Hartung, Gerald

Senior Fellow: October 2021–February 2022

Research Project: Epistemological Scepticism, Linguistic Criticism, and Critique of Modern Culture: Georg Simmel and Theodor W. Adorno

At the centre of this research work lies the question of how the relationship between epistemological scepticism and linguistic criticism is thematised in the philosophical thought of Georg Simmel and Theodor W. Adorno.
In the late nineteenth century, the criticism of idealism, the debate on materialism, and pessimism were at the centre of debates that influenced the linguistic and cultural theory of modernity. The blending of epistemological scepticism (a rejection of classical ontology) and linguistic criticism (a criticism of strict correspondence and language and logic, as well as linguistic usage) allowed the thinkers of the late nineteenth century (Steinthal, Lazarus) to prepare a position of cultural criticism that either had a radically sceptical profile (Mauthner, Wittgenstein) or aimed at overcoming scepticism (Cassirer). This constellation has a special relevance to research into the effect of German-Jewish thinkers on the history of theory in the modern era, in particular on linguistic and cultural theory: see the book Beyond the Babylonian Trauma: Theories of Language and Modern Culture in the German-Jewish Context (Berlin and Boston, 2018).

This project seeks to go one step further and will take the view that Georg Simmel and Theodor W. Adorno are the most important representatives of a radical scepticism in the aforementioned German-Jewish tradition. This concerns both the opening of philosophy to sociological questions and the conducting of micrological analyses of phenomena, both the emphasis on dialectical thinking and the turn towards metaphysics, both the critique of knowledge and the critique of the use of language. For all their well-known differences, which Adorno emphasised with polemical intent, this research aims to present Simmel and Adorno as representatives of a radical philosophical scepticism.

Gerald Hartung is professor at the philosophical seminary at Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany.