240 --> 00:18:13,660 an anxious retreat. It's driven by animal fear. 398 00:18:14,640 --> 00:18:17,039 Idealism retreats into an imminent sphere of 399 00:18:17,039 --> 00:18:19,759 protection where reality becomes the property 400 00:18:19,759 --> 00:18:22,200 of the bourgeois subject, the anxiety of loss, 401 00:18:22,460 --> 00:18:24,859 the fear of the external world invading the secure 402 00:18:24,859 --> 00:18:28,119 inner space stamps the entire ideal of Husserlian 403 00:18:28,119 --> 00:18:31,099 philosophy. And this anxiety manifests as what 404 00:18:31,099 --> 00:18:33,559 Adorno calls the rage against the non -identical. 405 00:18:33,930 --> 00:18:36,190 If the subject is obsessed with security and 406 00:18:36,190 --> 00:18:38,690 possession, it strives constantly to make the 407 00:18:38,690 --> 00:18:41,769 non -identical anything new, surprising, or irreducible 408 00:18:41,769 --> 00:18:45,069 commensurable with itself. It fears novelty and 409 00:18:45,069 --> 00:18:47,509 change because novelty threatens stability. If 410 00:18:47,509 --> 00:18:49,470 you can measure it, you can control it, and therefore 411 00:18:49,470 --> 00:18:52,009 you can possess it. Exactly. This hostility to 412 00:18:52,009 --> 00:18:55,130 novelty is primarily bourgeois. Secure only in 413 00:18:55,130 --> 00:18:57,769 its domain, the bourgeois mindset wants its world 414 00:18:57,769 --> 00:19:00,450 to endure for eternity, filtering out the new. 415 00:19:00,809 --> 00:19:03,569 And Adorno saw Heidegger as just furthering this 416 00:19:03,569 --> 00:19:06,630 rage. Instead of fixing Hussle's idealism, Heidegger 417 00:19:06,630 --> 00:19:08,930 regressed, abandoning rational critique for an 418 00:19:08,930 --> 00:19:11,329 appeal to timeless essences. His concept of being 419 00:19:11,329 --> 00:19:14,029 as essence repeats the totalitarian impulse by 420 00:19:14,029 --> 00:19:16,849 trying to master the non -identical. Right, transforming 421 00:19:16,849 --> 00:19:19,509 reality into an imminent sphere protected from 422 00:19:19,509 --> 00:19:22,569 change. Adorno concluded that Heideggerian existence 423 00:19:22,569 --> 00:19:25,670 is ultimately pseudo -concrete. he grafted the 424 00:19:25,670 --> 00:19:28,589 pathos of the concrete onto a fundamentally idealist 425 00:19:28,589 --> 00:19:31,390 and formal structure the search for the authentic 426 00:19:31,390 --> 00:19:34,549 the concrete was simply new camouflage for the 427 00:19:34,549 --> 00:19:37,170 old anxiety of possession you've absolutely got 428 00:19:37,170 --> 00:19:39,609 it the philosophical failure reflects a social 429 00:19:39,609 --> 00:19:41,990 and psychological compulsion This philosophical 430 00:19:41,990 --> 00:19:45,309 rigor leads us to Adorno's most direct, biting 431 00:19:45,309 --> 00:19:48,609 and, let's say, popular polemic against existentialism. 432 00:19:48,670 --> 00:19:52,089 The 1964 book, The Jargon of Authenticity. Yeah, 433 00:19:52,109 --> 00:19:54,190 this book targets not just Heidegger and Jaspers, 434 00:19:54,250 --> 00:19:56,990 but the vulgarized version of their ideas that 435 00:19:56,990 --> 00:19:59,470 was pervading post -war German culture. This 436 00:19:59,470 --> 00:20:01,349 is where Adorno gets personal and polemical. 437 00:20:01,490 --> 00:20:04,130 Oh, yeah. He aimed to demolish existentialism 438 00:20:04,130 --> 00:20:05,950 by treating it simultaneously as a philosophical 439 00:20:05,950 --> 00:20:09,289 trend and a damaging popular fashion. The core 440 00:20:09,289 --> 00:20:19,279 thesis is that modern existentialism So it maintains 441 00:20:19,279 --> 00:20:21,960 the drama of Kierkegaard's demand for radical 442 00:20:21,960 --> 00:20:24,160 self -scrutiny and commitment, but it completely 443 00:20:24,160 --> 00:20:27,210 empties it of its theological content. Precisely. 444 00:20:27,210 --> 00:20:30,470 It usurps a heavy religious authoritarian pathos 445 00:20:30,470 --> 00:20:32,890 without retaining any of the genuine religious 446 00:20:32,890 --> 00:20:34,849 content. It's the performance of spirituality 447 00:20:34,849 --> 00:20:37,950 without any actual spirit. It elevates terms 448 00:20:37,950 --> 00:20:40,390 like encounter, caring, and the unconditional 449 00:20:40,390 --> 00:20:44,410 into a kind of pseudo -sacred vocabulary. A vocabulary 450 00:20:44,410 --> 00:20:47,190 designed to affirm the nobility of the individual's 451 00:20:47,190 --> 00:20:49,690 internal struggle, regardless of social conditions. 452 00:20:50,329 --> 00:20:53,130 And Adorno sees a dark historical lineage in 453 00:20:53,130 --> 00:20:55,089 this emphasis on the distinction between the 454 00:20:55,089 --> 00:20:57,390 genuine and the counterfeit, what he calls the 455 00:20:57,390 --> 00:21:00,450 gold assay. This is a disturbing but necessary 456 00:21:00,450 --> 00:21:03,589 linkage Adorno draws. The ideological contrast 457 00:21:03,589 --> 00:21:05,970 between the genuine, sterling and true versus 458 00:21:05,970 --> 00:21:08,789 the foreign draws is historically linked to anti 459 00:21:08,789 --> 00:21:11,650 -Semitism. The rhetoric of authenticity accuses 460 00:21:11,650 --> 00:21:14,009 the other, the dissimulating outsider, historically 461 00:21:14,009 --> 00:21:17,009 the Jew of artful dissimulation. He connects 462 00:21:17,009 --> 00:21:19,210 the jargon to the language used by anti -Semites, 463 00:21:19,309 --> 00:21:22,750 recalling Wagner's famous plea for genuine German 464 00:21:22,750 --> 00:21:26,279 metal against foreign dross. The jargon of authenticity, 465 00:21:26,680 --> 00:21:29,240 Adorno warns, is a dangerous language of purity 466 00:21:29,240 --> 00:21:32,460 and exclusion. That gives the critique a tremendous 467 00:21:32,460 --> 00:21:35,359 moral weight. But let's turn to the famous analogy 468 00:21:35,359 --> 00:21:38,400 Adorno uses to illustrate how this jargon functions 469 00:21:38,400 --> 00:21:41,700 in mass society, the Wurlitzer Organ of the Spirit. 470 00:21:42,319 --> 00:21:44,880 It is a devastating analogy. The jargon functions 471 00:21:44,880 --> 00:21:47,299 exactly like commercial advertising and fascist 472 00:21:47,299 --> 00:21:50,240 propaganda. It supplies mass -produced, magical 473 00:21:50,240 --> 00:21:53,140 terms for genuine, unique existence. Just think 474 00:21:53,140 --> 00:21:55,339 about how a Wurlitzer organ operates. It takes 475 00:21:55,339 --> 00:21:58,160 complex, rich instrumental sound and simplifies 476 00:21:58,160 --> 00:22:00,960 it, mechanizes it, and humanizes it artificially. 477 00:22:00,980 --> 00:22:03,539 Exactly. The Wurlitzer organ takes the vibrato, 478 00:22:03,619 --> 00:22:05,779 which is a subtle, complex human vocal element, 479 00:22:05,940 --> 00:22:08,319 and mechanically superimposes it onto the mechanically 480 00:22:08,319 --> 00:22:10,480 produced sound of the instrument. The result 481 00:22:10,480 --> 00:22:13,170 is fake emotion. packaged for mass consumption. 482 00:22:13,410 --> 00:22:15,509 And the jargon does the same thing for human 483 00:22:15,509 --> 00:22:18,470 experience. It supplies ready -made, packaged 484 00:22:18,470 --> 00:22:21,369 patterns for being human. Because the patterns 485 00:22:21,369 --> 00:22:23,549 for genuine being have been driven out of people 486 00:22:23,549 --> 00:22:26,970 by the very machinery of unfree labor and the 487 00:22:26,970 --> 00:22:29,970 administered world, they are socially dispossessed 488 00:22:29,970 --> 00:22:33,619 of authenticity. The jargon then steps in, like 489 00:22:33,619 --> 00:22:36,220 a cheap technological solution, to provide a 490 00:22:36,220 --> 00:22:39,099 ready -made, humanity kit it's a modern reflex 491 00:22:39,099 --> 00:22:41,779 of nostalgia a waste product of the modern that 492 00:22:41,779 --> 00:22:44,779 it attacks designed to impose a quasi -sacred 493 00:22:44,779 --> 00:22:47,200 aesthetic on wholly disenchanted social conditions 494 00:22:47,200 --> 00:22:50,359 what's fascinating is adorno shows the complicity 495 00:22:50,359 --> 00:22:52,460 of the jargon with its seeming philosophical 496 00:22:52,460 --> 00:22:56,039 opposite which is positivism yes because both 497 00:22:56,039 --> 00:22:58,700 the jargon and positivism ultimately affirm the 498 00:22:58,700 --> 00:23:01,809 world as it is Positivism expels the mythical 499 00:23:01,809 --> 00:23:03,650 remainder of language for the sake of scientific 500 00:23:03,650 --> 00:23:06,089 facts, which only validates the current reality. 501 00:23:06,329 --> 00:23:08,130 And the jargon preserves the mythical remainder 502 00:23:08,130 --> 00:23:10,950 terms like fate and encounter, but it does so 503 00:23:10,950 --> 00:23:13,789 for the sake of a similar false immediacy, bypassing 504 00:23:13,789 --> 00:23:16,269 critical thought. Neither is dialectical. Neither 505 00:23:16,269 --> 00:23:19,230 recognizes contradiction. The highest maxim of 506 00:23:19,230 --> 00:23:22,279 both. results in saying that one has to obey 507 00:23:22,279 --> 00:23:25,180 or that one has to adapt oneself. Whether you 508 00:23:25,180 --> 00:23:27,880 adapt to scientific reality or the heroic demands 509 00:23:27,880 --> 00:23:30,640 of existence, the demand is submission to the 510 00:23:30,640 --> 00:23:34,339 status quo. Exactly. Adorno then shifts, using 511 00:23:34,339 --> 00:23:36,980 art to create a philosophical counter -model, 512 00:23:37,059 --> 00:23:41,140 specifically Samuel Beckett's Endgame. Why does 513 00:23:41,140 --> 00:23:44,039 Beckett function as a negative ontology for Adorno? 514 00:23:44,200 --> 00:23:48,579 Adorno saw Beckett as functionally negating existentialism, 515 00:23:48,579 --> 00:23:51,319 but... not through philosophical argument, through 516 00:23:51,319 --> 00:23:53,359 pure aesthetic representation. You remember the 517 00:23:53,359 --> 00:23:55,559 room in Endgame. It's ruined, empty, bleak. Right. 518 00:23:55,700 --> 00:23:57,799 That room was once the site of Kierkegaard's 519 00:23:57,799 --> 00:24:00,240 sovereign bourgeois interiority. Now it's just 520 00:24:00,240 --> 00:24:02,440 the wasted remnant of a world where instrumental 521 00:24:02,440 --> 00:24:04,619 reason has extinguished all meaning. And the 522 00:24:04,619 --> 00:24:07,779 characters, like Ham, they embody the failure 523 00:24:07,779 --> 00:24:11,779 of the jargon. Ham, the antihero, mocks any grand 524 00:24:11,779 --> 00:24:14,539 oration on the dignity of man. He embodies the 525 00:24:14,539 --> 00:24:17,519 withered and late modern cipher of what man was 526 00:24:17,519 --> 00:24:20,539 once supposed to be. The play shows that the 527 00:24:20,539 --> 00:24:22,720 conditions for existential heroics -free decision, 528 00:24:22,940 --> 00:24:25,579 absolute freedom, have simply vanished in the 529 00:24:25,579 --> 00:24:28,000 administered world. So existentialism is just 530 00:24:28,000 --> 00:24:30,299 a mystified description of social meaninglessness. 531 00:24:30,660 --> 00:24:33,279 It capitalizes on its own disenchantment. The 532 00:24:33,279 --> 00:24:35,460 world produced by instrumental reason lacks meaning, 533 00:24:35,599 --> 00:24:38,640 and existentialism responds by elevating nothingness, 534 00:24:38,700 --> 00:24:42,220 anxiety, infinitude into the purported eternal 535 00:24:42,220 --> 00:24:45,339 truth of the human condition. And endgame, by 536 00:24:45,339 --> 00:24:47,299 showing a world where meaning has truly been 537 00:24:47,299 --> 00:24:49,940 extinguished, It critically negates the solution. 538 00:24:50,339 --> 00:24:53,180 It demystifies existential philosophy by making 539 00:24:53,180 --> 00:24:55,319 its foundations look ridiculous. That's it. The 540 00:24:55,319 --> 00:24:58,000 final philosophical critique here involves Adorno's 541 00:24:58,000 --> 00:25:00,440 aesthetic theory, using the poet Holderlin to 542 00:25:00,440 --> 00:25:03,279 critique Heidegger's interpretative method. This 543 00:25:03,279 --> 00:25:06,079 hinges on Adorno's concept of parataxis. This 544 00:25:06,079 --> 00:25:09,160 is a complex but crucial term. Parataxis is Adorno's 545 00:25:09,160 --> 00:25:11,619 aesthetic countermodel. It means placing concepts, 546 00:25:11,859 --> 00:25:13,960 phrases, or clauses one after another without 547 00:25:13,960 --> 00:25:17,769 coordination or subordination. No and. No but, 548 00:25:18,009 --> 00:25:21,170 no because. Right. It resists false reconciliation 549 00:25:21,170 --> 00:25:24,470 or mediation. The elements just stand next to 550 00:25:24,470 --> 00:25:27,130 each other, dissonant and irreducible. This allows 551 00:25:27,130 --> 00:25:29,829 the contradictions to remain visible. So Adorno 552 00:25:29,829 --> 00:25:32,650 saw in Holderly's poetry a principled resistance 553 00:25:32,650 --> 00:25:35,529 to the aesthetic of organic unity, which was 554 00:25:35,529 --> 00:25:37,789 Heidegger's favorite kind of reading. Exactly. 555 00:25:37,990 --> 00:25:41,049 Heidegger artificially imposed a near -romantic 556 00:25:41,049 --> 00:25:44,029 aesthetic of organic unity onto Holderlin. He 557 00:25:44,029 --> 00:25:48,329 reduced specific concrete imagery, like the frugal 558 00:25:48,329 --> 00:25:50,829 customs on the poverty -stricken island of Patmos, 559 00:25:50,990 --> 00:25:54,650 to kish homages to natural simplicity and mindless 560 00:25:54,650 --> 00:25:57,250 nostalgia. He was just using the poetry as raw 561 00:25:57,250 --> 00:25:59,569 material to confirm his predetermined philosophical 562 00:25:59,569 --> 00:26:02,549 system. And Adorno accused Heidegger of revealing 563 00:26:02,549 --> 00:26:05,329 his own technological genius as a reader. It's 564 00:26:05,329 --> 00:26:07,789 a powerful accusation. Heider transformed the 565 00:26:07,789 --> 00:26:09,809 concrete elements of poetic language, like the 566 00:26:09,809 --> 00:26:12,170 famous danger -saving power motif in Patmos, 567 00:26:12,329 --> 00:26:15,089 into mere raw material for philosophical edification 568 00:26:15,089 --> 00:26:17,849 and universal pronouncements. He sacrificed the 569 00:26:17,849 --> 00:26:19,910 specificity of the concrete moment to the abstraction 570 00:26:19,910 --> 00:26:22,670 of his oncological concept, thereby proving yet 571 00:26:22,670 --> 00:26:24,910 again his crypto -idealism. His technological 572 00:26:24,910 --> 00:26:27,589 genius was his ability to strip the life out 573 00:26:27,589 --> 00:26:29,829 of difference and transform it into universal 574 00:26:29,829 --> 00:26:33,170 identity. That is exactly it. This intense, decades 575 00:26:33,170 --> 00:26:36,250 -long philosophical confrontation builds toward 576 00:26:36,250 --> 00:26:39,329 Adorno's magnum opus, Negative Dialectics from 577 00:26:39,329 --> 00:26:42,690 1966, which he jokingly called his fat child. 578 00:26:42,970 --> 00:26:45,930 Right. This anti -system attempts, by its very 579 00:26:45,930 --> 00:26:48,849 nature, to break through the delusion of constitutive 580 00:26:48,849 --> 00:26:51,589 subjectivity that he had spent his career critiquing. 581 00:26:51,650 --> 00:26:53,849 Negative Dialectics is the programmatic statement 582 00:26:53,849 --> 00:26:57,130 of Adorno's thought. Its primary goal is to establish 583 00:26:57,130 --> 00:26:59,930 the primacy of the object, the Varangdes objects 584 00:26:59,930 --> 00:27:02,390 over the subject. Which is the condition for 585 00:27:02,390 --> 00:27:04,970 a genuine materialism. Thought has to follow 586 00:27:04,970 --> 00:27:07,490 the object, honoring its difference, without 587 00:27:07,490 --> 00:27:10,349 reducing it to concepts generated solely by the 588 00:27:10,349 --> 00:27:12,490 subject. He attempts to use the power of the 589 00:27:12,490 --> 00:27:15,109 subject reason and conceptual thought to realize 590 00:27:15,109 --> 00:27:17,170 the limits of conceptual thought itself. It's 591 00:27:17,170 --> 00:27:19,730 a self -overcoming of reason. Precisely. And 592 00:27:19,730 --> 00:27:22,190 to prove that existentialism failed this test. 593 00:27:22,599 --> 00:27:24,839 Adorno relied heavily on the critique of pseudo 594 00:27:24,839 --> 00:27:27,359 -concreteness, particularly adopting insights 595 00:27:27,359 --> 00:27:29,839 from thinkers like Gunther Anders. And Anders 596 00:27:29,839 --> 00:27:32,059 argued that Heideggerian existence is pseudo 597 00:27:32,059 --> 00:27:35,359 -concrete. Yes. Heidegger claimed his concepts, 598 00:27:35,619 --> 00:27:38,339 readiness to hand, being with, were descriptions 599 00:27:38,339 --> 00:27:41,769 of concrete reality. But Adorno argued they were 600 00:27:41,769 --> 00:27:44,529 merely abstract placeholders, lacking the critical 601 00:27:44,529 --> 00:27:47,609 tools to grasp reality as it's mediated by history, 602 00:27:47,809 --> 00:27:50,569 society, and economics. So Heidegger took the 603 00:27:50,569 --> 00:27:53,289 pathos of the concrete and grafted it onto the 604 00:27:53,289 --> 00:27:56,670 idealistic formalism inherited from Hussle. Resulting 605 00:27:56,670 --> 00:27:58,829 in a system that simply couldn't make the breakthrough 606 00:27:58,829 --> 00:28:01,630 to non -subjective reality. And this philosophical 607 00:28:01,630 --> 00:28:04,250 failure is tied to Heidegger's fundamental failure 608 00:28:04,250 --> 00:28:07,109 to critique reification as a social problem. 609 00:28:07,269 --> 00:28:10,390 This is critical. Reification, the process by 610 00:28:10,390 --> 00:28:12,529 which social relations become viewed as objective, 611 00:28:12,690 --> 00:28:15,650 natural things, is a historical societal condition. 612 00:28:15,930 --> 00:28:18,509 But Heidegger condemned reification as merely 613 00:28:18,509 --> 00:28:21,289 a philosophical error, the forgetfulness of being, 614 00:28:21,450 --> 00:28:24,210 rather than a specific, historically determined 615 00:28:24,210 --> 00:28:26,609 social structure. By transforming reification 616 00:28:26,609 --> 00:28:29,329 from a societal issue into a timeless ontological 617 00:28:29,329 --> 00:28:31,950 structure, a problem of metaphysics rather than 618 00:28:31,950 --> 00:28:34,289 a problem of capitalism, Heidegger stripped it 619 00:28:34,289 --> 00:28:36,829 of its critical power. Exactly. It becomes eternal. 620 00:28:37,519 --> 00:28:40,339 This, for Adorno, is what constitutes the existential 621 00:28:40,339 --> 00:28:42,759 offering of wish fulfillment. Wish fulfillment. 622 00:28:42,900 --> 00:28:45,700 How does ontology become wish fulfillment? Existential 623 00:28:45,700 --> 00:28:48,700 ontology offers solace. It converts the misery, 624 00:28:48,859 --> 00:28:50,960 the anxiety, the lack of fulfillment in human 625 00:28:50,960 --> 00:28:53,099 existence, which Adorno believes is socially 626 00:28:53,099 --> 00:28:55,900 produced, into a metaphysical eternal truth. 627 00:28:56,509 --> 00:28:59,069 So if misery is just part of the structure of 628 00:28:59,069 --> 00:29:01,569 being, then we don't need to change society. 629 00:29:01,750 --> 00:29:04,230 We just need to adapt our attitude towards this 630 00:29:04,230 --> 00:29:06,309 eternal truth. It promises the reconciliation 631 00:29:06,309 --> 00:29:09,190 of subject and object, or at least the acceptance 632 00:29:09,190 --> 00:29:12,190 of their split, without requiring any challenge 633 00:29:12,190 --> 00:29:14,430 to the social conditions that necessitated the 634 00:29:14,430 --> 00:29:17,130 split in the first place. Its philosophical resignation 635 00:29:17,130 --> 00:29:20,079 disguises profound insight. We now reach the 636 00:29:20,079 --> 00:29:22,359 apex of Adorno's confrontation with Heidegger, 637 00:29:22,480 --> 00:29:24,880 the decisive insight in negative dialectics, 638 00:29:24,960 --> 00:29:27,480 where Adorno grants that Heidegger reaches the 639 00:29:27,480 --> 00:29:29,819 very borders of the dialectical insight into 640 00:29:29,819 --> 00:29:33,640 the non -identity in identity, only to then immediately 641 00:29:33,640 --> 00:29:36,279 accuse him of the family scandal. Right. What 642 00:29:36,279 --> 00:29:38,460 is Adorno claiming Heidegger is suppressing here? 643 00:29:38,660 --> 00:29:41,140 Adorno is suggesting Heidegger was right on the 644 00:29:41,140 --> 00:29:44,180 verge of the materialist breakthrough. He almost 645 00:29:44,180 --> 00:29:46,519 recognized the key truth of Adorno's negative 646 00:29:46,519 --> 00:29:49,680 dialectics. That whatever could be thought under 647 00:29:49,680 --> 00:29:52,740 the concept of being mocks the identity of the 648 00:29:52,740 --> 00:29:55,480 concept with that which it means. Being, if you 649 00:29:55,480 --> 00:29:57,859 conceive of it correctly, is the non -identical. 650 00:29:58,000 --> 00:30:00,740 But Heidegger refused to admit this non -identity. 651 00:30:00,799 --> 00:30:03,299 He suppressed the contradiction. He treated being 652 00:30:03,299 --> 00:30:06,700 as pure being, excluding all its otherness. By 653 00:30:06,700 --> 00:30:09,740 doing this, he was asserting identity, the idealist 654 00:30:09,740 --> 00:30:11,920 impulse, while pretending to champion difference 655 00:30:11,920 --> 00:30:14,319 through the use of vague ontological language. 656 00:30:14,640 --> 00:30:17,849 And the suppression is the family scandal. The 657 00:30:17,849 --> 00:30:20,150 analogy is perfect. A family scandal is something 658 00:30:20,150 --> 00:30:22,849 obvious to everyone outside, but which the family 659 00:30:22,849 --> 00:30:25,230 members refuse to acknowledge. They hush it up 660 00:30:25,230 --> 00:30:27,549 to maintain the appearance of unity and respectability. 661 00:30:27,750 --> 00:30:30,329 So Adorno argues Heidegger hushes up the non 662 00:30:30,329 --> 00:30:32,569 -identity and absolute identity like a family 663 00:30:32,569 --> 00:30:35,309 scandal. Covering up the idealist impulse present 664 00:30:35,309 --> 00:30:37,529 beneath the impressive ontological jargon of 665 00:30:37,529 --> 00:30:40,250 being, the impulse to possess the object through 666 00:30:40,250 --> 00:30:42,950 the subject remains just carefully concealed 667 00:30:42,950 --> 00:30:45,559 by a new vocabulary. Before concluding this critical 668 00:30:45,559 --> 00:30:48,880 sweep, Adorno briefly tackles French existentialism, 669 00:30:48,880 --> 00:30:52,140 particularly Sartre. If Heidegger was too abstract, 670 00:30:52,380 --> 00:30:54,660 wasn't Sartre, with his political commitments 671 00:30:54,660 --> 00:30:58,099 and emphasis on freedom, more concrete? Adorno 672 00:30:58,099 --> 00:31:01,460 was dismissive. He argued that French existentialism, 673 00:31:01,480 --> 00:31:03,940 despite his political engagement, remained fundamentally 674 00:31:03,940 --> 00:31:06,839 trapped in idealism too. The focus on decision, 675 00:31:07,119 --> 00:31:09,579 derived from Kierkegaard, swelled in importance 676 00:31:09,579 --> 00:31:11,859 at the very moment the objective chances for 677 00:31:11,859 --> 00:31:14,819 genuine political decisions were atrophying in 678 00:31:14,819 --> 00:31:16,839 the administered world. It's an overcompensation. 679 00:31:17,380 --> 00:31:20,140 Exactly. Celebrating unconditional freedom when 680 00:31:20,140 --> 00:31:22,400 objective unfreedom is increasing. That's the 681 00:31:22,400 --> 00:31:24,980 irony. And Adorno noted the profound irony in 682 00:31:24,980 --> 00:31:27,720 Sartre's own artistic output. He did. Adorno 683 00:31:27,720 --> 00:31:30,180 felt Sartre's plays were bad models for his own 684 00:31:30,180 --> 00:31:32,599 philosophy, because in their respect for truth, 685 00:31:32,799 --> 00:31:34,980 they accurately portrayed the administered universe 686 00:31:34,980 --> 00:31:37,759 and unfreedom that his philosophical treatises, 687 00:31:37,960 --> 00:31:40,740 which celebrated unconditional freedom, simply 688 00:31:40,740 --> 00:31:43,240 ignored. The art was truer than the philosophy. 689 00:31:43,740 --> 00:31:46,359 That's it. The ultimate failure for both German 690 00:31:46,359 --> 00:31:49,519 and French existentialisms was that they affirmed 691 00:31:49,519 --> 00:31:53,789 what is anyway. By converting the misery of existence 692 00:31:53,789 --> 00:31:57,470 into an eternal ontological truth, they subordinated 693 00:31:57,470 --> 00:32:00,089 the subject to the object, not to the objective 694 00:32:00,089 --> 00:32:03,809 social process, but to a reified concept of being, 695 00:32:03,990 --> 00:32:06,549 and thereby neutralized the impulse for radical 696 00:32:06,549 --> 00:32:09,819 social change. So after this unrelenting, decades 697 00:32:09,819 --> 00:32:12,640 -long critique, Adorno makes a stunning confession 698 00:32:12,640 --> 00:32:15,440 late in life. It reveals the ultimate stakes 699 00:32:15,440 --> 00:32:18,059 of his materialist project. This is the concept 700 00:32:18,059 --> 00:32:20,920 of Adorno's inverse theology. Yes, which emerged 701 00:32:20,920 --> 00:32:24,460 in a 1967 letter to the historian of Jewish mysticism, 702 00:32:24,660 --> 00:32:26,900 Gershom Scholem. This is the moment Adorno sticks 703 00:32:26,900 --> 00:32:29,319 closest to metaphysics. He confessed that his 704 00:32:29,319 --> 00:32:31,869 materialist orientation His insistence on the 705 00:32:31,869 --> 00:32:34,369 primacy of the object guaranteed an affinity 706 00:32:34,369 --> 00:32:36,470 with metaphysics, I might almost have said theology. 707 00:32:36,829 --> 00:32:38,970 That sounds like a betrayal of his own materialism. 708 00:32:38,990 --> 00:32:40,970 How does a radical materialist find affinity 709 00:32:40,970 --> 00:32:43,950 with theology? Adorno clarifies that his materialism 710 00:32:43,950 --> 00:32:47,210 isn't dogmatic. It agrees with theology at its 711 00:32:47,210 --> 00:32:50,990 most materialist. His critique insists that existence 712 00:32:50,990 --> 00:32:54,480 as it stands can only be judged deficient. by 713 00:32:54,480 --> 00:32:57,079 a standard external to existence itself. Right. 714 00:32:57,200 --> 00:33:00,640 If reality is all there is, then there's no criterion 715 00:33:00,640 --> 00:33:03,359 by which to criticize reality. Precisely. The 716 00:33:03,359 --> 00:33:06,259 sanctifying factor, das vaienda, the principle 717 00:33:06,259 --> 00:33:09,079 of transcendence or reconciliation, must be non 718 00:33:09,079 --> 00:33:11,720 -identical to empirical existence. And this, 719 00:33:11,859 --> 00:33:13,819 he argues, is the ultimate difference between 720 00:33:13,819 --> 00:33:17,400 his critique and the existentialists. Okay. Existential 721 00:33:17,400 --> 00:33:20,279 ontology, he argues, sanctifies without the sanctifying 722 00:33:20,279 --> 00:33:23,119 factor. It subordinates the subject to the object. 723 00:33:23,579 --> 00:33:26,160 to being or existence, and thus affirms power 724 00:33:26,160 --> 00:33:29,000 and what is anyway without establishing any possibility 725 00:33:29,000 --> 00:33:31,619 for transcendence or redemption. So Adorno is 726 00:33:31,619 --> 00:33:33,720 saying the existentialists gave up on the idea 727 00:33:33,720 --> 00:33:36,259 of a reconciled world. They found a kind of nobility 728 00:33:36,259 --> 00:33:38,240 in the brokenness without believing the brokenness 729 00:33:38,240 --> 00:33:40,259 could ever be mended. And this is where Adorno 730 00:33:40,259 --> 00:33:42,220 introduces one of his most powerful literary 731 00:33:42,220 --> 00:33:44,460 interpretations to illustrate his own inverse 732 00:33:44,460 --> 00:33:47,500 theology, the creature Odradek from Kafka's story, 733 00:33:47,720 --> 00:33:51,299 The Cares of a Family Man. Odradek! The strained, 734 00:33:51,299 --> 00:33:54,019 star -shaped, flat school of thread mixed with 735 00:33:54,019 --> 00:33:56,500 scraps of wood that cannot die and has no fixed 736 00:33:56,500 --> 00:33:59,440 abode. Adorno viewed Odridek as representing 737 00:33:59,440 --> 00:34:01,819 the awful of the phenomenal world, the waste 738 00:34:01,819 --> 00:34:04,539 product, the broken, distorted sign of reified 739 00:34:04,539 --> 00:34:08,719 life. It's the materialist anti -hero. But precisely 740 00:34:08,719 --> 00:34:12,480 as such, it is a motif of transcendence. Odridek 741 00:34:12,480 --> 00:34:15,340 is a broken -down remnant that lives on. It's 742 00:34:15,340 --> 00:34:18,250 useless, fragmented, yet it persists. So the 743 00:34:18,250 --> 00:34:20,449 hope of reconciliation, the possibility of redemption, 744 00:34:20,610 --> 00:34:23,329 is placed not in a harmonious ideal, but in the 745 00:34:23,329 --> 00:34:26,730 wounded, unredeemed object itself. This is Adorno's 746 00:34:26,730 --> 00:34:29,050 inverse theology. It's a conceptual resistance 747 00:34:29,050 --> 00:34:31,909 to positive religion, working internally within 748 00:34:31,909 --> 00:34:34,590 philosophy. The damaged thing, the most distorted 749 00:34:34,590 --> 00:34:37,090 material fragment of existence, promises the 750 00:34:37,090 --> 00:34:39,369 escape from the context of nature and the possibility 751 00:34:39,369 --> 00:34:42,000 of overcoming death. Adorno's materialist orientation 752 00:34:42,000 --> 00:34:44,780 in its commitment to the dignity of the non -identical 753 00:34:44,780 --> 00:34:47,860 object thus becomes intensely metaphysical. It 754 00:34:47,860 --> 00:34:50,059 does. And this brings us full circle, back to 755 00:34:50,059 --> 00:34:52,260 Adorno's early aspiring partner, Kierkegaard. 756 00:34:52,400 --> 00:34:55,400 In his final work, Aesthetic Theory, Adorno confirmed 757 00:34:55,400 --> 00:34:58,159 a late -style appreciation. The loop is closed. 758 00:34:58,900 --> 00:35:02,039 Adorno recognized in Kierkegaard a genuine dialectical 759 00:35:02,039 --> 00:35:04,840 tension, particularly in the notion of the sublime, 760 00:35:04,980 --> 00:35:07,960 the subject's experience of empirical powerlessness 761 00:35:07,960 --> 00:35:11,210 vis -à -vis nature. This powerlessness forces 762 00:35:11,210 --> 00:35:13,510 the subject to confront the primacy of the object 763 00:35:13,510 --> 00:35:16,030 and awakens the subject to the possibility of 764 00:35:16,030 --> 00:35:18,670 a non -coercive reconciliation with nature. So 765 00:35:18,670 --> 00:35:21,250 Adorno resisted Kierkegaard's leap of faith to 766 00:35:21,250 --> 00:35:23,969 the very end. But he finally acknowledged that 767 00:35:23,969 --> 00:35:26,590 the faith impulse itself was a species of negativity, 768 00:35:26,949 --> 00:35:29,630 a crucial rejection of the identity systems of 769 00:35:29,630 --> 00:35:32,769 his age. Exactly. Kierkegaard's resistance to 770 00:35:32,769 --> 00:35:35,070 the seamless reconciliation of subject and object 771 00:35:35,070 --> 00:35:37,710 was an anticipation of the Frankfurt School's 772 00:35:37,710 --> 00:35:40,650 core critique of identity theory. By relentlessly 773 00:35:40,650 --> 00:35:43,630 pushing against the limits of idealism and existentialism, 774 00:35:43,769 --> 00:35:46,530 Aborno's materialist critique inadvertently developed 775 00:35:46,530 --> 00:35:48,949 a path toward the possibility of a reconciled 776 00:35:48,949 --> 00:35:51,860 world. the very inverse theology that grants 777 00:35:51,860 --> 00:35:54,500 his philosophical project its critical and redemptive 778 00:35:54,500 --> 00:35:57,440 force. His entire intellectual life was a continuous 779 00:35:57,440 --> 00:36:00,460 process of scrutinizing his predecessors to define 780 00:36:00,460 --> 00:36:02,920 the exact necessary tasks of his own philosophy, 781 00:36:03,099 --> 00:36:05,159 a lifelong argument that created a worldview. 782 00:36:05,670 --> 00:36:08,670 That was an absolutely meticulous deep dive into 783 00:36:08,670 --> 00:36:11,190 the complex philosophical confrontation at the 784 00:36:11,190 --> 00:36:13,170 heart of Peter E. Gordon's Adorno and existence. 785 00:36:13,630 --> 00:36:16,610 It clarifies that Adorno wasn't just dismissing 786 00:36:16,610 --> 00:36:19,630 existentialism, he was trying to correct its 787 00:36:19,630 --> 00:36:22,409 failed attempt to become materialist. And if 788 00:36:22,409 --> 00:36:24,969 we carry Adorno's critique forward, remember 789 00:36:24,969 --> 00:36:28,269 his greatest fear. that philosophical thought 790 00:36:28,269 --> 00:36:30,690 would submit to the real compulsion of societal 791 00:36:30,690 --> 00:36:33,510 debt relations. He claimed that the philosophy 792 00:36:33,510 --> 00:36:35,949 of bourgeois interiority was always driven by 793 00:36:35,949 --> 00:36:38,250 the anxious pursuit of security, mirroring the 794 00:36:38,250 --> 00:36:40,969 desire for private property. So if that pursuit 795 00:36:40,969 --> 00:36:43,550 of secure interiority defined philosophy in the 796 00:36:43,550 --> 00:36:46,449 20th century, what does it mean for us now? Well, 797 00:36:46,469 --> 00:36:48,889 look at our current digital existence. We are 798 00:36:48,889 --> 00:36:51,849 constantly pursuing and curating authentic experiences, 799 00:36:52,269 --> 00:36:55,469 digital interiority, algorithmic self -optimization, 800 00:36:55,630 --> 00:36:58,070 the relentless pursuit of affirmation and isolation. 801 00:36:58,409 --> 00:37:01,130 Are these simply new forms of the bourgeois flight 802 00:37:01,130 --> 00:37:04,349 from the difficult mediated social world? That's 803 00:37:04,349 --> 00:37:07,289 a powerful question. What elements of our digital 804 00:37:07,289 --> 00:37:09,750 life and self -curation are motivated by that 805 00:37:09,750 --> 00:37:13,840 same? deep -seated anxiety of loss and the desire 806 00:37:13,840 --> 00:37:16,400 for absolute subjective security. What are the 807 00:37:16,400 --> 00:37:18,920 new window mirrors of our time? A question that 808 00:37:18,920 --> 00:37:21,199 keeps Adorno's critique intensely relevant today. 809 00:37:21,320 --> 00:37:22,940 We thank you for joining us on The Deep Dive. 810 00:37:22,960 --> 00:37:23,599 We'll see you soon.