Metaphysics by Theodor W. Adorno

Author:Theodor W. Adorno
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

LECTURE FIFTEEN

20 July 1965

I do not wish to recapitulate or sum up what I said in the last lecture, but would remind you that we arrived at the idea that the question whether it is still possible to live is the form in which metaphysics impinges on us urgently today. Without being a follower of Spengler one might well compare this situation to that of the philosophy of late antiquity, in which, in response to the same question, people fell back on expedients such as ataraxy, that is, the deadening of all affects, just to be capable of living at all. I cannot undertake a critique of Stoicism here. There is undoubtedly much which impels us towards the Stoic standpoint today, as appears very clearly in some motifs of Heidegger, especially in his early work. But I would say that even this standpoint, although it emphatically embraces the idea of the freedom of the individual, nevertheless has a moment of narrow-mindedness in the sense that it renders absolute the entrapment of human beings by the totality, and thus sees no other possibility than to submit. The possibility of seeing through this situation as a context of guilt concealed through blinding, and thus of breaking through it, did not occur to that entire philosophy. Stoicism did, it is true, conceive for the first time the idea of the all-encompassing context of guilt, but it did not discern the moment of necessary illusion in that context – and that, I would say, is the small advantage that we, with our social and philosophical knowledge, enjoy over the Stoic position. It should be said, at any rate, that the guilt in which one is enmeshed almost by the mere fact of continuing to live can hardly be reconciled any longer with life itself. Unless one makes oneself wholly insensitive one can hardly escape the feeling – and by feeling I mean experience which is not confined to the emotional sphere – that just by continuing to live one is taking away that possibility from someone else, to whom life has been denied; that one is stealing that person’s life. Similarly, a society which in its absurd present form has rendered not work, but people superfluous, predetermines, in a sense, a statistical percentage of people of whom it must divest itself in order to continue to live in its bad, existing form. And if one does live on, one has, in a sense, been, statistically lucky at the expense of those who have fallen victim to the mechanism of annihilation and, one must fear, will still fall victim to it. Guilt reproduces itself in each of us – and what I am saying is addressed to us as subjects – since we cannot possibly remain fully conscious of this connection at every moment of our waking lives. If we – each of us sitting here – knew at every moment what has happened and to what concatenations we owe our own existence, and how

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