Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth

Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth

Lambert Zuidervaart. New York: SUNY Press, 2024.

Available at: SUNY Press


Publisher's Overview:

An elusive and complex idea of truth lies at the center of Theodor Adorno's thought. Yet he never spells out what it is. Through close readings of Negative Dialectics, Aesthetic Theory, and related course lectures, Lambert Zuidervaart reconstructs Adorno's conception of truth, contrasts it with the conceptions of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, and explores its relevance for contemporary philosophy, art, and politics. Adorno regards truth as a dynamic constellation in which various dialectical polarities intersect. The most decisive polarity, Zuidervaart argues, occurs between society as it has developed and the historical possibility of a completely transformed world. Critically reconstructed, Adorno's conception of truth can help inspire hopeful critiques of an allegedly post-truth society.


Review of the Book:

Zuidervaart, who already published numerable books on critical theory in general and Adorno in particular, again shows himself to be an excellent and critical reader of Adorno. The greatest strength of Adorno, Heidegger, and the Politics of Truth is that it offers an in-depth study of Adorno's concept of truth, based on a thorough reading and understanding, and an original and critical interpretation of Adorno's work. It also surpasses that in demonstrating the need for a conception of 'truth as a whole' beyond propositional truth, and the need to link the concept of truth to social critique and social hope. All this makes this book a must-read for Adorno scholars.

— Thijs Lijster, author of Benjamin and Adorno on Art and Art Criticism: Critique of Art

Table of Contents:

1. Adorno’s Conception of Truth

2. The Humanly Promised Other of History

3. Surplus beyond the Subject

4. What Is, Is More Than It Is

5. Politics of Truth: Adorno, Foucault, and Feminist Critical Theory

6. “Weh spricht vergeh”: Truth in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

7. Promises of Truth

Appendix: Reflections from Damaged Life: Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69)

Social Domains of Truth: Science, Politics, Art, and Religion

Social Domains of Truth: Science, Politics, Art, and Religion

Lambert Zuidervaart. New York: Routledge, 2023.

Available at: Routledge Publishers

Publisher's Overview:

Truth is in trouble. In response, this book presents a new conception of truth. It recognizes that prominent philosophers have questioned whether the idea of truth is important. Some have asked why we even need it. Their questions reinforce broader trends in Western society, where many wonder whether or why we should pursue truth. Indeed, some pundits say we have become a "post-truth" society. Yet there are good reasons not to embrace the cultural Zeitgeist or go with the philosophical flow, reasons to regard truth as a substantive and socially significant idea.

This book explains why. First it argues that propositional truth is only one kind of truth—an important kind, but not all important. Then it shows how propositional truth belongs to the more comprehensive process of truth as a whole. This process is a dynamic correlation between human fidelity to societal principles and a life-giving disclosure of society. The correlation comes to expression in distinct social domains of truth, where either propositional or nonpropositional truth is primary. The final chapters lay out five such domains: science, politics, art, religion, and philosophy. Anyone who cares about the future of truth in society will want to read this pathbreaking book.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: Truth Is Not a Minted Coin

1.1 On the Very Idea of Truth

1.2 Kinds and Domains of Truth

1.3 Holistic Alethic Pluralism

2. Propositional Truth: Facts and Propositions

2.1 Facts and States of Affairs

2.2 Beliefs and Propositions

2.3 Decontextualized Disclosure

3. Accurate Insight and Inferential Validity

3.1 Knowledge and Propositions

3.2 Truth of Propositions

3.3 Propositional Truth and Objective Knowledge

4. Alethic Pluralism

4.1 Functionalism: Michael Lynch

4.2 Practical Pluralism

4.3 Social Domains of Truth

5. Propositional Truth and Discursive Justification

5.1 Alston’s Minimal Alethic Realism

5.2 Putnam’s Internal Realism

5.3 Post-Anti/Realism

6. Truth as a Whole and Authentication

6.1 Isomorphism, Fidelity, and Disclosure

6.2 Kinds and Types of Truth

6.3 Bearing Witness to Truth

6.4 Modes of Authentication

7. Truth and Science

7.1 Science as a Social Domain

7.2 Scientific Realism and Theoretical Truth

7.3 Science in Society

8. Truth and Politics

8.1 Hannah Arendt: Speaking Truth to Power

8.2 Michel Foucault: Linking Power to Truth

8.3 Political Truth

9. Truth in Art and Religion

9.1 Artistic Truth

9.2 Art and Politics

9.3 Religious Truth

9.4 Religion and Science

10. Philosophy, Truth, and Wisdom

10.1 Art, Religion, and Philosophy

10.2 Truth and Historicity

10.3 Social Critique and Practical Wisdom

Shattering Silos: Reimagining Knowledge, Politics, and Social Critique

Shattering Silos: Reimagining Knowledge, Politics, and Social Critique.

Lambert Zuidervaart. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2022.

Available at: McGill-Queen's University Press

Publisher's Overview:

Questions first raised by Hannah Arendt in the 1960s take on new urgency in the post-truth era, as political leaders blithely reject facts in the public domain: Is truth politically impotent? Are politics inherently false? Is the search for truth still relevant?

Shattering Silos, a companion volume to Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation and Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal, provides a path-breaking response. As in his two previous books, Lambert Zuidervaart challenges the boundaries philosophers set up between epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy. Knowledge, he argues, takes different forms in various social domains, and all are subject to political struggle. A critique of contemporary society must draw on many social domains of knowledge, including the arts and religion, and should recast politics as a striving for truth in the broadest sense. Proposing a new conception of truth - one that emphasizes the unity of knowledge and truth, as well as their diversity among different social domains - Zuidervaart asks what such holism and pluralism suggest about how we understand politics and society. This book proposes a new understanding of large-scale social change, challenging how most people think about knowledge and truth.

Interweaving epistemology, social criticism, and political thought, Shattering Silos aims to help redirect an allegedly post-truth society.

To Sing Once More: Sorrow, Joy, and the Dog I Loved

To Sing Once More: Sorrow, Joy, and the Dog I Loved. Lambert Zuidervaart. Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2021.

Available at: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Publisher's Overview:

How do we honor the dog friends who keep us company without complaint? How do we prepare when their all-too-short lives near an end? How do we grieve their passing and take joy in their memory? This memoir celebrates the life of a beautiful Golden Retriever named Hannah Estelle. It tells how, at a time of deep sadness, Hannah's puppy presence helped the author learn to sing again; how, as he became an accomplished vocalist, her faithful friendship brought grace and joy; and how, during the cancer-wracked months that ended her life, his singing to Hannah helped her departure. Woven around texts from poignant songs, the book speaks of loss and love, of sorrow and joy, of suffering and hope. Each chapter is a dog song, inspired by the canine companion it is about, and songlike in its own aspiration. Lambert Zuidervaart tells lyrical stories about a dear dog's life to thank her for helping him learn to sing once more.

Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School: Critical Retrieval

Truth in Husserl, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt School: Critical Retrieval. Lambert Zuidervaart. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2017.

Available at: MIT Press.

An innovative, ambitious, tradition-crossing study drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas to propose a new and transformative concept of truth.

Publisher's Overview:

The idea of truth is a guiding theme for German continental philosophers from Husserl through Habermas. In this book, Lambert Zuidervaart examines debates surrounding the idea of truth in twentieth-century German continental philosophy. He argues that the Heideggerian and critical theory traditions have much in common—despite the miscommunication, opposition, and even outright hostility that have prevailed between them—including significant roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Zuidervaart sees the tensions between Heideggerian thought and critical theory as potentially generative sources for a new approach to the idea of truth. He argues further that the “critical retrieval” of insights from German continental philosophy can shed light on current debates in analytic truth theory.

Zuidervaart structures his account around three issues: the distinction between propositional truth and truth that is more than propositional (which he calls existential truth); the relationship between propositional truth and the discursive justification of propositional truth claims, framed in analytic philosophy by debates between epistemic and nonepistemic conceptions of truth; and the relationship between propositional truth and the objectivity of knowledge, often presented in analytic philosophy as a conflict between realists and antirealists over the relation between “truth bearers” and “truth makers.” In an innovative and ambitious argument, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Habermas, Zuidervaart proposes a new and transformative conception of truth.

Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal: Essays in Reformational Philosophy

Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal: Essays in Reformational Philosophy. Lambert Zuidervaart. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. 

Available at: McGill-Queen's University Press.

A call for solidarity and renewal in the arts and the academy.

Publisher's Overview: 

What good is art? What is the point of a university education? Can philosophers contribute anything to social liberation? Such questions, both ancient and urgent, are the pulse of reformational philosophy. Inspired by the vision of the Dutch religious and political leader Abraham Kuyper, reformational philosophy pursues social transformation for the common good.

In this companion volume to Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation, Lambert Zuidervaart presents a socially engaged philosophy of the arts and higher education. Interacting with the ideas of leading Kuyperian thinkers such as Calvin Seerveld and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Zuidervaart shows why renewal in the arts needs to coincide with political and economic transformation. He also calls for education and research that serve the common good. Deeply rooted in reformational philosophy, his book brings a fresh and inspiring voice to current discussions of religious aesthetics and Christian scholarship.

Art, Education, and Cultural Renewal is a testament to the practical and intellectual richness of a unique religious tradition, compelling in its call for social solidarity and cultural critique.

Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation: Essays in Reformational Philosophy

Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation: Essays in Reformational Philosophy. Lambert Zuidervaart. McGill-Queen's University Press. April 2016.

Find it at: McGill-Queen's University Press

Also see: Ground Motive symposium responding to the book

Publisher's Overview:

Reformational philosophy rests on the ideas of nineteenth-century educator, church leader, and politician Abraham Kuyper, and it emerged in the early twentieth century among Reformed Protestant thinkers in the Netherlands. Combining comprehensive criticisms of Western philosophy with robust proposals for a just society, it calls on members of religious communities to transform harmful cultural practices, social institutions, and societal structures.

Well known for his work in aesthetics and critical theory, Lambert Zuidervaart is a leading figure in contemporary reformational philosophy. In Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation - the first of two volumes of original essays from the past thirty years - he forges new interpretations of art, politics, rationality, religion, science, and truth. In dialogue with modern and contemporary philosophers, among them Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, and reformational thinkers such as Herman Dooyeweerd, Dirk Vollenhoven, and Hendrik Hart, Zuidervaart explains and expands on reformational philosophy’s central themes. This interdisciplinary collection offers a normative critique of societal evil, a holistic and pluralist conception of truth, and a call for both religion and science to serve the common good.

Illustrating the connections between philosophy, religion, and culture, and daring to think outside the box, Religion, Truth, and Social Transformation gives a voice to hope in a climate of despair.

Truth Matters: Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion

Truth Matters: Knowledge, Politics, Ethics, Religion. Lambert Zuidervaart, Allyson Carr, Matthew J. Klaassen and Ronnie Shuker, editors. McGill-Queen's University Press. January 2014

A pioneering study of why truth is important in philosophy, public culture, and everyday life.

Find it at: McGill-Queen's University Press

Also see: Truth Matters Interdisciplinary Conference

Why should we seek and tell the truth? Does anyone know what truth is? Many are skeptical about the relevance of truth. Truth Matters endeavours to show why truth is important in a world where the very idea of truth is contested.

Putting philosophers in conversation with educators, literary scholars, physicists, political theorists, and theologians, Truth Matters ranges across both analytic and continental philosophy and draws on the ideas of thinkers such as Aquinas, Balthasar, Brandom, Davidson, Dooyeweerd, Gadamer, Habermas, Kierkegaard, Plantinga, Ricoeur, and Wolterstorff. Some essays attempt to provide a systematic account of truth, while others wrestle with the question of how truth is told and what it means to live truthfully. Contributors address debates between realists and anti-realists, explore issues surrounding relativism and constructivism in education and the social sciences, examine the politics of truth telling and the ethics of authenticity, and consider various religious perspectives on truth.

Most scholars agree that truth is propositional, being expressed in statements that are subject to proof or disproof. This book goes a step farther: yes, propositional truth is important, but truth is more than propositional. To recognize how it is more than propositional is crucial for understanding why truth truly matters.

Contributors include Doug Blomberg (ICS), Allyson Carr (ICS), Jeffrey Dudiak (King’s University College), Olaf Ellefson (York University), Gerrit Glas (VU University Amsterdam), Gill K. Goulding (Regis College), Jay Gupta (Mills College), Clarence Joldersma (Calvin College), Matthew J. Klaassen (ICS), John Jung Park (Duke University), Pamela J. Reeve (St. Augustine’s Seminary), Amy Richards (World Affairs Council of Western Michigan), Ronnie Shuker (ICS), Adam Smith (Brandeis University), John Van Rys (Redeemer University College), Darren Walhof (Grand Valley State University), Matthew Walhout (Calvin College), and Lambert Zuidervaart (ICS).

Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture

Art in Public: Politics, Economics, and a Democratic Culture. Lambert Zuidervaart. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Find it on: Amazon

Why should governments provide funding for the arts? What do the arts contribute to daily life? Do artists and their publics have a social responsibility? Challenging questionable assumptions about the state, the arts, and a democratic society, Lambert Zuidervaart presents a vigorous case for government arts funding, based on crucial contributions the arts make to civil society. He argues that the arts contribute to democratic communication and a social economy, fostering the critical and creative dialogue that a democratic society needs. Informed by the author’s experience leading a nonprofit arts organization as well as his expertise in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, this book proposes an entirely new conception of the public role of art with wide-ranging implications for education, politics, and cultural policy.

Dog-Kissed Tears: Songs of Friendship, Loss, and Healing

Dog-Kissed Tears: Songs of Friendship, Loss, and Healing. Lambert Zuidervaart. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, Resource Publications, 2010.

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“It is 4:00 a.m. the day after Rosa died. I am wide-awake from a brief and troubled sleep.”

Many people form deep attachments to their pets. Yet we wonder how to celebrate our friendships with them and how to grieve their death. Dog-Kissed Tears is a meditative memoir woven from life with Rosa. In stories that are funny, sad, moving, and honest, Lambert Zuidervaart links his attachment to his beloved dog and his love for human friends. Familiar songs help him trace his personal journey through the adoption, life, and death of a canine companion. As Lambert works through grief and longing for Rosa, he connects memories of childhood with self-discoveries in middle age. Dog-Kissed Tears weaves a lyrical narrative of friendship, loss, and healing. Its spiritual undercurrent is subtle but profound.

Social Philosophy after Adorno

Zuidervaart, Lambert. Social Philosophy after Adorno. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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This book examines what is living and what is dead in the social philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno, the most important philosopher and social critic in Germany after World War II. When he died in 1969, Adorno’s successors abandoned his critical-utopian passions. Habermas, in particular, rejected or ignored Adorno’s central insights on the negative effects of capitalism and new technologies upon nature and human life. In this book, Lambert Zuidervaart reclaims Adorno’s insights from Habermasian neglect, while taking up legitimate Habermasian criticisms. He also addresses the prospects for radical and democratic transformations of an increasingly globalized world. The book proposes a provocative social philosophy “after Adorno.”

Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure

Zuidervaart, Lambert. Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and Imaginative Disclosure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; paperback 2008.

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It is unfashionable to talk about artistic truth. Yet the issues traditionally addressed under that term have not disappeared. Indeed, questions concerning the role of the artist in society, the relationship between art and knowledge, and the validity of cultural interpretation have intensified. Lambert Zuidervaart challenges current intellectual fashions by proposing a new critical hermeneutics of artist truth that engages with both analytic and continental philosophies and illuminates the contemporary cultural scene. People turn to the arts as a way of finding orientation in their lives, communities, and institutions. But philosophers, hamstrung by their own theories of truth, have been unsuccessful in accounting for this common feature in our lives. This book portrays artistic truth as a process of imaginative disclosure in which expectations of authenticity, significance, and integrity prevail. Understood in this way, truth becomes central to the aesthetic and social value of the arts.

The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy

The Arts, Community and Cultural Democracy. Edited by Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen. London: Macmillan Press; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. ICS Library: NX180 .S6 A773 1999 c.1-3

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This interdisciplinary and international collection explores the role of the arts in shaping contemporary religion and politics. The authors ask about the future of viable communities and democratic cultures in a postmodern world. They look for clues in artistic practices and institutions, and in their impact on how people create history and interpret texts. Part I (Politics of Culture) describes economic, technological and political barriers to cultural democracy and suggests how they can be overcome. Part II (Institutions of Art) examines the impact of these barriers on the arts and shows how contemporary artists and their communities can respond. Part III (Questions of Interpretation) investigates the role of creative interpretation in forming open communities and contesting illegitimate authority. Part IV (Creations of History) carries this investigation into the field of art history, illustrating how artists and art historians have addressed issues of communal identity and cultural democracy in various settings.

The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997; paperback 1999.

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Theodor W. Adorno died in 1969, and his last major work, Ästhetische Theorie, was published a year later. Only recently, however, have his aesthetic writings begun to receive sustained attention in the English-speaking world. This collect of essays is an important contribution to the discussion of Adorno’s aesthetics in Anglo-American scholarship.

The essays are organized around the twin themes of semblance and subjectivity. Whereas the concept of semblance, or illusion, points to Adorno’s links with Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the concept of subjectivity recalls his lifelong struggle with a philosophy of consciousness stemming from Kant, Hegel, and Lukács. Adorno’s elaboration of the two concepts takes many dialectical twists. Art, despite the taint of illusion that it has carried since Plato’s Republic, turns out in Adorno’s account of modernism to have a sophisticated capacity to critique illusion, including its own. Adorno’s aesthetics emphasizes the connection between aesthetic theory and many other aspects of social theory. The paradoxical genius of Aesthetic Theory is that it turns traditional concepts into a theoretical cutting edge.

Pledges of Jubilee: Essays on the Arts and Culture

Pledges of Jubilee: Essays on the Arts and Culture. Edited by Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995.

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Produced in honor of Calvin G. Seerveld, this volume highlights Seerveld’s legacy as a scholar, teacher, and cultural leader even as it breaks new ground in the fields of cultural theory and aesthetics.

The introduction discusses the importance of Seerveld’s contributions to the study of the arts and culture, summarizes the essays in this collection, and relates them to themes in Seerveld’s work. The volume’s fourteen essays extend Seerveld’s efforts to new areas and probe the traditions on which his efforts rely. An open letter from Nicholas Wolterstorff and a bibliography of Seerveld’s writings begin and conclude the volume. United by the cross-fertilizing of theory, criticism, and history, and sharing a concern to help transform culture through Christian scholarship, all of these essays make a fitting tribute to Seerveld, a Reformational interdisciplinarian par excellence.

Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and the Electronic Media

Dancing in the Dark: Youth, Popular Culture, and the Electronic Media. Co-authored by Quentin J. Schultze, Roy M. Anker, James D. Bratt, William D. Romanowski, John William Worst, and Lambert Zuidervaart. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1991.

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“Believers of every faith will find Dancing in the Dark a source of revelation and provocation as they try to make sense of contemporary American culture. I daresay even skeptics will find light in its pages, and the beginning point for important conversations about how to create a more humane society.” —Bill Moyers

“This is an outstanding critical examination of the role of the electronic media in packaging popular culture for youthful consumption. By integrating insightful historical, sociological, artistic, and literary analysis, the authors of Dancing in the Dark avoid simplistic judgmental explanations. The relationship between youth and the electronic media is seen instead as a symbiotic one—the media need the youth market for their economic survival, while youth, who are in search for their own identity, need the guidance, nurture, and constructed reality which the media provide…. This book is must reading for youth workers, ministers, teachers, parents, or anyone who wants a better understanding of the effect of popular culture, contained in the electronic media, upon youth today.” —Jack Balswick, Fuller Theological Seminary

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Lambert Zuidervaart. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought series. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991; paperback 1993.

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Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is a vast labyrinth that anyone interested in modern aesthetic theory must at some time enter. Because of his immense difficulty—of the same order as Derrida’s—Adorno’s reception has been slowed by the lack of a comprehensive and comprehensible account of the intentions of his aesthetics. This is the first book to put Aesthetic Theory into context and outline the main ideas and relevant debates, offering readers a valuable guide through this huge, difficult, but revelatory work. Its extended argument is that, despite Adorno’s assumptions of autonomism, cognitivist, and aesthetic modernism, his idea of artistic truth content offers crucial insights for contemporary philosophical aesthetics.

The eleven chapters are divided into three parts: Context, Commentary, and Critique. The first part offers a brief biography, describes Adorno’s debates with Benjamin, Brecht, and Lukács, and outlines his philosophical program. The second is an interpretation of Adorno’s aesthetics, examining how he situates art in society, production, politics, and history and uncovering the social, political, and historical dimensions of his idea of artistic truth. The third part evaluates Adorno’s contributions by confronting it with the critiques of Peter Bürger, Fredric Jameson, and Albrecht Wellmer.