Identities (Dec 2021)
Plato, Adorno, and the Dialectic
Abstract
Although the relationship between Adorno and Aristotle has received some recent attention, little work has been done either demonstrating or making connections between Plato and Adorno, especially on the topic of the dialectic. This is likely because Adorno himself has little to say about Plato’s dialectic, although he does refer often to Plato’s ideas and forms, and sometimes to his aesthetics. In his lectures on metaphysics, Adorno seems to suggest that Aristotle rather than Plato marks the true beginning of the dialectic because Aristotle addresses mediation while Plato is constrained to static forms. But Adorno’s reading of Plato as a thinker of pure concepts, in contrast to Aristotle as an innovator of mediation, misses the complex mediations of Plato’s dialectical approach, especially in The Republic.
