For this lecture, Adorno used the translation of the Phaedrus by Constantin Ritter, in Platon, Sämtliche Dialoge, ed. Otto Apelt, vol. 2: Menon – Kratylos – Phaidon – Phaidros (Leipzig: Meiner, 1922). His personal copy is located in the Theodor W. Adorno Archive (NB Adorno 40). Adorno further consulted the English translation by B. Jowett, The Dialogues of Plato, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1937); this also includes annotations to the passages from the Phaedrus discussed in this lecture (NB Adorno 49, pp. 250–54). The Stephanus pagination, which is normally used for Plato’s works, is based on the page and section numbers from the three-volume edition by Henricus Stephanus (Paris, 1578). The chapter numbers given here by Adorno refer not to the Stephanus, however, but to the Apelt; they were presumably also adopted in the paperback edition of the Schleiermacher translation, which most of Adorno’s students would probably have used. (Platon, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 4, ed. Walter F. Otto, Ernesto Grassi, and Gert Plamböck, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1958). The chapters in the Phaedrus correspond to sections 249d–252c. (In these notes, all references correspond to the edition of Phaedrus published by Oxford University Press in 2002 and translated by Robin Waterfield. —Trans.)
See the speech by Lysias in the Phaedrus (227c). In his personal copy, Adorno noted the name “Proust” next to the sentence quoted here.
See Plato, Phaedrus, 15ff. (237a ff.).
See ibid., 25ff. (244a ff.); concerning the doctrine of anamnesis, see, especially, Phaedrus 250a, Phaidon 72e–77a, and Menon 80d.
See Plato, Phaedrus, 33 (250b).
See Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 34: “To transform the leap of life into a gait, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian—that only the knight of faith can do—and that is the only miracle.” Adorno quotes this Passage in Kierkegaard (129) and repeatedly returns to it later, for example, in The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Fredric Will (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
See Plato, Phaedrus, 35f. (252a–c).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One (1808), trans. David Constantine (London: Penguin, 2005), 29.
See Plato, Phaedrus, 33 (249c–d).
See Plato, Phaedrus , 23 (241e).
See, in addition to the passage from the Phaedrus, also Plato’s Ion 533d–e and Timaeus 71e–72a. See also Hermann Gundert, “Enthusiasmos und Logos bei Platon,” Lexis 2 (1949), 25–46.
See Plato, Phaedrus, 28f. (246a ff.).
This association may refer to Hölderlin’s hymn “Patmos,” (1802); see Friedrich Hölderlin, Selected Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Penguin, 1998), 231–42.
See Eduard Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Part 2, Section 1, Sokrates und die Sokratiker; Plato und die Alte Akademie (Leipzig: Reisland, 1922), especially 882–86.
Plato, Phaedrus, 33f (249d–250c). Adorno’s personal copy of the Phaedrus contains the note “Body as prison / Phaedo” next to the quoted passage.
Neither the wording nor the occasion of this statement by Josef Hermann Dufhues, a leading member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia from 1958 to 1962, could be ascertained.
Concerning the “elimination of desire from the object of beauty” as a basic element of the Christian approach to beauty, see Augustine, Confessions, ed. Michael P. Foley, trans. Frank J. Sheed (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), Book 4, chapter 13ff.
This text is excerpted from Aesthetics by Theodor W. Adorno, a collection of the author’s lectures on aesthetics delivered in the winter of 1958–59. The volume is edited by Eberhard Ortland, translated by Wieland Hoban, and published this month by Polity.