History and Freedom

Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrongturnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded thatwe are doomed to suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factorsthat prevented him from identifying a definitive plan for thefuture course of history was his feelings of solidarity with thevictims and losers. As for the future, the course of events was toremain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to aHölderlin-like openness. This trace of the messianic has whathe called the colour of the concrete as opposed to mere abstractpossibility. Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on theroad leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. Thesecond of these was concerned with the topics of history andfreedom. In terms of content, these lectures represented an earlyversion of the chapters in Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant andHegel. In formal terms, these were improvised lectures that permitus to glimpse a philosophical work in progress. The text published here gives us an overview of all the themesand motifs of Adorno's philosophy of history: the key notion of thedomination of nature, his criticism of the existentialist conceptof a historicity without history and, finally, his opposition tothe traditional idea of truth as something permanent, unchangingand ahistorical.