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Filosofía y sociología
Conforman este volumen dieciocho lecciones que impartió Adorno en el semestre de verano de 1960 en la Universidad Johann Wolfgang Goethe de Frankfurt, y que más que constituir una introducción a la filosofía o a la sociología, buscan desplegar algo del conflicto que históricamente domina estos dos ámbitos. • Adorno expone la historia del surgimiento de la sociología como ciencia para luego dedicarse a la doctrina de las ideologías, con la intención de llegar a un problema central que es tanto filosófica como sociológicamente relevante y al que ninguna de las dos disciplinas puede sustraerse: el problema de la idea de la verdad y el de la determinación social del conocimiento en general. En la medida en que el concepto de ideología debe estar subordinado al de verdad, se plantea la pregunta de si la verdad, que es lo que incumbe al conocimiento, surge solo históricamente o si está dada de forma eterna, planteando así el problema de la génesis y la validez como una cuestión central en la relación entre filosofía y sociología.
- GenresPhilosophy
368 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2015
About the author
Theodor W. Adorno
620 books1,471 followersTheodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.
Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.
Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 18, 2019
"Philosophie und Soziologie" are a series of lectures by philosopher, sociologist and seems so much more in its wikipedia entry, Theodor W. Adorno, a person that will surely pop up in your reading material if you do any kind of research in sociological stuff (raising my hand). And what can be said about these transcribed lectures were he analyzes the relationship (or head-on fight) between philosophy and sociology?
Well, it is an interesting book, with some eye-opening passages, and some good analysis. However, it is, at the same time, a transcription of some lectures, with the difficulties this brings to the reader when this book falls on their hands: too long paragraphs, things that may be easier to understand in the lecture's context but that are hard to on the white pages; some repetition; lack of knowledge of some of the topics/people that keep popping up but that the students of Adorno's class surely knew of...
That does not mean that the book is worthless, but that it is more of a curio and an 'extra' for people who already know of the matter at hand and just want to get some extra information on the topic or on Adorno's views on it.
The best: a look on Adorno's mind and his lectures; some passages, particularly in the latter lectures, are really interesting
The worst: to be on those lectures transcribed here would have been better, for sure; some of the chapters are difficult to understand in the vacuum of this book; I may be pedantic, by I kind of hate the use of the word 'chance' in Spanish (so much of a Spanglish word and I feel so out of place here in this translation...)
Further Reading: take a look on how the brain works ("The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks); check the dystopian novel Adorno talks about in his lectures ("Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley); think about language and its role ("Language, Bananas & Bonobos", Neil Smith) or take a look on what is reality ("Über Gewißheit" by Ludwig Wittgenstein)... The list could be endless, the desire for knowledge, boundless.
6.5/10
(Spanish Translation by Mariana Dimópulos)
Well, it is an interesting book, with some eye-opening passages, and some good analysis. However, it is, at the same time, a transcription of some lectures, with the difficulties this brings to the reader when this book falls on their hands: too long paragraphs, things that may be easier to understand in the lecture's context but that are hard to on the white pages; some repetition; lack of knowledge of some of the topics/people that keep popping up but that the students of Adorno's class surely knew of...
That does not mean that the book is worthless, but that it is more of a curio and an 'extra' for people who already know of the matter at hand and just want to get some extra information on the topic or on Adorno's views on it.
The best: a look on Adorno's mind and his lectures; some passages, particularly in the latter lectures, are really interesting
The worst: to be on those lectures transcribed here would have been better, for sure; some of the chapters are difficult to understand in the vacuum of this book; I may be pedantic, by I kind of hate the use of the word 'chance' in Spanish (so much of a Spanglish word and I feel so out of place here in this translation...)
Further Reading: take a look on how the brain works ("The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat" by Oliver Sacks); check the dystopian novel Adorno talks about in his lectures ("Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley); think about language and its role ("Language, Bananas & Bonobos", Neil Smith) or take a look on what is reality ("Über Gewißheit" by Ludwig Wittgenstein)... The list could be endless, the desire for knowledge, boundless.
6.5/10
(Spanish Translation by Mariana Dimópulos)
October 2, 2024
Adorno offers 18 lectures dedicated to the topic of Philosophy and Sociology, in which he runs through the history of sociology as a science, its role as a revolutionary science of the emerging bourgeois class, and its dialectical becoming the ideological defender of an oppressive system through the embrace of nominalism. Adorno counterposes this history to that of philosophy and its dedication to the concept, its production and its truth value, arguing that though the two sciences stand in opposition to one another, each presupposes the other in and through mediation, a process of dialectic thinking which is anything but the reduction of the opposition to a third. Adorno's lectures veer into an extended meditation on ideology, generation and validity only to return to the principle thesis that truth and history, however they are framed, yield a dialectical mediation in which their opposition is intertwined.
August 15, 2026
The first 3 lectures of Adorno’s Philosophy and Sociology already contain, in concentrated form, many of the ideas that run through his entire philosophy.
At the same time you get a deep dive in the real meaning of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, insights you don’t get by reading the (usual) textbooks or even the thinkers themselves, who are not always easy to understand. These ideas become gradually more clear through Adorno’s discussion of the dialectic between sociology and philosophy. Step by step, the reader is confronted with the meaning of social realities such as reification, second nature, and the ossification of consciousness. This, for me, is the real beauty of these lectures.
If you are still struggling with Adorno’s philosophy with the real meaning of ‘Preponderance of the Object’ and how this relates to Kant, Fichte, Hegel and many other thinkers these lectures are a real Master Class.
You will also get a deep dive in the meaning of the ‘Subject’, a concepts which is for readers and in philosophy ambiguous in many ways (cf. p. 26): Lecture 3 and other lectures give a meaningful explanation.
What begins as a discussion of sociology and Auguste Comte gradually becomes a meditation on the relation between subject and object, the historical character of social reality, the limits of positivism, and finally the possibility of freedom and utopia.
In the later lectures, you will find an interesting comparison between Comte and Durkheim.
Durkheim described social phenomena as things (choses, hence chosism). Adorno shows both the truth and the danger of this approach: social phenomena really do confront us with a thing-like objectivity, but sociology risks turning historically produced relations into apparently natural facts. (Lectures 5-6-7)
(Cf. Durkheim’s studies on suicide.)
Social facts are choses (things) ==> they exert objective coercion.
Yet this thing-like social reality originates through human beings, not through nature: it has become a kind of second nature. Social arrangements that were historically produced can consequently appear natural, necessary and immutable. Myths of progress, or perhaps today the apparent inevitability of neoliberal dream, can be understood in this light.
(One might even relate this to contemporary phenomena such as the epidemic of burnout and depression.)
==> Lecture 5: Because of this Second Nature, historically produced social relations appear to us as if they were governed by natural laws. The subject itself is formed through history and therefore tends to experience these relations as given, necessary and immutable. Philosophy should disclose the historical and social processes behind this apparent natural necessity, rather than simply adapt to it. Therefore, a moment of freedom of the subject is necessary: without it, the subject could not critically resist or transcend what presents itself as an objective necessity.
Summary:
Second nature ==> social reality appears as natural necessity ==> the subject itself is historically formed by it ==> but the subject cannot be liquidated ==> a moment of subjective freedom is necessary to disclose and resist this apparent necessity.
This theme was later elaborated by the Frankfurt School and can also, in quite different forms, be recognized in Freud, Heidegger and thinkers associated with the Conservative Revolution.
Key Learning Point
Lecture 3 in particular contains what I find one of the most beautiful formulations of Adorno’s thought: we can think beyond what exists only because what exists already contains traces of what it might become.
==> refering on page 29 to fn 7 on p. 271, which points to Adorno’s radio discussion with Ernst Bloch and to his Lecturer Course History and Freedom (see my review there).
==> Adorno alluded to Kant’s discussion of the old ontological proof for the existence of God … He explains that we cannot have any concept, including any concept of what does not as yet exists, unless “some ferment, or some seeds, of what this concept genuinely intends.”
==> Hence the Hope (cf. Bloch) that if the concept is already there, then there is also a trace of what the concept intends, a real possibility of realizing the concept in question.
This is the crucial thought.
==> If unfreedom were absolutely total, if no possibility or experience of freedom existed anywhere, we could not meaningfully form the concept of freedom in the first place. Our ability to recognize the world as unfree therefore already testifies to traces of freedom within it. (if unfreedom were total, we would recognize freedom only as an empty word)
==> This is also linked to the concept of the subject as we encounter it in Fichte: “an utterly creative and spontaneous agency.” But this conception is corrected in Hegel, who introduces a “freedom towards the object”: the capacity “to abandon oneself into the object, to immerse oneself as thinking subject in the matter itself” (p. 27). This means that reality ( the empirical object) can correct the subject: hence Adorno’s preponderance of the object. The subject is not absolute, but it remains necessary; it cannot simply be liquidated, as positivist science would like to do. Moreover, the subject itself is historically formed. This is one of the finest examples of Adorno’s sophisticated way of thinking: neither subject nor object can be made absolute. And from here we can already see connections to second nature, reification, and other recurring themes in his work
This world of unrealized possibilities (= ferments, seeds, fragments ) differs fundamentally from a realm of eternal ideas. Utopian thinking concerns unrealized possibilities within history (ruins) itself: it is immanent rather than transcendent.
This can in turn be related - traced back - to Jewish mysticism and to motifs that were secularized and transformed in the thought of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Adorno. (see my review of Susan Buck-Morss, 'The Origin of Negative Dialectics' and Gershom, Scholem, 'The Messianic Idea n Judaism', Walter Benjamin 'The Arcades Project' where these links are more elaborated)
Adorno wrote a great deal, but this idea of the trace may be one of the most fascinating threads running through his thinking. It also makes his Negative Dialectics more understandable.
At the same time you get a deep dive in the real meaning of Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, insights you don’t get by reading the (usual) textbooks or even the thinkers themselves, who are not always easy to understand. These ideas become gradually more clear through Adorno’s discussion of the dialectic between sociology and philosophy. Step by step, the reader is confronted with the meaning of social realities such as reification, second nature, and the ossification of consciousness. This, for me, is the real beauty of these lectures.
If you are still struggling with Adorno’s philosophy with the real meaning of ‘Preponderance of the Object’ and how this relates to Kant, Fichte, Hegel and many other thinkers these lectures are a real Master Class.
You will also get a deep dive in the meaning of the ‘Subject’, a concepts which is for readers and in philosophy ambiguous in many ways (cf. p. 26): Lecture 3 and other lectures give a meaningful explanation.
What begins as a discussion of sociology and Auguste Comte gradually becomes a meditation on the relation between subject and object, the historical character of social reality, the limits of positivism, and finally the possibility of freedom and utopia.
In the later lectures, you will find an interesting comparison between Comte and Durkheim.
Durkheim described social phenomena as things (choses, hence chosism). Adorno shows both the truth and the danger of this approach: social phenomena really do confront us with a thing-like objectivity, but sociology risks turning historically produced relations into apparently natural facts. (Lectures 5-6-7)
(Cf. Durkheim’s studies on suicide.)
Social facts are choses (things) ==> they exert objective coercion.
Yet this thing-like social reality originates through human beings, not through nature: it has become a kind of second nature. Social arrangements that were historically produced can consequently appear natural, necessary and immutable. Myths of progress, or perhaps today the apparent inevitability of neoliberal dream, can be understood in this light.
(One might even relate this to contemporary phenomena such as the epidemic of burnout and depression.)
==> Lecture 5: Because of this Second Nature, historically produced social relations appear to us as if they were governed by natural laws. The subject itself is formed through history and therefore tends to experience these relations as given, necessary and immutable. Philosophy should disclose the historical and social processes behind this apparent natural necessity, rather than simply adapt to it. Therefore, a moment of freedom of the subject is necessary: without it, the subject could not critically resist or transcend what presents itself as an objective necessity.
Summary:
Second nature ==> social reality appears as natural necessity ==> the subject itself is historically formed by it ==> but the subject cannot be liquidated ==> a moment of subjective freedom is necessary to disclose and resist this apparent necessity.
This theme was later elaborated by the Frankfurt School and can also, in quite different forms, be recognized in Freud, Heidegger and thinkers associated with the Conservative Revolution.
Key Learning Point
Lecture 3 in particular contains what I find one of the most beautiful formulations of Adorno’s thought: we can think beyond what exists only because what exists already contains traces of what it might become.
==> refering on page 29 to fn 7 on p. 271, which points to Adorno’s radio discussion with Ernst Bloch and to his Lecturer Course History and Freedom (see my review there).
==> Adorno alluded to Kant’s discussion of the old ontological proof for the existence of God … He explains that we cannot have any concept, including any concept of what does not as yet exists, unless “some ferment, or some seeds, of what this concept genuinely intends.”
==> Hence the Hope (cf. Bloch) that if the concept is already there, then there is also a trace of what the concept intends, a real possibility of realizing the concept in question.
This is the crucial thought.
==> If unfreedom were absolutely total, if no possibility or experience of freedom existed anywhere, we could not meaningfully form the concept of freedom in the first place. Our ability to recognize the world as unfree therefore already testifies to traces of freedom within it. (if unfreedom were total, we would recognize freedom only as an empty word)
==> This is also linked to the concept of the subject as we encounter it in Fichte: “an utterly creative and spontaneous agency.” But this conception is corrected in Hegel, who introduces a “freedom towards the object”: the capacity “to abandon oneself into the object, to immerse oneself as thinking subject in the matter itself” (p. 27). This means that reality ( the empirical object) can correct the subject: hence Adorno’s preponderance of the object. The subject is not absolute, but it remains necessary; it cannot simply be liquidated, as positivist science would like to do. Moreover, the subject itself is historically formed. This is one of the finest examples of Adorno’s sophisticated way of thinking: neither subject nor object can be made absolute. And from here we can already see connections to second nature, reification, and other recurring themes in his work
This world of unrealized possibilities (= ferments, seeds, fragments ) differs fundamentally from a realm of eternal ideas. Utopian thinking concerns unrealized possibilities within history (ruins) itself: it is immanent rather than transcendent.
This can in turn be related - traced back - to Jewish mysticism and to motifs that were secularized and transformed in the thought of Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Adorno. (see my review of Susan Buck-Morss, 'The Origin of Negative Dialectics' and Gershom, Scholem, 'The Messianic Idea n Judaism', Walter Benjamin 'The Arcades Project' where these links are more elaborated)
Adorno wrote a great deal, but this idea of the trace may be one of the most fascinating threads running through his thinking. It also makes his Negative Dialectics more understandable.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews