It's just that there isn't much power in your should because you can change it anytime you want. There's no should. It's just you doing whatever you do.

My 'morality' is a system that says those values inform my actions. — AmadeusD

They inform your actions? What does that mean?

Do you experience morality that way? Can you change your morality notions on a whim?

I understand they seem to, but there's no way to assess this beyond "people influence each other". — AmadeusD

There is though. It could be that aliens are beaming the moral thoughts into your head. "People influence each other" is just a stab at satisfying a particular worldview.

So leaving behind what we don't know (just read Plato's apology, it's all about acknowledging what I don't know), all we have is that morality seems to have an external ground. It doesn't seem like something I'm making up, it's more something I become aware of through experience.

We can just leave it at that. No need to make peace with a worldview. Is there?

you can't make the guilt go away by changing your morals, right?
— frank

Yes. I was a sociopath for several years, partially to achieve this. — AmadeusD

You shouldn't have to do that if morals are a choice. Morals seem to come from outside, that was my point.

But guilt hurts, right? It can really hurt. Up to a point you can chose whether you're going to face it or not, but you can't make the guilt go away by changing your morals, right?

I feel like "mysticism" is not the best term here though. Really what bothers modern sensibilities is just metaphysics and the transcendent in general. Philosophy need not appeal to any sort of mystical experience to fall afoul of this bias in contemporary thought (particularly analytical thought). Which I feel is unfortunate. I think "anti-metaphysics" tends to actually just assume a very particular sort of metaphysics, and then this position essentially just "cheats" on justifying itself by pretending it is "just the skeptical, agnostic position." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well said.

- Adorno's unfettered dialectics ... eliminates ontology altogether. His rejection of any
ontological stipulation in favor of an infinite dialectics which penetrates
all concrete things. and entities seems inseparable from a certain arbitrariness, an absence of content and direction ... — Kracauer, History, p.207

I think this is a typical reaction by those averse to dropping ontology. It seems to leave one floating on air?

Cool, thanks. — Jamal

:up: As for what Adorno made of it, I'm still trying to formulate that. He spent a lot of time sunk deep in the quasi-mystical. He tried to learn Hebrew because one of his friends became an expert in Jewish Kabbalah. But what I notice from Buck-Morss's outline is that while others around him are tipping over into lunacy, he keeps his head. For Adorno, truth is about facts. Hegel would have said we only ever encounter partial-truths. The final truth would reside in the Absolute (sort of).

I think when he describes the descent of the spirit into human life (which is what that lecture portion you quoted is about), he's describing what Marxists around him believed. He's explaining what's wrong with the picture the Marxists are embracing. The reason Lukacs stifled himself was this belief that they were cruising into this great mystical reunification between the subject and the object, between humanity and the Absolute. God was waking up and looking out onto a human world. That's what the Proletariat was supposed to be. This isn't just about emancipation. In fact, as Adorno shows, it's not about emancipation at all. This is a religious vision. Adorno wasn't buying it.

What did he really believe about the universe? I think he would have said we need to temper the drive to answer questions like that.

I guess we could first look at what Hegel meant by it. I agree with this guy:

Given the evidence for Hegel’s place in the Hermetic tradition, it seems surprising that so few Hegel scholars acknowledge it. The topic is often dismissed as unimportant or uninteresting (it is neither). Usually, it is treated as relevant only to Hegel’s youth (which is false). Surely one reason for this attitude is disciplinary specialization. Few scholars of the history of philosophy ever study Hermetic thinkers. Another reason is the recent tendency among influential Hegel scholars to argue that it is wrong-headed to treat Hegel as having any serious interest in metaphysics or theology at all, let alone the sort of exotic metaphysics and theology that we find in Hermeticism. This is the so-called “non-metaphysical reading” of Hegel. As Cyril O'Regan has pointed out, it goes hand in hand with an “anti-theological” reading. For instance, David Kolb writes, “I want most of all to preclude the idea that Hegel provides a cosmology including the discovery of a wondrous new superentity, a cosmic self or a world soul or a supermind.” But this is exactly what Hegel does.

The phrase “non-metaphysical reading” seems to have originated with Klaus Hartmann who, in his influential 1972 article “Hegel: A NonMetaphysical View,” identified Hegel’s system as a “hermeneutic of categories.” Other well-known proponents of Hartmann’s approach include Kenley Royce Dove, William Maker, Terry Pinkard, and Richard Dien Winfield.

The non-metaphysical/anti-theological reading relies on ignoring or explaining away the many frankly metaphysical, cosmological, theological, and theosophical passages in Hegel’s writings and lectures. Thus the non-metaphysical reading is less an interpretation of Hegel than a revision. Its advocates sometimes admit this — Hartmann, for instance — but more often than not they offer their “reading” in opposition to other interpretations of what Hegel meant. It is, furthermore, no accident that the same authors finish out their “interpretation” by tacking a left-wing politics onto Hegel, for they are, in fact, the intellectual heirs of the nineteenth-century “Young Hegelians” who also gave non-metaphysical, anti-theological “interpretations” of Hegel. The non-metaphysical reading is simply Hegel shorn of everything offensive to the modern, secular, liberal mind. This does not, however, imply that I am offering an alternative “right Hegelian” reading of Hegel. I am simply reading Hegel. In so doing, I hope to contribute to the “nonpartisan, historical and textual analysis” of Hegel’s thought called for by Louis Dupré.

Such a reading, I am convinced, places Hegel’s philosophy squarely in the tradition of classical metaphysics. In this view, I am in accord with the broadly “ontotheological” interpretation of Hegel offered by Martin Heidegger, who coined the term, and by such scholars as Walterjaeschke, Emil Fackenheim, Cyril O'Regan, Malcolm Clark, Albert Chapelle, Claude Bruaire, and Iwan Iljin. “Ontotheology” refers to the equation of Being, God, and logos. Hegel’s account of the Absolute is structurally identical to Aristotle’s account of Being as Substance (ousia): it is the most real, independent, and self-sufficient thing that is. Hegel identifies the Absolute with God, and does so both in his public statements (his books and lectures) and in his private notes — and with a straight face, without winking at us. Hegel does not offer the categories of his Logic as mere “hermeneutic devices” but as eternal forms, moments or aspects of the Divine Mind (Absolute Idea). He treats nature as “expressing” the divine ideas in imperfect form. He speaks of a “World Soul” and uses it to explain how dowsing and animal magnetism work. He structures his entire philosophy around the Christian Trinity, and claims that with Christianity the “principle” of speculative philosophy was revealed to mankind.” He tells us — again with a straight face — that the state is God on earth.

I see no reason not to take Hegel at his word on any of this. I am interested only in what Hegel thought, not in what he ought to have thought. To be sure, Hegel’s appropriation of classical metaphysics and Christianity is transformative; Hegel is no ordinary believer. But his metaphysical and religious commitments are not exoteric. He believes that his Absolute and World Soul, and so forth, are real beings; they are just not real in the sense in which traditional, pious “picture-thinking” conceives of them. If Hegel departs from the metaphysical tradition in anything, it is in dispensing with its false modesty. Hegel does not claim to be merely searching for truth. He claims that he has found it. — Glenn Magee

Cool. How do you think Adorno understood Hegel's use of the term "absolute spirit" in this quote?

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

Surely that describes all Hegelians these days? — Jamal

No.

In contrast, the metaphysical reading counters that anti-metaphysical interpretations take a one-sided approach to Hegel’s work (Beiser 2005, Goodfield 2009, Rosen 1984, Taylor 1975, Thompson 2018). Hegel conceived his PR to be a part of a wider system. Isolating any one text from its wider context may appear to inoculate any such reading from metaphysical claims elsewhere in Hegel’s system. However, only a reading that grasps the full metaphysical foundations of his thought will do justice to his self-understanding (Houlgate 2005). — SEP

Yes, Adorno makes that point explicitly in the lecture. Maybe I wasn't clear. — Jamal

You drew attention to the fact that self awareness is dependent on being in a social arena. I don't think you mentioned the part about how freedom requires intersubjectivity, so that as Hegel's narrative progresses, freedom disappears. In other words, if the Proletariat actually turned into what Marx thought it would, there wouldn't be any freedom. Are we on the same page there?

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

The key point, for Hegel, is that only the free will of an individual can ground the free will of another (Stillman 1980). Something is mine when mutually recognized as my possession by another. This is the first appearance of right where the activity of my free will in taking possession is free, and not mere arbitrariness. It is this agreement between two individuals forming a kind of contract which is so important for Hegel. This is because mutual recognition becomes a vehicle for how we can develop further a more concrete understanding of freedom as right in the world. If such recognition was under threat, this would unsettle how we can ground our free will in a free will of another. — SEP article on Hegel's Philosophy of Right (PR)

That article also notes that there are some who read Hegel and ditch the mysticism that it's couched in. I'm sure @Count Timothy von Icarus will see that Adorno's explanation of Hegel (in your quote) has Neoplatonic undercurrents. We don't need to explore that, (unless we do need to).

It's the end of the world.
Is it still here?
I thought it was already gone.

I love the word lunch
It smells of sandwiches
and stars on the walls.

It's the end of the world.
Am I a ghost?
Can they see me?

The lawnmower shaves the world
but if you tried to put all the clovers back
How would you know which way they go?

It's the end of the world.
It's fallen into a well
The little people crowd around.

On the other hand, he does aim to "prioritize the object" and he is a kind of materialist. The world of experience is not entirely amenable to concepts, and it's unpredictable, because there is more to it than the subject puts into it, even though there's a subject-object reciprocity. — Jamal

True. The idealism that bugged him is the alienation of the subject to the object. That shows up in two places: in Kant (as the thing-in-itself problem), and in Marx's ideas about a commodity's exchange value (which means a commodity's value has become abstract for the sake of exchange, rather than use.) Adorno become convinced that these two cases of it are linked, and that what Marx outlined (in the first chapter of Kapital) is the real source of the Kantian thing-in-itself problem. In fact, for Adorno, it goes beyond being a feature of bourgeois culture (as it was for Lukacs), and becomes an organizing feature of human consciousness.

Also for Adorno, history unfolds similarly to music: the present moment has a sense of momentum as it arises out of the past, and the future takes shape according to the inner logic of the cultural story that's being played out. This is his belief in the unity of form and content. The "form" part is like the composition itself, the notes on paper. The content is a unique playing of that composition. Adorno says the orchestra never purely expresses the notes of the form, but rather the whole thing proceeds just like any events in time: arising from the past, and constrained by meaning to fall forward. It's almost like he's saying every musical production is like jazz in a way, with the form as a touchstone. Human history is like jazz.

The human race

I don't think it affirms that he was an ontological antirealist, and I don't think he was an antirealist. — Jamal

I went back looking for where I may have been mistaken. Ontological anti-realism is skepticism about ontology. One formulation would be to say we just don't have the God's-eye-view necessary to determine whether the world is made of mind-stuff or non-mind-stuff.

Through his life, Adorno was along the lines of a phenomenologist. In the 1920s he was surrounded by people who were giving up altogether on reason as a path to truth. For some Marxists, reason was tainted. Adorno rejected both of these lines of thought, but still ended up as, well, an ontological anti-realist. All knowledge is "within the bounds of experience."

Right. Adorno had never believed we can use philosophy to predict historical events, so the only part of Marxism that interested him was the part that was transmitted through Lukacs.

Lukacs was basically saying the mind-body problem originates in the separation between labor and product that takes place when a commodity takes on exchange value. In other words, the abstraction we call money is the source of the mind-body problem.

I mean, we know that everywhere the concept of money went, mathematics blossomed. Math needs that boost of abstraction to get off the ground. I think Lukacs may have been right. Adorno was definitely convinced.

Do I have a moral duty to help YOUR descendants? — Agree-to-Disagree

No. The moral issue I'm talking about has little to do with you in particular.

but it doesn't explain his opposition to the concrete form that activism took in the sixties, i.e., why exactly he did not think much of the student protesters around 1968. — Jamal

Buck-Morss says that was the same opposition he'd always had. The Frankfurt group began to doubt Marx regarding the power of the proletariat to transform the world when Hitler came to power. When the war started, that belief was entirely gone. Adorno had never believed Marx was right though.

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. I put the extra line spaces in:

Adorno's position did have an inner logic based on
his intellectual experiences, which by 1931 had convinced him of three things:

that any philosophy, and Marxism was certainly no exception, lost its legitimacy
when it overstepped the boundaries of material experience and claimed metaphysical knowledge (this had been the lesson of Cornelius's neo-Kantianism);

that the criterion of truth was rational rather than pragmatic, and hence theory
could not be subordinated to political or revolutionary goals;

and that avant·garde art, even when as with Schonberg's music it had no consciously political intent, could be progressive rather than simply bourgeois decadence, that it was
not mere ideology, but, at least potentially, a form of enlightenment as well . — Buck-Morss

What if an organism could change the environment? They could change the environment to allow themselves to survive. — Agree-to-Disagree

Living things are architects: sometimes profoundly altering the earth to meet their needs. This has been going practically since life first appeared. People who think climate change is a moral issue because it's evil to transform the world are just misinformed about the nature of life.

The moral issue is about having the power to help our descendants, but failing to act on their behalves.

Reality always exceeds the concepts we apply to it, in such a way that no concept, however refined, can all there is to say. — Banno

Maybe it's this;

We know our concepts are limited because the world surprises us, disappoints us, goes all to hell in ways that our theories didn't predict. In this is a kind of materialism. The evidence for materialism is on-going suffering.

So if we spent time poking our heads out of old concepts like a turtle from its shell, would we discover solutions to suffering that we were oblivious to?

It's brilliant, but I definitely wouldn't call it an introduction. It traces Adorno's thinking through his interactions with Walter Benjamin, Lukacs, Brecht, etc. — Jamal

Maybe background would be a better word then. One of Adorno's preoccupations was with the difference between the concept of the thing and an example of the thing in the wild. Imagine that your mind is trying to hold the world in its hands, but the world is like sand and some of it always slips through your mind's fingers. I want to know why that was so important to Adorno.

So, yeah, I go with the system that means welll, but fails from time to time as opposed to the one that means harm and typically gets it right. — Hanover

Do you mean dictatorships usually mean harm?

This is another introduction to Negative Dialectics by Susan Buck-Morss.

Mine was 2.2, liberal airhead.

Very dated. — Jamal

:up:

Speaking of football, I consider your theory to be like a football bat. — Hanover

Since base-football, which makes use of the footbat, is a vast untapped opportunity for merchandise sales stretching out to the horizon, I think you're saying my theory is freaking genius.

In other words, yes it is part of the American psyche to question government, but that is based upon history and well developed ideology, not just mindless fear governments can be bad. — Hanover

Are dictatorships really unusually bad compared to democracies? They're both capable of horrendous mistakes and diabolical episodes, as well as great feats of righteousness. How is one really better than the other?

Speaking of Russia, I'd suggest their willingness to cede power to dictators is also explained by their history. Russian people are bound together by a shared history and attachment to that land. Americans are bound by a limited history, a specific ideology, and a dream of self advancement .

More so not liberals than liberals though. — Hanover

True. I think that explains why we have the oldest constitution in continuous use. The Constitution is all we've got.

Try your gay Trumpery pal out with that and see if you get a hot reaction. — unenlightened

I'll ask him if he thinks his devotion to Trump is coming from a desire to be dominated by him in bed. That's a great idea.

Assuming the goal is to prove yourself to be in that sweet spot between hopelessly strict and hopelessly lenient, the debate will center on where that sweet spot is, with most defending their test score as being the sweet spot. That's my plan. — Hanover

My theory is that Americans are by nature kind of sheep-like. At a football game we all coalesce into a patriotic mass as the national anthem is played. Knowing that about ourselves, we demand democracy to keep our personal identities from being subsumed into the super-identity. In other words, we use democracy to guard against our native tendencies.

A country like Russia doesn't really need democracy because historically, they aren't easy to govern. They don't feel threatened by dictatorship because they don't fear that they'll all just fall in line and lose themselves in the herd.

I think Adorno may have had it backwards. You're open to dictatorship only if you aren't afraid of it. You aren't afraid of it if you're very confident about your own autonomy.

This doesn't really address what you said, but I said it anyway,

This is a blurb from the Adorno entry in the SEP.


"In contrast to the “scientific dualism” of word and thing, formal logic and inference, Adorno calls for an explicitly “aesthetic” method of “configurative language”: “a dialectically intertwined and explicatively indissoluable unity of concept and thing” (ibid., 38) which makes disclosive truth possible. In Negative Dialectics he captures this idea with the claim that “In dialectics … the rhetorical element is on the side of content” (1966a [1973, 41]). Recent scholarship has attempted to bring Adorno’s thinking about language (and rationality) into critical discussion with certain Wittgensteinian, pragmatist, and neo-Hegelian strains of anglophone philosophy (Demmerling
1994;"

It sounds a lot like Russell/early-Witt where the world is "all that is the case" which indicates unity of true propositions and world, or content and thing. I'm guessing that we're supposed to have ejected ontological commitments prior to reading Adorno. We're ontological anti-realists.

suppose you’re right. But then, Adorno was pretty much saying that every philosopher had imposed their concepts extinguishingly on the world. — Jamal

Even British empiricists? How?

Yes, but note that Adorno thinks the role of philosophy is to make that intellectual effort after all, only without extinguishing the complexity, difference, uniqueness, etc. — Jamal

An example of someone who does this is Schopenhauer. After observing that subject and object are two poles of one concept (along with cause and effect), he posits a One whose will pervades the universe, and all else is sort of illusory. That view extinguishes the things we value the most.

edit: although I wouldn't say Schopenhauer was wrong, just incomplete.

More a matter of coherence. — Banno

Did you show that the theory of forms is incoherent? I missed that.

I think the contradiction he's talking about is that we treat something like the Absolute as a substantial thing (substantial in the Aristotelian sense, as an independent thing).

But we can show that the Absolute isn't independent after all. We conceive if it against a background of disunity, the non-Absolute. This situation generalizes.

"It collides with its own boundary". He's saying it as poetically as he possibly can.

Alternatively, we might understand "triangularity" as a way of grouping some objects, as something we do, and without supposing the existence of a mystic form. — Banno

True. It's a matter of taste, though.

Is our aim to understand true triangles, or is it to understand real triangles? After all, it's the ones with the bumps and imperfections with which we find ourselves working. So why not both? — Banno

It's both. The math class is the realm of true triangles. The real world works by a margin of error. This is pretty much what Plato said.

Plato would require that true knowlege of something is knowledge of the form...
— Hanover
And was he right? I doubt many would now agree. — Banno

The truest triangle is the form. Real triangles always fail to match the concept due to bumpity parts that have to be overlooked.

No, and please, no more of these frankisms (random questions with mysterious hidden motivations). — Jamal

I thought maybe you could read the lecture in German and talk about the translation. I would suspect the translation before deciding that Adorno didn't understand dialect.