Zarte Empirie und erfahrendes Denken. Kracauer, Benjamin und Adorno als literarischphilosophische Zeitdiagnostiker

Essayism as a form of writing and a form of life

“… 22 22 Rolf Wiggershaus, who hints at essayistic elements in Wittgenstein’s and Adorno’s writing, explicitly highlights Wittgenstein’s reactive strategy too and sees it as part of his philosophical self‐concept (Wiggershaus, 2012, 94, 97). …”

“…Musil too conceives abstract and seemingly general concepts like “love” as a family of concrete and particular cases—the striking affinity of Musil’s example “forkness” and various particular types of fork (Musil, 1995, II.1278–1279) to Wittgenstein’s “games” as a network of “family resemblances” (Wittgenstein, 2009, §§66–67) has often been noted. While Adorno is rather critical of ordinary language, he too “shrinks back from the overarching concept” (Adorno, 1984, 164) and may, according to comparative studies, have more intersections than commonly assumed with Wittgenstein’s method of bringing words back from metaphysics to concrete instances of language use (see Demmerling, 1994, 137; Wiggershaus, 2012, 122–123).…”