Abstract
A few weeks after Paul Tillich’s death in October 1965, Theodor W. Adorno stood before his class at the outset of a new series of lectures and paid tribute to his former postdoctoral supervisor. He says of Tillich,
I owe him the most profound debt of gratitude for having approved of my Habilitation thesis in 1931…It is a debt such as I owe to few others. Had he not exerted himself on my behalf something he did despite the differences in our respective theoretical points of view…it is very questionable whether I would be able to speak to you today; it is even questionable whether I would have survived.1
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Notes
Theodor W. Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 3.
Paul Tillich, Gesammelte Werk, vol. 4 (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1959–1975), 301.
Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, trans. Michael Robertson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 37.
Theodor Adorno, “Errinerungen an Paul Tillich,” In Werk und Wirken Paul Tillichs, ed. Wolf-Dieter Marsch (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1967), 26–28.
Wilhelm and Marion Pauck, Paul Tillich: His Life & Thought, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 155.
John W Murphy, “Paul Tillich and Western Marxism,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 5.1 (1984), 13–24.
Ronald H. Stone, “Tillich: Radical Political Theologian,” Religion in Life 46 (Spring 1977), 44–53.
Ronald H. Stone, “Tillich’s Use of Marx and Freud in the Social Context of the Frankfurt School,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 33 (Fall 1977), 3.
Terrence O’Keefe, “Paul Tillich and the Frankfurt School,” Theonomy and Autonomy: Studies in Paul Tillich’s Engagement with Modern Culture, ed. John L. Carey (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1984), 67.
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little Brown, 1973), 35.
James Champion, “Tillich and the Frankfurt School: Parallels and Differences in Prophetic Criticism,” Soundings 69 (Winter 1986), 514.
Gary M. Simpson, Critical Social Theory: Prophetic Reason, Civil Society, and Christian Imagination (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 32.
Ibid., 34. These remarks are found in, Paul Tillich, “Review of Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 9 (1941), 476–478.
Bryan Lee Wagoner, The Subject of Emancipation: Critique, Reason and Religion in the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Paul Tillich (unpublished PhD diss., Harvard University, 2011), 358.
Theodor W Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995), 31.
Theodor W Adorno, lectures on Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 194.
Paul Tillich, “Man and Society in Religious Socialism,” Main Works/Haupt Werke, vol. 3, ed. Carl Heinz Ratschow (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1998), 491.
Adorno’s criticism is published in, Theodor W Adorno, “Contra Paulum,” Briefwechsel: Theodor W. Adorno und Max Horkheimer, vol. 2, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 475–503. For an English translation, see, Waggoner, Subject of Emancipation, 378–401.
Adorno, “Parataxis: On Höderlin’s Late Poetry”, Notes to literature, vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 109–152.
Ibid., 137. In the letter, “Nur als zum Ideal verhält seine Dichtung sich zur Theologie, surrogiert sie nicht”. Theodor W Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11: Noten zur Literatur: Parataxis (Frankfurt: Surhkamp, 2003), 478.
Paul Tillich, Perspectives on 19th and 20th Century Protestant Theology (London: SCM Press, 1967), 242.
Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 6.
Adorno first delivered the paper to the Hölderlin Society in 1963. It caused considerable controversy, and led Heidegger himself to withdraw his membership from the society. See: Robert Ian Savage, Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger, Adorno, Brecht (Rochester, NY: Camden, 2008), 98.
Adorno, “Why still Philosophy,” Critical Models, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 6.
This account must leave aside consideration of debates over the relationship Adorno’s thought to that of Heidegger, and to what extent the former’s polemical writing against the latter masks significant similarities in their thought. See, Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek, eds., Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008).
Brief consideration of Adorno’s emphatic concept of truth will be offered below. For further discussion of this concept, see: Deborah Cook, ed., Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008).
David Farrell Krell, “Adorno’s Parataxis,” Language without Soil: Adorno and Late Philosophical Modernity, ed. Gerhard Richter (New York: Fordham, 2010), 197.
J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 357.
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1995), 3.
For a prominent articulation of such criticism, see: Jürgen Habermas, Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 106–130.
Elsewhere I suggest that Adorno inverts Tillich’s notion of correlation. See: Christopher Craig Brittain, Adorno and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 163–168.
Martin Heidegger, “Only a God Can Save Us Now,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6.1 (1977), 5–27.
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Brittain, C.C. (2015). Parataxis and Theonomy. In: Manning, R.R. (eds) Retrieving the Radical Tillich. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137373830_6
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