Adorno reads Anaximander’s fragment as a proto-bourgeois exchange saying.

Evidence

Here, Adorno returns to a consideration from a few years earlier regarding a ‘proto-bourgeois’ saying by Anaximander. In the English translation by Kathleen Freeman – which is itself based on a German translation by Hermann Diels, the standard during Adorno’s time – this quotation reads as follows: ‘The Non-Limited is the original material of existing things; further, the source from which existing things derive their existence is also that to which they return at their destruction, according to necessity; for they give justice and make reparation to one another for their injustice, according to the arrangement of Time’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1451

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Adorno’s ‘proto-bourgeois’ reading of Anaximander commit the very anachronism he elsewhere criticizes in translating modern categories into early thought?
• XREF: connects to: Adorno treats exchange as a principle shaping thought and feeling to the innermost being. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 930; Adorno’s identification of exchange with identity logic is meta-economic, not capitalist — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1298; Adorno read Kierkegaard’s aesthetic as a proto-materialist seed of world-change.

Broader Connections

• Adorno treats exchange as a principle shaping thought and feeling to the innermost being. #expands (0.85) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 930
• Adorno’s identification of exchange with identity logic is meta-economic, not capitalist #corroborates (0.80) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1298