Introduction

Surprising as this may seem for a thinker steeped in Marxist theory and materialism, metaphysics was a key category in Adorno, and a concept around which his entire philosophical career revolved. By wresting this concept from its traditional associations with idealism, totality and affirmation, Adorno hoped to give it a new twist that would lead to its rehabilitation within the framework of a critical theory of society. Rather than understanding metaphysics as a purely theoretical and thus contemplative endeavour, Adorno urged his audience to think of metaphysics in social terms and ultimately as an element of unconstrained experience. He viewed metaphysics as a haven for truth: it is where experience leaps beyond the false totality of modern life and connects with the redemptive potentiality of real material being.

The history of Western metaphysics since Plato has been dominated by the attempt to distinguish between the temporal and the non-temporal, the world of finite objects in which we exist, and a suprasensible world of eternal or absolute objects. Behind the world of appearances and shadows there is a true, real and immutable world of essences about which philosophy has tried to speak. As the Greek word “metaphysics” (meta-physics, or that which exists before the science of the visible world, physics) intimates, the ultimate aim of this fundamental discipline has been to ground a science of the transcendent as opposed to the sphere of the immanent.