Adorno and Heidegger

[Adorno]

Hi!

I am new in PP and I just joined the subgroup "Adorno".

My own thoughts are strongly inspired by Heidegger and his inexhaustible philosophy keeps me breathless. I am not an Adorno expert. First and foremost, I perceive Adorno as one of the major opponents to Heidegger (or his "jargon of authenticity"). However, I was very impressed by Andrea Barbara Alker's (unfortunately available in German only) book "Das Andere im Selben - Subjektivitätskritik und Kunstphilosophie bei Heidegger und Adorno" in which she shows the clear proximity of Heidegger and Adorno and the rather harsh opposition might be understood exactly from this close proximity of thoughts. Putting the opposition for a moment aside, isn't authenticity a particularly important notion in performance? In this context, the 1966 article "Toward an ontology of Bob Dylan" by William J. Richardson, re-published in 2010 in Philosophy Social Critisism (see http://psc.sagepub.com/content/36/7/763.short) is of twofold interest. Firstly, the author starts out from a view that is apparently linked to critical theory but also builds on Heidegger's notion of authenticity to understand the performance of Bob Dylan. Secondly, it is exactly Bob Dylan who inspired the current head of the Frankfurt school, Axel Honneth, to deal with questions concerning authenticity. Honneth organised symposia on Dylan and edited some books on that topic.

Cheers,

Hans

[Will Daddario]

Thanks for these thoughts, Hans. I'll check out those publications (though I'm unable to read German (as soon as I finish my current project I plan to learn)). There certainly is a great deal of opposition between Adorno and Heidegger, thanks, in no small part, to Adorno himself who was always keen to make distinctions between Heidegger's system and his own (anti) system.

[Drew Milne]

Hi there. There's a good deal of animosity between Adorno and Heidegger, which is often more about uspoken antagonisms than about philosophical differences, but there are lots of interesting discussions on their affinities. One point of mediation is through Marcuse, who was a pupil of Heidegger before he took a more Marxist turn, and much of the work of Marcuse is Heideggerian and Marxist. Marcuse tried to persuade Heidegger to make some atonement for his Nazi involvement, without much success. There's a lot interesting things in the work of Marcuse that is missed, I guess because of some his more gestural brush strokes, but you might find Marcuse more congenial as a way of moving towards Adorno. While I think that Jargon of Authenticity is often rather heavy-handed, it has been my experience that the call to authenticity is often a kind of escapist artifice, whereas the call to truth in the different modalities of what is meant by truth, especially where there is a recognition that science fails truth, is the more searching and revealing call. Take care.