Heterogenesis and the Problems of Metaphysics

Abstract

Theodor Adorno’s verdict on the relationship between empiricism and metaphysics would perhaps have met with Gilles Deleuze’s guarded approval. Chance, for Deleuze, was the sole form of necessity; the empiricist search for the conditions of the new involved a counter-effectuation of the accidents of experience; and events defied the strict modal distinction between possible, impossible and necessary. That the link between empiricism and metaphysics was exemplified for Adorno in the concept of openness might also have met with Deleuze’s approval, for openness, according to Adorno, is philosophy thinking beyond itself.

Empiricism, with its emphasis on empirical sources, implies an essential element of metaphysics at least in the sense that the essential knowledge … has an inherent fortuitousness, from which it derives an element of meaning which, according to the prevalent logic, is excluded precisely by the concept of the accidental.

(Adorno, 2000, p. 141)