If someone has found meaning in John Smith's interpretation of gold plates stumbled upon supposedly in the Adirondack for example, and he has full buy in to all that due to his upbringing, why would I suggest it's bullshit? That i don't get. — Hanover

This is where I fall into an in-between -- I reject it because I was brought up to believe in it, and yet I don't reject my folks belief. I don't care if they find comfort in it, but I do care that they feel discomfort in my lack of belief. (And "lack of belief" in mormanism indicates various rituals and such -- it's not just what you say at times, but a communal religion, for better or worse)

What that has to do with the OP? I'm not sure cuz it was only your mention of my origins that spurred me on to post.

I started looking but forget where I read it -- Adorno said something about how philosophy is all about seeing the obvious in different ways, so that what is obvious has different conclusions based upon how we think about the obvious.

I only kinda get it cuz of my background interests and reading. I liked this bit that I don't remember where it was at cuz it made lots of sense to me -- philosophy often delves into the obvious and sometimes looks pedantic, while there is a point we miss.

Damn your eyes. — Banno

I, for one, am happy to draw you back into Adorno. :D

M'kay.

I agree that there's no particular reason for the physical constants or starting conditions of the universe.

I don't know why you'd claim our particular universe evolves deterministically when we have QM as an obvious counter-example to the various examples we'd be tempted to invoke. There is at least one natural phenomena, according to science, which does not behave according to the relationship of necessity between events.

How do you arrive at a belief that the universe we happen to live in is deterministic? Much more how to make it an obvious belief?

That the world has a meaning can't now be maintained, — Jamal

This is a theme I'm enjoying throughout -- not an assumption so much, but a Background belief that need not be demonstrated at all. I'm enjoying it because it's what I feel and I don't run into many deep thinkers who feel the same.

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. — Jamal

Yeh! It's a very cool passage -- which is why I highlighted it, and gave the best guess interpretation I could give.

I'm glad you gave a structure for the lecture cuz I was thinking of doing the same, with numbers and summaries, and yours looks about right to me

Suits me :smile: — Jamal

Me too :smile: -- imagine a world where what you do for the economy doesn't define your entire existence. I like that imaginary.

Excellent summary. My thoughts are still so scatterbrained I appreciate these synopses.

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

If we take Marx as an Orthodox sage --

In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

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

Electron can be spin up or spin down. We measure it down. Why was it down? "Because it could be up or down". That's cool, but why was it down? — flannel jesus

Suppose the many-worlds interpretation -- is "It was down because you're in the down-electron universe, whereas another version of you is in the up-electron universe" a sufficient explanation?




Cool. I don't agree for reasons I already stated, but ultimately that's just a battle of terminology. I can go along with the notion that the PSR implies determinism.

How then, using this terminology, does determinism not imply the PSR? What is the deterministic scenario in which the PSR is false?

the singular nature of the end result. I want to know why one thing happened, if your explanation doesn't tell me exactly why this one thing happened, then it doesn't seem sufficient, right? — flannel jesus

I guess it'd depend upon what you want out of your sufficiency.

I'm inclined to say that if the probability distribution of an event is consistent between tokens of said event then there's still a "singular nature of the end result" -- it's just that it's a probability distribution which is neither 1 or 0.

I also think that while we like to know a relationship such that A necessitates B, this is only because we like to control nature and such relationships enable us to do so. But nature need not conform to our desires, and we have to be open to that possibility.

But I can imagine a consistent way to believe the PSR while accepting that possibility -- namely since we are already allowing causes into our ontology we need only say there are at least two kinds of causes, and note the logical relationships which differentiate the kinds (necessity between A->B, or a necessary probability between A->B/C)

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.

LND6 was a wild ride. I found myself agreeing with him on Heidegger, and his distinction between two bad poles of philosophy that feed on one another -- the formal and the arbitrary -- is very interesting.

Philosophy always deals in concepts, and it is for this reason that the philosopher is easily tempted to cut out what philosophy is supposedly about -- the ever changing world, the "content", the "referent".


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":

However, when Hegel substitutes ‘indeterminateness’ for this, the concept, namely, thethe w absence of
determinateness as such takes the place of what is undetermined – through what Kant would have called a ‘subreption’, that is, a misrepresentation. The purely linguistic slippage from ‘the indeterminate’,
the term that denotes what is underlying, to indeterminateness is itself the turn to the concept.

"The turn to the concept" -- I'm not sure I'm understanding. My first guess is that Hegel is moving from "the indeterminate", a concept about the concept "indeterminateness", and the linguistic move is his phenomenology from the concept of the concept to the concept itself. And Kant would call this move illegitimate, but that's kind of the whole rift between Kantian and Hegelian epistemology -- For Hegel terra incognita can be uncovered, and there is no separation between concepts and objects, not even in a parallel-functional operation of a pure-understanding/pure-intuition, where "intuition" is counted as part of the mind but is still the "object" which comes to justify concepts with respect to scientific knowledge.

What are the reasons that you find satisfactory, and why? What is it about necessity between events -- ball A causes ball B to move in such and such a direction -- that is more satisfactory than the stochastic description -- photon A causes electron B to be in the first or second energy state at such-and-such a probability?

Suppose the case with a quarter -- why did you see heads this time and not tails? Well, because 50% of the time you will see that and 50% of the time you won't, and this is only one time so you had to see one or the other.

I think insofar that such explanations don't amount to "Just because" then they could still count as good enough for the PSR, but not good enough for determinism. So perhaps an explanation for stochastic events is that there are two kinds of events, deterministic and stochastic. So insofar that we are willing to accept that there is such a thing as metaphysical cause at all it seems that the hard commitment is already done with -- it's easy enough to suppose that there could be two kinds of causes, to my mind.

But then this wouldn't be a brute fact if we are following along with the PSR -- perhaps it's a regulative fact, though there's some further reason why our explanation ends with causation -- like we cannot comprehend events outside of the structure of causation, for instance. That doesn't mean there are no such events, only that we wouldn't be able to comprehend them, and this is why explanation must terminate in cause -- see how this satisfies the notion that everything has a reason, even if that reason is not a cause?

It's a Be-cause, but not a metaphysical cause.

Does it pop out of nothing anymore than the belief that A necessitates B pops out of nothing? Is there a cause for the necessary connection between causes, and so forth on back? Or does explanation eventually end, and we can still be rational for all that?

I imagine that the explanation is unsatisfactory, generally speaking, but we'd reach for it in the event that we have reason to believe such-and-such a kind of event is, in fact and not just because of how we calculate things, stochastic.

So if we simply accepted "Self-caused" for all events then that's deeply unsatisfactory, and there I'd say yeah pretty much amounts to denying what the proponent of the PSR is wanting to say.

But given the difficulties there are in claiming quantum events being deterministic that seems to me the most obvious example that we'd reach for. Why did it cause itself? For the same reason that A necessitates B -- that's just how it works.

In a way the explanation in operation in both cases, be it deterministic or stochastic, is an appeal to an events being -- the kind of being it is is what explains how it behaves. Deterministic events necessitate, and stochastic ones do not, and the PSR could be taken as a regulative rather than factual principle whereby the termination of thought into self-caused events is acknowledged as unsatisfactory, and so be on the lookout to see if we missed something after all.

"The conditions were sufficient for this thing to happen, but it didn't happen anyway"... Maybe I'm misunderstanding what sufficient means, but it doesn't seem like that's how sufficient works. — flannel jesus

In the case of a stochastic event I'd imagine we have to say "The conditions were sufficient for 50%A/50%B, and we observed A this time" -- or B. And then, if truly stochastic, you'd predict that with repeated measurements of the same system-event you'd begin to see the distribution emerge, whatever distribution that happened to be for that phenomena.

↪Moliere if everything has an explanation, but determinism is not true, the problem for me is, where's the explanation for the undetermined event? — flannel jesus

Isn't "That's a self-caused event" a sufficient explanation for an uncaused event? Or "These events are the stochastic events"?

Wouldn't that just mean that insofar that determinism is true there is a/(some version of the) PSR must be true, namely, the one wherein reasons are causes and there are no other explanations worth considering with respect to the PSR, or something like that.

I think I'd be more inclined to accept the inference from determinism to the PSR than the inference from the PSR to determinism just because reasons and causes need not be one and the same, so it seems obvious to me that one can hold that everything has an explanation without everything having a cause.

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. — Jamal

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. — Jamal

Fair. I was very much reacting to the text because I'm used to having to defend Marxism -- and I suspect we just have a slightly different set of experiences which can account for what is basically an aesthetic preference. I agree with his criticisms, but felt like I needed to point out positives since that is my habit.

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. — Jamal

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.

But I know this is not at all orthodox, or Marx's position, or what Adorno is addressing. I just see Marx's analysis as influencing a lot of the disciplines which inform these various struggles in addition to the obvious, direct applications such as Lenin's and the labor movement's.

Still, I'll not digress too much on this as we go forward. I'll accept Adorno's appraisal and keep trucking along -- I got it out of me now :D

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. — Jamal

Heh, naw. I'll just slot it into the eternal List -- things that could be interesting to visit, but for now I'll stay focused on the lectures and ND.

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). — Jamal

I can see it either way -- I think I was just reacting because I'm in the habit of pointing out good things, given how unpopular Marx tends to be. Reading the criticisms I think he's correct about Marx and various failings of Marxism -- I certainly wouldn't venture to say something as stupid as he didn't understand it! :D

But, I'll keep the apologism reigned in.

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.

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.

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.

Hrrmm -- now how to get it to where "if everyone wins then you're the extra-special winner"

Candidly, I encourage those who don't wish to compete not to compete. Races are easier to win with fewer contestants. — Hanover

Would that the race were so provincial that one could opt out of it -- as it is I'd bet on convincing the guys at the back it'll be easier to just take the prize than win the race.

Finished LND 4

I noticed, thanks to y'alls efforts, how "systemization" isn'tis 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.

Fair.

Since people have exploited others for forever it's not inhuman, but that's inhumane in the sense of humanism or wanting more than this violence.

It feels like a cheat to me. Looking at my own life, I can see that pretty much all the problems I have are my own responsibility. — T Clark

By naming an inhuman system I certainly don't mean to erase personal responsibility, only de-emphasize it as a cultural norm. Of course we all have to grow up and deal with consequences.

But I'll go back to the distinction between kings and CEO's -- isn't capitalism at least less inhuman than feudal systems?

In which case, while your problems are certainly your problems and only up to you to deal with, there are still inhuman systems we live within while we make those choices.

Capital, which I prefer to feudalism, is still inhuman in the sense that it survives by exploiting other humans -- you see that much, yes? Or no?

I don't live in an "inhuman system," — T Clark

Here is where I feel closest to -- I think not only you, but I and @Martijn and everyone here lives in an inhuman system.

What else to call a society which is a world bully and doubles down on the destruction of future generations in the name of winning today?

I am interested in the subconscious aspects here in relation to secular and non-secular rituals. — I like sushi

I suppose my thought is that the non-secular isn't so different from the secular here -- the ritual of cleansing, of dealing with our animal side within the confines of social expectation, seems difficult to distinguish from the anthropological angle.

All cultures have various rituals surrounding the body, and in this sense I think that toilets are anthropologically interesting.

The reason I'm hesitant with "ablution" is that you're drawing a distinction between secular/non-secular, whereas I'd say the ritual is about the same -- just with different words and beliefs.

Heh -- I'd say that if you're after the anthropological angle then questions of comparisons between Romans and plumbing are too big picture.

And "ablutions" may not be the right word. It depends on what we're talking about, rather than Big Ideas.

I do think that there's a relationship between how people decide to deal with the facts of being biological creatures who eat and poop, and one's culture. But I have no idea how to investigate that in a serious fashion.

I'm wondering if he has the right tools for this. — Banno

I get the sense that he was tired of having to prove that he had the right tools for this from the first two lectures -- I felt he was expressing exasperation at being hounded by questions that he felt didn't matter after all, that the tools presented were not inferior but not even applicable -- a screwdriver offered for a wire-nut for instance.

What good is politics if it doesn't serve the common man? — Martijn

It's good-for maintaining claims on property.

Huh. Well look at that. That's cool. Thanks for sharing!

There's a dude I follow in the social medias who does geographic and political science work on waste-water, and I've seen him express sentiments similar to what you're alluding to. Which indicates to me that there's probably something there, though I wouldn't have a clue as to how to go about doing the research or who to read to start getting a foothold into the thought.

Morning thought -- the structure of a symphony may provide a good analogue to the dialectical pattern.

I listened to Beethoven's 7th this morning to confirm, and I think there's something to the analogy still. The basic structure I'm referring to is that a symphony is composed of four movements, and a standard structure for the composer for the movements is 1: Main theme, 2: Minor theme, 3: Synthesis of the themes, 4: Progression and cap

Furthermore, the notion of counter-point in symphony has a kind of mirror to the notion of reflection between moments in dialectics.

This by way of offering a form for understanding dialectics which is sensible and yet not logical in the strict, modern logical sense. At most it's an informal logics from that viewpoint -- though from Adorno's viewpoint I imagine that the formal logics are a diversion from what's proper to philosophical thought, at best.

This quote from LND 3 was exciting to read because it confirmed a lot of what I felt about Hegel:

Thus once the identity of two contradictory concepts has been
reached, or at least asserted in the antithesis, as in the most famous
case of all, the identity of Nothing with Being, this is followed by a
further refl ection to the effect that, indeed, these are identical, I have
indeed brought them together – Being, as something entirely undefi ned, is also Nothing. However, to put it quite crudely, they are not
actually entirely identical. The thought that carries out the act of
identifi cation always does violence to every single concept in the
process. And the negation of the negation is in fact nothing other
than the α
¸
να′ µνησις, the recollection, of that violence, in other words
the acknowledgement that, by conjoining two opposing concepts, I
have on the one hand bowed to a necessity implicit in them, while
on the other hand I have done them a violence that has to be rectifi ed. And truth to tell, this rectifi cation in the act of identifi cation is
what is always intended by the Hegelian syntheses.17 This structure
– we are speaking here of a structure of dialectics – this structure is
not something that can always be strictly sustained, and I know very
well that you could show me quite different structures in Hegel’s
Logic.

That the dialectic, in a sense, does a violence to the concepts of Being and Nothingness in their equation and sublation, and that this pattern is one of thought -- that the positing will bring about another positing, and these things together form a moment -- these are things I've tried to find ways to say and so it's something of a relief to see a Big Cheese say similar things to my sympathies. Makes me think maybe I got something out of the reading after all, while the suspicion the entire time was that it was nothing but my own imagination.

EDIT: And, generally, LND 3 felt clearer than 1 and 2 in terms of what Adorno is doing because he's less responding to criticisms to get his audience to listen to why his project is worth listening to and beginning to differentiate himself from Hegel, as well as ends with a kind of transcendental question: 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.

Cheers.

We have similar views of the world, especially with respect to rejecting competition and achievement as markers of worth.

Can our choices ever be free from determinants, constraints and consequences? — Truth Seeker

Sure. Just choose the other determinant, constraint, or consequence.

We don't get to create the whole world out of nothing, but we can choose amongst the options available which are constrained by various determinants, constraints, and consequences, but choice still remains.

To be honest I think I made a mistake and jumped the gun -- I mixed up those who had already submitted with those who I had heard were going to submit. It made me anxious so I thought it best to say something "just in case"

but about the lack of validity in the argument. — Banno

We agree on the validity of the argument.

To get from an "is" to an "ought", logically, there needs to be some premise which connects the two verbs. This need not even be ontologically significant. Or logically significant!

The is/ought distinction needs more attention than is given here. "Life is good" -- ok, sure. all of it? in every case? all the time? And if so what is the difference between the reference of "Life" and "...is bad"? Is anything bad if Life is Good?

Well I appreciate it cuz it's helping me.

Much easier to start a new thinker with some easier to digest thoughts than the thinker himself.

Happy May Day, everyone.

I think some essays have been removed from my PM -- but at present I have @Sam26 and @Bob Ross 's submissions.

I wanted to remind people that the end of this month is the last day for submissions, and also note how I believe I've lost some submissions in my PM's -- so if you're not either Sam or Bob, please resubmit and I'll make sure to preserve the essay outside of the PM.

Addendum: I think I've heard people say they have interest in submitting, and have mistaken that with submissions. I look forward to more submissions!