Originally published on eve.gd on 12 June 2012, last updated 6 September 2026.
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Just found one that I hadn't noticed before:
The term "commitment" unites Heidegger and Jaspers together with the lowest tractatus-writers.
– Adorno, Theodor W., The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. by Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 69.
This is a strange conflation if it is indeed supposed to refer to Wittgenstein's Tractatus, 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 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus 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.
Featured image by Cuito Cuanavale under a CC-BY license.
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1. ‘Cuito Cuanavale’, Flickr <http://www.flickr.com/photos/hexadecimal_time/>