A reaction: I'm struck by how this rejection of positivity parallels the criticism of faith I have been outlining in that thread.

There are also some interesting relations to logical pluralism in the rejection of a single totalising framework and sensitivity context. — Banno

Anyway, I'll try to hold off the criticism until the designated time slot, and enjoy the reading. I find the material well written and very interesting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Play it at my funeral. — Hanover

I think when he says "contents" he's talking about real events that stand as examples of concepts. Like with music, the score is the concept (or form), and a performance is the content. He said it's a mistake to fail to see the way the performance is its own entity, each moment arising out of the history of the performance, and propelled onward from there. The score is literally nothing in the absence of the performance (and vice versa).

That would relate to the mind as when people think of mind as a domain or vault of some kind. They're separating mind from the living flow of events that are the content of the concept of mind. — frank

See I'm practising my negative (critical) thinking, to see how it goes. — Metaphysician Undercover

When he talks about "confronting concepts with their objects and, conversely, objects with their concepts", isn't this exactly the type of identity philosophy which he claims to be rejecting? — Metaphysician Undercover

It almost looks like he's chosen the evaluative descriptor, "negative," as a nay-saying gesture, which an uncharitable person might think is hardly better than the yay-saying he criticizes (or thinks is stupid). — Jamal

... are no longer measured against their contents, but instead are taken in isolation, so that people take up attitudes to them without bothering to inquire further into the truth content of what they refer to. For example, if we take the concept ‘positive’, which is essentially a concept expressing a relation, we see that it has no validity on its own but only in relation to something that is to be affirmed or negated. Then we find that simply because of the emotional values that it has acquired, that have accumulated around the word, the term is wrenched out of the context in which it has validity and is turned into an independent and absolute thing, the measure of all things. — p.23

Its principal cause is undoubtedly the irrevocable loss of absolutely binding uniform categories. This means that the less the mind possesses predetermined so-called substantial, unquestioned meanings, the more it tends to compensate for this by literally fetishizing concepts of its own devising which possess nothing that transcends consciousness. In short it makes absolutes of things it has created. And it achieves this by tearing them from their context and then ceasing to think of them further. — p.24

Identity thinking (epistemology)
    ↓
Hypostasization (ontology)
    ↓
Reification (sociology, politics, etc)

But I believe that, if you wish to grasp what I am aiming at but am forced to explain to you in stages, you should be clear in your minds from the outset that we are not speaking here about negativity as a universal, abstract principle of the kind that I was initially forced to develop – or not to develop, but that I placed at the start of my argument because I had to start somewhere, even if I do not believe in an absolute beginning. Instead, the negativity I am speaking about contains a pointer to what Hegel calls determinate negation. In other words, negativity of this kind is made concrete and goes beyond mere standpoint philosophy by confronting concepts with their objects and, conversely, objects with their concepts. — p.25

‘Well, if he has got a negative principle or if he thinks negativity is such an important matter then he ought really to say nothing at all’ — p.26

... there is perhaps a so-called positive motive force of thought ... — p.26

But I believe that precisely this aspect of positivity, which acts as a corollary to negativity, is conjoined with the principle of negativity because it resists being fixed once and for all in an abstract, static manner.

If it is true that every philosophy that can have any claims at all to the truth lives from the ancient fires, i.e. it secularizes not just philosophy, but also theology, then we have identified here, or so I believe, an outstanding point in the secularization process. It is the fact that the prohibition on graven images that occupies a position of central importance in the religions that believe in salvation, that this prohibition extends into the ideas and the most sublime ramifications of thought.

Hence, to make this quite clear, the issue is not to deny the existence of a certain fixed point, it is not even to deny the existence of some fixed element in thought; we shall in due course, I hope, come to discuss the meaning of such a fixed element in dialectical logic in very concrete terms. But the fixed, positive point, just like negation, is an aspect – and not something that can be anticipated, placed at the beginning of everything. — p.26

You may well ask me about what I said earlier on: if you admit that the positive, like the negative, is no more than an aspect, and that neither may be regarded as an absolute – why then do I privilege the concept of negativity so emphatically?

So, to pay respect for the difference you point out, what I see is a trick of rhetoric. He apprehends Hegel as hugely powerful in influencing the minds of men, and he has a desire to tap into that power, perhaps having political objectives. To support this end, he has mentioned some work of the younger Hegel, which is somewhat inconsistent with the older Hegel, and with reference to this, he claims everything he says is "contained" (in a qualified sense) in Hegel.

The trickery is this. He implies that he and the thoughts he presents, originate from, or have been greatly influenced by ("contained") by Hegel, suggesting that he is Hegelian. In reality, he is not, but he knows that Hegel is understood as a powerful authority, and he desires to gain support for his project by appearing to be consistent with Hegel — Metaphysician Undercover

The lecture is concluded by assertions that he adheres firmly to Hegelian principles — Metaphysician Undercover

I believe furthermore that at present a true philosophical critique of the hypostasis of mind is fully justified because this hypostasis is proving irresistible to philosophy, which after all operates in the medium of the intellect, which thrives exclusively and at all times in the mind.

The situation today is one that secretly everyone finds deeply dubious, but it is also one that is so overpowering that people feel they can do nothing about it, and perhaps they can in fact do nothing about it. Nowadays – in contrast to what Hegel criticized as abstract subjectivity or abstract negativity – what predominates in the general public is an ideal of abstract positivity ... — p.17

Now, when I speak of ‘negative dialectics’ not the least important reason for doing so is my desire to dissociate myself from this fetishization of the positive ... — p.18

The fact is that what we might call the secret or the point of his philosophy is that the quintessence of all the negations it contains – not just the sum of negations but the process that they constitute – is supposed to culminate in a positive sense, namely in the famous dialectical proposition with which you are all familiar that ‘what is actual is rational’. It is precisely this point, the positive nature of the dialectic as a whole, the fact that we can recognize the totality as rational rightdown into the irrationality of its individual components, the fact that we can declare the totality to be meaningful – that is what seems tome to have become untenable. — p.19

I do not know whether the principle that no poem can be written after Auschwitz can be sustained. But the idea that we can say of the world as a whole in all seriousness that it has a meaning now that we have experienced Auschwitz, and witnessed a world in which that was possible and that threatens to repeat itself in another guise or a similar one – I remind you of Vietnam – to assert such an idea would seem to me to be a piece of cynical frivolity that is simply indefensible to what we might call the pre-philosophical mind. A philosophy that blinds itself to this fact and that in its overweening arrogance fails to absorb this reality and continues to insist that there is a meaning despite everything – this seems to me more than we can reasonably expect anyone who has not been made stupid by philosophy to tolerate (since as a matter of fact, alongside its other functions, philosophy is capable of making people stupid).

... neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the British colonial administration of India deliberately burst the lungs of millions of human beings with poison gas ...

One cannot bring Auschwitz into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states in terms of a mere gradual increase of horror, regarding which one preserves one’s peace of mind. Certainly, the martyrdom and degradation suffered by those in the cattle-cars, completely without precedent, casts a harsh, deathly light on the most distant past, in whose obtuse and unplanned violence the scientifically organized kind was already teleologically at work. The identity lies in the non-identity, in what has not yet been, which denounces what has been. The statement that it’s always been the same, is untrue in its immediacy, true only through the dynamic of the totality. Whoever allows the cognition of the increase of horror to escape them, does not merely fall prey to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to recognize, along with the specific difference of what is newest from what has gone before, simultaneously the true identity of the whole, of horror without end. — Minima Moralia, 149

Perhaps, to be more precise, with the sole difference that critical theory really signifies only the subjective side of thought, that is to say, theory, while negative dialectics signifi es not only that aspect of thought but also the reality that is affected by it. In other words, it encapsulates not just a process of thought but also, and this is good Hegel, a process affecting things. This critical character of dialectics has to be dissected into a series of elements. The first of these is the one I attempted to explain last time – as you will perhaps recollect – namely the relation of concept to thing. — p.20

Do not forget that the very fact that thinking takes place in concepts ensures that the faculty that produces concepts, namely mind, is manoeuvred into a kind of position of priority from the very outset; and that if you concede even an inch to this priority of spirit – whether in the shape of the ‘givens’ that present themselves to the mind in the form of sense data or in the shape of categories – if you concede even an inch to this principle, then there is in fact no escape from it. — p.21

I'm still in "absorb" mode — Moliere

No. — frank

Are we on the same page there? — frank

Just to add: for Hegel, the experience of freedom can only happen in a social situation. We give one another freedom — frank

That article also notes that there are some who read Hegel and ditch the mysticism that it's couched in. — frank

thought itself – and thought is tied to subjectivity – is negativity, and to that extent negativity, and especially dialectical thinking, is negative dialectics from the outset. — p.11

You must be mindful of the fact that you once learnt in arithmetic that a minus number times a minus number yields a plus, or, in other words, that the negation of negation is the positive, the affirmative. This is in fact one of the general assumptions underlying the Hegelian philosophy. — p.14

The idea that he develops repeatedly as early as the Phenomenology, admittedly with a somewhat different emphasis, and then above all in the Philosophy of Right, in the very crude form in which I have explained it to you – this idea is that the subject, which as thinking subject criticizes given institutions, represents in the first instance the emancipation of the spirit. And, as the emancipation of the spirit, it rep- resents the decisive transition from its mere being-in-itself to a being-for-itself. In other words, the stage that has been reached here is one in which spirit confronts objective realities, social realities, as an autonomous, critical thing, and this stage is recognized as being necessary. But Hegel goes on to reproach spirit for restricting itself in the process, for being itself narrow-minded. This is because it elevates one aspect of spirit in its abstractness to the status of sole truth. It fails to recognize that this abstract subjectivity, which is itself based on the model of Kant’s practical reason and, to a certain extent, on Fichte’s subjective concept of free action – that this subjectivity is a mere aspect that has turned itself into an absolute; it overlooks the fact that it owes its own substance, its forms, its very existence to the objective forms and existence of society; and that it actually only becomes conscious of itself by conceiving of the seemingly alien and even repressive institutions as being like itself, by comprehending them as subjective and perceiving them in their necessity. Here we see one of the crucial turning points of Hegel’s philosophy, not to say one of its decisive tricks. It consists in the idea that subjectivity which merely exists for itself, in other words, a critical, abstract, negative subjectivity – and here we see the entrance of an essential notion of negativity – that this subjectivity must negate itself, that it must become conscious of its own limitations in order to be able to transcend itself and enter into the positive side of its negation, namely into the institutions of society, the state, the objective and, ultimately, absolute spirit. — p.14

Human beings are in fact ζωον πολιτικóν, ‘political animals’, in the sense that they can only survive by virtue of society and social institutions to which, as autonomous and critical subjectivity, they stand opposed. And with his criticism of the illusion that what is closest to us, namely our own self and its consciousness, is in fact the first and fundamental reality, Hegel has – and this is something we must emphasize – made a decisive contribution to our understanding of society and the relationship of individual to society. Without this Hegelian insight, a theory of society as we understand it today would not really have been possible. – So what I am saying is that he destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. — p.16

However – and this is precisely the point at which criticism of Hegel has to begin if we are to justify the formulation of a negative dialectics – we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with great efforts, with infinite pains? — p.16

I believe that I do not have to spell out for you the implications of such a statement. It would imply simply that, with the assistance of the dialectic, whatever has greater success, whatever comes to prevail, to be generally accepted, has a higher degree of truth than the consciousness that can see through its fraudulent nature. In actual fact, ideology in the Eastern bloc is largely determined by this idea. A further implication is that mind would amputate itself, that it would abdicate its own freedom and simply adapt to the needs of the big battalions. To accept such a course of action does not appear possible to me. — p.17

I will go read the first lecture before trying to say anything more substantial. — Leontiskos

But I have the best of intentions about showing you that the factors that define reality as antagonistic are the same factors as those which constrain mind, i.e. the concept, and force it into its intrinsic contradictions. 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

It is the identity of mind and its correlative, the unity of nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities.

The generality of the ideas developed by discursive logic, power in the sphere of the concept, is built on the foundation of power in reality. — Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Concept of Enlightenment

This little quote clears a couple of things up for me. It explains why Adorno backed away from supporting any sort of political activism. It affirms that he was an ontological anti-realist, and he would have sympathized with surrealism. — frank

That you, Adorno, and others believe that "society" refers to an object, rather than to a concept, because it is something real with "an objective structure", does not really prove that this is the truth. — Metaphysician Undercover

Your Overall F Score is: 2.23
You are a liberal airhead.

Scores for Personality Variables:
Conventionalism: 1.75
Authoritarian Submission: 2.29
Authoritarian Aggression: 1.88
Anti-intraception: 2.25
Superstition and Stereotypy: 2.33
Power and "Toughness": 1.88
Destructiveness and Cynicism: 2.50
Projectivity: 2.60
Sex: 1.67

In my opinion, "society" refers to a concept rather than an object. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with this — Metaphysician Undercover

This I believe could constitute a challenge to the law of identity itself. If contradiction inheres within the object itself, this would seem to imply that the object could have no identity. But he does not clarify what he means in this statement, and the ancients allowed contradictory predications so long as they are not at the same time. This is how change was understood, a negation of the property, a property come form its contrary. That requires temporal extension. — Metaphysician Undercover

Although no a priori “logics” dictates that such a tendency should emerge, modern agents are prone to use concepts in overly subsumptive ways, focusing on universality and generality while downplaying, and in some cases bracketing, the conceptualized particular. They do this not because the nature of language forces them to do so, but, rather, because social and economic pressures are such that quantification, orientation towards exchange value, commodification, calculation, and so forth, are being privileged (both epistemically and in cruder social and everyday terms) over attention to the particular (at least for its own sake).

Could you provide the exact quote from Negative Dialectics? — Number2018

I believe that these considerations will suffice for the moment to show you how we are compelled from the vantage point of objective reality to apply the concept of contradiction, not simply as the contradiction between two unrelated objects, but as an immanent contradiction, a contradiction in the object itself. — p.9

Basic conception: structure of contradiction, in a twofold sense:

(1) the contradictory nature of the concept, i.e. the concept in contradiction to the thing to which it refers

[...]

(2) the contradictory character of reality: model: antagonistic society. — p.1

Adorno explicitly points out the existence of a gap between 'a part of the object' and 'the definitions imposed on it by thinking.' — Number2018

I love them! Since this is new material for me I don't feel able to put my thoughts into structures or find relevant resources to bounce off of so it's very helpful. — Moliere

what I'd say is one can use contradiction in interesting ways without at the same time undermining your philosophy. The "formal" concerns arise, but may not be interesting or relevant. — Moliere