Dialectics and metaphysics

Abstract

This chapter analyses how Adorno tackles the question of metaphysics, both in the Negative Dialectics and in the lectures he devoted the topic. According to Adorno, metaphysics has two meanings. In the traditional, Aristotelian sense, it consists in the attempt to conceptualise the connection, or mediation, between two spheres that in Plato were still radically separate, namely: on the one hand, the sphere of the unchanging, or a priori, and, on the other, the sphere of changing and corruptible experience. In a second, specifically Adornian sense, metaphysics—or, rather, “metaphysical experience”—denotes the moment in which thought reaches its very limits and glimpses the “ultimate questions”, such as the question of the “meaning” of life and death.