Notes to Adorno’s Negative Dialectics

• “the ontologization of history permits one without a glance to attribute the power
of Being to historical powers, and thus to justify submission to historical
situations as though it were commanded by Being itself…That history can be
ignored or deified, depending on the circumstances, is a practicable political
conclusion from the philosophy of Being. Time itself, and thus transiency, is both
absolutized and transfigured as eternal by the existential-ontological drafts. The
concept of existence as the essentiality of transience, the temporality of temporal
things, keeps existence away by naming it. Once treated as the title of a
phenomenological problem, existence is integrated. This is the latest type of
philosophical solace, the type of mythical euphemism—a falsely resurrected faith
that one might break the spell of nature by soothingly copying it” (p. 130-1)
o “Existential thinking crawls into the cave of a long-past mimesis. In the
process it is nonetheless accommodating the most fatal prejudice from the
philosophical history which it has laid off like a superfluous employee: the
Platonic prejudice that the imperishable must be the good—which is to say
no more than that in permanent warfare the stronger is always right. Yet if
Plato’s pedagogy cultivated martial virtues, the Gorgias dialogue still
made these virtues answerable to the highest idea, to the idea of justice. In
the darkened sky of the existence doctrine, however, no star is shining any
more. Existence is sanctified without the sanctifying factor. Of the eternal
idea in which entity was to share, or by which it was to be conditioned,
nothing remains but the naked affirmation of what is anyway—the
affirmation of power” (p. 131)