Thank you for your contribution, Number. I'm not sure how to answer until I know more, and I'm not familiar with Žižek's critique. My suspicion is that either Žižek is wrong, or you are wrong in using Žižek to critique Adorno. It remains to be demonstrated that Adorno does what you or Žižek says he does rather than doing the cool radical thing that Žižek thinks he is doing himself. On the face of it, what Žižek seeks to do doesn't seem far from what I see as Adorno's goal, though one can seriously doubt that the latter's thinking leads anywhere good, politically. But the idea that Adorno ends up on neutral ground doesn't really fit with how I read his Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, where (arguably) we see negative dialectics in action.

But basically it's too early for me to get into those debates, and maybe you're right.

It is precisely the implicit neutral position that creates a blind spot, enabling the return of identity and sustaining an ideological function. Žižek’s solution is to relate the mediating process to a different form of Otherness, one that cannot serve as an anchoring point for defining the subject’s identity. Regarding your example of the market situation, it suggests that the same people could simultaneously exercise their freedom in some respects while being affected by coercion in others." — Number2018

Interestingly, I think this part of your Žižekian critique of Adorno is actually a pretty good defence of Adorno, because it goes some way to answering my sceptical doubt about Adorno's position (which I imagine is shared by Žižek) that reality itself is contradictory, that the contradictions are not just in and between the concepts that are applied to it. My reframing, to remove the contradiction, was hasty and thoughtless; as you point out, things are more complex, and (I want to put it stronger than this but I'm not sure how) we need to keep ourselves open to the existence of contradictions. Because that is how we actually experience the world. (that's a bit better)

That’s suitably dialectical, and agreeable.

I think I see what you mean. Adorno doesn’t like idealism because it’s too arrogant, presuming an identity between subject and object, not because he denies a subject-object intertwinement (which, however, is non-totalizing).

I'd be interested to see others' thoughts on the objection that Adorno attempts to respond to: Why must everything be a matter of contradictions? In my example of market freedom quoted below — the market is a domain of freedom and the market is a domain of coercion — the contradiction can be dissolved by a re-framing that contains qualifications, and in a Left-wing manner too:

The market is a domain of freedom for these people and a domain of coercion for those people. No contradiction.

(Like, a zoo is not necessarily contradictory just because it allows people to walk in and out of its territory at will but doesn't allow the penguins to do the same)

I'll attempt my own answer. What has often mattered for Marxian dialectical thinkers (I'd hope there are non-Marxian examples too) is the critique of ideology, i.e., of the set of ideas that dominate in society. Like liberalism. Liberalism, roughly speaking, maintains that the market just is a domain of freedom simpliciter, since legally it is equally free to anyone, and how you make use of that freedom to secure your income is up to you, and wage-work is a contractual arrangement made between two free and equal parties, everyone is equal before the law, and so on. Liberalism has to do this because, roughly speaking, it denies that liberal-democratic capitalist society is essentially class-based or structured according to the relations of production.

So what's happening here is that you refuse to allow the contradiction to be dissolved because you are taking the liberals at their word to expose their contradictory ideology. However, I guess this suggests that the contradiciton is only in the ideas, not in capitalist reality itself, and it occurs to me that this is an old debate in Marxism that I wouldn't want to get bogged down in — though I would like to see what people think about the status of contradictions. It's important for the reading because Adorno maintains that the contradicitons are indeed in reality, not only in concepts.

A couple of examples: the drive for profit has created the unprecedented means to meet human needs on a massive scale, but precisely that drive prevents production from being directed to satisfying those human needs; the freedom of the market, i.e., freedom of choice and the freedom to trade, is based on compulsion: most people have no choice but to sell their labour to survive.

Note the way that this account emphasizes mutual and immanent dependency: it is not that capitalism has created the means to meet human needs on a massive scale despite the profit motive; and it is not that the market is a domain of freedom despite compulsion. — Jamal

I think I concur with your gist, but...

When you see that it's actually one face of a two-sided coin, that it can't exist independently of that coin, it's like you've fallen into an idealist world. In other words, understanding dialectics should be accompanied by an "Oh shit!" — frank

Marx, Adorno, Zizek, Malabou, Pippin and Brandom seem to have been able to go through that "oh shit!" moment without falling into idealism. We can ditch that, don't you think?

(Unless you just mean, not that you become an idealist, but that you fall into the world of Hegel and the German idealists)

If it's the best way of thinking philosophically, then it's true philosophy, and will never be obsolete so long as there are human beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

But it's not obvious to me that so long as there are human beings, there will be true philosophy. But even if it does follow, maybe what matters more is whether such thinking prevails.

I'll do what I can to keep up with the reading, but that's a lot of material. So I'm happy that you're in no rush. — Metaphysician Undercover

Great :smile:

We start with the Lectures on Negative Dialectics (LND), which is based on recordings of Adorno's lectures in 1965-66, just after he'd completed the six-year task of writing the book. The lectures took place at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Unfortunately it looks like there were no extant recordings or transcripts for lectures 11 to 25, so we only have some notes for those. Even so, I think the first ten work as a nice introduction to ND, not least because they're much less condensed and difficult than his formal writings.


Geist

First, a reminder at the outset (largely for me) to keep in mind the translator's note. When the translation has "spiritual," the word Adorno is using is geistig, in the same way as used by Hegel.

The fact is that the term Geist falls somewhere between the available English words — spirit, mind, intellect — with all of which it also overlaps.

Editor's foreword

Most of the foreword is written from the standpoint of a familiarity with Adorno's theoretical philosophy and is therefore not very useful to us at this point. It focuses on three things:

1. Negative dialectics as advocating and exemplifying subjective philosophical/intellectual/spiritual experience, as opposed to (or as well as) a methodology

2. The attempt, with negative dialectics, to give "fair treatment" to the sphere of the non-conceptual, that in the world which exceeds our concepts, which Adorno believes is the proper concern of philosophy.

3. The method of constellations, designed to get around a huge problem produced by (2) above, namely that in giving fair treatment to the sphere of the non-conceptual, philosophy has no choice but to operate with concepts.

These will make more sense down the line, so I won't dwell on them now.


LND, Lecture 1

Adorno opens the lecture with a tribute to the recently deceased Christian philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, revealing that Tillich had effectively saved Adorno's life by approving his Habilitation thesis in 1931, which allowed him to get a job at Oxford and thereby secure an exit visa to leave Germany in 1934, before the Nazis closed in. For us, this is not particularly relevant to negative dialectics, but it's much more than a mere personal tidbit, since it supplies some crucial biographical context for the development of his thinking, particularly the thinking that led to Dialectic of Enlightenment.

He begins the lecture proper by saying that due to time constraints he has decided to use his book, Negative Dialectics, as the material for the lectures, rather than create a course with its own dedicated material consisting of the results of his research. In the guise of a preliminary pedagogical remark, this is a clever way of introducing negative dialectics, making the case for a certain kind of philosophical practice:

I am very aware that objections may be raised to this procedure, in particular those of a positivist cast of mind will be quick to argue that as a university teacher my duty is to produce nothing but completed, cogent and watertight results. I shall not pretend to make a virtue of necessity, but I do believe that this view does not properly fit our understanding of the nature of philosophy; that philosophy is thought in a perpetual state of motion; and that, as Hegel, the great founder of dialectics, has pointed out, in philosophy the process is as important as the result; that, as he asserts in the famous passage in the Phenomenology, process and result are actually one and the same thing. — p.4

The students are urged not to expect finished results, but rather, I would say, to share in that intellectual experience which is both the method and the content of his philosophy.

(Incidentally, Adorno in these lectures often addresses himself to the "positivists" in his audience, and seems to make reference to their various non-philosophical specialisms. This leads me to believe that the lectures were attended by, I'm guessing, postgraduate sociologists and psychologists, rather than just or even primarily philosophy students.)

He states the plan for the lecture course:

I should like to introduce you to the concept of negative dialectics as such. I should like then to move on to negative dialectics in the light of certain critical considerations drawn from the present state of philosophy. — p.5

This brings him to considerations of justification by methodology, anticipating a question in the minds of his listeners and readers: "how does he actually arrive at this?" Related to the distinction of process vs. result, Adorno expresses here a scepticism about the familiar distinction of method vs. content:

I maintain that so-called methodological questions are themselves dependent upon questions of content. — p.5

We might come back to this issue as we go through the lectures, but in a nutshell, Adorno criticizes philosophical method "in the precise sense," e.g., that of Descartes in his Discourse on the Method, as an attempt to force the world into a pre-established, abstract conceptual schema. As ready-made methodology applied to the matter at hand, it sees what it expects to see, because in its original formation it has been (a) abstracted too much from the real world and (b) ossified by its formalization. Not only that, but it elevates the rational subject, the philosopher, to the status of an arbitrating, neutral overseer. In contrast, dialectical thought emphasizes the entwinement of method and content, and of subject and object, thus of the philosopher and the world (hence the need, incidentally, for what is known in critical theory as immanent critique, critique as an inside job).

Moving on, next we get a simple definition: negative dialectics...

sets out to be a dialectics not of identity but of non-identity. — p.6

I am not well-versed in Hegel, so I feel like making some small effort to answer the general question, what is dialectics, before looking at Adorno's explanation, and before looking at his own kind of dialectics and thus the question, what is non-identity?


What is dialectics?

Adorno warns us against the popular triadic formulation of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which came from Fichte and which Hegel did not embrace wholeheartedly ("we sometimes see this form used in a way that degrades it to a lifeless schema" — Phenomenology of Spirit, §50). This warning is not only for the reason that the formulation is not very Hegelian, but also because to the extent that it is Hegelian, it emphasizes (I think) exactly the thing about Hegel that Adorno doesn't like: the neat wrapping up of contradictions in a positive synthesis (in negative dialectics, synthesis is downgraded).

And because I'm not familiar with it, I'm also going to avoid the formulation that Hegel does use, in the Encyclopedia Logic, i.e., abstract-dialectical-speculative. Hegelians reading this are welcome to go into that.

So, here goes. Dialectics is a way of thinking that actively traces the contradictions and movements within concepts and things, and avoids freezing them into definitions and treating things as fixed and complete. Dialectics is the way of thinking that recognizes — or put differently, the dialectic is — the process characterized by the instability of concepts and objects, in which concepts and objects are not graspable in their finality but are transformed through an inner, or immanent, mediation between their contradictory aspects.

An example, from the materialist end of the Hegelian spectrum, is capitalism. Dialectical thinking helps us see that capitalism is not a fixed, natural, eternal state of affairs, but is a moment (meaning a phase or a part) of a dialectical process, a dynamic phase in something ongoing.

And generating the dynamism of this process are contradictions. A couple of examples: the drive for profit has created the unprecedented means to meet human needs on a massive scale, but precisely that drive prevents production from being directed to satisfying those human needs; the freedom of the market, i.e., freedom of choice and the freedom to trade, is based on compulsion: most people have no choice but to sell their labour to survive.

Note the way that this account emphasizes mutual and immanent dependency: it is not that capitalism has created the means to meet human needs on a massive scale despite the profit motive; and it is not that the market is a domain of freedom despite compulsion.

It might be objected that dialectical thinking is not in fact required for all this. You don't have to be a dialectician to be an economic historian who understands the historical nature of capitalism, or to believe that society evolves. But it's notable that the historical nature of socioeconomic structures was not much appreciated prior to Hegel and Marx — or when it was, it was viewed in Enlightenment fashion as simple linear Progress. And this indicates the lasting value of dialectics: it's only dialectical thinking which is always on the alert, always sensitive to the existence, in the here and now, of tensions and potentials that can go unrecognized.

EDIT (I somehow lost this bit when I first posted it):

It follows that there are conventionally acceptable frozen concepts in use right now which dialectical thinking could usefully call into doubt. An example that springs to mind is consciousness. In a lot of philosophy, from the early moderns right up to present day analytic philosophy, consciousness is treated as a fixed property of individuals — perhaps with a locus in the brain — whereas if we take a dialectical approach we might think of it as socially embedded, as substantially a feature or product of the mediation between self and other instead of a product of the brain.

I won't elaborate on that any further, since what I'm trying to show right now is just that dialectical thought might still be useful, and might even remain the best way of thinking philosophically — and that it's not just an obsolete step in knowledge's forward march.


Why must everything be a matter of contradictions?

Another objection, which Adorno actually addresses on page 7 and 8, is that these tensions, conflicts, and discrepancies are not really contradictions, that calling them contradictions is at best metaphorical, and at worst the artifact of a fault in one's conceptual scheme, one's logic, or one's choice of language — and finally, that they can be dissolved just by framing things differently. Adorno is strongly motivated to convey to the audience that dialectics is definitely not merely figurative, suggestive, faulty, illogical, or a bewitchment of language, but really means what it says, logically and rigorously.

On page 7 he illustrates the meaning of contradiction in the concept using the example of freedom. The predicative statement "A is B" functions as an identity statement, A = B [what, generally?]:

Freedom = Self-determination as ensured by the constitution

But the concept of self-determination as defined in such a constitution doesn't capture everything that freedom is:

the concept of freedom contains a pointer to something that goes well beyond those specific freedoms, without our necessarily realizing what this additional element amounts to. — p.7

He doesn't say what this something is, but we can guess: a life unmarked by coercion and compulsion in general, the ability to experience love and pleasure and beauty every day, the chance to exercise one's creativity and thereby to flourish. These are not covered by legal self-determination, thus the A = B identity statement is false, and in fact A ≠ B, thus we arrive at a contradiction in the concept of freedom.

What matters is that traditionally in logic one strives to get rid of contradictions, but in dialectics one faces up to them. It can't be denied that contradictions can be ironed out, but do we really want to do that? Dialectics says no, definitely not.

That Adorno quotation there also makes me think of Wittgenstein's family resemblances and the idea of open concepts. I don't know if it's worth going into that.

Anyway, what do you think? Is it the case that Hegel and Adorno are saying, generally, that a predicative judgment is actually an identity statement in disguise? I doubt this, since it seems to me obviously false and certainly controversial, but the way Adorno lays it out makes it look like the relevant concept of contradiction depends on this claim.


Part and whole

Another way of framing dialectics is in reference to the interdependence of the part and the whole (or particular and universal), which is an important (or the only?) site of contradiction, where the object is in tension with the concept. Dialectical thinking seeks to view the phenomenon as a manifestation of something larger, and thus seeks to go beyond the phenomenon to an expansive concept or system of concepts — but without leaving the phenomenon behind. To be known, the phenomenon cannot be apprehended alone (a dead specimen) and equally cannot be seen as a mere manifestation of something higher, as if all that mattered was this subsumption — but must also be seen anew in its double aspect as a manifestation and at the same time as living and active individual, living and active through its very participation in the whole.


The twofold structure of contradiction

Adorno says that the concept of contradiction has a twofold meaning:

1. The contradictory nature of the concept and the resulting contradiction between the concept and the thing to which it refers.

2. The contradictory nature of the thing itself — for Adorno's purposes, antagonistic society.

This brings him to the question: why does this "disharmony" exist? He gives a striking answer:

To put it in a nutshell, in both cases we are dealing with the principle of mastery, the mastery of nature, which spreads its influence, which continues in the mastery of men by other men and which finds its mental reflex in the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is introduced to it or that it encounters into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of influence. — p.9

This is probably now straying away from dialectics as such and towards specifically negative dialectics. Anyway, I'll end it here, and maybe in another post I'll take a stab, without straying beyond the first lecture, at that second question, specific to Adorno's philosophy of negative dialectics: what is non-identity?

Meanwhile, feel free to post about lecture 1 or about what I've said so far. But I'm in no rush.

@Count Timothy von Icarus, @frank: Welcome aboard. It'll be a while before we get to ND itself so I'll hold off commenting on the prologue and introduction.

Can I ask what you mean by TPFers? — Samlw

Tim means the members of TPF, The Philosophy Forum, and has for reasons known only to himself chosen to be difficult and weird. Don’t take it personally.

Starting there is ok with me.

BTW I haven't studied Hegel, and some might think it's mad to tackle this without doing Hegel first, but I'm not massively concerned — I'm working back to Hegel via Adorno, like I did with Kant, via Schopenhauer (though some might say there's a huge difference, namely that Adorno actually understood Hegel).

Useful as preparation — or we could even start with it — is Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966. His lectures are — relatively — a breeze.

Minima Moralia is too aphoristic for a reading group, IMO

Yeah I will/would start a thread. I'm thinking Negative Dialectics, specifically the non-official but apparently only decent English translation by Dennis Redmond.

What do you think? — Moliere

I'm up for it and I'm in the mood.

I'd be up for a TPF reading group. But I reckon nobody else would be interested.

:pray:

That resonates with how I think about things. — Moliere

Yeah, me too, and that's pretty much what his Negative Dialectics is about so that's what I'm aiming for at the moment.

Thanks; I'm glad I'm not crazy. But again I want to say that it's not conservatism: Adorno castigates capitalism at every opportunity. So it's something like knowing that humans suffer domination because of capitalism but also refusing easy categories like those of (official) dialectical materialism.

I'm now thinking of all this is in terms of a link between the dispositional dimension of arrogance vs. humility and the epistemological dimension of identity vs. nonidentity.

From Adorno's point of view, there is a dangerous arrogance in philosophy's attempt to corral the object within the bounds of a concept (whatever that concept might be, e.g., the Forms, the synthetic unity of apperception, the general will, etc.). Youthful rebellion has this arrogance too: the messiness of reality is brushed aside and swept under the carpet in favour of an ideal, since that ideal is based on a certain conception of what exists that might lead, for example, to regarding human beings as nothing more than counter-revolutionaries, or invaders, etc. This is a kind of identity-thinking.

In contrast, humility would lead one to an appreciation of the nonidentical, that which exceeds our concepts; the thisness of this and that. Thus, one opens up to the world in all its inconvenient multifariousness.

But I want to provide a bit of caution to the idea that the 20th century was uniquely evil. The USA's extermination of the natives and exploitation of Africans and immigrants were liberal precursors to the evils of the 20th century; only the 20th century is more evil because of our abilities to continue the same with more firepower due to technological progress. — Moliere

That's a deep can of worms. If I wanted to get into it I'd want to reference Dialectic of Enlightenment, J.G. Ballard's novel Crash (sceptical towards the dichotomy of humans variously using or misusing technology; it's more like technology is an expression of us and also remakes us), and possibly Straw Dogs by John Gray, but I'm not sure I do right now. It's a good point to bring up though. — Jamal

No worries. I'm not exactly addressing your concern, but sort of just thinking out loud because the topic appeals to me and is something I've thought about — Moliere

If you think of something then by all means share it, but also, it's sort of something that's not fun to think about. — Moliere

I realize now that this is pretty much where I unconsciously wanted to go with the discussion, and merely used my own story to look at it --- but the moment I realize that's where I wanted to go, I don't want to.

Sure, but this angle is a new one. Putting it differently, I'm more interested in Adorno than I am in myself. So, I'm reading Adorno via my perennial personal concerns, but I'm more interested in the reading than I am in coming up with an answer as to what I should do myself.

Yeah but I like to think this is a different angle. I'm telling myself that.

That's a great-looking quiche.

I do rather like the developing argumentum ad peanutem. — Banno

:up:

And you and I both know that one is true: there is meaning in food.

I'm living backwards; I become more radical with age. It always seemed obvious to me that the political world is as round as the physical, and wherever one happens to reside, the extremes of left and right meet and become one at the antipodes, where the blood is always redder. — unenlightened

I used to scoff at this idea, thinking it reactionary, not to mention facile and simplistic. It's galling to find myself now gravitating towards it.

My dad was a communist turned socialist - how was I supposed to rebel against that? Oh, I remember now, "turn on, tune in, drop out".

And look how that turned out!

the quote isn't precisely apropos, but its thrust is in the ballpark: "If at age 20 you are not a communist, you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not capitalist you have no brain." - George Bernard Shaw, possibly. — BC

It's a great quote, and I have it at the back of my mind in all this. But it's such a familiar thought that it's become a cliché. Adorno has a way of taking a cliché and making it fresh and thus more serious (or, as some would say, pretentiously rewording it). Another example from Minima Moralia I was thinking of last night was...

the power of experience breaks the spell of duration and gathers past and future into the present.

When I read that I thought, this is "time flies when you're having fun" but without the fun (since the "experience" could be any kind of experience); and, as if underlining that, at the end of the section he concludes with a single sentence: "Time flies."

Anyway, yeah, you might say that the OP is an attempt to, egotistically, dignify a really common experience and dress it up as something more than it is. However, as I've been saying to Moliere, I haven't really become a conservative (or "capitalist"), so the trajectory is not quite the same.

The young are more likely to settle on radical sounding politics and moral severity for the same reason they are likely to settle on any other far-out sounding thing -- music, clothing, slang -- whatever. One's youth is embarrassing later in adulthood.

Then too, as much as young people won't/don't/can't admit it, the young tend to be kind of stupid (this opinion based on my experience). It's unavoidable. Why, after so few years, would they be otherwise?

For my part it took many years, several decades really, to become the sensible person I now wish I had been at 18. — BC

Yes. However, I had an interesting experience recently. I'm accustomed now to thinking I was an idiot in my youth, but I found an old diary in which I was going on about politics and philosophy, and it was actually quite good, more subtle and sophisticated than I thought I was back then.

On reflection, I realized that this was not good news at all, because what it meant was that I had forgotten most of what I knew, and I have not in fact been getting more wise but just unknowingly treading water, learning the same things over and over again while becoming slightly less angry. That was a yikes moment.

But there is a difficulty here where it is very easy to project the systemic onto the personal, without a proper recognition of the limits of personal agency in political contexts. This can lead to simplistic manichean narratives that reduce to "if only the wicked stopped being wicked and the just ruled, all problems would be fixed," or more pernicious, the derivation of personal guilt through mere "complicity" or association with systems that people have no realistic way to escape. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a great point. I haven't thought about it like that. Maybe it's an argument not only to teach ethics early on, but to teach political philosophy before or during the teenage years of radicalization --- for me, I first learned about politics in this personalized way and found it difficult to recover from that.

You can see this in the careers of some leftist crusaders who, rightly outraged by some of the missteps of the Obama years and upset over some of the deficits in the neo-liberal global order, allowed themselves to become virtual cheerleaders for Trump, who seems almost certainly more inimical to their values. And there definitely seems to be this thought process of: "good, let him win. Then things can get so bad that we can destroy the system and start over!" Which tends to miss just how much suffering such a "tearing down" implies, or the fact that a great many revolutions do not produce better situations, and often end up reproducing many of the same problems (e.g. the Soviets were initially even worse on minority rights than the Tsars). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I certainly recognize the appeal of this viewpoint and I was attracted to accelerationism for a while. Its central point seems to be to face up to that suffering and embrace it, since it is unavoidable and might lead to a better world. What makes this interestingly different from earlier versions of that familiar ends-justify-the-means attitude (both left and right) is that it positions itself counter-culturally against a "soft" mainstream (again, both left and right), thus posing as a radical advancement beyond the various liberalisms and leftisms feebly surviving in the remains of the post-war consensus.

(Incidentally, this could be the Trotskyist in me talking again but I thought it was mainly under Stalin that the minorities suffered, having enjoyed more rights and autonomy from 1917 to 1923, when non-Russian languages were encouraged and ethnic cultural traditions were combined with, rather than replaced by, new socialist ones.)

But this is where the "crisis of meaning" steps in and pours gasoline on the fire. Because people want conflagration. They fantasize about it. The shop for it with tactical gear and rifles. They accessorize for it. And I do think this is different. It isn't (just) about opprobrium, it becomes about fulfilling a life narrative, which I think can make it much more potent.

I think you can see something similar in the period before the First World War, a desire for conflict for its own sake. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ah, the tragic heart of your post. What do you mean by "And I do think this is different"? Different from the past?

Fortunately, I was educated by conservative Dominicans and Jesuits for twelve years that by the end (somehow) made me an avowed atheist and nascent Marxist. — 180 Proof

:cool:

the decades – the defeats – have only radicalized me so that I've grown even more pessimistic and more anarchistic. Until I drop, for me at least, the struggle against all forms of injustice and dehumanization goes on — 180 Proof

:up:

Yes, and I guess there's always a risk that my kind of reflections are effectively conservative.

That was the most interesting post-length piece I've read in years. — Leontiskos

Thank you, glad you liked it :smile:

Sure, but aren't we ignoring the other side of the coin? Namely that appealing to the inherent mismatch of ideals with reality is a cop out, and serves as an explanation for any act inconsistent with the operative principles of a society that disallows it? As in, there was a downside to the French Revolution, and I'm not convinced your construal is able to come to terms with that downside. The promotion of an ideal is not unobjectionably good, given both that there is moral worth to the stability of the status quo, and that false ideals are very often promoted. — Leontiskos

Having for years appealed to the mismatch between ideals and reality in an effort to protect the ideals, I think I see what you mean (I was radicalized by Trotskyists who were able to casually wash their hands of Stalinism since he represented "the revolution betrayed").

So I guess what you're saying is that the problem is in the very pursuit or promotion of an ideal? And for a couple of reasons: it tends to devalue everything about how things are, the status quo (which is bad because a lot of what exists is valuable); and it's difficult to distinguish bad ideals. Makes sense.

The answer might be something boring like finding a middle way. On one end you have Marinetti and the futurists positively rejoicing in war and the destruction of existing society --- an attitude that can characterize not only fascism but left-wing movements too --- and on the other you have conservatives and traditional reactionaries (as opposed to radical ones like the Nazis).

And maybe that middle way necessitates the relinquishing of the ideal --- or perhaps the shelving of the ideal to the secret Utopian corner of one's mental library.

But I want to provide a bit of caution to the idea that the 20th century was uniquely evil. The USA's extermination of the natives and exploitation of Africans and immigrants were liberal precursors to the evils of the 20th century; only the 20th century is more evil because of our abilities to continue the same with more firepower due to technological progress. — Moliere

That's a deep can of worms. If I wanted to get into it I'd want to reference Dialectic of Enlightenment, J.G. Ballard's novel Crash (sceptical towards the dichotomy of humans variously using or misusing technology; it's more like technology is an expression of us and also remakes us), and possibly Straw Dogs by John Gray, but I'm not sure I do right now. It's a good point to bring up though.

I mean I take your point, and certainly the Frankfurt School were fixated on Europe and traumatized by what happened there to the exclusion of everything else, and I should be careful to correct their Eurocentrism. But still, I'm still inclined to say there is something importantly unique in the evil of the twentieth century, and that this wasn't just a technical issue --- I just don't have any arguments as yet.

I appreciate the reflection you've given of Adorno, but I also think that maybe it wasn't just a rejection and rebellion leading to bad outcomes -- the bad outcomes are just what politics are in our age of the nation-state. — Moliere

Yes, I don't want to give the impression that I think, or that Adorno thought, that the worst disasters were brought on by angry youths and revolutionaries. I'm not making the conservative argument here, not exactly. Certainly I agree it's the case that the disasters of the twentieth century were generated by the capitalist and imperialist order, by nationalism, the reaction against the workers' movement leading to fascism, etc., and on a deeper level the inherent movement of Enlightened Europe towards domination, over peope and nature.

I'm just digging down through the layers of Adorno's deep pessimism and shame on behalf of Europe.

Still, I wanted to let you know how much I appreciate that you seem to be jumping back into active participation feet first. Turns out you have interesting things to say. Whoda thunkit, or as the Cambridge English Dictionary puts it - Who would have thunk it? — T Clark

Thank you Top Clark.

Here's one of my favorites. — T Clark

Yeah it's great. I'm sure I could make it relevant.

:cool:

Well, since the popular ideal of reading is smooth uninterrupted flow, and I'd heard people say the endnotes were a disruption of that flow, I wondered if you'd experienced them in the same way. But yeah, that kind of thing doesn't bother me anyway.

Maybe those people weren't reading the e-book.

One realizes with horror that earlier, opposing one's parents because they represented the world, one was often secretly the mouthpiece, against a bad world, of one even worse. — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

Looking at this again and forgetting about myself for the moment, it's interesting to flesh out the context. It was around the time of the First World War that Adorno was a teenager (not that teenagers existed back then). The world of his parents was the world he and Horkheimer often in their work refer to as something like the classic era of the European bourgoisie. Not exactly the emancipated society but in terms of violence and oppression nothing compared to what was coming. In criticizing his own youthful opposition to them he is putting himself in the category of twentieth century destruction, in the new generation who would go on to violently remake the world and institute more brutal forms of domination, whether with fascism or communism. So the worse world of the quotation is not only the world of political extremism but also the entire world of the Second Thirty Years' War and everything that went with it: industrialized warfare, genocide and the targeting of civilians, mass mobilization, popular nationalism, and at the end, the development of weapons that could wipe out everyone.

There's something different in our histories that I'm not sure is worth investigating or not -- lots of my indignation came from not just my folks, who certainly didn't help things, but also the political changes that took place due to September 11th, which is when I was in my teens with nascent political thoughts. Things were bad then, in a manner which resembled the books we were assigned to read which warned against totatalitarianism, like 1984 and Animal Farm, and they have only progressed in that direction. — Moliere

Interesting. So you're probably around ten or fifteen years younger than me. For me, my radicalization was curiously out of time, disconnected from the real world and in fact flying in the face of it, since it was the late eighties and early nineties.

So while I have no doubt that I have shared your flaws in being attracted to big projects and being caught up in self-righteous anger, there's also always been this reality which has only gotten worse, and which Marxism is capable of explaining better than the liberal theories I was brought up to believe in. — Moliere

Yes, this whole personal issue is only interesting because I do still believe this too, as Adorno himself did.

Which in turn is what lead me down various routes and is basically how I've arrived at where I'm at today, which is whatever it is. Some kind of Marxism, but without the rosey viewpoint or utopian zeal. — Moliere

Yes, and again, a lot like Adorno. But if we want a good society, and if such a society cannot be born without pain, and if one has lost the willingness to countenance such pain on the way to the good society, then what is the Marxism for except an indulgence in a tragic hope? But that's a lot of ifs.

Very cool TC. I tried to get a "buddy read" going with my brother but he postponed it for so long I couldn't wait any longer and read it myself (One Hundred Years of Solitude, it was (5/5); who knows, maybe DFW was influenced by it, although I imagine the surrealism in Infinite Jest is just as likely to have come out of his love of David Lynch movies).

How disruptive do you find the endnotes?

the principles of this very forum are liberal — Banno

Yes, I'm not anti-liberal simpliciter. I'm an immanent liberal-sceptic.

Yes, I've noticed, but isn't it just that in North America liberalism commonly, in popular discourse, refers to social/social justice liberalism, described in the "New Liberalism" section of the SEP article?

(Those who associate social liberalism with the political Left might see these usages as completely divergent, but I think there's continuity enough that continuing to group them under the liberal banner makes sense)

I sometimes feel I ought to read that, but tennis and drug addiction have always been turn offs for me.

Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies

:cool: Crossed wires or something

I'm actually going to read one of his books soon, the one about Nietzsche. As for his metaphysics, it hasn't ever grabbed my interest, but that may change. Very difficult stuff, I've heard, but I guess that's par for the course, or dare I say de rigeur.

Yeah, I was talking about Deleuze's metaphysics, not metaphysics generally — and I imagine there might be other philosophers around who do it in the same knowing way (though fdrake's talk of moorings should be noted).