Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in
the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to
suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factors that prevented him
from identifying a definitive plan for the future course of history was
his feelings of solidarity with the victims and losers. As for the
future, the course of events was to remain open-ended; instead of
finality, he remained committed to a Hölderlin-like openness. This trace
of the messianic has what he called the colour of the concrete as
opposed to mere abstract possibility.
Early in the 1960s Adorno gave four courses of lectures on the road
leading to Negative Dialectics, his magnum opus of 1966. The second of
these was concerned with the topics of history and freedom. In terms of
content, these lectures represented an early version of the chapters in
Negative Dialectics devoted to Kant and Hegel. In formal terms, these
were improvised lectures that permit us to glimpse a philosophical work
in progress.
The text published here gives us an overview of all the themes and
motifs of Adorno's philosophy of history: the key notion of the
domination of nature, his criticism of the existentialist concept of a
historicity without history and, finally, his opposition to the
traditional idea of truth as something permanent, unchanging and
ahistorical.
