The lecture on negative dialectics is the last of the four lectures from the years 1960 to 1966 that accompanied the development of Adorno's negative dialectics. Together with the three preceding lectures - Ontology and Dialectics, on the Doctrine of History and Freedom, and Metaphysics, Concepts, and Problems - it serves as both a propaedeutic and a self-commentary on Adorno's main work from 1966. In the variation of themes found in the book under the title "Introduction," Adorno unfolds in the lectures a "theory of spiritual experience," in which he attempts to characterize the philosophy that has always been in his mind. This theory was, for him, nothing less than a methodology of his philosophy as a whole.