---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: Another Adorno-against-Wittgenstein moment

wordpress_id: 2127
wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/?p=2127
date: !binary |-
  MjAxMi0wNi0xMiAxMToxMjo0OSArMDIwMA==
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  MjAxMi0wNi0xMiAxMToxMjo0OSArMDIwMA==
categories:
- Academia
- Philosophy
- Theodor Adorno
- Ludwig Wittgenstein
tags:
- Adorno
- Wittgenstein
comments: []
---
<p>Just found one that I hadn't noticed before:</p>
<blockquote><p>The term "commitment" unites Heidegger and Jaspers together with the lowest <i>tractatus</i>-writers.</p></blockquote>
-- Adorno, Theodor W., The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 69.
<p>This is a strange conflation if it is indeed supposed to refer to Wittgenstein's <i>Tractatus</i>, at which Adorno takes aim in several other places. (Adorno, Theodor W., Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. by Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), p. 62.; Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel’, in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 89–148, p. 101.) Here, he seems to bring existentialism in line with Wittgenstein's logical positivism. Although Wittgenstein's book is named, on Moore's suggestion, after Spinoza's <i>Tractatus Theologico-Politicus</i> and it, obviously, just means "tract", I suspect that Adorno uses the term in order to have another pop at Wittgenstein, but in a strange place.</p>
<p><i>Featured image by <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hexadecimal_time/">Cuito Cuanavale</a> under a CC-BY license.</i></p>