After everything, the only responsible philosophy is one that no longer imagines it had the Absolute at its command; indeed philosophy must forbid the thought of it in order not to betray that thought, and at the same time it must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth. This contradiction is philosophy's element. It defines philosophy as negative.
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Each of those thinkers [Xenophanes, Aristoteles, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Marx] found his own truth in critique. Critique alone, as the unity of the problem and its arguments, not the adoption of received theses, has laid the foundation for what may be considered the productive unity of the history of philosophy. In the progressive continuity of such critique even those philosophers whose doctrines insist on the eternal and the timeless acquired their temporal nucleus, their historical status.*
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*T. W. Adorno, "Why still philosophy," in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (NY: Columbia University Press, 2005), 7, 8
Photo credit: Jeremy Shapiro (Horkheimer and Adorno [center]; Habermas [far right]).
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