@Metaphysician Undercover It occurs to me that you are thinking of Adorno's non-conceptual along the lines of Kant's manifold or Bergson's (naturally non-conceptual) intuition. I think this is because from the outset you are looking for the non-conceptual within consciousness. But Adorno doesn't have much time for that kind of non-conceptual, at least not on its own:

Bergson as well as Husserl, the standard-bearers of philosophical modernity, innervated this, but shrank away from it back into traditional metaphysics. Bergson created, by fiat, a different type of cognition for the sake of the non-conceptual. The dialectical salt was washed away in the undifferentiated flow of life; that which was materially solidified was dismissed as subaltern, instead of being understood along with its subalternity. Hatred of the rigid general concept produced a cult of irrational immediacy, of sovereign freedom amidst unfreedom. — Adorno, ND, Interest of Philosophy

Intuitions succeed, however, only desultorily. Every cognition, even Bergson’s own, requires the rationality which he so despised

Going back to the Solidified section...

For consciousness is at the same time the universal mediation and cannot leap, even in the données immédiate [French: given facts] which are its own, over its shadow. They are not the truth.

The non-conceptual is what philosophy aims for, as Adorno has explicitly stated. This is because it is the site of truth. And here he says that they, the given facts (by which he means the immediate, since he is contrasting it with "universal mediation"), "are not the truth". Therefore the non-conceptual is not the immediate.

Generally speaking, the idea that the very thing Adorno is interested in is something internal to the subject is the opposite of Adorno's meaning, to put it very mildly.

And this, that which extends beyond the concept, the nonconceptual, indeterminate, is shown to be what is immediate to the subject. — Metaphysician Undercover

But where? I don't see the evidence in those quotations.

Note what I said before about that section:

Here in the "Solidified" section, he makes the point that generally speaking what is given in immediacy and unrelfected-upon is not a good candidate for a fixed point, because these things are mediated in ways that are non-obvious. Immanent critique begins in concrete material reality, but it doesn't take it for what it appears to be; it must analyze the ways in which the concrete givens are mediated socially, historically, and via their "affinities". In other words, the material (the social) is indeed some kind of ground or fixed point, but it is not an unquestionable foundation.

On the other hand, even though the immediately given has to be assumed to be intrinsically problematic...

"Not every experience which appears to be primary is to be denied point-blank. "

So he is more subtle than might be expected. Recall the vital importance in intellectual experience of openness. The non-identical may be glimpsed at such moments of raw unreflective experience. — Jamal

The last point there sort of aligns with your current opinion, but I'm not sure I believe it any more.

Introduction: Qualitative Moment of Rationality

To yield to the object is so much as to do justice to its qualitative moments. The scientivistic objectification tends, in unity with the quantifying tendency of all science since Descartes, to flatten out qualities, to transform them into measurable determinations. Rationality itself is to an increasing extent equated more mathematico [Latin: in mathematical terms] with the capability of quantification. As much as this took into account the primacy of the triumphant natural sciences, so little does it lie in the concept of the ratio in itself.

Here he contrasts actually existing rationality with ratio, or "ratio in itself". The latter is reason or rationality in its widest or most originary sense, embracing both its meaning in classical Greek philosophy and also its even more expansive potential. It is reason before it was hijacked by quantification, i.e., before the Scientific Revolution made mathematics the paradigm of rational thought—or else it is reason as it could have been and could be. The important point about this is that quantification is not essential to reason: it does not "lie in the concept of ratio is itself."

It [quantification] is blinded not the least because it blocks itself off from qualitative moments as something which is for its part to be rationally thought. Ratio is not a mere sunâgôgê [Greek: gathering, assembly], the ascent from disparate phenomena [Erscheinungen] to the concept of its species. It demands just as much the capacity of distinction. Without it the synthetic function of thinking, abstractive unification, would not be possible: to aggregate what is the same means necessarily to separate it from what is different. This however is the qualitative; the thought which does not think this, is already cut off and at odds with itself.

The "qualitative moment" is indispensible to reason, so a reason centred on measurement, which forgets the importance of qualitative variation, goes wrong. Reason as such is not just about abstracting categories from phenomena. If it were, quantification would be an appropriate kind of rationality, because both categorization and quantification involve abstracting away from the particulars—to a general class or to a number, respectively.

The other side of synthesis—the synthesis required for the categorization of multiple phenomena under a single category—is the act of making distinctions, and this fundamentally qualitative. Felix and Tom are both cats, but Rover over there is not a cat.

Now, quantification may come along and claim that distinctions can be reduced to different measurements, but in doing so it is unknowingly parasitic on qualitative distinction.

Plato, the first to inaugurate mathematics as a methodological model, still gave powerful expression to the qualitative moment of the ratio at the beginning of the European philosophy of reason, by endowing sunâgôgê [Greek: gathering, assembly] next to diairesis [Greek: a dividing] with equal rights. They follow the commandment, that consciousness ought, in keeping with the Socratic and Sophistic separation of physei [Greek: by nature] and thesei [Greek: thesis], snuggle up to the nature of things, instead of proceeding with them arbitrarily. The qualitative distinction is thereby not only absorbed by the Platonic dialectic, into its doctrine of thinking, but interpreted as a corrective to the violence of quantification run amok. A parable from the Phaedros is unambiguous on this score. In it, the thought which arranges and nonviolence are balanced. One should, so runs the argument, in the reversal of the conceptual movement of the synthesis, “have the capacity, to divide into species corresponding to its nature, to carry out the cut according to the joints, and not attempt, after the manner of a bad cook, to shatter every member”.

This is a satisfying and rather counter-intuitive interpretation of Plato, not as the progenitor of a top-down rationalism contemptuous of particulars, but as a philosopher concerned with doing justice to "the nature of things".

The physei/thesei distinction in Plato seems to be primarily about language, but Adorno is using it in a wider sense to connote modes of reason.

Thesei (by convention): a mode of reason that imposes its theses on things
Physei (by nature): a mode of reason which is open to that which is objective and other than thought (this is where the snuggling comes in)

Adorno claims that Plato is careful not to bypass or dismiss the physei, because he keeps the two in balance. One must divide up nature, but not however one likes, i.e., not the way necessitated by the system one happens to be committed to already (i.e., "arbitrarily"), but rather follow the joints ("snuggle up to the nature of things").

That qualitative moment is preserved as a substrate of what is quantified in all quantification, which as Plato cautions should not be smashed to pieces, lest the ratio, by damaging the object which it was supposed to obtain, recoil into unreason. In the second reflection, the rational operation accompanies the quality as the moment of the antidote, as it were, which the limited first reflection of science withheld from philosophy, as suborned to this latter as it is estranged from it. There is no quantifiable insight which does not first receive its meaning, its terminus ad quem [Latin: end-point], in the retranslation into the qualitative. Even the cognitive goal of statistics is qualitative, quantification solely the means. The absolutization of the quantifying tendency of the ratio tallies with its lack of self-consciousness.

The first sentence demonstrates on a micro-scale the same argument as found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where it's shown that reason, in its very attempt to lead us out from under the spell of religion and superstition, nevertheless becomes myth again—this is the "recoil into unreason" on a larger scale. Here, the primacy of quantification mirrors this instrumentalization of reason.

The meaning of "first reflection" and "second reflection" seems clear enough now, but it tripped me up at first. The first reflection is science, or the mode of rationality characteristic of science, which does not question or know its presuppositions (including qualitative distinction), and just carries on in the conventional way—which for historical reasons happens to be the way of quantification. The second reflection is the philosophical mode, which is able to bring back the qualitative as an antidote to this quantification. The second reflection examines science's presuppositions and reveals that the qualitative is fundamental to thought and cannot be cast aside without going wrong.

Insistence on the qualitative serves this, rather than conjuring up irrationality. Later Hegel alone showed an awareness of this, without any retrospective-romantic inclinations, at a time to be sure when the supremacy of quantification was not yet so widespread as today. For him, in accordance with the scientific formulation, “the truth of quality [is] itself quantity”. But he cognized it in the System of Philosophy as a “determination indifferent to being, extraneous to it”. It retains its relevance in the quantitative; and the quantum returns back to the quality.

Hegel showed the way. He was not a Romantic irrationalist, harking back to a pure, pre-rational past or appealing to an intuitive engagement with reality. He held quality and quantity together in some kind of balance, or made them interdependent. So the goal is not to destroy quantification but to sublate it along with quality into a more balanced kind of reason.

I am not quite sure, but I think "the truth of quality [is] itself quantity" means that quality implies the possibility of quantification. Quality leads to quantification but the latter does not or should not just surpass and cancel out the former. In fact, "the quantum returns back to the quality" in their sublation, meaning that the measurement, or data point, or maybe unit of measurement, is revealed through this union with quality to be an aspect of that quality, or to be meaningful in a qualitative context.

Ontological anti-realism isn't the view that reality is constituted by the mind. You're thinking of Dummett's anti-realism.

Ontological anti-realists wouldn't try to settle the debate about whether the mind or the body takes precedence. Sometimes it's the kind of skepticism we find in Wittgenstein, which is that we don't have a vantage point from which to rule on the question. In continental philosophy, it's dialectics: that mind and body are thesis and anti-thesis. What's the synthesis? The Absolute, which was once another name for God. The fact that the Absolute inherits shades of divinity contributes to the illusion that it's something static. The only thing we'll ever know about the Absolute is the experience of following the contours of the mind, which is dialectics. It's very cool to be reminded of that. — frank

Yeah, ok :up:

I'm struggling to fit Adorno into my philosophical landscape, and this is another thread to it: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche all orbit around suffering, primarily with the aim of accepting it as part of life: and not just an unfortunate part, and definitely not a result of capitalism, but rather the primary engine of the psyche. Does this trivialize or denigrate suffering? Actually, I think it does. The philosophy of acceptance needs to be tempered by actually facing it. — frank

Exactly.

Adorno was an ontological anti-realist. He wouldn't take the concept, as you're using the word, and materiality to be anymore than a dichotomy that plays out in one kind of dialectical story. — frank

I disagree. He's not a naive realist, and he's not a realist in any other ordinary way, but I don't think he believes that reality is constituted by the mind. The priority of the object, the insistence that reality precedes and resists the mind (resists concepts and identity-thinking) despite its mediation, point to a realist thrust in Adorno's philosophy. Add to that his commitment to aspects of reality denigrated or ignored by other philosophers: the particular and contingent, and suffering. Suffering and the non-identical are not just "stories," and his anti-idealism gains its passion and commitment from this ethical orientation, namely that suffering has revealed the hubris and falsity of idealism.

But I see where you're coming from: we cannot break out of mediation. But Adorno believes this knowledge of our mediation can reveal mediation's crimes and misdemeanors.

The nonconceptual has been shown to be the immediate. — Metaphysician Undercover

For Adorno, this is very much not the case. Can you remember which passages made you so convinced of this?

I have not found any reason yet to think that Adorno thinks of identity thinking as good. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course not, I wouldn't make that claim.

really think that it is this tendency of yours, to categorize the nonconceptual as some form of external object, or the thing in itself, which misleads you. We have no need or warrant to look at external things, because they are completely ineffective in the realm of concepts. That is because the intuitions lie between, as the medium. And the intuitions are nonconceptual. So we have our conceptual and nonconceptual right here, without looking toward the thing in itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

I get it straight from the text.

Something else I meant to say is that Adorno very intentionally avoids defining the non-conceptual, because to do so would be to reify it, to solidify it into a fasifying concept. Of course, it is a concept, but he wants it to remain just a pointer, a bit like the thing in itself, which is a signpost without much positive content.

So in a way I was undermining his intention by trying to pin it down. The solution might be to just talk about what it means, without offering these meanings as definitive and comprehensive.

I've got a heavy arsenal and I'll choose the weapon according to intent and circumstances. Just kidding, we're not doing battle, nor even debating, just trying to assist each other to understand why we each, respectively, interpret the way that we do. You are guided by your principles, and I follow mine, and I think we both claim a better interpretation than the other. I'm willing to adapt if you show me how your principles are better suited for the purpose. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agreed! It seemed to me that rather than trying to understand, you were just automatically gainsaying anything I said, scoring points by fisking. Years of TPF will normalize that kind of behaviour, but it's not the best way. However, if that's your style I can deal with it :cool:

I think @frank is right to notice that you are forgetting the dialectical nature of Adorno's philosophy.

Adorno is arguing in ND, that what you are insisting on here, is a false premise. — Metaphysician Undercover

A principal point is that Identity thinking, identifying concept and object is a false principle. We need to dismiss it as faulty thinking. This means that we cannot refer to this principle in an attempt to understand the principles which Adorno is putting forward, because he has explicitly said that we need to reject this. This implies that we need to look at other principles for understanding the relationship between conceptual and nonconceptual. To fall back onto this identity principle is a mistake. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think what it comes down to—what must always be borne in mind with Adorno—is that concepts, and therefore identity-thinking, are both indispensible and problematic. This might even be the central idea of negative dialectics. He does not say that we should "dismiss" or "reject" concepts or identity-thinking. The difficulty he has been at pains to describe, especially in the lectures, is that negative dialectics seeks to understand the nonconceptual by means of the concept, which is to say, to circumvent the falsifying nature of the concepts, by means of concepts themselves. He is aware that this looks impossible on the surface.

I've found it useful to go back over what we've already read, because a lot of our current questions are, if not answered, at least clarified. In the section entitled "Dialectics not a standpoint," he admits that identity-thinking is fundamental to thought and cannot be completely avoided, only supplemented and corrected as we go.

The appearance [Schein] of identity dwells however in thinking itself as a pure form from within. To think means to identify

I interpreted this before as follows:

This word for appearance, Schein, is the same as in appearance/essence, and it similarly suggests illusion. Here, the illusion is that thought has exhausted the object, that mind and world are united completely. But this is an illusion that arises from within, from the way we think: to think means to identify. — Jamal

In his book Adorno Brian O'Connor makes the distinction between coercive and non-coercive identity-thinking:

In contrast to the coercive attitude – the one Adorno finds in modern society and in its philosophy – the non-coercive attitude attempts to close the gap between it and the object, without the authority of preconceived categories. — Brian O'Connor, Adorno, p78

Identity-thinking is the main villain precisely because it cannot really be dispensed with entirely.

Now that we understand that there is no such thing as an identity relation between concept and object, we can pursue the true nature of the concept. As an alternative, Adorno has proposed a relationship between concept and nonconceptual. — Metaphysician Undercover

According to what I've said so far, this here is a faulty argument. The implied premise, which you state elsewhere, is that if there is no such thing as a 100% successful identity relation, identity-thinking must be rejected. But this is not Adorno's view. So the focus on the relationship between the concept and the conconceptual is not an alternative to identity-thinking, but a way of pushing it through to breaking point, whereupon the nonconceptual might be revealed. But there is a kind of alternative, a supplement to coercive identity-thinking, which is mimesis, the kind of understanding embodied in art.

Incidentally, my impression is that despite appearances I don't think we're too far apart in our interpretations. But you just seem too eager to come down on one side or the other, and to reify and hypostasize and systematize all over the place with the result that the elements of Adorno's thought become frozen and static.

it does not erase the distinction, because many will still utilize it. however it demonstrates the distinction to be unsound, therefore one which we ought to reject. Philosophers like to instil categories, and these may become dogma or ideology, but Adorno is showing that this specific way of categorizing is unacceptable. To have a better understanding we need to reject it and accept a better way. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with the part about categories, dogma and ideology. In fact, it's deeper than that. Reification is essential to the genesis of concepts anyway, so from the outset concepts falsify their objects, making them prime material for ideology.

But I disagree with "unacceptable". What he finds unacceptable is not identity-thinking per se, but its dominance and coerciveness in modern thought.

The subject is the object. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't really understand this part of your post. The subject as object is a moment in the practice of negative dialectics, especially since in the "Privilege" section he emphasizes the importance of the philospher's self-examination—but you seem to want to say more than that.

I recommend you have a look again at the "Disenchantment of the Concept" section. It helped me. It has some relevant nuggets:

The requirement that philosophy must operate with concepts is no more to be made into a virtue of this priority than, conversely, the critique of this virtue is to be the summary verdict over philosophy. Meanwhile, the insight that its conceptual essence would not be its absolute in spite of its inseparability is again mediated through the constitution of the concept; it is no dogmatic or even naively realistic thesis. Concepts such as that of being in the beginning of Hegel’s Logic indicate first of all that which is emphatically non-conceptual; they signify, as per Lask’s expression, beyond themselves. It is in their nature not to be satisfied by their own conceptuality, although to the extent that they include the non-conceptual in their meaning, they tend to make this identical to itself and thereby remain entangled in themselves. Their content is as immanent in the intellectual sense as transcendent in the ontical sense to such. By means of the self- consciousness of this they have the capacity of discarding their fetishism. Philosophical self-reflection assures itself of the non- conceptual in the concept. Otherwise this latter would be, after Kant’s dictum, null, ultimately no longer the concept of something and thereby void.

Anyway, concept/thing, subject/object, and mediation seem to be covered extensively later, so maybe we should hold off getting too deep into it now.

Please start a new discussion for that, because it doesn’t belong here. This thread is for those who are reading Negative Dialectics to discuss the book.

EDIT: Thanks

So you tried the Kantian angle, and now it's Marxism. What will you be throwing at me next?

The ontological status of concepts is a red herring. It doesn't follow from the fact that concepts are part of the material world that there is no legitimate distinction to be made between concepts and the world. ND is full of the distinction and utterly relies on it. This doesn't imply a mind vs. matter ontology. One can maintain a materialist ontology, where both concepts and objects are part of a single, material world, and still insist on a functional or critical distinction between the act of identifying (the concept) and that which is to be identified (the object).

You draw the wrong conclusion from Adorno's materialism. The point of it isn't to collapse the distinction between a concept and what it represents, but to enable a critique of the relationship between them.

concepts are already a part of the material reality. Therefore your argument is not valid because "the material reality to which concepts are applied" includes concepts themselves, so that if he is talking about material reality, we cannot automatically conclude that he is not talking about concepts. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, concepts are part of the material world. But this does not mean that when we use a concept, we are talking about the concept itself. This is to confuse a tool with the object it is being used on.

When we want to talk about the concept, which is also part of material reality, then we will take care to make that clear. It's the difference between "capitalism goes back to the 16th century" and "capitalism is concept that goes back to Adam Smith". In the former statement, the concept of capitalism is being used as a tool, but the fact that the tool is also material does not magically transform the object of analysis into the tool itself.

If we could not make this distinction, Adorno's whole cricial project would be dead in the water, because he could no longer say that the conventional concept of capitalism fails to capture the reality of the economic system.

The concept is a kind of material object that attempts to subjugate others. The non-conceptual and non-identical are what resists or escapes such domination.

Wow, that's exactly the criticism I've leveled at you above. You are describing Marxist philosophy from fundamental idealist categories, the separation between mind and material reality. So I think it is actually you who is stubbornly upholding the idealist ontological perspective, while trying to understand Marxist materialism. — Metaphysician Undercover

It should now be clear that I'm not promoting any form of idealism. But I've certainly simplified Adorno to make my points. The 16th-century economic system did not have a "capitalism" nametag. Our historical concept of capitalism came later, and was used to organize, understand, and indeed, partly constitute that past as a specific object of analysis. This mediation is where identity thinking happens, e.g., the modern concept can easily impose itself retrospectively, smoothing over the non-conceptual particularity and internal contradictions of that historical reality.

But this mediation, or "partial constitution," does not erase the fundamental distinction. On the contrary. The goal of negative dialectics is to use the concept to push against its own mediating function, to expose the gap between our conceptual "capitalism" and the heterogeneous, non-identical reality of the 16th-century economic life it tries to capture. To say the object is conceptually mediated is not to say it's conceptually created. Conflating the two is what allows the concept to dominate the object apparently without remainder.

So I'm not promoting a simplistic dualist interpretation. I'm basing things on Adorno's underlying dialectical maintenance of subject vs. object, a "separation" (but not an ontological one) which is both true and false:

The separation of subject and object is both real and semblance. True, because in the realm of cognition it lends expression to the real separation, the rivenness of the human condition, the result of a coercive historical process; untrue, because the historical separation must not be hypostatized, not magically transformed into an invariant. This contra- diction in the separation of subject and object is imparted to epistemol- ogy. Although as separated they cannot be thought away, the ψεῦδος [falsity?] of the separation is manifested in their being mutually mediated, object by subject, and even more and differently, subject by object. As soon as it is fixed without mediation, the separation becomes ideology, its normal form. Mind then arrogates to itself the status of being absolutely inde- pendent—which it is not: mind’s claim to independence announces its claim to domination. — On Subject and Object, from Critical Models

Introduction: Privilege of Experience (ii)

When Adorno uses the term "experience" recall that the introduction is meant to be an account of intellectual/spiritual/philosophical experience, the experience necessary to retain critical freedom in a debased society.

In sharp contrast to the usual scientific ideal, the objectivity of dialectical cognition needs more subject, not less. Otherwise philosophical experience shrivels. But the positivistic spirit of the epoch is allergic to this. Not everyone is supposed to be capable of such experience. It is held to be the prerogative of individuals, determined through their natural talents and life-history; to demand this as the condition of cognition, so runs the argument, would be elitist and undemocratic.

The critical theorist is a radical democrat who wants to make the world better for everyone, but at the same time requires a level of philosophical engagement that is highly demanding of individuals; only a privileged few can satisfy these demands. What wants to be democratic is necessarily undemocratic—or so it seems ("so runs the argument").

It is to be conceded that not everyone in fact is capable of the same sort of philosophical experiences, in the way that all human beings of comparable intelligence ought to be able to reproduce experiments in the natural sciences or mathematical proofs, although according to current opinion quite specific talents are necessary for this. In any case the subjective quotient of philosophy, compared with the virtually subjectless rationality of a scientific ideal which posits the substitutability of everyone with everyone else, retains an irrational adjunct. It is no natural quality. While the argument pretends to be democratic, it ignores what the administered world makes of its compulsory members. Only those who are not completely modeled after it can intellectually undertake something against it. The critique of privilege becomes a privilege: so dialectical is the course of the world. It would be fictitious to presume that everyone could understand or even be aware of all things, under historical conditions, especially those of education, which bind, spoon-feed and cripple the intellectual forces of production many times over; under the prevailing image-poverty; and under those pathological processes of early childhood diagnosed but by no means changed by psychoanalysis. If this was expected, then one would arrange cognition according to the pathic features of a humanity, for whom the possibility of experience is driven out through the law of monotony, insofar as they possessed it in the first place. The construction of the truth according to the analogy of the volonté de tous [French: popular will] – the most extreme consequence of the subjective concept of reason – would betray everyone of everything which they need, in everyone’s name.

It's true that only a few are able to engage in such experience, but this is not so much an elite privilege born of natural talent or good breeding, but is the tragic result of an administered society that leaves so little room for independent thought that only a few, by chance, make it through with their wits in order. The argument against Adorno's elitism "pretends to be democratic," purportedly arguing on behalf of the people, but what it's really doing is arguing on behalf of the administered society, taking the debased state of intellectual culture as the democratic standard. Thus the democratic objection is quite dangerous, since it attacks the very thing—independent, original critical thought—that might help diagnose society's problems correctly:

The construction of the truth according to the analogy of the volonté de tous [French: popular will] – the most extreme consequence of the subjective concept of reason – would betray everyone of everything which they need, in everyone’s name.

You don't take a vote on what is true. This notion actually stems from the relativism of the subjective concept of reason. The individual is the measure of truth, therefore the collective of all these individuals is the ultimate arbiter. The people themselves are thus betrayed by the idea that the popular will can decide what is and is not so.

So Adorno has redescribed the argument against elitism like this:

The administered society, the capitalist system, and narrow scientific and technical training have together produced stunted minds, conditioned to accept the status quo. But then they say that the statements of the intellectual should be acceptable to these minds, i.e., they should fit with standard lines of thought, must not be erratic and eccentric, etc. These, they say, are all signs of elitism. So critical thinking is automatically disqualified and conformist thinking prevails, seen as true, reasonable, realistic etc.

To those who have had the undeserved good fortune to not be completely adjusted in their inner intellectual composition to the prevailing norms – a stroke of luck, which they often enough have to pay for in terms of their relationship to the immediate environment – it is incumbent to make the moralistic and, as it were, representative effort to express what the majority, for whom they say it, are not capable of seeing or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see. The criterion of truth is not its immediate communicability to everyone. The almost universal compulsion to confuse the communication of that which is cognized with this former, all too often ranking the latter as higher, is to be resisted; while at present, every step towards communication sells truth out and falsifies it. In the meantime, everything to do with language labors under this paradox.

He insists on the necessity for independent critical thinking carried out by a lucky few, but insists that they are just that: lucky. Adorno is, then, elitist in a certain sense, but radically democratic at heart.

Still, it does look pretty elitist: it's incumbent on the intellectuals to think on behalf of the benighted masses, who cannot do it themselves, such are their crippled, pathological minds. On the other hand, this is just an uncharitable description of something that's natural and unavoidable, or perhaps rather morally imperative, in present conditions: insofar as any society-wide social movement needs intellectuals, they will be few in number and must try to focus and distil the thoughts and feeling of the non-intellectuals, and lead the way.

The criterion of truth is not its immediate communicability to everyone.

Adorno is facing up to the following problem: given that intellectuals have a responsibility to think for the general population, how will they communicate it to them, especially considering that people are structurally conditioned not to see the truth? Easily digestible, dumbed-down info nuggets are easy to communicate, but not up to the task of conveying difficult truths.

Adorno says there is a tendency to confuse communicability with truth, and this has to be resisted. But he goes further:

at present, every step towards communication sells truth out and falsifies it

This seems hyperbolically pessimistic, but I don't believe he means it quite like that. I think he means to bring out the deep conflict or "paradox" as he puts it: communicative language distorts the truth, but such language is necessary to convey the truth.

Obviously this goes back to what we were saying about his difficult prose style. In this section, he justifies it. (Some might counter that other intellectuals in the Frankfurt School, particularly Horkheimer and Marcuse, were able to write clearly and accessibly while effectively communicating the same or similar truths.).

Later on, after the glimpse of his theory of truth, which I've already covered, he returns to the theme of elitism:

Elitist arrogance has not the least place in philosophical experience. It must give an account of how much, according to its own possibility in the existent, it is contaminated with the existent, with the class relationship. In it, the chances which the universal desultorily affords to individuals turn against that universal, which sabotages the universality of such experience. If this universality were established, the experience of all particulars would thus be transformed and would cast aside much of the contingency which distorted them until that point, even where it continues to stir. Hegel’s doctrine, that the object would reflect itself in itself, survives its idealistic version, because in a changed dialectics the subject, disrobed of its sovereignty, virtually becomes thereby the reflection-form of objectivity.

"Elitist arrogance has not the least place in philosophical experience" because philosophical experience depends on a humility with regard to its own abilities, for example an awareness of the subject's own class interests. More plainly, philosophical experience demands self-reflection: e.g., what social and historical factors have shaped my perspective? Answering questions like these is to reveal how one's philosophical practice is "contaminated with the existent". The intellectuals, while able to see a bit deeper than others to see how the social totality conditions our thoughts, do not float free of the world like all-knowing guiding angels; they are as mediated and conditioned as everyone else.

Put differently, true elitists believe that in their philosophical experience they have a sovereign subjectivity, pure and uncontaminated and above the herd. Adorno, in contrast, says the philosophers must start with the knowledge that they are already contaminated, and work out how. Then, in negative dialectics...

the subject, disrobed of its sovereignty, virtually becomes thereby the reflection-form of objectivity.

Last bit:

The less that theory comes across as something definitive and all-encompassing, the less it concretizes itself, even with regard to thinking. It permits the dissolution of the systemic compulsion, relying more frankly on its own consciousness and its own experience, than the pathetic conception of a subjectivity which pays for its abstract triumph with the renunciation of its specific content would permit. This is congruent with that emancipation of individuality borne out of the period between the great idealisms and the present, and whose achievements, in spite of and because of the contemporary pressure of collective regression, are so little to be remanded in theory as the impulses of the dialectic in 1800. The individualism of the nineteenth century no doubt weakened the objectifying power of the Spirit – that of the insight into objectivity and into its construction – but also endowed it with a sophistication, which strengthens the experience of the object.

Fascinating stuff. It turns out that the privilege of experience is not just a stroke of personal luck but is an achievement of modernity: the possibility of this non-conformist kind of philosophical thought that the world needs was generated by bourgeois individualism, especially the hundred years or so of stability and progress that led up to the First World War (and Adorno's birth a few years before that).

But there are two sides to it, of course.

I interpreted Adorno differently. I don't want to drag the thread through parts of the text that have already been covered, but just to explain, these passages made me think Adorno was using or alluding to the specialized meaning Hegel gave to the word concept: — frank

I think our views can probably be made to come out as consistent. :up:

But I see your description of sense (a) as somewhat confused. Yes, it is what is heterogenous to thought, and what is of interest to ND, but economics systems are not an example, as these are conceptual. The question of "physical objects" is even more difficult, and I'll address this below. — Metaphysician Undercover

We've been here before. Remember that what we're doing is trying to understand what Adorno means. It's clear that he does not think that when we talk about economic systems, we are talking about concepts; he thinks we are talking about a material reality to which concepts are applied (the response of "material reality itself is just a concept!" is equally inappropriate, an intrusion of idealist dogma). You are confusing the map with the territory. It's about economic systems, not "economic systems". Concepts like "economic system" are not just abstract categories; they're crystallizations of real social relations, and the nonconceptual is the lived experience of those relations, including, say, exploitation and homelessness. Or are exploitation and homelessness just concepts too?

I used the concept of the thing-in-itself on the condition that ...

... you can imagine this to be immanent to experience, decoupled from Kant's formal apparatus, and potentially determinate — Jamal

You were unable to do that, and fell back on rehearsing Kant's formal doctrine.

If Adorno is Kantian — Metaphysician Undercover

I didn't say Adorno is Kantian simpliciter, so your Kantian critique is misguided. But even if we stick with Kant, you are wrong when you say that ...

the thing in itself is only a concept. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a basic misunderstanding. For Kant, the thing-in-itself is not only a limit concept, but is also a real presupposition, a necessary posit of things. Otherwise, appearances would be mere illusion. Appearances are of something.

Generally you are being pedantic, failing to take my analogy in the spirit it was intended, and stubbornly upholding an idealist viewpoint while trying to understand an anti-idealist philosopher.

The non-conceptual is whatever isn't conceptual, which comes down mainly to two specific overlapping meanings: (a) it's what philosophical thought is properly directed towards, also known in ND as what is heterogeneous to thought—i.e., particular things, like physical objects, economic systems, works of art, etc.; or (b) it's whatever eludes conceptual capture. Sense (b) is equivalent to the meaning of the non-identical.

Adorno also refers to the non-conceptual within the concept. This more obscure aspect of it might be what @frank and @NotAristotle are thinking of. I think it's a way of describing (b) while emphasizing that the inadequacy of the attempted conceptual capture is intrinsic to the concept.

But I see that as a consequence of the basic concept<->(non-conceptual) object relationship. A good way to think about that is to see the non-conceptual as the thing in itself, if you can imagine this to be immanent to experience, decoupled from Kant's formal apparatus, and potentially determinate. In my opinion, Adorno is as Kantian as he is Hegelian, and often more so. You see it especially here.

How are we to define ideology? — NotAristotle

This post from earlier in the discussion might help:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/990809

Introduction: Privilege of Experience

The point of this section is to defend, against charges of elitism, the necessity for a difficult, non-conformist philosophy, as the only route to truth in social philosophy in the context of late capitalism and the administered society. What really stood out to me was not the main argument itself—which I find myself nodding along with in complete agreement—but the short detour that amounts to Adorno's theory of truth:

Truth is objective and not plausible. So little as it immediately falls into anyone’s lap, and so much as it requires subjective mediation, what counts for its imbrication is what Spinoza all too enthusiastically proclaimed for the specific truth: that it would be the index of itself. It loses its privileged character, which rancor holds against it, by not allowing itself to be talked out of the experiences to which it owes itself, but rather allows itself to enter into configurations and explanatory contexts which help make it evident or convict it of its inadequacies.

"Truth is objective and not plausible" is a very Adornian thing to say, but I think the meaning is clear. Truth is not a matter of personal or popular opinion; and at the same time it is not easy, reasonable, intuitive, or immediately acceptable, because it has to break through the ideological shell of common sense. And such difficult truths do not just "fall into anyone's lap."

Rather, they require "subjective mediation," the working through, by means of subjective application, of the material at hand in all its multifarious connectedness. (To this extent Adorno always agreed with Kant that objectivity is found via subjectivity)

what counts for its [i.e., truth's] imbrication is what Spinoza all too enthusiastically proclaimed for the specific truth: that it would be the index of itself

An imbrication is a pattern of overlapping scales, tiles, whatever. Thorne and Menda have "woven mesh". The idea is that truth is a matter of a kind of interweaving, so it's something like the coherence theory of truth. Adorno is saying that the truth is finally revealed through subjective mediation almost like Spinoza's self-evident truths that have no need of an external standard for verification, but in the case of negative dialectics it's more like the way that a certainty, for Wittgenstein, sometimes finds its place by fitting into your picture of the world.

So I see the imbrication like this:

141. When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.)

142. It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support. — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Adorno is combining this kind of insight with that of Spinoza:

[...] I know that I understand the true philosophy. If you ask in what way I know it, I answer: In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles: that this is sufficient, will be denied by no one whose brain is sound, and who does not go dreaming of evil spirits inspiring us with false ideas like the true. For the truth is the index of itself and of what is false. — Spinoza to Albert Burgh

Spinoza was "all too enthusiastic," and yet there's an important insight there, which is basically what Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" is all about.

(It should be added that Wittgenstein and Adorno are far apart here in some ways too: for Adorno, the light dawning over the whole is no peaceful sunrise)

Yes, it definitely cleared up some things for me.

Very nice summary :up:

Seems to me that he explicitly defines the content as the non-conceptual — NotAristotle

Yes, he certainly does think that the non-conceptual is the proper object of study, which is to say content, of philosophy. And the non-conceptual can present itself immediately or at the end of an analysis of the thing's mediations.

What does AP refer to? — NotAristotle

Analytic philosophy.

Oh yeah! That was interesting. I even contributed a few posts myself, so maybe you're right and I heard it there.

I used it in one of my old OP's — Moliere

Interesting. What was that about?

I found the Noto/Sakamoto album because I was having a look through the releases by the Ensemble Modern. Another one I liked:

The central issue seems to be a criticism against Hegel's categories needing to be both emergent and logically invariant. Adorno see these two descriptions as incompatible. So the section tries to untangle becoming, changing, evolving, from the invariant, immutable, eternal concepts of idealism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right. Hegel can't have it both ways: if we want to do justice to the contingency and emergence, we can't also hold onto the a priori invariants.

He makes the distinction between concept and content. It appears to me, that the concept is always mediated, and content is immediate, also the medium. This puts solidity, being "that which holds together", and the ensuing whole, the concrete, as something mediated, conceptualized, or provided by conception. Content on the other hand is nebulous, and this leaves subjective experience, along with that which is immediate, content, in the strange situation of being unable to understand itself. "That which is most subjective of all, the immediately given, eludes its grasp." — Metaphysician Undercover

Surely the non-immediacy, i.e., the mediatedness, of content is the whole point of this section: the appearance is the bad positive and behind it lies some internally contradictory thing, which I take to be the content. Despite this terminological difference I suspect we agree more than disagree.

What do we even mean by "content"? The content is surely what Adorno is referring to with "the thing" here:

[Explicitly idealistic philosophy] hides in the substruction of something primary, almost indifferent as to which content, in the implicit identity of concept and thing ...

Adorno, being interested in the the non-identity of concept and thing, reveals through the analysis of mediation a different thing (different from the appearance). So the content here is not something like sense-data or the given, i.e., the content of experience in AP terms, but the content of philosophy (philosophy as it should be, i.e., negative dialectics).

It takes the unmediated immediacy, the formations, which society and its development present to thought, tel quel [French: as such], in order to reveal their mediations through analysis, according to the measure of the immanent difference of the phenomena to what they claim, for their own part, to be.

So I think we'd be close to a good interpretation if we either say that the things as revealed in all their mediatedness are the content, or the mediations themselves are the content.

In the final paragraph then, he attempts at an explanation of how the whole, as the concept, and mediated, emerges out of the immediate, the content. The two extremes, the immediate content, and the invariant concept, are described as "moments" rather than as "grounds". The supposed invariance however, is revealed as an artificial, or even false invariance, being "produced", created. We can see that the "immutability is the deception of prima philosophia", and the concepts gain the appearance of invariance when "they pass over into ideology", where they are solidified as part of the whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Notice the solidity is only an appearance, because if it were true, dialectics could have no effect. So referring back to the beginning of the section, this is why solidity, and even the whole itself, are the bad positive. — Metaphysician Undercover

:up:

Any links to the whole album? — Moliere

https://open.spotify.com/album/1PokAFXFycM6g47eIQ9jIn?si=UcL2cSGeR0G11PvYE74u6A

I was inspired to relisten to Ground Zero - Consume Red by your song: — Moliere

I'm 25 minutes in and the drums have just entered the battle. :up:

I have a vertiginous feeling that I've heard it before, or even used to be kind of into it, and I've since forgotten it. :chin:

I intend on revisiting and trying to do a paragraph-by-paragraph breakdown as I've done before. — Moliere

I look forward to it. That said, I feel I got a pretty good feel for it in the end. I sometimes get the feeling with Adorno that he takes unnecessarily circuitous routes to get to relatively simple points. Although that, of course, is a feeling to be suspicious of. Because it's not just "the point" that's important for him to convey, but the intellectual experience, i.e., the process.

A note on style, given your conversation with NotAristotle: I've noticed in my disentangling that many of the sentences have two sentences parsed into clauses such that we must think of two ideas within the same sentence. In my disentangling I had to prioritize one or the other thought -- so it made me think that the density of the sentences is very much the point since he didn't want to give priority to a Thesis over an Antithesis, but rather talk about them in relation to one another for the purpose of dialectical reflection. — Moliere

Absolutely, that's what stood out when I tried to see a pattern in his particular variety of difficulty. It's what I was getting at here , when I said he squashes thoughts together that we would normally expect to be presented one after the other. My reworded version in that post basically just splits it into three sentences. Of course, it's that linearity that he tries to avoid, as I think you're saying too.

:party: I love the whole album.

Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto.

All right. Assuming you are at no point finally persuaded by the cumulative effect of Adorno's analyses, we may have to revisit this quagmire in the future.

Introduction: Dialectics and the Solidified

I was confused by this section until I looked at the alternative translations of Festen: fixed. Empiricism and phenomenology take the fixed to be the passively apprehended immediate givens, whereas for Hegel—who famously criticizes faith in immediate givens at the beginning of the Phenomenology—the fixed turns out to be the subject in the guise of Absolute Spirit. Adorno rejects both. He agrees with Hegel that sense-certainty is unreliable—it represents the "bad positive"—but faults him for losing sight of the concrete and producing a merely formal, abstract system in which the fixed thing is a projection of the subject.

In lecture 7 he spoke very unflatteringly of Krug's quill, calling the objection "idiotic," but here he is unembarrassed to be entirely on Krug's side:

In Hegel, of course, the primacy of the subject over the object remains undisputed, despite his many assertions to the contrary. It is the semi-theological word Geist that masks this primacy—Geist, spirit, mind, which cannot help but recall the subjectivity of the individual. The price that Hegel’s logic pays for this is its excessively formal character. Obliged by its own concept to be substantive and content-laden, it, nonetheless, in its striving to be everything at once, both metaphysics and a theory of categories, expels from itself all determinate entities, the very things that could legitimize this approach. It is in this respect not so very far from Kant and Fichte, whom Hegel tirelessly condemns as the peddlars of abstract subjectivity. For its part, the science of logic is abstract in the most basic sense; the reduction of thought to universal concepts eliminates in advance their contrary term, the concreteness that the idealistic dialectic prides itself on carrying and developing. Mind wins its battle against an absent enemy. Hegel’s sneering remarks on the subject of contingent existence, the “Krugian quill” that philosophy can and shall be too lofty to deduce from itself, is a caught-you-red-handed. Hegel’s logic was only ever interested in the concept as medium and refused to reflect on the relationship of the concept to its contents in anything but the most general way; it was thus assured in advance of the absolute character of the concept, despite undertaking to prove that very point. — Thorne & Menda translation

A by-now-familiar point: Hegel's philosophy, though like all other philosophy it has its proper object and content in the non-conceptual, forgets about it and treats its own concepts as its content, becoming thereby merely formal and abstract.

This talk of a fixed point also goes back to my discussion with @Metaphysician Undercover. I suggested there that material reality could stand as the ground in Adorno's thought. Here in the "Solidified" section, he makes the point that generally speaking what is given in immediacy and unrelfected-upon is not a good candidate for a fixed point, because these things are mediated in ways that are non-obvious. Immanent critique begins in concrete material reality, but it doesn't take it for what it appears to be; it must analyze the ways in which the concrete givens are mediated socially, historically, and via their "affinities". In other words, the material (the social) is indeed some kind of ground or fixed point, but it is not an unquestionable foundation.

On the other hand, even though the immediately given has to be assumed to be intrinsically problematic...

Not every experience which appears to be primary is to be denied point-blank.

So he is more subtle than might be expected. Recall the vital importance in intellectual experience of openness. The non-identical may be glimpsed at such moments of raw unreflective experience.

I found this section difficult, and what I've said here avoids getting caught up in the details, which I didn't really untangle—so I'd be interested in what others think.

Lastly, I will just comment on the prose itself. I find it remarkably difficult. Maybe even intentionally opaque? There are a lot of allusions I do not understand and the method of expression is not in any way explicit or easy to elucidate. Still, I appreciate the level of interpretation the text allows because of its complexity. — NotAristotle

This is something that Adorno put a lot of effort into, so basically yes, it’s meant to be hard. Adorno was deeply suspicious of the fixation on “clarity” seen especially in Anglo philosophy. He thought that clarity, under the guise of neutrality and transparency, delivered pre-digested ideas along pre-defined rails, and he thought this was part of the “administered society,” representing the bureaucratization of philosophy and individual insight. He believed that clarity was conformity.

He also saw clarity and accessibility as features of the culture industry: they enable cultural products to be easily standardized and therefore commodified, and they encourage passive consumption. His prose style rebels against this; I think we can agree that he succeeded in preventing his work from being easily packaged and disseminated in mass culture. And it's certainly the case that you can't read ND without working through it—for me, I can't understand a passage of ND until I begin to type it in my own words or respond, in writing, sentence by sentence. Just reading it like a regular book is impossible.

Personally, I think he was an amazing prose stylist and I even enjoy the particularly difficult prose of ND, precisely for the way it makes me slow down and then rewards me with startling insights and arguments once I've distentangled it.

BUT! It should be said that ND is particularly hard compared to his other work, and this might be a translation issue. It's standard in scholarship now to use the Redmond translation, as we are doing, but it's clunky and inelegant in a way that I suspect the original is not, and it hasn't even been properly published—no decent official English translation, in proper book form, is available.

In contrast, the prose of Minima Moralia is often stunningly brilliant.

For a much cuddlier and more conversational Adorno, his lectures are good, as are his popular essays and radio broadcasts.

Anyway, in this thread I've already said a few things about his prose, which you might find interesting:

as we approach ND itself, I am thinking about Adorno's style of presentation. It's a fact that his style is very deliberate, something he was always conscious of, and something he was forever pre-occupied by (because he didn't separate form and content). I think it will help to know how to read him, which is not always a matter of finding an answer to "what is he trying to say?" at the level of a paragraph but of keeping multiple descriptions, analogies, etc. in mind over the course of the work.

One aspect is his attitude to definition. It's a principle of his method that in his writing he avoids definitions of concepts, instead circling around them, or approaching them from different angles. (More than that, I suppose he does not even regard them as fixed points that can be honed in on)

Even though these lectures were recorded, not written, I think we've already seen this principle at work. We've seen him going over similar ground repeatedly, never satisfied with a single metaphor or encapsulation. — Jamal

But this section goes deeper than that, since he is talking about his own mode of expression, i.e., it's meta. Expression in language that aims to uncover reality in the way described above should itself enact dialectics in its mode of expression. Thus, we get Adorno's way of writing: style as substance, form as content (I'm glad we've finally got back to this topic, which I think I mentioned on the first page of this thread). Rather than obscurantism, this is the fullest stringency (EDIT: or maybe better put, the best balance between expression and stringency). He does not want to explain and describe, but to performatively expose. The same applies to negative dialectics as applies to screenwriting: show don't tell. — Jamal

Before diving into a more comfortable rewording, it's worth stopping to wonder why he wrote like this. It is initially quite annoying. I don't think it's an intentionally inflated pomposity or pretentiousness, although it reads a bit like it is. It's a serious attempt to performatively express content in form. Difficult substance, difficult style. The idea, I suppose, is that the mode of clarity and linearity would be too comfortable to elicit proper intellectual engagement. Personally, I'm 50/50 on this issue. Sceptical but also sympathetic. In a way, this kind of writing is easier than a plainer kind of style, because you don't have to constantly remind yourself to slow down as you do when reading, say, Plato; it's forced on you. — Jamal

Adorno's style is mimesis in action, showing in the form of his writing the real contradictions of the world. — Jamal

Do you think Adorno talks about Marxism as if it were objectively true? If so, why? Given the terrible things done under Stalin during Adorno's lifetime, does it really make sense to read Adorno as a Marxist? Or, does criticality towards capitalism not imply Marxism?

This seems to be a tension inherent in the book; ND rejects abstract theorizing, why is Marxism the exception to this rule? Or, do you disagree that Marxism is theoretical and abstract? — NotAristotle

Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School were deeply affected by Stalinism. It was one of the things that convinced them that Marxism had to be revised. It was part of the catastrophic failure of socialism that critical theory was meant to help to fix.

What we do see in Adorno's work throughout his life is a commitment to (a) the Marxist theory of exploitation; (b) Marx's theory of commodity fetishism; and (c) the goal of emancipation. It does seem that Adorno treats these (the first two) unquestioningly as successful results of social science—and as fundamental and indispensable categories for a critical theory of society—in the same way as he takes for granted Freud's identification of the unconscious as the primary driver of behaviour.

But he rejects a few things too: (a) the inevitability of revolution and the teleology of history (Marx himself was ambivalent on this but it is certainly a feature of traditional Marxism); (b) the proletariat as the revolutionary subject and the gravedigger of capitalism; (c) techno-optimism: Marx and Marxism celebrated man's mastery of nature far too much for Adorno's taste; (d) economic determinism and the base-superstructure model, far too simplistic for Adorno.

At this point I'm not going to look at why he felt he could rely so completely on those Marxian theories that he did agree with, without ever arguing for them, but it's a fair question.

It occurs to me that rather than induction or deduction, there are two alternative ways of characterizing his reasoning: abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation) and transcendental argument. In fact, looking at the SEP entry for transcendental arguments, I notice the suggestion has been made that transcendental arguments are abductive rather than deductive as they are commonly taken to be. This means that abductive reasoning and transcendental argumentation might be two ways of describing the same process of reasoning.

In a transcendental argument you infer what must be the case for this fact, whatever it is, to be possible, and thereby determine its necessary conditions. In abductive reasoning you ask what hypothesis best explains the fact. You can see how these can go together.

So, I aim to answer this...

But this implies that we ought to be able to analyze and judge the inductive reasoning involved in concluding the "preestablished whole". — Metaphysician Undercover

...with a couple of examples of Adorno's reasoning.


1. The entrepreneur

Adorno begins with the fact of objectively necessary false consciousness: a capitalist must believe in a fair exchange between himself and the worker, even though this belief is objectively false. The transcendetal question is "What must be the case for this illusion to be—not just possible, but necessary?" Or "What must be the case for the maintenance of this paradox to be possible?" And here is where the abductive reasoning comes in to hypothesize the social whole as the best explanation, completing the transcendental argument by identifying the conditions. (Obviously this is just an outline)


2. Free time

Adorno gave a radio lecture entitled "Free Time" in 1969, published these days in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, among other places, and also available online on its own as a PDF. The fact to be explained is that free time, supposedly a realm of freedom, is experienced as boring, compulsory, and empty, e.g., obligatory hobbies, regimented vacations. The common views are either to shrug and say that's just what free time is like—an unproblematically mindless recovery from work; or to put it on the individual, who fails to make proper use of their free time, perhaps because people are just bad at leisure, or some such notion.

Here is where the immanent analysis begins, which identifies a contradiction, namely that free time is "shackled to its contrary" to the extent that it is experienced as unfreedom. The transcendental question then is "What must be the case for this specific, systematic perversion of free time to be possible? How can the state of freedom be experienced as a state of unfreedom?"

Reasoning abductively, the hypothesis that makes this fact intelligible is that free time is not an autonomous sphere as its name might suggest, but is entirely determined by the "totality of societal conditions," which holds sway outside work as much as in it, particularly since so-called free time is required by capital to maintain its workers. Free time is a "continuation of labor as its shadow".

Only people who have become responsible for themselves would be capable of utilizing their free time productively, not those who, under the sway of heteronomy [a kind of alienation], have become heteronomous to themselves.

The needs and impulses of individuals have been so thoroughly shaped by a society based on profit, control, and the "rigorous division of labor" that people are "heteronomous to themselves." They no longer know what authentic desire or freedom would feel like.


Adorno's work is full of such arguments or analyses, and the pattern is always the same: you start with a puzzling, painful, or contradictory fact about our experience, show the inadequacy of popular explanations, and then demonstrate that the fact becomes intelligible only when seen as a necessary consequence of the capitalist whole. Maybe this is what negative dialectics is in a nutshell.

Introduction: Against Relativism (continued)

So far in this section Adorno has (a) dismissed the popular argument against relativism; (b) described the historical and social genesis of relativism; and (c) directly criticized relativism from an epistemological perspective. Now, he presents his positive alternative to relativism.

In truth divergent perspectives have their law in the structure of the social process, as one of a preestablished whole. Through its cognition they lose their non-committal aspect. An entrepreneur who does not wish to be crushed by the competition must calculate so that the unpaid part of the yield of alienated labor falls to him as a profit, and must think that like for like – labor-power versus its cost of reproduction – is thereby exchanged; it can just as stringently be shown, however, why this objectively necessary consciousness is objectively false. This dialectical relationship sublates its particular moments in itself. The presumed social relativity of the intuitions obeys the objective law of social production under private ownership of the means of production. Bourgeois skepticism, which embodies relativism as a doctrine, is narrow-minded.

Once you view things in the context of the pre-established whole, i.e., capitalist society, you will no longer want to say "everything is relative," because this would be to reject the successful explanations you've reached. Once you have situated things in the social whole, you will no longer be satisfied with reducing all thoughts to their genesis in the interests of individuals or groups, since you will have established their truth or falsity with respect to objective reality, that is, the social whole.

The capitalist is compelled by competition to exploit the worker but simultaneously think of this exploitation as a fair exchange: "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay". The fact of the matter is revealed only in the context of the social whole, the capitalist system. This dialectic "sublates its particular moments in itself," in other words, the two moments of objective necessity of exploitation and that of the false picture of fairness are synthesized into a higher-level structure. Sublation not only synthesizes but preserves the contradictory elements, and this is the case here: we can see both simultaneously as bound together and interdependent. And this is a demonstration of immanent critique and determinate negation, and the validity of moving through these to the higher level context, significantly the way that we can understand objective reality through its contradictions.

Yet the perennial hostility to the Spirit is more than a feature of subjective bourgeois anthropology. It is due to the fact that the concept of reason inside of the existing relations of production, once emancipated, must fear that its own trajectory will explode this. This is why reason delimits itself; during the entire bourgeois epoch, the idea of the autonomy of the Spirit was accompanied by its reactive self-loathing. It cannot forgive itself for the fact that the constitution of the existence it controls forbids that development into freedom, which lies in its own concept. Relativism is the philosophical expression of this; no dogmatic absolutism need be summoned against it, the proof of its own narrowness crushes it. Relativism was always well-disposed towards reaction, no matter how progressive its bearing, already displaying its availability for the stronger interest in antiquity. The critique of relativism which intervenes is the paradigm of determinate negation.

Here, he gets Freudian, applying a psychological analysis to a personified reason: relativism is a defence mechanism to protect reason in capitalist society from its own emancipation, which is liable to undermine that society. Thus relativism is a symptom of a deep conflict between potentially emancipatory reason and the needs of the society that produced this reason. The result is a kind of "self-loathing".

And ultimately relativism is defeated not by an opposing doctrine but by its narrowness, meaning its inability to see the wider conditions of its own genesis, which is immanently revealed by negative dialectics when it (ND) shows that what relativism takes to be fundamental is actually derivative of an enveloping context.

Since the social whole changes, isn't Adorno himself just another relativist, but on a bigger scale? — Jamal

It seems like we'd have to say "no" in keeping a charitable reading. That the social whole changes will change consciousness, but I'm thinking that this is a false consciousness. In this case I'm relying upon Marx's analysis of capital to state "the social law" only because the social whole is capitalist, and this notion of the bourgeois relativist is also only interesting because these are the circumstances we find ourselves in.

But, on the other hand, it seems that since there's never a final synthesis ala Hegel we can still reach for this more general view of things -- but the relativist of tomorrow, like the relativist of ancient Greece, will have its own particular false consciousness.

It seems to me that Adorno believes that the relativist can be demonstrated objectively false on their own terms -- not because they must have a presupposition (since a relativist can always take the skeptics route of denial over affirmation), but because the social whole will require a kind of truth that is beyond this relativism.

In a way I get the feeling that the relativism he's pointing out in particular is one that thinks things done: We're at the end of history living in liberal democracies in this viewpoint, and so we're all free to believe as we wish within our individual consciousness.

And, it seems then, that this attitude will be perennial -- if the social structure changes the form of relativism will change, but it will still be embedded within a social whole which said relativist will not be a relativist towards. — Moliere

:up:

Is there a difference between the relativism of truth and the historical situatedness of truth? — Jamal

I'd say so.

In a simple way suppose that the cat wanders off the mat. Then "The cat is on the mat" is false, where it was once true. Truth isn't relative here, but the situation changes the truth value of a particular expression. — Moliere

That might be the perfect encapsulation of my own thoughts about it. It's objectively true that the cat was on the mat. This is not relative to a framework or perspective, e.g., the cat's or the cat's owner's; it's a truth about the house at that time (where the house stands for the social whole).

I agree, he basically says that the actual consequences of relativism are what refutes it. The problem i find is that the social "whole" which he refers to is not well validated. — Metaphysician Undercover

We can talk about preestablished social conditions, but the relativist will claim that they are relativistic conditions. Adorno needs the "whole" to support his objective law. — Metaphysician Undercover

If one wanted to be sceptical of Adorno at this juncture, this would be a reasonable way to go about it.

I think the social whole is, or potentially is, validated by the explanatory power of Adorno's critiques, namely of Enlightenment, of the culture industry, the countless objects of his micrological analysis in Minima Moralia, and within ND, for example precisely this critique of relativism, which is able to explain its genesis and reveal its weakness. The presence of the social whole in his thought ties things together. Without it, things in all their contradictory nature just don't make sense. Thus, the social whole is a valid inference. I admit, of course, that he nowhere deduces it.

This objective whole is really nothing other than Spirit in principle, as that which unites. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand this interpretation. I mean, I can accept that Adorno inherited the very idea of a totality from Hegel, but he explicitly distinguishes it from Spirit.

Care to share a reference for the secondary material? — Moliere

I know the question wasn't directed at me but I feel like listing the ones I’ve liked so far:

• The one I've just finished is A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity by Peter Gordon. Specifically counters the idea that Adorno was a dour negativist with no conception of human flourishing, but amounts to a comprehensive re-interpretation of all his work. An easy read, but not shallow.
• A great overview/introduction is Brian O'Connor's Adorno in the Routledge Philosophers series.
• A brilliant but eccentric (eccentric in what she chooses to focus on and leave out) introduction is The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno by Gillian Rose.
• Two collections of essays by Adorno scholars, covering all his work in a fairly accessible way, are well worth reading: Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts edited by Deborah Cook, and the Blackwell Companion to Adorno.

Introduction: Against Relativism (continued)

Next, Adorno moves from historicizing relativism to tackling it head-on. To stop at historicism would be no better than relativists themselves, because it would be the same reductionist move, namely taking the genesis of the idea, as opposed to its validity, to be all that matters.

Recalling that he had already characterized relativism as an attitude of vulgar materialism...

Utterly hostile towards the Spirit, such an attitude remains necessarily abstract. The relativity of all cognition can only be maintained from without, for so long as no conclusive cognition is achieved. As soon as consciousness enters into a determinate thing and poses its immanent claim to truth or falsehood, the presumably subjective contingency of the thought falls away. Relativism is null and void simply because, what it on the one hand considers popular and contingent, and on the other hand holds to be irreducible, originates out of objectivity – precisely that of an individualistic society – and is to be deduced as socially necessary appearance [Schein]. The modes of reaction which according to relativistic doctrine are unique to each individual, are preformed, always practically the bleating of sheep; especially the stereotype of relativity. Individualistic appearance [Schein] is then extended by the cannier relativists such as Pareto to group interests. But the strata-specific bounds of objectivity laid down by the sociology of knowledge are for their part only deducible from the whole of the society, from that which is objective. If Mannheim’s late version of sociological relativism imagined it could distill scientific objectivity out of the various perspectives of social strata with “free-floating” intelligence, then it inverts that which conditions into the conditioned.

Despite its roots in vulgar materialism, relativism is always only an abstract thesis that survives only insofar as it is "maintained from without," i.e., pretending to transcendence—because when one is on the inside of the thing, immanently achieving a determinate conclusion, the purported relativism of the thought becomes irrelevant.

Relativism is "null and void" because the particularly conditioned and yet also sacrosanct opinion of the individual is, as a matter of objective fact, produced in the first place by society, a society that needs such an appearance, i.e., the appearance that everyone has their own equally valid truth is "socially necessary". Despite the celebrated individuality of these opinions, they are to a large degree "preformed," amounting to "the bleating of sheep." The very thesis of relativity is one such fashionable off-the-shelf idea.

But of course, it isn't very fair to take this primitive individualist relativism to be the primary example of relativism per se, so Adorno brings up a more sophisticated variety, that of Vilfredo Pareto, for whom truth is relative not to individuals but to social groups such as economic classes. Pareto argued that what appear to be logical arguments are usually nothing more than rationalizations that hide the underlying interests of particular groups.

This is more plausible, and even seems close to something Adorno might say himself, but he is against it too. This relativism, having the same structure, is structurally flawed in the same way: there is a larger social context shared by the various groups, just as there is a larger social context shared by various individuals, and it is this context—society as a whole—which produces groups and ideas.

QUESTION: Since the social whole changes, isn't Adorno himself just another relativist, but on a bigger scale? Is there a difference between the relativism of truth and the historical situatedness of truth?

Introduction: Against Relativism

Adorno says dialectics (including negative dialectics) is as much against relativism as it is against the absolute. However, he thinks the popular argument against relativism, namely that it is self-refuting, is "wretched".

The popular argument against Spengler since Leonard Nelson, that relativism presupposes an absolute, namely its own validity and thus contradicts itself, is wretched. It confuses the general negation of a principle with its own ascent to an affirmation, without consideration of the specific difference of the positional value of both.

He is saying that one can legitimately negate a principle, in this case with "there is no absolute truth," and that the popular argument against relativism mistakes this negation for an illegitimate, self-defeating affirmation. The popular argument is thus lacking in nuance. For Adorno, it is no more than a logical gotcha that misses the point that relativism is a critical stance, or perhaps a sceptical tool, rather than a positive, universal proposition. This is what he means when he mentions their "positional value": the popular argument flattens out these differences and treats everything like a positive claim.

So that's not the way to defeat relativism. Instead...

It would be more fruitful to cognize relativism as a delimited form of consciousness. At first it was that of bourgeois individualism, which for its part took the mediated individual consciousness through the generality for the ultimate and thus accorded the opinions of every single individual the same right, as if there were no criterion of their truth. The abstract thesis of the conditionality of every thought is to be most concretely reminded of that of its own, the blindness towards the supra-individual moment, through which individual consciousness alone becomes thought. Behind this thesis stands a contempt of the Spirit which prefers the primacy of material relationships, as the only thing which should count. The father’s reply to the uncomfortable and decided views of his son is, everything is relative, that money, as in the Greek saying, maketh the man. Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.

Here he avoids taking on relativism directly and instead historicizes it. It begins with bourgeois individualism, expressed in classical liberalism, for which the individual is sovereign and independent. It thereby "accorded the opinions of every single individual the same right"; the individual is the ultimate source and arbiter of truth.

The problem is that although this relativism sees that all thoughts are conditioned by context—in this originary case the context of individual consciousness—it fails to see the conditions of this very idea itself, which feature a constitutive blindness to the social inheritance of thought.

In other words, Adorno is saying that relativism is, not logically self-refuting, but hypocritical. It makes use of thoughts inherited from the social world to produce the thought that thoughts are entirely the product of the individual.

Behind this thesis stands a contempt of the Spirit which prefers the primacy of material relationships, as the only thing which should count.

I'm finding it hard to work out how he makes this leap from the thesis of relativism to the contempt for Spirit. I understand the distinction he means, which is that between (1) useful productive work and the financial, class, in general materialist (in the popular sense, as Adorno says, "vulgar") concerns that go along with it; and (2) art and ideas, love and beauty, and God if you're so inclined. But how does relativism produce the exclusive focus on (1) and dismissal of (2)?

Maybe the answer is in the analogy:

The father’s reply to the uncomfortable and decided views of his son is, everything is relative, that money, as in the Greek saying, maketh the man.

The father is unimpressed by his son's critical views. He can dismiss them without argument, because in the real world, that is, the world of materialist interests, all that matters is money, and the son's ideas amount to nothing in comparison.

In practice, then—given the socio-economic system we have—relativism puts the seal of approval on any action of the individual that improves or maintains its financial or class status, and at the same time protects such individuals and the systems they participate in from criticism.

So relativism is not a profound philosophical position but is just an affirmation of the bourgeois individual's right to enrich himself, and is thereby a shallow, spiritless product of a shallow, spiritless society.

So the connection here has to do with the distinction made in intellectual history between genesis and validity. By reductively treating ideas as nothing more than the expression of their conditional origins (be it an individual or a class), relativism dismisses the claims of Spirit, and any truth that aspires to a validity beyond its genesis. This reduction is the methodology of vulgar materialism, which sees material interests as the only reality. The relativist's "everything is relative" is in effect a tool for this dismissal.

To be continued.

This truth, that their foundations are false, and that they are actually groundless, is the grounding of negative dialectics.

I'll refer to the Lectures, lecture 3, "Whether negative Dialectics is Possible", where he discusses Hegel's concept of the determinate negation. I believe that Adorno demonstrates the falsity of Hegel's conception of "synthesis". This falsity becomes the true determinate negation for Adorno, therefore a fixed point, a grounding for negative dialectics — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting point. I think it might be a bit misleading, and this hinges on whether such a fixed point can act as, or is equivalent to, a ground, foundation, or first principle, in the traditional philosophical sense that Adorno is addressing. I'm not sure it can. Determinate negation as fixed point is not so much a foundation—it is not a positive proposition on which a system can be built—but is more like method, critical orientation and commitment.

I mean, you could take the fixed point to be the ground, but is it interpretatively useful to do so?

EDIT: Maybe the answer to the last question is yes. Another way of putting it is that ND is in a sense grounded insofar as it starts from the solid ground of the knowledge that there is no ground, and this is the dialectical point Adorno himself makes. Ultimately, to me this seems more rhetorical than strictly accurate.

EDIT2: And there's another candidate for the ground of negative dialectics: material reality, or "the object" as in "the priority of the object". As he has been saying in the Frigility of Truth section, ND starts in the concrete and works out from there. So why not that? I happen to think this is wrong or misleading too, but I won't go into that now.