I wonder what some folk are going to think about having their post count reset to 0. Will that happen? How "fresh" will the new start be? Don't want to clutter up the public thread with my idiosyncratic bouts of curiosity.

Will we have to sign up again as if joining a new site? Or will we just load up TPF one March day and be on an empty new forum? Will new membership admittance be the same as it is now (ie. no temporary "open enroll" to get the initial numbers up, etc.)? — Outlander

Existing members will have to sign up to join the new site. This is essential for legal compliance, because this is where you will agree to the new Acceptable Use Policy.

So far I don't have a definite plan for how to get existing members over to the new site. Probably I'll make a list of members who have been active over the past year or so, and send an email. Otherwise, there will probably be a permanent announcement on the archive site.

And yes, I think we should probably open up the new site, to allow anyone to sign up, though with admin approval to activate accounts.

And so, what are we to make of this concept of philosophical responsibility? — Pussycat

An interesting question, PC. Maybe you could start a dedicated discussion topic.

This is quite nice, more ... humane than ND, meaning Adorno there speaks like a normal person, unlike the convoluting language employed in his theoretical work, I can actually understand him on first reading! — Pussycat

Yes, I find all his lectures are like that.

Do you think it is because he only wants to be critical that he doesn't develop his philosophy into an ontology and epistemology? Wouldn't the development be ideological, or lead back to ideology via reification? — Pussycat

Yep. Being critical or negative is a necessity, not just an evasion of philosophical responsibilities.

There are around 270 million citizens of countries with a king, and this is an international site. Please do not presume that your "we" covers everyone here.

EDIT: I promise I'm not anti-American, but this habit of Americans of assuming everyone is American is infuriating.

We have a climate change thread on the front page which tends to degenerate into personal attacks. Maybe it's a topic that would be better suited to the Lounge? — frank

Yes, we already closed the Politics & Current Affairs category and moved the active discussions to the Lounge, so to be consistent we should do the same with the thread in question. I'll move it.

:up:

If you're interested, there's a book of his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, which seems to be mainly about Aristotle: Metaphysics: Concept and Problems.

Good stuff. Since Adorno believes that in the interdependent subject-object relation, the interdependence is asymmetrical—the object has primacy, in that it always exceeds the subject logically and historically—you might say that his philosophy implies an ontology, because this priority is simultaneously an ontological one, establishing the irreducability of the object to the subject and the condition for the possibility of the subject.

The trouble, from your point of view, will be that refuses to develop this into a positive ontology, instead using it as part of a critical move to reveal the shortcomings of all ontology ever attempted.

And there's also the fact that his materialism, like Marx's, is not a metaphysical materialism, so it doesn't really concern itself with the ultimate nature of reality.

But let's see how it goes. :up:

Yet what I see in Adorno is a form of systematization around an opposition to "identity-thinking." I want to say that there is no thought that is not susceptible to systematization, and that every thinker is more or less systematic. But the curious question asks whether a thinker like Adorno who is emphatically opposed to "philosophical systems" in a thoroughgoing way could ever himself avoid a system erected around this goal—a goal that he energetically devotes himself to.

System-thinking is a form of monomania, and therefore anyone who is especially devoted to a singular cause will tend to be a system-thinker in one way or another. I would argue that the only way for the devoted person to avoid this is by devoting themselves to a cause that is not singular, and this is what the analogia entis or the coincidentia oppositorum attempts to provide. Causes which are negative and therefore act in opposition have an especially difficult time avoiding monomania. Adorno's cause is not only negative, but the thing that he opposes (identity-thinking) itself strikes me as being singular. At the same time, it does involve a certain ambiguity and subtlety which makes it vaguely familiar to Przywara's or Rommen's approach, but I think it will fail to avoid systems-thinking precisely because it is insufficiently ontologically grounded.

But again, I think the ultimate test here has to do with the way of life of the philosophers in question. Figures like Przywara or his student, Josef Pieper, intentionally lived lives that were resistant to systematization. Their activities, engagements, readings, and relationships were all significantly varied, which is what ultimately leads one away from monomania. Supposing that Adorno desperately wanted to oppose the Holocaust and its (logical) pre-conditions, the point here is that one can actually want to avoid the Holocaust too much, strange as that may seem. One can be led into a form of monomania even in their project to oppose pure evil (and this is a basic reason why evil is so pernicious). In order to avoid systems-thinking one is required to engage systems and even evil systems in paradoxical ways (e.g. Luke 6:29). Totalitarian thinking is very likely to breed totalitarian thinking, either by propagation or, more likely, by opposition. When one says, for example, "This must never happen again!," they inevitably commit themselves to a coercive and systematizing approach. They are forced to offer a program which will guarantee a certain outcome, and guarantees require systems. — Leontiskos

Thanks Leon, this is beautifully expressed, erudite, full of interesting ideas, and fundamentally misguided.

I'm reminded of the famous charge that relativism is self-refuting, which Adorno criticized:

The popular argument ... 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. — Negative Dialectics Against Relativism

In other words, this popular argument against relativism mistakes a critical stance for a positive, universal proposition. Similarly, in your criticism of Adorno you mistake his critical focus on identity thinking for some first principle or originary ground—something that might function as the foundation of a system. But it's not that, and I don't think your performative-contradiction gotcha works. (It's not a temperamental fixation either, and I might come to that)

1. Adorno is not anti-system in any simple way. He regards system as a necessary or inevitable moment in, or element of, all significant philosophical thought, one that he has to pass through himself. Relatedly, he is not simply against identity thinking or classificatory concepts. These are all part of a process. Note that I do not mean that he uses them just to later on throw them away like Wittgenstein, rather that he uses them dialectically, such that they are always in play. Used like this they articulate what they cannot capture alone. The "system" of negative dialectics, if you want to call it that, is not a positive edifice but a set of critical movements designed to fail productively so as to demonstrate the priority of the object negatively, i.e., not by stating it but by showing the failure of the subject to fully constitute it.

2. System is not best characterized psychologically as monomania, but as a form of thought, one that tends to comprehensiveness and closure, synthesis and reconciliation, and the subsumption of the non-identical under identity. System, Adorno might say, is a conceptual expression of the social compulsion towards unquestionable authority. Reducing it to temperament misses its historical and structural character, basically that it's philosophical and sociological rather than psychological. The question is not whether a thinker is devoted or balanced, but whether their thought fits the conditions and reproduces or resists the social compulsion.

3. Adorno himself is not monomaniacal. His focus on identity thinking is not a singular fixation or cause that he is devoted to above all else. Identity thinking isn't just one thing among others or, quoting myself from above, a first principle or originary ground. Rather, it's the general form of conceptual thought in its historical actuality—the way of thinking, under concrete conditions, which assimilates the object to the subject. His critique is not pushing a specific doctrine but is focused on this tendency, which he analyzes from within rather than opposing from without.

4. Your comments about the Holocaust don't do justice to the role it plays in his thought. To say it must never happen again is not a moral program or the foundation of a system, but the basic condition under which philosophy can still justify its existence, given the new conditions. For Adorno, the Holocaust reveals a basic defect in the Enlightenment and modernity, one that cannot be ignored. Thus he refuses to prescind from Auschwitz and carry on philosophizing as though it were just an aberration or temporary setback. To accuse him of monomania is therefore to miss the point entirely: what looks like obsession might in fact be philosophy's overdue awareness that it can no longer prescind from the catastrophe that defines the modern age. (I should also note that when Adorno mentions "Auschwitz" he means it to stand for all instances of industrial mass-slaughter, not just the Holocaust).

As for totalitarianism, I think it's too easy, or perhaps superficial, to say that an anti-totalitarian philosophy might itself become totalitarian if it goes too far. I just don't agree that Adorno's focus is unhealthily obsessive or that it risks trampling over reality on the way to the guaranteed outcome of a program. The more common complaint is that Adorno doesn't offer anything at all that can function as a program, nor any projected outcome beyond the minimal hope of an end to suffering and domination. On the contrary, he is painfully aware of how the revolutionary program led to totalitarianism in the USSR and in his own country (I mean East Germany).

Your suggestion that philosophers ought to live lives of variety and balance, and stop making such a fuss about the Holocaust, reminds me of something Terry Eagleton wrote:

Those who speak of harmony and consensus should beware of what one might call the industrial chaplain view of reality. The idea, roughly speaking, is that there are greedy bosses on one side and belligerent workers on the other, while in the middle, as the very incarnation of reason, equity and moderation, stands the decent, soft-spoken, liberal-minded chaplain who tries selflessly to bring the two warring parties together. But why should the middle always be the most sensible place to stand? Why do we tend to see ourselves as in the middle and other people as on the extremes? After all, one person’s moderation is another’s extremism. People don’t go around calling themselves a fanatic, any more than they go around calling themselves Pimply. Would one also seek to reconcile slaves and slave masters, or persuade native peoples to complain only moderately about those who are plotting their extermination? What is the middle ground between racism and anti-racism? — Why Marx Was Right

I suppose, as I said, this is the point where I disagree with Adorno. That's not to say that I am judging either one of our perspectives to be true or false, in any absolute sense. I think that I simply believe that "ontology" has a different nature from what Adorno believes. Since, as I said, ontology is speculative, I cannot claim to be confident that I am right.

However, as I said a few days ago, I believe that the goal of ontology is to determine the immediate. True certainty can only be produced in this way. So to insist that there is mediation all the way down, I believe would be a self-defeating ontology. It's like saying that we might as well stop seeking certainty because we can never have it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Thank you MU, this is very good and clear. You and Adorno certainly disagree here, but I'd like to emphasize some things about his position with a view to achieving general agreement of interpretation. His "mediation all the way down" as I called it is not nihilistic. It's not saying we can never reach the truth, but proposing a search for truth which is very different from first philosophy, of which Heideggerian fundamental ontology is a newer version, according to Adorno. In a nutshell, he is against ontology as such. Now, I can respect that you cannot accept his position here, but maybe we can agree that this is what he thinks.

Not that it will change your mind, but I think the key might be to see that for Adorno, mediation is not an obstacle to truth, but rather its constitutive condition. This way of putting it is structurally similar to one of the ways I used to argue against indirect realism, phenomenalism, etc (BTW I haven't changed my mind about it, just left behind the debate): the sensorium is not a distorting medium between ourselves and the world, but is the condition for the world to appear to us at all, and is the means through which we are engaged with it. Just as indirect realists seem to regard only a suppositional perception without the senses as allowing us to get beyond ourselves to apprehend the Real, so ontologists in their own striving for immediacy regard only a non-sensory "intellectual intuition", a pure grasp of being, as sufficient for attaining the truth of what is.

So that's just an important reframing, away from mediation as distortion/contamination/corruption and towards mediation as constitution. The upshot is that truth is found in the totality of mediations. Or maybe better put: an object's truth-content is found in the totality of its mediations.

In terms of the history of philosophy Adorno goes something like this:

He is against all first philosophy, the traditional search in metaphysics for a foundational principle. He sees this as the paradigm in philosophy of coercive identity thinking. He therefore accepts Kant's verdict on metaphysics and the limits of reason, while rejecting the details of his system as hypostatizations of the bourgeois subject. He then embraces Hegel's dialectical method while rejecting his totalizing system, the synthesis of the Absolute, and so on.

Heidegger and others—Adorno uses "neo-ontology" to group them—attempted to find a way between German idealism, which they saw as another flawed philosophy of consciousness, and positivism, which they dismissed for its reductionism and scientism. The crucial way through was to accept Kant's critique of the attempt to know things-in-themselves while arguing that Kant had totally ignored a deeper question, that of the Being of those things. Adorno saw this as regressive, an escape from concrete mediation into a new mythology, another pre-critical first philosophy in disguise.

Regarding certainty, it would be interesting to examine Adorno's attitude to it. I expect it would look a bit like Wittgenstein's, insofar as it would reject absolute certainty but also avoid total relativism.

I think I see the point, I just don't agree. I think the nature of ontological questions is such that they transcend all social and historical conditions. That's why I said the same questions are asked throughout history and by every different culture. What varies is the formulation of the question. So the questions appear to differ but they really ask the same thing, i.e. how do we approach the unknown. The unknown has a different appearance depending on the social historical mediation, therefore the question has a different formulation depending on these factors. — Metaphysician Undercover

What did you think of my proposal of how to make my perspective consistent with Adorno's? If we recognize that since the formulation of the question is always going to be mediated by social and historical conditions, and we know that this is going to make the question asked, the wrong question, then we can conclude that the answer is always already within the question. The answer being that the question itself is mistaken, or the wrong question. — Metaphysician Undercover

My perspective is that the reason why the question is more important than the answer, is due to the need to determine the appropriate question. To be consistent with Adorno, maybe that's the answer which inheres within the question, that the question itself is wrong. — Metaphysician Undercover

I appreciate the effort, but since you still adhere to the promise of a transcendently correct question, I don't think it works. This implies that concrete conditions merely contaminate an attempted purity, whereas Adorno's point is that they're constitutive, that it's mediation all the way down.

I noticed that Pieter R van Wyk’s account has been deleted. Are you deleting all accounts for banned people now or was that a request by him? — T Clark

I don't usually do it unless I'm asked to do so but on this occasion I wanted to remove as many traces of him as possible without actually removing his posts, which woud be unnecessarily destructive.

Jamal...so if i'm understanding you correctly, you don't tolerate any type of self-promotion? Could you be more specific about the self-promotion you can't deal with? — ProtagoranSocratist

For example, if you fill your posts mainly with quotations from a book you have written, and mention that book in every post, that counts as self-promotion. But in fact, Pieter was banned not just for self-promotion but also for evangelism and crackpottery, since he appeared to believe that his book held all the answers.

Generally, putting links to your work in every post is the main thing we don't allow.

Site guidelines

I do see that he is proposing some form of empiricist perspective — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not anything I recognize as empiricism. The idea is rather that questions are socially and historically mediated, never completely separable from their formation. And they are also mediated subjectively in the intellectual experience of the philosopher, whose thinking is shaped by their situation. The concrete social and historical conditions produce certain questions, so we understand and attempt to answer the questions partly through understanding these conditions.

The person asking the question may not know the answer, but the question itself is not a blank slate. A question like What is freedom? asked in 5th century Athens and 18th century France are different questions. The historical context, the social struggles, the available language all mediate the question and pre-structure the field of possible answers.

Anyway, I know that many philosophers would object to this approach, but that's what Adorno is saying.

I think I'll be staying in the Shoutbox for a while. Juust in case — Outlander

You have one thing the crackpots don't have, which is humility. You don't claim to have all the answers, so don't worry.

I banned @Pieter R van Wyk for self-promotion and crackpottery.

Although I think he wants to target all phenomenologists including Husserl with this, just to make that explicit (not that you said otherwise), and not just Heidegger -- but Sartre, and Bergson, and anyone who might lay claim to "the things themselves" absent ratio: this being a sort of "flip side" to Hegel who claimed everything is "analytic" --- the idea goes from one to the next as any philosopher could judge -- where now by looking to the non-identical we are trying to set aside our desiderata in favor of the things where we cannot do so without some sort of ratio for the things themselves to be mediated by.

EDIT: I finished Being, Subject, Object and see I was following along with the general pattern of thinking -- he notes the difference between these thinkers there while grouping them. — Moliere

:up:

Yes, totally. It's not just about Heidegger, but he is in a way paradigmatic.

I'm still struggling slowly through "Question and Answer".

I'm totally on board with what Adorno is saying in this section, so maybe I can explicate it. For the moment I'll just address the bit about answers being included in philosophical questions.

Adorno is accounting for the ontological need, the dissatisfaction with neo-Kantianism and positivism that prompted the creation of philosophies such as Heidegger's:

That is why ontology has surrounded itself with its miasma. In keeping with an old German tradition, it considers the question more important than the answer; where it owes what it has promised, it has raised its failure for its part to a consoling existential.

So one reason the need continues to be felt is this idea in philosophy that the question is what is most important. You often see this even today, and not just in this German tradition: the fetishizing of the question.

BUT!

In fact questions [ do ] have a different weight in philosophy than in the particular sciences, where they are abolished through their solution, while their rhythm in the history of philosophy would be more akin to duration and forgetting. This does not mean, however, as in the constant parroting of Kierkegaard, that the existence of the questioner would be that truth, which searches in vain for the answer. Rather in philosophy the authentic question almost always includes in a certain manner its answer. It does not follow, as in research, an if-then pattern of question and answer. It must model its question on that which it has experienced, so that it can catch up to it. Its answers are not given, made, produced: the developed, transparent question recoils in them.

I've added the bolded "do" to make it clear what Adorno is saying. He is saying that the idea has some truth to it.

First, I think we can all agree with Adorno that philosophical questions are generally/often not "abolished through their solution." That is, what appear as solutions are not really solutions at all, and the questions become reformulated or perhaps discarded as uninteresting, never solved with the gathering of data as in science. This is why "their rhythm in the history of philosophy would be more akin to duration and forgetting." The rhythm is not question -> data/proof -> solution.

Now, the way that a good philosophical question "almost always includes in a certain manner its answer" is that a good philosophical question already shows us what we are looking for; it tells us the kind of answer that will satisfy us—but unlike science this is not external. The question embodies a particular experience, one rooted historically and socially. So the answer is not external to the question, as it is with empirical data in science, but immanent to the genesis of the question. This is the meaning of "It must model its question on that which it has experienced, so that it can catch up to it."

None of this is meant to imply that we can immediately read off the answer straight from the question. Nor does it mean that the answer can be deduced in the manner of mathematics or formal logic, as if all philosophical questions implied the whole philosophical system of the world in microcosmic tautology.

Take for example this question: "How do body and soul interact?"

Descartes had a hypothesis:

The part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain. It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain’s substance and suspended above the passage through which the spirits in the brain’s anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities. The slightest movements on the part of this gland may alter very greatly the course of these spirits, and conversely any change, however slight, taking place in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of the gland. — The Passions of the Soul

If you can imagine this role of the pineal gland having been empirically confirmed, the question would have then disappeared. It would have turned out to have been a scientific question.

But as a philosophical question—which we now see that it is—it expresses the conditions of its genesis, defining a horizon of meaning. It presupposes that there are two distinct things and that they are problematically related. This expresses a worldview which is already part of the kind of answer that might satisfy the question. The answer would be the answer it was owing to its dualism, and this was in the question already.



The situated experience that constituted the genesis of the body-soul or mind-matter question would be one of feeling divided. I won't fill in the details but one can see how this feeling could be a result of social forces: we experience ourselves as thinking and willing agents, but also as objects in a world of mechanism and calculation; and because of the division of labour we see manual and intellectual work as entirely distinct. Adorno and Marx might put this in terms of alientation.

So Adorno isn't saying that asking a question magically gives you the answer, rather that in philosophy, the way a question is framed already expresses an insight into what it seeks. The question is not a neutral, disinterested request for information but the expression of an experience. Thinking it through, not importing information, is what brings answers to light.

So for Adorno, philosophy's task is to make questions transparent enough that they reveal their own truth-content.

EDIT: This is related to what I was saying elsewhere on TPF recently about genesis and validity. In a nutshell, the validity of a philosophical idea is never entirely unrelated to its genesis.

The Ontological Need: QUESTION AND ANSWER

The ontologies in Germany, particularly the Heideggerian one, remain influential to this day, without the traces of the political past giving anyone pause. Ontology is tacitly understood as the readiness to sanction a heteronomous social order, exempted from the justification of consciousness. That such considerations are denied a higher place, as misunderstanding, a falling astray into the ontic, and a lack of radicalism in the question, only reinforces the dignity of the appeal: ontology seems all the more numinous, the less it solidifies into a definite content, which the impertinent understanding would be permitted to get a hold of. Intangibility turns into unassailability. Whoever refuses to follow suit, is suspected of being someone without a fatherland, without a homeland in being, indeed not so differently from the idealists Fichte and Schelling, who denigrated those who resisted their metaphysics as inferior. In all of its mutually combative schools, which denounce each other as false, ontology is apologetic. Its influence could not be understood, however, if it did not meet an emphatic need, the index of something omitted, the longing that the Kantian verdict on the knowledge of the absolute ought not to rest there.

Adorno, here very much on the side of reason, begins by attacking Heideggerian irrationalism and accusing it and other such "fundamental ontologies" of tacit complicity with fascism.

For Heidegger, asking for justification for his ontology is already to have gone wrong. Thus he sets up his ontology as exempt from justification, and this is presented as proof of its profundity.

Notice Adorno says that Heideggerian philosophy exempts itself not just generally from justification, but specifically from the justification of consciousness. The point here is to assert consciousness against Heidegger's rejection of consciousness-centred philosophy and thus to emphasize that justification, and therefore also reason and critical autonomy, is constitutively subjective—or is always subjectively mediated. In all of modern philosophy it is from consciousness that reason arises and from there is imposed intersubjectively to achieve objectivity. Every philosopher in his own subjective reasoning must submit to the agreed rules of justification—but after all it is the subject who reasons. This attitude is most obvious from Kant through to German Idealism, in which the subject is elevated to a universal "I".

The appeal to unmediated access to Being is irrational because only through subjective mediation is reason applied, and in asking us to deny our own conscious reason Heidegger clears the ground for an uncritical acceptance of heteronomous authority, i.e., the social order imposed from outside consciousness in the name of "Being".

Moving on from his cursory assertion of neo-ontology's ideological function as fascist apologetics, he considers why this philosophy seems so attractive. It would not have been so influential, he says, had it not met a need.

But before I continue, I'm going to do this:


Heidegger's fundamental ontology & what Adorno doesn't like about it

I only know Being and Time from secondary literature and lectures; I have not read the work itself. What follows then is at best a rough sketch, but I think it'll be enough for an understanding of Adorno's casually delivered accusation of support for fascism, if not for an adequate assessment of it.

Heidegger in B&T begins with a revival of the question of the meaning of Being. Philosophy has spent most of its time investigating beings and their properties, not Being itself. This is the ontological difference; the investigation of beings is concerned with the ontic, whereas Being itself is ontological.

To begin his investigation of Being he focuses on the one particular being for whom Being is an issue, namely the human being. His name for this being is Dasein, which means "being-there". This analysis is entitled "The Analytic of Dasein".

Dasein is special because it already has a direct, pre-theoretical familiarity with Being. So instead of building a theory built on justification, Heidegger lays out the structures of Dasein's existence, giving us an "existential analytic". That this is all beyond the reach of rational critique is the central problem for Adorno.

EDIT: To be more precise, the central problem is that Heidegger's ontology is based on or consists of a rejection of rational critique. The traditional language of justification and the subjective is held to be superficially ontic. Since the ontology is therefore exempt from intersubjective reason, what you end up with is a new dogmatic philosophy.

According to Heidegger the nature of Dasein's existence means that the subject-object framework is wrong. Dasein is not a detached spectator but is rather characterized by being-in-the-world, where Dasein's world is a context of significance. Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world describes two ways Dasein encounters things: ready-to-hand, meaning they are made use of practically as familiar unquestioned parts of our world; and present-at-hand, meaning things are observed in a detached, theoretical manner, as in science.

Also part of what it is to be Dasein:

- Care: Dasein's basic structure, the condition of being concerned with its own being, projecting itself towards the future.
- Thrownness: Dasein always finds itself thrown into a context it didn't choose.
- The They: the conformist public which blocks Dasein's authentic potential.
- Authenticity: via anxiety and confronting one's own mortality one can act independently of The They.

These structures, the Existentialia, are presented by Heidegger as neutral insights which apply transhistorically to human existence. But for Adorno, rather than the eternal truths of Being, they grew out of a specifically German and conservative context and played an ideological role. And they were able to do this, and to pose as eternal and natural, because they were from the outset abstract, drained of substantive content: what does Dasein care about, and why? Into what kind of society is it thrown? Granted that Dasein's existence is one of being-in-the-world, but why should we just accept the given state of that world? Heidegger brackets the social and material conditions that shape it, treating them as ontologically neutral, so as to get at Dasein's being. But Adorno points out that this very effort and this crucial bracketing is to abandon the central philosophical task of critiquing all that exists. The result can only be social conformism and ideology, no matter how appealing and partially true Heidegger's analysis is.

But the real ideological danger is that the Existentialia are not as abstract and empty of content as they pretend to be. Although they're presented as formal structures, they're actually saturated with conservative, specifically German content: Thrownness implies Volk, Fatherland, and destiny; The They is part of an anti-Enlightenment critique of liberal modernity; etc. This move allows Heidegger to universalize what is actually a particular German Romantic worldview, giving it the authority of ontological necessity.

This is just self-promotion. I'm closing it.

I'm really enjoying the first section of "The Ontological Need". It's Adorno as we don't often get to see him so clearly, as staunch defender of the Enlightenment. He pretty much comes out and says it in the first few lines: Heidegger's ontology is philosophical support for fascism.

I'm still working through it though.

I'll say some more about the introduction, particularly the linguistic angle.

1. Isn't the emphasis on expression a subjectivization of cognition? Doesn't it elevate personal perspective over truth, or even---which is worse---equate them?

He actually addresses this objection in the introduction itself, where he says that what is contingent and subjective is not mere, by which I mean that the contingent and subjective cannot be legitimately cast as the inferior pole of a Socratic opinion vs. knowledge dimension. This is because the subective is objectively determined, and the contingency of perspective is not a random anything-goes contingency:

This contingency meanwhile is not so radical as the criteria of scientivism would wish. Hegel was peculiarly inconsistent when he arraigned the individual consciousness, the staging-grounds of intellectual experience, which animated his work, as the contingent and that which is limited. This is comprehensible only out of the desire to disempower the critical moment which is tied to the individual Spirit. — QUALITY AND THE INDIVIDUATED

It [individual experience] would have no continuity without concepts. Through its participation in the discursive medium it is, according to its own determination, always at the same time more than only individual. The individuated becomes the subject, insofar as it objectifies itself by means of its individual consciousness, in the unity of itself as well as in its own experiences: animals are presumably bereft of both. Because it is universal in itself, and as far as it is, individual experience also reaches into that which is universal. Even in epistemological reflection the logical generality and the unity of individual consciousness reciprocally condition one another. This affects however not only the subjective-formal side of individuality. Every content of the individual consciousness is brought to it by its bearer, for the sake of its self- preservation, and reproduces itself with the latter. — QUALITY AND THE INDIVIDUATED

This is quite Kantian, but none the worse for that: objectivity via the subject. What it comes down to for Adorno is a refusal to accept the primacy, characteristic of science, of the view from nowhere and the abstraction which attempts to reach it. It might have been fruitful for science, but applied to philosophy it is a fundamental mistake, since critical insight is inseparable from the subject and understanding has in actuality been impoverished across the board by the purported objectivity of abstraction, classification, and mere signification, under the imperatives of economy and bureaucracy.

Or as Roger Foster puts it:

[Adorno] is arguing that the subject-neutral perspective cannot reflect, within itself, on what kind of truth it is. That is to say, it cannot reflect on its own dependence on historical experience. For Adorno, this is not merely an oversight; it is rather structural, because the denial of its dependence on history is in effect built in to the subject-neutral perspective. — The Recovery of Experience

2. Isn't it an argument for philosophy as poetry, sacrificing logical justification?

Adorno is very aware of this objection, which is why in the introduction and in the lectures he emphasizes that negative dialectics rigorous, stringent, and so on.

The way I think about it is that argument and expression have to work together (this is along the same lines as the "Argument and Experience" section, though that was about experience more generally, whereas here we are looking at language).

So argument is most successful when the material it works with is most truthful, which means rich in the qualitative content revealed best by linguistic expression. And expression is most successful when it is answerable to and motivated by the compulsion of logic.

But that's all I have right now on that question.


3. What does it mean in practice to use concepts expressively? What does the Darstellung of negative dialectics look like?

The obvious answer is to point to ND and his other works. But this doesn't tell us much.

It helps to see that within concepts themselves there is a reflection of that non-identical remainder which belongs to things. We can use concepts in a way that allows their contextual associations to speak, associations that exceed or are suppressed by the concepts' definitions. It's like poetry: there are no true synonyms---every word has its special associations and sounds, and flattening these out or thinking of them in terms only of their defintions would be a regression from understanding and truth. Adorno maintains that the same is true in philosophy for concepts.

One thing this means in practice is a refusal to state or settle on definitions or on a single conception of an object or state of affairs. This would explain his tendency to circle around a topic, using different concepts along the way. It is in the interplay of concepts and their associations that we catch glimpses of the truth.

Adorno believes that the task of philosophical writing is to reverse the tendency of concepts to detach themselves from the nuances of contextual significance. Making concepts receptive to the moment of expression is therefore to allow the context in which a concept is experi enced to inform its cognitive significance. — Roger Foster

I actually don't know if any of that constitutes an answer to the question, but it goes some way towards it.

:up:

For me, the earliest such example was Nabokov with "Lolita." There you have it, page after page of aestheticization of pedophilia. — Astorre

Thereby showing the emptiness and potential manipulativeness of aestheticization, since Humbert is not the author's mouthpiece.

From what I've gathered, the introduction in ND is a reviewed version of an essay Adorno has written to accompany his lectures, which is featured in LND. This might explain why there are parts missing in the LND translation, and also why some parts are different: the LND appendix translation in based on a different original material. I spent hours trying to validate this for sure, I gave up, it is what I think. — Pussycat

Yes, it's clear the texts are different, even though the differences are quite minor. We can't quite treat them as alternative translations.

EDIT: Actually I was under impression that the version in the lectures was an amended version of the introduction. I think ND was finished by the time he did the lectures.

The introduction is not so much an introduction as the heart of the whole work. It's an essay outlining the problem and the program of negative dialectics, namely how to approach the world philosophically in conditions that have eroded the fullness of intellectual-spiritual experience---in other words how to fulfil the promise of philosophy in conditions where conceptuality itself hinders the search for truth.

The centrality of language in this program only became clear to me at the end, and that sent me back to the "Speculative Moment" and "Darstellung" sections:

The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated.
This may help to explain why portrayal [Darstellung] is not a matter of indifference or external to philosophy, but immanent to its idea. Its integral moment of expression, non-conceptually-mimetic, becomes objectified only through portrayal – language. The freedom of philosophy is nothing other than the capacity of giving voice to this unfreedom.

This is then reiterated and emphasized at the end, in the "Rhetoric" section, where he switches from suffering to utopia. So the dimension that language must illuminate expressively, using concepts to reveal their own inadequacy, is the dimension with suffering at one end and utopia on the other. The search for truth is inseparable from ethics (and politics?).

Other important aspects of the introduction are:

- Identity thinking and the consequent failure of idealism and other philosophies
- (Negative) Dialectics
- Anti-system but preserving the spirit of system

Thank you and others for the support.

If we are not allowed to question the sexual ethics of Western Europe, then we will not question the sexual ethics of Western Europe. But that sort of a rule should be made explicit. I don't see how those who question the sexual ethics of Western Europe can simply be threatened or banned for "abandoning reason." There are lots of people from other regions of the world on TPF. — Leontiskos

Questioning the sexual ethics of Western Europe is one thing; stating that gay people are degenerate and immoral (or that they behave immorally) is something else. Debating sex and gender is one thing; denying the identity or dignity of transgender people is another.

We won't tolerate intolerance. We want to ensure we have a shared foundation of mutual respect and the equal dignity of all participants regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Well, I say we don't tolerate intolerance, but in reality sometimes we do. I am inclined now to be more strict.

A comment I read about the distinction between the New Left and the conservative religious critique, was 'For Adorno and Horkheimer, myth and Enlightenment are dialectically intertwined: Enlightenment arises from myth but reproduces myth’s structure of domination in a new, “rationalized” form. Thus, the way out is neither regression to pre-rational faith nor blind progress through science, but a self-reflective form of reason — one that is conscious of its limits and its entanglement with power.' — Wayfarer

Well, it's a reasonable summary of DoE, sure.

But I still sense a lack in their spiritual anthropology, so to speak. I think, for the religious, humanity has a cosmic signficance with which it seeks reconciliation. — Wayfarer

Something akin to this is very strong in Adorno's works, though without the actual religion. However, that "lack," i.e., the impossibility under certain conditions of a spritual experience worthy of human beings is often precisely their point, since they do not exempt themselves.

If you think Harry was in the same league as The Great Whatever and StreetlightX, I can only assume you didn't interact with him much.

To some of us, this is much more than a website to waste time or "shoot the shit" on. More than a casual hobby or past time but an active part of one's life and between some of us almost like a club of distant pen pals (I'm trying to avoid saying "like a family" because that's simply not accurate for the majority of posters). My point is, participation on this site is important to some people more so than you might think. We're all real people with real lives and real feelings. Please remember that Jamal — Outlander

What do you think follows from this? That I should never ban anyone? On the contrary, it is because I want to maintain and improve the community that I have to get rid of members who make the experience of being here worse.

To exclude or demean others is to abandon reasoned inquiry for dogma or prejudice. You are lucky you are still here.

Part of Harry's last comment (now deleted).

The big mistake you make is not to catch that this is the trick that is going on. You are caught in the Cartesian representational understanding of what it is to be a mind... — apokrisis

Blah blah blah blah-blah bl-ba-blah blah. — Harry Hindu

I did. Low quality and obnoxious.

Stop posturing Leon.

Kavus Torabi, "The Sweetest Demon"

I banned @Harry Hindu, partly for low quality, and partly for obnoxiousness.

I want people to know there's no room here for that kind of crap any more.

I know this is the Lounge but I don't see why TPF should be hosting disputes like this. It's effectively a platform for culture warriors. I'm closing it.

It is also one of the themes in Max Horkheimer's book The Eclipse of Reason'. It doesn't age that well, written as it was in the aftermath of WWII, but his basic point stands. Horkheimer traces how the meaning of reason has shifted from a normative, world-guiding principle to an instrumental faculty directed to specific ends. In the classical and pre-modern worldview, reason was understood as objective—it reflected an intelligible order inherent in reality itself. To act rationally was to conform to this cosmic or moral order, in which reason provided not only the means for action but also the standards by which ends were judged. With the rise of modern science, empiricism, and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on human autonomy, this conception of reason eroded. Rationality came to be understood as subjective and instrumental, concerned not with what is true or good but with how to achieve whatever ends are already desired. Horkheimer argues that in this transformation, reason has been stripped of its substantive and ethical content; it has become a tool for calculation, efficiency, and control. This marks the “eclipse” of reason—the point at which rationality itself becomes irrational, serving domination rather than enlightenment, and leaving modern civilization powerful in its techniques but impoverished in meaning and purpose.

This later becomes one of the main themes of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment. — Wayfarer

Yes, but...

For Horkheimer, the "Enlightenment's emphasis on human autonomy" led to the erosion of objective reason only because it was not properly realized.

I've been wondering how we are supposed to tell the difference between Horkheimer's and Adorno's critique and the reactionary anti-Enlightenment critique, since the criticism of the Enlightenment looks similar in both cases. I'm trying to identify the central difference, since I don't think it's just the fact that H&A explicitly say that they are pro-Enlightenment, as they do in the preface to DoE:

We have no doubt—and herein lies our petitio principii—that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today. If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate. — Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment

So ok, they are open about it: they are not anti-Enlightenment. But there's more, and the key to unlock it is that they characterize their argument as a petitio principii. They set out to critique the Enlightenment's suitability in bringing about freedom while already assuming that Enlightenment and freedom are inseparable; and the very thing they rely on to be critical is what is in question.

There is, they believe, no way out of this circularity, no way of performing a critique from a privileged position outside the circle of Enlightenment. So for H&A this circularity is not actually fallacious, but is central to their self-aware method, known as immanent critique.

The reactionary anti-modern position pretends to a transcendent standpoint, perhaps appealing to a golden age of reason prior to its corruption by liberalism, or to natural law, to God or "higher knowledge" or the cosmic, etc. There is always an external authority claimed as support.

This is not H&A's strategy at all. From the inside, they push the modern concept of reason till it breaks, without external help.

So I think this is the central difference, and its significance lies in what it reveals about the motivations and aims of the respective arguments. H&A are motivated by the promise of freedom and an end to domination, aiming at a radicalization of the Enlightenment. Reactionaries would banish it and reinstate domination of a different type. And that's a big difference.

NOTE: I'm not saying conservatives and reactionaries can't legitimately make use of their criticisms, and I'm not calling into question your own use of Horkheimer (I'm not saying you're wrong, or anything so crude).

NOTE 2: I couldn't decide between conservative and reactionary so I went with a mix of both.

I agree with this, that for Adorno the immediacy of the self is fake. And it makes sense to me because I put this into a temporal context, as a sort of analogy to help me understand. We are inclined to place the self, with its experience, at the present in time, and this presence supports the assumption of immediacy. But analysis of this experience, which is represented as the immediate, or being at the present, fails to find the present, and all is reduced to either past or future. So the immediacy of the present is illusory.

Not to be dissuaded though, the logical solution would be to unite the two opposing features, past and future, in synthesis, thereby creating the required immediacy of the present, in conception. However, this ultimately fails because the two opposing features are categorically distinct, incompatible, so in actual practise, "the present" becomes a divisor rather than a unifier. Therefore the two cannot properly be opposed in conception nor can they be unified in synthesis.

Now we have the situation which Adorno likes to describe as each of the two in the pair, being mediated by the other. The inclination is to unite the two in synthesis, and the unity would be what is immediate. But this doesn't work because the incompatibility prevents the possibility of synthesis, so that immediacy is fake.. Now we are left with the two distinct features, each mediated, and we have nothing which is immediate. — Metaphysician Undercover

I roughly agree.

Referring to my temporal analogy above, utopia would be found in the immediacy of the present. The future (expressed as "possibility") obstructs utopia through the sense of urgency, as the unending need to produce change. But looking backward in time, the "immediately realized", appears to support a real end to change, the reality of the effect, thereby keeping the dream of utopia alive. In this way the two (possibility, and the realized) mediate each other, and the immediate, as the utopia of now, is never actually present.

The way I see it is that the future is like an immense force, the force of "possibility" which necessitates that we choose. So long as the future is forcing us in this way, utopia is impossible. However, when we see that through choice and action we can bring about real change, as the "immediately realized", this provides hope that we can put an end to the destructive force of possibility, and have utopia. — Metaphysician Undercover

I like this angle on possibility. My only doubt is your interpretation of "immediately realized," which differs from mine. It's difficult to imagine Adorno regarding anything immediately realized as good. Here's the translation in the appendix of the lectures:

Its path is blocked by possibility, never by immediate reality; this explains why it always seems abstract when surrounded by the world as it is.

Immediate reality is surely the world as it is, the false or bad world. Adorno aims to surprise by saying that this is not what obstructs utopia, but rather possibility.

But I like your idea of possibility as an "immense force". Utopia as an actual possibility weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living (to repurpose a quotation from Marx).

Introduction: RHETORIC (ii)

The last paragraph of the introduction is about utopia. This doesn't mean a plan for a perfect society but rather the reconciliation of thought and reality that would exist in a world in which people can relate to each other and to things freely, without coercion and the cold logic of utility:

Dialectics seeks to master the dilemma between the popular opinion and that which is non-essentializingly [wesenslos] correct, mediating this with the formal, logical one. It tends however towards content as that which is open, not already decided in advance by the scaffolding: as protest against mythos. That which is monotonous is mythic, ultimately diluted into the formal juridicality of thinking [Denkgesetzlichkeit]. The cognition which wishes for content, wishes for utopia. This, the consciousness of the possibility, clings to the concrete as what is undistorted. It is what is possible, never the immediately realized, which obstructs utopia; that is why in the middle of the existent it appears abstract. The inextinguishable color comes from the not-existent. Thinking serves it as a piece of existence, as that which, as always negatively, reaches out to the not-existent. Solely the most extreme distance would be the nearness; philosophy is the prism, in which its colors are caught.

The final paragraph is difficult — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I get it. Following is my analytical schematic, which Adorno would have hated. It is not meant to substitute for the real thing, but to help unlock it for a re-read. The paragraph proceeeds like this:

1. Dialectics is well-suited to apprehending the content, the truth of things.

2. Thinking which seeks this is seeking utopia (since its own conceptual mechanism tends to obstruct the content, attaining knowledge of this content is a distant dream).

3. The consciousness of the possibility of utopia leads thinking to look for it in concrete particulars, assuming that if it is to be found anywhere it will be there, the relatively undistorted individual things (relatively undistorted because notionally independent of, or not entirely captured by, identity thinking)

4. The "immediately realized" is what presents itself as immediate, society as it seems to be , the existent as false appearance, false because it appears as unproblematic and exhaustive---the ideology of the market, individual liberty, of work vs. free time, means-ends rationality, and the whole mythology around all that. It might be expected that this is what blocks utopia, but in fact...

5. Possibility obstructs utopia, because if utopia is limited to what happens now to be possible, it's not much of a utopia. Focusing on possibility forecloses on utopia. At least a focus on the "immediately realized" allows the utopian ideal to be maintained, because it remains just a hopeful dream. Possibility, on the other hand, by bringing it closer in imagination to what exists, sells it short.

6. Utopia then appears abstract: free-floating above both the particulars and concepts that structure them in existing society.

7. It is what does not exist (and what is not possible, I suppose) that constitutes utopia.

8. As such, it has a unextinguishable quality, its "colour".

9. From inside the existent (or among the existents if you prefer), there is one thing that can reach out towards utopia: thought (philosophy). But it does this negatively: in showing how our concepts break down and how we are enmeshed by contradictory systems and ideologies, thought points towards a world where this is not the case.

10. Utopia is kept close, paradoxically, by keeping it at a distance. The promise and motivation of utopia, something close to the spirit of enquiry---and just close to the spirit per se---can be maintained only if it is not regarded as something that can be reached from where we are now.

11. Thus, like a prism, philosophy lets us see utopia's colours without bringing it close to what exists.

I think that fits with this:

the concept is not the thing (the prism is not the light) but that which operates upon the thing in order to render it perceptible. The light was there but only became a perceivable object by passing through the prism of concepts forged by philosophy. — Moliere

I do not think, as you seem to, that he has given up on the quest for the immediate. I think he is now considering the possibility of the activity of thinking as immediate. I — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I think it's like this: immediacy in circumstances of modernity is always fake, a result of reification. Those things that present themselves as this-and-just-so, like money or commodities---what's more immediate than a banknote or a smartphone in your hand?---are reifications of historical developments and social relations, so immediacy under these conditions is ideological. BUT Adorno hangs on to the utopian ideal of thinking, namely of the lack of separation between subject and object.

Significantly for our debate, I think the self itself is a fake immediacy, at least in the world we know---and I think this is an important position of Adorno's. The self is a reflection of, or is parasitic on, one's society. There is no pure self underneath all the contingent mediations. Immediacy, if possible, would itself be historical and contingent.

Things have changed since Adorno's day, but we can still recognize his analysis of the modern subject as a construction of the Enlightenment: the autonomous bourgeois individual in command of himself who unproblematically introspects and comes to rational decisions and then acts on them.

Anyway, I've been looking at his other works and there is a lot to recommend your view; he is often writing approvingly of immediacy, although at the same time he is warning us not to grasp for it. A particularly pessimistic instance is in the dedication to Minima Moralia:

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewellery, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer. — Minima Moralia

In other words, immediacy is presently unreachable, and any claim to have reached it desecrates its utopian promise.

Immediacy in circumstances of the "bad mediation" cannot help but be a perversion, and at best turns into another kind of mediation:

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter. It is not merely that pure feeling, so far as it is still possible within the determinate system of the economy, becomes precisely thereby society’s alibi for the domination of interests and bears witness to a humanity that does not exist. The very involuntariness of love, even where it has not found itself a practical accommodation beforehand, contributes to the whole as soon as it is established as a principle. If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter-pressure. — Minima Moralia

And yet, as you say, he retains immediacy as the utopian promise. In a sense, the movement of the concept towards understanding is a manifestation of the desire for immediacy.