Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. A war fucks everything and everyone sort of story. Point made. — Hanover

Plus aliens.

LND lecture 6

This was a fun one. I had to do a breakdown to make sense of it. For now, I'll just post it and leave it at that, before coming back to look at things in more detail.

So the lecture goes something like this:

1. How philosophy can proceed, picking up the problem in lecture 5 (p56)
2. One reason the world wasn't changed is that it wasn't interpreted sufficiently: Marx and Marxism failed to critique the domination of nature, and in fact celebrated it, and this is a major failure; there is more philosophizing to do (p58)
3. That the world has a meaning can't now be maintained, and this means Hegel is beyond redemption, and so is all identity thinking (p59)
4. Hegel's Logic (p60)
5. Illustration of the problem with Hegel by a linguistic analysis of Hegel's move from "the indeterminate" to "indeterminateness" (p61)
6. General points about Hegel just demonstrated: Hegel "conjures away" exactly what philosophy sets out to understand (p62)
7. The paradox of philosophy: can philosophy succeed using concepts to reach the nonconceptual? (p.62)
8. Two bad options remaining if philosophy fails to face this challenge: the formal or the arbitrary (p63)
9. Heidegger and being (p64)

Generally, 2 is a really interesting critique of Marx, 3 is a fundamental tenet of Adorno's connected to his deepest motivations, and 4/5 is a fiendish puzzle.

The paragraph which talks about Hegel's move I don't think I'm fully following. Hegel makes an inference , or an equivocation, in moving from "the indeterminate" to "indeterminateness": — Moliere

Yeah, I haven't got to the bottom of it yet. What's cool about it though is that it looks a lot like the linguistic analysis I've seen in ordinary language philosophy, like that of Austin and Ryle.

It seems that even in communist society there's a time for those who wish to critique, but one need not become a philosopher. — Moliere

Suits me :smile:



Good stuff, thank you for filling in the Hegelian background. I noticed in one of Adorno's essays on Hegel (Hegel: Three Studies) that he identifies Spirit with "social labour", which sounds like a crude sociologization. It's like he was saying here's what Hegel was talking about without realizing it.

LND Lecture 5

I might not say much about this lecture, because it feels like a digression in which Adorno is answering the letter he received about Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. It's all very Marxist and practical—and not just because it concerns the relationship of theory to practice but because he seems genuinely concerned about what is to be done, and surprisingly even seems quite optimistic when he says that now is a good time to develop a philosophy fit for purpose, because "We find ourselves in a kind of historical breathing space." [EDIT: actually that's in lecture 6]

11. Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. — Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

There's a striking tension in what Adorno says. His interpretation has it that Marx in thesis 11 did not just mean that the time for philosophy is over and we have to just "wade in with our fists and there will be no more need for thought"—because it's the task of philosophy to change the world, philosophically. And yet...

That aside, I believe that Marx really did believe – and we have to think back to the period in which the writings we are considering here were written, that is to say, around the year 1848 – that philosophers would in fact be best advised to pack it in and become revolutionaries, in other words, man the barricades – which, as is well known, cannot be found anywhere nowadays, and if they were to be erected in any advanced society today they would be quickly eliminated by police or security guards. But he probably did mean something of the sort. — p.51

So this is close to contradiction, unless we say that around 1848, a few years after the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx changed his mind, or at least his emphasis. For Marx, there has to come a point when it's time for revolution.

That aside, Marx's metaphilosophical position seems to be assumed in a lot of what Adorno says. Marx thought that philosophy would eventually be overcome, negated or as I like to put it, solved, in an emancipated post-revolutionary society. In this way, philosophy would lead to practice and this practice would be the culmination of philosophy. Thus it's a teleological view, even if Marx did not always see a necessity in the process.

Adorno is asking what philosophy should do in the situation in which that culmination didn't happen, since the expected revolutions either failed or led to bad outcomes like the bureaucratic and totalitarian systems of the Eastern Bloc (it's interesting that he mentions "Those of you who have escaped from the East").

For Adorno, philosophy must remain autonomous, and only in that way, decoupled from practice, can it be of any use to practice. A familiarly dialectical view.

Note that to say philosophy must remain autonomous is not to imply that it can go on as if it can float freely, unmediated, above society and history—this is as much anathema to Adorno as it was to Marx. It just means it cannot be expected to justify its every move according to either the contemporary situation or to Marxist orthodoxy. This would amount to a "shackling" of philosophy.

One question: if emancipation is the realization of philosophy, does that mean there will be no more philosophy?

:up:

is this 'emancipation' to be understood primarily in political terms? — Wayfarer

I now see you might have a contrast in mind between political and spiritual. I think Adorno would say the latter follows.

Would you say that Adorno holds that theory itself can be a form of resistance? — Tom Storm

Yes indeed, and I've just read a lecture of his in which he makes this point: theory and practice are not mutually exclusive, and thought is practical, even when it is not about the practical or directed towards it.

EDIT: It even extends into his writing style, in which he enacts the resistance to what he sees as the neat packaging of "clarity".

It's a weird thing to me still, because I used to always separate the two in my mind, and it's amazing to see how Adorno, for example, connects the most abstract theories about epistemology and metaphysics with practical concerns. This is challenging but in the end I think the right way to go, the way I see it.

Pretty much, but there's a sense---and this is probably a gross caricature---in which he retained the Marxian view that philosophy will be solved in a world free of domination. Also, he's definitely against praxis at the expense of theory.

So when Marx says the philosophers have only interpreted the world and the point, however, is to change it, Adorno interprets this as meaning that the point of philosophy is to change it, not that we should stop philosophizing, man the barricades, and roll our sleeves up. I think this is a correct interpretation.

You almost remind me of Adorno himself, in that you see everything as ideological :wink:

But the answer is: not quite. There is room for social sciences like sociology and anthropology, which are empirical sciences which are not reducible to biology and physics. There is also room for philosophy. This is where W and A differ: for the former it's therapy, for the latter it's because emancipating human beings hasn't happened yet.

The trouble is that even when the philosophy is about the big picture, the concepts and arguments being used have to be analyzed in detail. What exactly does concept X presuppose, is it consistent with concept Y in its aspect Z, and so on.

Philosophy involves ultimate generality, but that generality doesn't imply vagueness. So we can make a distinction between two dimensions: general-particular, and vague-detailed. We can address the general in a detailed way.

EDIT: Oh, and welcome :smile:

Point being, what is intuitive is not fixed. Our practices change our intuitions.

So it remains quite problematic to attempt to ground logic on an intuition. Much clearer to ground it on practice.

Also important here, and perhaps this cannot be emphasised enough: while intuition is private, practice is public. We share our practices more easily than out intuitions.

So we might grant your point and still find intuition wanting as a grounding for rationality. — Banno

Yep.

But practice changes too. I wonder if one of the criticisms of psychologism works against this Wittgensteinian view as much as it does against psychologism: if logic is relative to our practices then it's contingent.

EDIT: Also: is it quite right to say that logic is grounded in our practices, as if it is based on them, when in fact it is immanent to them?

The reason I'm thinking about this is that a couple of days ago I noticed that Adorno had written more about formal logic than I thought he had. In his critique of Husserl's critique of psychologism (Against Epistemology: A Metacritique), he agrees that psychologism is wrong but disagrees that it follows that logic is a priori, transcendental, quasi-Platonic. This is where Wittgenstein agrees and says it's about our practices (language games and our form of life), but Adorno says it's sociohistorical, though not reducible to sociohistorical facts.

EDIT: I was going to say something about intuition, which is different from psychologism and more in line with Husserl's transcendental answer---but I'll leave it.

Going back over LND5 I'm thinking I'm sympathetic to Adorno's take on theory/practice -- I certainly agree that "practice" can become a kind of fetish, and even anti-intellectual. Concepts -- theory -- are an important part of practice, and thinking is itself a practice. — Moliere

From what I remember—I still have to read it again—he says that this point is already in Marx, that the fetishization of practice is a feature of the contemporaneous versions of Marxism popular in the sixties. That lecture is very much of its time, as I recall, with the student protests brewing and activists hungry for action.

Ultimately, I believe it leads to unintelligibility, which to avoid requires the priority of the subject. — Metaphysician Undercover

Adorno thinks that gets you intelligibility at the cost of falsity.

Well, your position is interesting and I’ve enjoyed grappling with it, but I’ll move on to theory and practice now. No doubt we’ll revisit this stuff.

So if you were to disagree with someone's intuition, not to share their intuition, they have no comeback. It's difficult to see how not having an intuition is something you can be wrong or mistaken about. i think we agree on this. It's a pretty poor grounding for the whole of rationality. — Banno

But couldn't we say that intuition and self-evidence are signs of, or of a piece with, our practices? It just doesn't seem all that far from saying "they would not be participating in the same activity" to saying they would not have the intuitions—the experience of the agreement of logic with what we do—that people have when they successfully do x and y.

Granted that to say intuition is the ground is too strong, but isn't it also too strong to say that intuition as ground is entirely off the mark?

My simplistic way of thinking of it is that we can use "the working-class" as a convenient shorthand, because there is something real there which is a lot like that, so long as we remember to keep our minds open. — Jamal

Partly for my own benefit I'd like to work out exactly what is lost, what is misleading, in this over-simple formulation. It seems to assume there is an object that in principle might be captured by a concept, if only we found the right one. But the object itself is not a stable entity and the idea that the concept resembles or approximates it is a reification of the concept. It pretends to abnegate itself while secretly continuing to apply it. Better put, the concept and the object are historical, fractured, necessarily non-identical. It's not a matter of finding a good approximation but of finding the truth in the contradictions. That's pretty vague but it's the best I can do right now.

There's also a risk, with "so long as we remember to keep our minds open," of psychologizing and trivializing negative dialectics. The non-identity of concepts and objects is not just a matter of mental attitude but is an objective condition of society.

This is attempting to dissolve the problem too soon — Jamal

Specifically it is dissolving the problem in favour of the subject, which is why he is against idealism.

I think you are missing the point. The argument is not that this aspect of the weather does not have real existence, the argument is that it does not exist as an "object". Nor does it truthfully exist as a "system", though it might be modeled as a system. We impose imaginary boundaries as this is what is required of "system", and this imposition produces the illusion of an "object".

If we started from the core of the storm, and worked our way outward, looking for these boundaries which make the storm into a definitive "object" as a system, we wouldn't ever find them. We start at the eye, and we wouldn't limit the system just to the eye. Nor would we limit it to the eye and the eyewall. Then we have spiral rain bands, but still the wind and clouds extend further, right into the neighbouring high pressure area, such that there is a continuous pressure gradient from the middle of the low pressure area to the middle of the high. There is no real boundary which separates the storm from everything else, it's just an imaginary boundary imposed on a world of interconnectedness.

This could be an example of Adorno's "systematization". Notice, it's a sort of subjective boundary imposed upon the whole, to create what passes for a "system", out of a selected part. Adorno is talking about, and provides an example of this systematization in theory. What I have provided is a description of how it works in practise. We apply systems theory to partition out a specific, intentionally selected aspect of reality, and model that aspect as an object, a system which is bounded.

So I extend this by analogy to the way you consider "society" to be an object. How would you separate one specific society from another, as they are all interconnected. And if the entirety of humanity is "society" in general, how would we account for all the opposing customs, etc.? This practise of systematization, which is to take something which is inherently subjective, and portray it as objective we find everywhere. For example, some will take a subjectively created group of people such as "the working class", and treat this proposed group as an objective distinction. In reality, there is just arbitrary, subjective criteria which are imposed to create the illusion of a real unified group of people. — Metaphysician Undercover

Okay, this is great. I think you've hit the nail on the head. I was focusing on the full-on idealism because you had been seeking justification not just for real objects but for real interconnectedness (but I guess if the objects are in some sense ideal/imposed then so is the interconnectedness). So you're right that I was missing something, but what I was missing, specifically, is that you're expressing the problem that negative dialectics seeks to address. Adorno agrees with you (up to a point), and you're making a very Adornian point, which is that reality exceeds the grasp of concepts. That in reality which exceeds this grasp he calls the nonidentical.

Now, you'll notice that Adorno will refer to objects, using concepts, while also implying that the concept doesn't quite fit, which in your terms implies that the object is imposed and means that he cannot legitimately use that concept to refer to the real, or that the purported object is entirely ideal. But he has no choice. He will say things like "objects exceed the grasp of their concepts," and applying this to one object, say the working-class, this is a way of showing that we must refer to it as an object but must also remember that its very object-hood is partly a product of thought and does not precisely capture what it's trying to capture (and what's more, no object concept can capture it).

My simplistic way of thinking of it is that we can use "the working-class" as a convenient shorthand, because there is something real there which is a lot like that, so long as we remember to keep our minds open. That is, the conclusion that the object is in your words "simply a creation of boundaries imposed by thought" is not quite right: it is not simply or only that. It might be more or less close to what is real, but the important point is that sometimes it is very far from close, which is when we fail to hear the "suffering voices."

NOTE: See my post below in which I criticize and attempt to revise what I just said:

So it's sort of a starting point for negative dialectics that philosophy is paradoxical. Concepts always leave something out or fail to fit reality, i.e., they to some degree reflect thought. Imposing a boundary is a good example. And yet to do philosophy at all (and not only philosophy) we have to think in concepts. Adorno's solution will be the method of constellations.

In his inaugural lecture of 1931 he said:

philosophy has to bring its elements, which it receives from the sciences, into changing constellations … into changing trial combinations until they fall into a figure which can be read as an answer, while at the same time the question disappears — Copied from the SEP entry

(constellations of concepts, he means)

I'm guessing that later on he abandoned the idea that the procedure comes to an end and the question just disappears (that would seem to result in a system), but this gives a flavour of the method of constellations (wrapping the idea neatly in the phrase "the method of constellations" is probably very un-Adornian but it's ok for now).

So society and hurricanes are real but are also in a sense ideal, in that judgements are socially and historically mediated through concepts. Adorno's theory is one of mediation: reality is not constituted by the subject, but neither is it just given immediately as in empiricism.

I don't think that constitutes anti-idealism, it simply signifies that it is a philosophy which is other than the philosophy which establishes an identity of being and thought. So for example, Parmenides promoted an idealism with that identity of being and thought. Socrates and Plato were critical of this idealism, mostly due to the way that it seemed to exclude the possibility of becoming as something real, and intelligible. Plato ended up outlining an idealism which places mind as prior to being. So he moved away from "the identity of being and thought", but he didn't get away from idealism. — Metaphysician Undercover

But for Adorno the identity of being and thought is the result of the idealist prioritization of the subject.

Anyway, generally I think you go too far when you (appear to) reject the objects entirely, as if they are subjective illusions. This is attempting to dissolve the problem too soon, and Adorno resists this—he settles within the tension rather than coming down on one side, as he must do to do justice to what's real. So, in summary, I think you are quite deeply in tune with Adorno, but you give too much ground to idealism, which is the point at which you begin to demand foundational principles and justifications.

I'm interested to learn more. I really do not see the anti-idealism which you refer to, yet. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think he states it openly in the first lecture:

We are concerned here with a philosophical project that does not presuppose the identity of being and thought, nor does it culminate in that identity.

Here I think there's a certain agreement then, too -- because I tend to take the intersectional approach, and by so doing I can point to more than the labor struggle as examples that I have in mind: Not just the Soviet Union, but also the labor movement. And not just the United States' labor movement, but also the modern Chinese labor movement. And not just labor, but also race. And not just race, but also sex. — Moliere

Yes, and that would be very much in sympathy with Marcuse, I suppose. Adorno is just a lot less optimistic across the board.

But, I'll keep the apologism reigned in. — Moliere

Feel free! Anyway, I'll read lecture 5 and say something soonish.

My previous post in reply to you was rather dismissive and simplistic. I do see the problems, you've set them out well in your latest post, your position is coherent, and it highlights the tension at the heart of Adorno's philosophy. He is not simply anti-idealist. It's good to take time over the antagonism rather than, as I am tempted to do, forget about it and move on.

What it comes down to is (a) I am nevertheless ready to move on and don't think this is the right time to tackle the issue (though I intend now to keep it in mind), and (b) there is a real antagonism in Adorno's thinking, which goes right down to the bottom of idealism vs realism, which I hope will become, maybe not clearer, but more explicit as the reading goes on into ND.

So I'll keep it short. I think you're on the right track with the line of throught that goes from Aristotle, through Hegel, and to Adorno: the "blurring" is exactly his intention, but not so as to muddy the waters but to be more truthful. He hasn't just forgotten to lay out his principles—he is against doing philosophy in that way. Your position is ultimately based on a framework Adorno rejects.

Here's an example of the need for distinction. Advocates for the application of systems theory in science, will say that a weather storm, like a hurricane, can be modeled as "a system". This system is assumed to be a composition of interconnected active parts, interconnected through their activities, and operating as a whole, an object," the system". The problem is that in reality there is no such boundary between the low pressure area and the high pressure area, just a gradation, and the supposed boundary which makes all that interconnected activity into "a system" as a whole, an object, is completely "imposed by thought".

This is common in modern thought, to impose an arbitrary boundary on activity, create "a system", and treat that created system as if it is a real, independent object, "beyond thought". I would argue that this is similar to how you claim that "society" refers to an object. You impose some arbitrary boundaries on activities, and you clim that there is an object here, called "society". But your object is simply a creation of boundaries imposed by thought. — Metaphysician Undercover

Good stuff, but here is the thing: the bolded conclusion isn't justified. It begs the question. From the fact that we impose artificial boundaries on hurricanes it doesn't follow that hurricanes don't exist apart from those boundaries.

I suggest we return to that interminable debate later on. Suffice to say I'm glad you chose not to let go of this particular bone of contention, and I'll continue to think about it.

On the topic of realism it would be interesting at some point to compare Adorno with McDowell. They seem very close, and also very distant. For both, the objects of experience, though not ideal, are conceptually mediated; but for Adorno, this mediation goes wrong and leaves stuff out.

Finished LND 4

I noticed, thanks to y'alls efforts, how "systemization" is a contrast-class, but one that isn't as described as "System" in this lecture. "System" is something that philosophy at one time pursued and should continue to preserve that spirit, whereas systemization is a pre-figured tabulating system with a bucket labeled "Not of interest", or something along those lines -- I get the idea that given we cannot have a true System in the manner which philosophy once pursued we have, in order to fulfill that need for a system, replaced it with systemization which has the appearance of a system without any of the drive for what motivated the philosophical system in the first place: not just totalizing, but a grasping of the universe, and with the end of LND 4 -- not just a grasping, but rather a grasping of all that is such that human beings come to live free lives.

So "System" is that which cannot be achieved, but likewise for Adorno there's an impulse in there that he seems to believe is necessary in order for philosophy to progress at all. — Moliere

Yep, that's how I read it.

:grin:

In LND 5 I get the sense that Adorno is missing out on a lot of what makes Marxism so great -- while some of his predictions are false what he offers is the explication of a worldview from the philosophical perspective such that one need not adopt bourgeois philosophy, and while his utopian visions have yet to be achieved Marx's contributions to a proletariat philosophy have been invaluable as a basis for reflection. He takes Rousseau's notion of the social contract to include the economic flows wherein people, born free, came to live in chains. His articulation between slave and worker, and the relationshiop between worker/owner is invaluable for analyzing power relationships, and not just in an academic sense -- but in terms of real world organizing. — Moliere

I've only skimmed the lecture and will have re-read it, but from my dark post-Marxist point of view he might actually be too uncritical of Marxism. I think he agrees with most of what you say here. What he rejects are mainly (1) the proletariat as the revolutionary subject and universal class, and (2) the teleology of history. (And probably (3) a strict economic determinism (whether or not that is actually Marx's position)).

He agrees with a lot of historical materialism and, I think, buys right into Marx's analysis of alienation, the commodity, and exploitation.

Without articulating how selling one's labor-time is exploitative, for instance, there'd be no practical political basis for workers to struggle on the shop floor. Rather, and this did happen, they ought join liberal societies of association for workers rather than disrupt the flow of commerce.

But if the relationship in which exchange is freely taking place is exploitative unto itself then this gives political justification -- as in an articulatable standard that could hold across people as something they can consistently demand together -- for industrial agitation. — Moliere

You're right that Adorno's approach does little for working-class organization, but that's because he probably sees the extraction of surplus-value as one aspect or way of looking at the more generally alienating and dominating nature of capitalist society. That is, he de-prioritizes it.

But, I gather this will be a frequent point of thinking for me -- because it seems Adorno is trying to save what's worth saving, whereas I'm pretty much just a Marxist who doesn't see it as a doomed project or something which has been falsified, but a proper political philosophy for the working class which has aided many sorts of the have-nots in their struggle to have.

EDIT: On the flip-side, his criticisms are also very valuable -- I'm not disagreeing with them so much as reacting to them from my own perspective. — Moliere

But I can understand the Marxist assessment that Adorno is effectively regressive. If the working-class remains the agent of change, his thinking is not much use, or counter-productive. That said, I think his hatred of capitalism exceeds that of Marx, so I'd say yes, he's definitely worth reading even from that Marxist point of view.

EDIT: Also you might want to have a look at the Adorno-Popper debate, part of the "positivism dispute" in the social sciences, in which Adorno seems to have been put in the position of defending Marxism. It might supply a different picture of his relationship with Marxism. I used ChatGPT to produce a summary of it because there's a lot to read and I've got enough on my plate. I can post it here if you're interested.

EDIT 2: A personal reflection. What strikes me now is that the Frankfurt School were facing up to the failure of working class revolution and the absorption of the working class into bourgeois society and culture (which was not the case in Marx's time), long before I was born, and yet it's only in the last ten years or so that I've faced up to this in my own thinking. I imagine you might say that they were over-reacting, perhaps understandably given the world situation at the time; personally I think their disillusionment still stands (but I don't particularly want to infect you with it).

I hesistate to follow you down that rabbit hole, because I find it hard to relate to your concerns. I think you're making it more complex than you need to. Or, more charitably, you're a hardcore idealist who cannot accept Adorno's materialism.

But what you're saying does go to the heart of the subject-object relation, which is a central part of his thinking; and there is in fact a dialectical antagonism in his thinking between objects as non-conceptual and objects as ineluctably mediated—so I'll try responding.

From this interpretation I could not get beyond the idea that he promotes system thinking. However, I noticed at the part where he talks about Heidegger that "system" thinking refers to following a single principle, and this is what unifies thought. So I went back to the beginning of the lecture and found that he actually defines "system" as a movement of thought which follows a single principle. So "system" must be properly understood as the activity of a certain type of thinking, not as the thing produced by that type of thinking

The thing produced being a philosophical system such as Kant's transcendental idealism or Fichte's Science of Knowledge, yes? Well, why not both? They're part of the same deal. I don't think Adorno makes an important distinction between the activity of making a system and the resulting philosophical system itself, or if he does it's along the lines of the systematization/system distinction.

But it's central to Adorno that there is not just thought; philosophical system is almost synonymous with idealism, for him. When he speaks of phenomena he means the objects of experience, which he wants to treat as non-conceptual, or not entirely conceptual. His basic thrust with regard to the status of phenomena is materialist and anti-idealist. The question of idealism vs realism is something I think he goes into in more detail in ND itself. For now I find it helpful to maintain a more-or-less naive picture of the subject-object relation, with the mind here and semi-mind-independent things over there. (In the end, he is neither idealist nor naive realist, but somewhat Kantian, but without inaccessible noumena (maybe that's another way of saying he's a Hegelian without Spirit)).

So the interconnectedness we are talking about here, is relations of thought. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, which interconnectedness are we talking about? Adorno is saying there is an interconnectedness beyond thought, not only beyond philosophical systems but obscured by philosophical systems.

So the interconnectedness we are talking about here, is relations of thought. And we can criticize these relations with the criticism of judgement, as he says. We can also criticize phenomena, and "phenomena" refers to how the material situation appears to us through sensation. You propose a "real interconnectedness" of phenomena, but how are we supposed to derive this? Any connections we make are made within our minds, by our minds, and the same holds for divisions. So I don't see how "real interconnectedness" can be supported. Or even if we assume it, it drops from relevance like Kant's noumena. — Metaphysician Undercover

So this is a classic argument for idealism: real interconnectedness must obviously be understood in thought, so such a real interconnectedness, beyond thought, cannot be supported, therefore there is only thought—or else we go with Kant's solution.

Though I cannot see the attraction of this approach, I'm happy to keep an eye out to see how he criticizes idealism further down the line. Suffice to say, it's one of his biggest targets, perhaps his biggest (he thinks empiricism always ends up in idealism too).

EDIT: I forgot...

We can also criticize phenomena, and "phenomena" refers to how the material situation appears to us through sensation. — Metaphysician Undercover

We should be careful. Adorno has an interesting theory of bodily experience, and tends to use "somatic" when he is talking about sensation, because he believes the concept of "sensation" is implicated in the subjectivization characteristic of idealism, i.e., the concept of sensation takes something physical and relational and unjustifiably turns it into something mental and private. This idealist pressure of thought is demonstrated by your own way of wording things here, I think.

Incidentally, it might help to put the somatic in context: irreducible suffering, non-conceptual and resisting the conceptual, testifies to the non-identical:

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. — Adorno, ND

If there is nothing other than system philosophy which produces interconnectedness, then it is still needed — Metaphysician Undercover

Like Adorno, I don't accept the antecedent. Things are really connected, before a system is applied to them. Indeed we could think of that as his main point, since the problem with philosophical systems is that they forget the real interconnectedness in their drive to cover everything with their own schemes.

Now, if you are looking for some kind of foundational argument justifying the claim of interconnectedness, I think you will look in vain, because negative dialectics is demonstrative and anti-foundational, rather than progressing in a linear fashion from, say, a proof that the world exists. I'm not quite clear: is that the kind of thing you're expecting he should do?

So are you saying that he thinks we still need system thinking, along with the inverse, a philosophy without system is actually not possible? — Metaphysician Undercover

No, I just meant what I said before, the interpretation of his position that we both agree on. Myth represents philosophical systems and the smorgasbord represents fragmentation. This is probably very un-Adornian, but I feel like he wants a middle way between them.

System, the form of portrayal of a totality in which nothing remains external — ND, Idealism as Rage

Note his way of wording this. I think it implies there is an alternative form of the portrayal of totality, namely that which does not contain everything and which is not closed.

That's a good way of putting it. And from Adorno's point of view neither the myth nor the smorgasbord are good options, on their own.

Anyway MU, I'll ponder your thorough analysis and get back to you in a day or two. I'll say right now though, that I don't really see the problem. I mean, I see the tension, but I think it's just another way of stating Adorno's dialectical attitude to system, and the proof will be in the pudding.

there is no reason to believe that phenomena, as a multiplicity already, has any sort of interconnectedness other than that granted by a system. — Metaphysician Undercover

Isn't there? Is this a Thatcherite point, i.e., there's no such thing as society?

And it's not like he clearly demarcates X and Y aspects anyway. For example, in the lectures he seems to approve of the "principle of unity," but in ND, quoted above, he says that negative dialectics seeks to replace that principle. Contradictions all the way down.

Some reflections concerning dialectics in general...

But our disagreement here is just the result of the real ambivalence in his position, which is dialectical: he is both against and for system. — Jamal

Here I'm tempted as always to resolve the contradiction by saying that his position is not really one of dialectical contradiciton, that it's more like: he is against X aspects of system but he is for Y aspects of system, which replaces the contradiciton with a simple differentiation. But Adorno always resists this, believing that this is identity-thinking in action.

So I should ask myself: is something lost when I resolve the contradiciton in that way? Perhaps what is lost is that aspects X and Y are not really separable into discrete sets of aspects, these having this effect and those having that. In other words, the non-identical in those aspects, or in system as such, is lost when the contradiciton is dissolved. The aspects are part of an inextricably tied up bundle of mutually dependent phenomena, so separating them breaks and thereby hides all the interconnections, thus their characteristics, and thus the unique characteristics of system itself.

So what is then lost is that his critique of system is not in fact extricable from his promotion of it. More precisely what is lost is the open tension in his view, which he doesn't want to be neatly wrapped up so we can move on to the next problem. EDIT: The key here is that the persistence of contradictions is a mode of truth.

That's a bit weak but I'll leave it there.

Proust is great but I don't expect to go back to him to finish it. As Alonso said, it can be tedious.

I haven't read the big Frenchies either: Flaubert, Balzac, Zola, and Hugo all await me. But like you I'll choose Dostoevsky over Sartre.

he really promotes the need for a proper philosophical system. — Metaphysician Undercover

But this is ambiguous. He promotes the need for a system, in that he thinks there is something important in this need that can be redirected into "blasting open the phenomena with the insistent power of thought". But I don't think he's saying he wants to actually do a philosophical system.

I had a look at ND itself:

If one speaks in the newest aesthetic debates of anti-drama and anti-heroes, then negative dialectics, which holds itself distant from all aesthetic themes, could be called an antisystem. With logically consistent means, it attempts to put, in place of the principle of unity and of the hegemony of the supra-ordinated concept, that which would be outside of the bane of such unity. — ND, Prologue

The philosophical system was from the very beginning antinomical. Its very first signs were delimited by its own impossibility; exactly this had condemned, in the earlier history of the modern systems, each to annihilation by the next. The ratio which, in order to push itself through as a system, rooted out virtually all qualitative determinations which it referred to, ended up in irreconcilable contradiction with the objectivity to which it did violence, by pretending to comprehend it. It became all the more removed from this, the more completely it subjugated this to its axioms, finally to the one of identity. The pedantry of all systems, all the way to the architectonic ponderousness of Kant and, in spite of his program, even Hegel, are marks of an a priori conditional failure, documented with incomparable honesty by the rifts of the Kantian system; in Moliere pedantry is already the center-piece of the ontology of the bourgeois Spirit. — ND, Relation to System

All emphatic philosophy had, in contrast to the skeptical kind, which renounced emphasis, one thing in common, that it would be possible only as a system. This has crippled philosophy scarcely less than its empirical currents. Whatever it might be able to appropriately judge is postulated before it arises. System, the form of portrayal of a totality in which nothing remains external, sets the thought in absolute opposition to each of its contents and dissolves the content in thought: idealistically, before any argumentation for idealism. — ND, Idealism as Rage

EDIT: But our disagreement here is just the result of the real ambivalence in his position, which is dialectical: he is both against and for system.

EDIT: Incidentally, how should we reference quotations from ND, given that the various versions of the Redmond translation have different paginations? Above I’ve just referred to the section titles, and in a couple of versions these have numbers too, which I’m guessing refer to the old Ashton translation. I guess it’s not a huge deal when we’re using electronic copies that can be searched.

@Alonsoaceves is responding to my ten-year-old OP, which is about In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust.

Update: I never did get through the whole thing.

After second, I realized that he is actually promoting the need for a true philosophical system. — Metaphysician Undercover

He is saying there is value in the need for a system, but he is not promoting the project of a philosophical system itself. He is on board with the modern rejection of systematic philosophy, and makes that quite obvious. This is where he differs from Hegel and Fichte (and Kant, although it’s more complex with Kant).

If you think his wish to preserve the energy of philosophical systems is evidence of a secret drive towards a full-blown system, then that’s going beyond what he’s saying, turning his critique back onto him. I don’t think there’s the evidence to make that accusation, though there’s an obvious tension in his position.

What he says about philosophical systems is a justification of his attempt to make sense of the world as an objective reality whose parts are connected without imposing an overarching metaphysical principle, such as spirit.

Do you disagree with this summary:

1. Philosophy should treat phenomena as interconnected within an organized whole
2. This is possible without system in the traditional sense
3. And this takes what is good about system rather than merely abandoning it dismissively
4. Imposing one's own scheme on the phenomena from the outside is to take what's bad about system---the phenomena should be allowed to speak for themselves — Jamal

The first twist, is that the meaning of "system" has really changed. Now, what "system" refers to in anti-system philosophy, is really systematization. So anti-system, or a-system philosophy, if it's decent philosophy, will demonstrate system in a latent form. The latent system is really quite tricky because it's where the subjective meets the objective.

The point though, is that this systematization type of thinking, which becomes "provincial", and even "cottage" at the end of the lecture, is what true philosophy must strive to avoid. — Metaphysician Undercover

The first time I read this I thought wow, MU, you're a genius, I totally missed that twist!

And it's backed up by the notes for the lecture:

So great is the need for system that today systematization has taken its place unobserved. The explanation is assumed to be that the facts should find their proper place in an organized scheme that has previously been abstracted from the facts themselves.

This need ensures that even bodies of thought that claim to be anti-systematic (Nietzsche), or a-systematic, are latent systems. — p.33

So now I'm doubting my own interpretation of what he meant.

But it doesn't seem to fit. Part of the problem I think is that in these lectures Adorno is improvising. He goes from a few notes but otherwise makes it up on the spot, so it often doesn't tie together neatly, and that makes the arguments difficult to untangle. In this case, I don't think it's just the systematization he wants to avoid; it's also system in the traditional sense exemplified by German idealism, explaining the world from a single principle kind of thing.

The way I'd put it is, philosophy should avoid both traditional system and systematization, but it should take the energy of the former.

The provincialism he talks about can't just be a matter of systematization, because its problem is that it still acts like it's able to do traditional systemaic philosophy:

This consists in the fact that, in general nowadays, in the models it applies to reality, philosophy behaves as if the visibility of existing circumstances allowed it to survey all living creatures and subsume them under a unifying concept – this is something it still takes for granted.

But the problem here, I'm inclined to believe, is Adorno's presentation, which as you say is all over the place. Maybe he gets too carried away polemicizing. As it is, I don't know what he's referring to with the stuff about provincialism.

Actually, looking at it again it's clear enough that he's targeting Heidegger and the existentialists, because he mentions his book The Jargon of Authenticity in this connection, and that's who he is targeting in that book.

[time passes]

OK, I think I know what he's getting at, and I now think you're right. Provincial philosophies are latently systematic in that they secretly maintain that impulse to tie everything together by imposing their ready-made schemes (systematization), but they fail to take what is good about system, which is the organic development of such a system. In other words, they follow the letter, not the spirit, of system (pun not intended).

I don't think it's important so sort out this confusion (although the confusion might be entirely mine). What matters is:

1. Philosophy should treat phenomena as interconnected within an organized whole
2. This is possible without system in the traditional sense
3. And this takes what is good about system rather than merely abandoning it dismissively
4. Imposing one's own scheme on the phenomena from the outside is to take what's bad about system---the phenomena should be allowed to speak for themselves

I got there in the end.

I believe that the issue which lies beneath this conundrum is the problem of the relationship between the true and the false. The true, we can never know with absolute certainty, yet we have certainty about the false, as the impossible, beginning with contradiction. This produces a categorical distinction between the false and the true, as the false is "the thing" which is impossible, while the true is the possible, which is not a thing at all, but a multitude of possibility. I believe that this description provides an explanation of Adorno's reference to what is "definite", and to the "concrete expression" in the radio broadcast you quoted — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I see what you mean. I relate this to the mundane fact that it's easier to criticize than to offer something positive, and it's somehow more productive to give a bad review than a good one: the false, or falsely presented, is what strikes us most and gives thinking purchase.

In case there's any misunderstanding, I don't really mean that negative dialectics seeks out the false just because that's the easy thing to do. It's more that the false is what stands out, needing to be addressed.

EDIT: I'm not sure if that works to be honest.

from the Hegelian proposal of determining the positive, which is actually fruitless (or impossible), to a more realistic method of determining the negative. Determining the impossible then places the possible into a proper perspective. — Metaphysician Undercover

It's possible that this agrees with my own understanding of it.

Here's an interpretation from "Adorno Studies Through a Glass Darkly: Adorno's Inverse Theology" — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep, looks good.

LND Lecture 4

This picks up the second question from the last lecture: is philosophy possible without system?

The crux of the biscuit is as @Moliere put it:

Is philosophy without system possible? And Negative Dialectics is meant to answer in the affirmative, but also without arbitrarity -- where philosophy has a proper authority. — Moliere

To begin with Adorno lays out where contemporary philosophy stands with regard to systems:

Today it has become much easier to assert that systematic philosophizing has become impossible – and, in consequence, we must renounce attempts to secure everything that has given the concept of system such enormous emphasis. And I place such great value on this because I believe that you will understand my approach to philosophy only if you see it in its relation to the idea of system and not simply as a random body of thought indifferent to system. — p.35

He takes the idea of system seriously, rather than merely dismissing it.

To get more specific about the concept of system, he distinguishes the relevant philosophical sense from mere systematization. The latter is some kind of organizational schema applied selectively, as in sociology; but a philosophical system develops from a basic principle to "draw everything into itself" so that nothing escapes it. It is totalizing.

The drive towards system in philosophy "is no longer felt by people’s enfeebled consciousness today." Knowing that Adorno, along with most other 20th century philosophers, concedes that systems are a lost cause, this is a curious comment. It signals the complexity of his position.

it is my belief that an a-systematic or anti-systematic form of thought can compete with the system nowadays only if it feels this need itself and – if I may anticipate this programmatic point – if it is also capable of absorbing into itself something of the energy that was formerly stored up in the great philosophical systems. — p.36

However, more than absorbing this energy, some supposedly anti-systematic philosophies are latently systematic, namely that of Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. I won't attempt to work out how this applies to Nietzsche, or to unpack what Adorno says about Heidegger, but it's more obvious to me in Husserl, whose phenomenology ended up in a system of transcendental idealism.

His comments on Heidegger lead him to say something interesting about Kant, who I'm more at home with:

Paradoxically, then, we might speak in Heidegger’s case of an irrational system of philosophy. It combines, we might say, the claim to totality or, as he himself says in a number of places, at least of Being and Time, it combines the claim to totality with the renunciation of comprehension. Incidentally, you can already find this curious coupling implied in Kant, since Kant expressly defends the idea of a system of transcendental idealism and had formed the plan of supplementing the three Critiques with a positive system of this sort, while at the same time rejecting the idea of comprehending the objects ‘from within’ as intellectualistic and Leibnizian – even though the reality is that, if philosophy had succeeded in conceptualizing everything that exists without leaving a remainder, it would necessarily have comprehended the phenomena it had subsumed. But this is just one of the many questions that remain unresolved – magnificently unresolved, we must add – in Kant. — p.38

Kant simultaneously asserts the possibility of an all-encompassing system, while admitting that we cannot know things in themselves. But having such a system would require the phenomena it incorporated to be properly comprehended, meaining they would have to somehow bring in the noumenal along with them. Adorno might think this tension is "magnificent" because Kant is honest about it: he doesn't pretend to have conceptual closure, despite his massive urge to systematize.

In contrast to Heidegger, whose philosophy is an "idealism in disguise," philosophy should take a different path:

the path on which system becomes secularized into a latent force which ties disparate insights to one another (replacing any architectonic organization) – this path in fact seems to me to be the only road still open to philosophy. — p.38

I don't really get exactly how this good latency is supposed to be different from Heidegger's latency, but as he says it's to do with the way the latter makes use of the concept of Being. In any case, that last quotation is a concise statement of the basic programme.

This is along the lines of what we may say of theology, since in this latter case the process of secularization released the idea of the system as the idea of a coherent, meaningful world.

I like this analogy. Prior to secularization, the idea of a coherent, meaningful world was unreleased because it was unquestioned. It had nothing to appear against, therefore it just wasn't a thing. Or, secularization broke the monopoly on the idea.

The analogy is that the idea of a coherent authoritative philosophy has been released by the demise of systems, so that a strong and meaningful philosophy might thrive without depending on system.

To me Adorno seems to be saying that we shouldn't be satisfied with a weak kind of philosophy that pursues restricted problems or else abandons itself to relativism, subject to "contingency and whim". We should want some kind of unity.

My postulate would then be that the power of the system – what at one time was the unifying power of a structure of thought as a whole – had to be transformed into the criticism of individual detail, of individual phenomena. — p.40

In explaining what he means by criticism he mentions the debate he had with Karl Popper. I might look into that in a separate post because I imagine it's a fascinating confrontation between philosophical traditions.

That, then, would be the programme I want to put before you here. And this programme may well come closest to something that Nietzsche had in mind. Thinking would be a form of thinking that is not itself a system, but one in which system and the systematic impulse are consumed; a form of thinking that in its analysis of individual phenomena demonstrates the power that for- merly aspired to build systems. By this I mean the power that is liberated by blasting open individual phenomena through the insistent power of thought. This power is the same power that once animated the system, since it is the force which enabled individual phenomena, non-identical with their own concepts as they are, to become more than themselves. This means that something of the system can still be salvaged in philosophy, namely the idea that phenomena are objectively interconnected – and not merely by virtue of a classification imposed on them by the knowing subject. — p.40

Whatever its merits, it sure sounds good.

He anticipates the objection that he's naive in expecting all this:

You will all want to say: Aren’t you being rather naïve in expecting philosophy to deliver something of which it is no longer capable? In the age of the great systems – in modern times, let us say, from Descartes to Hegel – the world possessed a certain visibility. — p.41

The world simply does not have this visibility now. The world is not so simple as it was, and there is no shared ground in which everything can be expected to make sense. Disenchantment, the fragmentation of meaning, the demise of hierarchical societies in which everyone knew their place, the rise of secularism and Enlightenment, and the permanent revolution of capitalist development---all this means we can't do philosophy like we used to:

the traditional conception of philosophy can only be validated if thinking behaves as though it still inhabited the traditional society in which philosophy was able to function.

But this would be the validation of falsehood.