Seküler Metafiziğin İmkanı: Theodor W. Adorno

This study traces Theodor W. Adorno’s claim that metaphysics has been secularized in the category of history by considering his criticisms of both traditional metaphysics and contemporary criticisms of metaphysics. Indeed, in the 20th century, Adorno emphasizes the importance of secular metaphysics and heretical speculation despite the efforts of the sciences and scientific philosophy to discredit and liquidate metaphysics and thus philosophy. By problematizing this radical emphasis and its reasons, attention will be drawn to the functionality and necessity of philosophy in our age of decay and decadence. In addition, it will be argued that secular metaphysics opens the door to emancipation by allowing one to experience the non-identical instead of identifying with the given. In the 1965, in History and Freedom: Lectures, Adorno challenges the traditional meaning of metaphysics and proposes its transformation into history, declaring that truth is no longer embodied in transcendent and eternal concepts but in concrete suffering and the ability to respond to it. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, on the other hand, does not propose an affirmative metaphysical doctrine, but concludes with a chapter on metaphysics that, while criticizing traditional metaphysics, expresses solidarity with the possibility of a transformed metaphysics. The horror of Auschwitz is concrete evidence of the collapse of all systems of thought. Since the decay of the great metaphysical systems has led to the disintegration of philosophical truths, the understanding of truth requires the interpretation of the remaining fragments/debris. Therefore, by emphasizing the necessity of a philosophical turn from thought to interpretation, it imposes a new task on philosophy. The model of this interpretation is the natural history model Adorno developed in his early manifesto, “The Idea of Natural-History” (1932).