If you're interested, there's a book of his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, which seems to be mainly about Aristotle: Metaphysics: Concept and Problems. — Jamal

This is quite nice, more ... humane than ND, meaning Adorno there speaks like a normal person, unlike the convoluting language employed in his theoretical work, I can actually understand him on first reading!

The trouble, from your point of view, will be that refuses to develop this into a positive ontology, instead using it as part of a critical move to reveal the shortcomings of all ontology ever attempted. — Jamal

Do you think it is because he only wants to be critical that he doesn't develop his philosophy into an ontology and epistemology? Wouldn't the development be ideological, or lead back to ideology via reification?

I don't think so. At the end of the quoted passage he is dismissing claims that Hegel's dialectics can properly be called "negative". And, at the beginning, he distinguishes a "succinct" sense from a "general" sense. I believe that Adorno is moving toward the general sense. Look at this quote from "Rhetoric": — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't see how he is dismissing at the end of the quoted passage, quite the opposite, care to explain? Also, I believe Adorno is dismissing both the "succinct" sense and the "general sense", the latter being far too broad for Adorno.

I take your quote from "Rhetoric" to recover dia-lectics literal meaning, in order to save rhetoric, and nothing more.

This is clearly not the case. Read "Rhetoric" thoroughly. This is the final paragraph. — Metaphysician Undercover

I read it, and I don't see how it relates to what the two of us have been talking about. Unless ... unless you would think that somehow utopia links to the polyvalence of experience?? After all, polyvalence implies a colorful experience, and so philosophy, as prism, captures life's richness of lived experience. Is this what it is you are saying?

But this is what one would expect, since negative dialectics is the opposite of hegelian dialectics, right? — Pussycat


No. The paragraph you provided explains why this is not the case. — Metaphysician Undercover

Clearly. I was only following what you said:

I think that negative dialectics, being the negative to Hegelian dialectics, recognizes the importance of the opposite, noncontradiction, as the foundation for this polyvalence. That is the richness of lived experience which escapes conceptualization when conceptualization is bounded by contradiction. — "Metaphysician

I couldn't disagree more. Not only does Adorno not say that negative dialectics is the negative to Hegelian dialects, but.. Wait, where exactly in the text does he say all this? That negative dialectics recognizes the importance of noncontradiction, being the foundation of the polyvalence?? That there is a richness of lived experience which escapes conceptualization when conceptualization is bounded by contradiction??? This is very sloppy...

I can't say that I understand what you are asking. If X infuriates you, then it is right that you object to it. Don't you agree? The question of whether or not X is objectively right, and whether you ought to object to X by some third party principles, is not relevant. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think it is more like he is stating this as an observation. The infuriation is what it is, as the way Adorno interprets the situation, whether or not it is right or correct for them to be infuriated is not being discussed.

This is one thing I've noticed about Adorno, he seldom, if ever makes judgements of good or correct. He judges nonidentical, false, and things like that, but not right, or correct, and things like that. I assume that's a feature of negative dialectics. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, Adorno doesn't interpret the situation, but I would think that whenever he brings up mainstream opinion, that he doesn't think very highly of it. This, bundled with the fact that the furies are never a wise counsel, leads me to believe that Adorno meant it to show the opposition of the common people to dialectical thought, both flavors, if you like.

He finishes his first lecture with:

Now, you all know that when we speak of dialectics in the succinct sense that I have tacitly been assuming – the ancient Greek concept of dialectics coincides more or less with epistemology and logic, and is far more general than what I have been explaining to you – you all know that dialectics in the sense of contradictions both in things and in concepts exists in two major versions: an idealist version which may to a certain degree be regarded as the pinnacle of philosophical speculation, and a materialist version which has been turned into an official world-view that dominates a very large portion of the globe (and as such it has degenerated into the very opposite of itself). And you may well want to ask me why I do not simply declare myself satisfied with this alternative but choose instead to speak of something else, namely a negative dialectics. You may well ask further whether I am not the kind of professor who tries to brew his own little philosophical soup in the hope that one day he may obtain a chapter to himself in Ueberweg-Heinze (or one or other of its continuations). At this point I should like to mention an objection that has been raised by an extremely knowledgeable source, namely by someone from your own circle, someone from amongst those present here today. Given that the concept of dialectics contains the element of negativity precisely because of the presence of contradiction, does
this not mean that every dialectics is a negative dialectics and that my introduction of the word ‘negative’ is a kind of tautology? We could just say that, simply by refusing to make do with the given reality, the subject, thought, negates whatever is given; and that as a motive force of thought subjectivity itself is the negative principle, as we see from a celebrated passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology where he remarks that the living substance as subject, in other words, as thought, is pure, simple negativity, and is ‘for this very reason, the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis.’ In other words, 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. I should like to respond to this in detail next time. For now I wish only to set out the problem as it has been put to me and to say that it calls for an answer.

So he concedes that his own "negative" dialectics is very similar to Hegel's dialectics, owing to the presence of contradiction, to the point that it might be indistinguishable by some. His whole project, one can say, is to show how it differs, not ignoring the similarities.

If one objected, as has been repeated ever since by the Aristotelian critics of Hegel, that dialectics for its part grinds everything indiscriminately in its mill down into the mere logical form of the contradiction, overlooking – even Croce argued this – the true polyvalence of that which is not contradictory, of the simply different, one is only displacing the blame for the thing onto the method.

The "grinding everything indiscriminately in its mill down into the mere logical form of the contradiction", what I reinterpreted as "reducing everything unto contradiction", is what is similar, and here Adorno is defending every form of dialectics: hegelian (idealistic), marxist (materialistic), negative. The herd doesn't comprehend and is angried.

It's not like that negative dialectics comes to the rescue of our precious polyvalence of experience, which was erroneously sacricifed by bad and faulty hegelian dialectics. There is nothing to restore about it, negative dialectics continues in the same path, even more so.

But this is what one would expect, since negative dialectics is the opposite of hegelian dialectics, right? So where the latter reduces everything to contradiction, discarding polyvalent experience, the former would bring it back, our hero, well no, that's too bad.

The introduction is not so much an introduction as the heart of the whole work. — Jamal

From what I've gathered, the introduction in ND is a reviewed version of an essay Adorno has written to accompany his lectures, which is featured in LND. This might explain why there are parts missing in the LND translation, and also why some parts are different: the LND appendix translation in based on a different original material. I spent hours trying to validate this for sure, I gave up, it is what I think.

Yes, he doesn't say anything about right, I was asking you.

Your interpretive position is that the impoverishment of experience through dialectics (due to the sacrifice of qualitative polyvalence of experience) is wrong, based on faulty hegelian dialectics, right? To this Adorno adds that this impoverishment infuriates mainstream opinion. So do you think that the mainstream rightly object so vehemently to it?

This is exactly the point. To reduce everything to contradiction is the faulty process because that misses out on "the richness of lived experience". In other words it doesn't grasp the reality of the situation, therefore it is not the appropriate philosophical process. So, I propose to you, that you are mistaken in classing Hegelian dialectics and negative dialectics together, in the same category, as reducing the polyvalence of experience to contradiction. I think that negative dialectics, being the negative to Hegelian dialectics, recognizes the importance of the opposite, noncontradiction, as the foundation for this polyvalence. That is the richness of lived experience which escapes conceptualization when conceptualization is bounded by contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

So when Adorno says: "The impoverishment of experience through dialectics, which infuriates mainstream opinion, proves itself however to be entirely appropriate to the abstract monotony of the administered world", there by "dialectics" he means Hegelian dialectics, and not negative dialectics? (so that to not class them together). And therefore that mainstream opinion has every right and is correct in being infuriated?

OK, that's one way of looking at it. But being "absorbed into institutional authority" doesn't necessarily imply being "tamed by it" rather than "subverting" it. We could look at the presidency of Trump for example, and evaluate whether this is an instance of a revolutionary movement being tamed by authority, rather than subverting authority. We'd probably be able to identify elements of both, but that just means that it's wrong to portray the possibilities as a dichotomy, one or the other. — Metaphysician Undercover

Trump's presidency is a revolutionary movement? Subvert as in undermine? I don't understand why you would bring Trump up, since the thrust and power of the hippie movement was clearly stopped and commodified, thus tamed, and eventually didn't bring a stop to domination, whereas Trump is all about domination. That one seeks to replace one power with another, this is no true revolution, one being to end all domination.

I think you misunderstand what Adorno was saying. The "dialectical discipline" is the inadequate way of looking at things. And whoever adopts this method forfeits the true perspective which the polyvalence of experience provides for, as a bitter sacrifice. "Whoever submits to dialectical discipline, must unquestionably pay with the bitter sacrifice...".

Please reread the passage, and you'll see that what follows supports my interpretation. — Metaphysician Undercover

I reread, and from I gather:

Dialectical discipline, Hegel's (positive) and Adorno's (negative), both sacrifice and reduce the polyvalnece of experience to contradiction. Contradiction is not a caprice of dialectical thought, as critics pose, but ontologically real, and for dialectics to be in touch with the world, it must embrace contradiction, especially in a damaged world as ours. This embrace is what would enable dialectics to critique the abstract monotony of the administered world. But it comes at a cost, the reduction of everything unto contradiction means the loss of the richness of lived experience, its immediacy, living in the moment. There is already a contradiction here: the polyvalence of lived experience in a monovalent dominative world.

An example would be of a fast car, say a Ferrari, the owner would race it to the ground, pride himself of how fast she is, get high on the adrenaline of speed, perhaps treat it as a pussy magnet etc. Whereas the dialectician would refuse all these, see the power dynamics behind it, and just see the Ferrrari as a totem of capitalist culture. There can be no middle point between the owner and the dialectician. Dialectics reflects reality's hollowness, its impoverishment, it is why it is so infuriating, on one hand, but so appriopriate, on the other.

But Adorno does not stop there. "What is painful about it is the pain of such, raised to a concept". Reality's hollowness is not infuriating to the dialectician, but painful, and also conceptualized, meaning thought of. This conceptualization itself is what produces guilt: "Thought is driven, out of its unavoidable insufficiency, its guilt for what it thinks, towards it". Conceptualization always falsifies.

In the myth of Theseus and Procrustes, Procrustes was forcing travelers to fit his bed by stretching or cutting them, robbing them of their riches, their identity. Theseus forces Procrustes to the same, not for revenge, but to witness the result. It is why Adorno needs Hegel, to submit him to his own method and report on the failure.

Where do you get the sense that the realization was missed — Metaphysician Undercover

This, I took from ND's introduction:

Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. — ON THE POSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY

The realization was missed because the hippie movement failed to transform the world in its image, but was commodified and commercialized, liquitated even. What could have been a revolutionary movement, capable of subverting entrenched power and liberating consciousness, was instead absorbed into institutional authority, tamed by it. Much like, as Adorno says, what happened with Hegel's dialectic.

A wave is a temporal event, it comes to an end, and its energy is dispersed. But this does not imply that the realization of its energy is necessarily "missed".
It is only missed by those who do not follow the threads of transformation. That is why the polyvalence of experience is a requirement. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand, who or what requires the polyvalence of experience? Why then would Adorno say that (negative) dialectics demands the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience?

Anyway, I just wanted to try to visualize this sacrifice, by taking images from the arts.

It's probably a crude summary but I think that's roughly right: dialectics sacrifices the richness and diversity of experience in its pursuit of truth.

On the main point, I agree. And it's not like Adorno ever pretends that negative dialectics is presuppositionless. — Jamal

Yes, I was just about to post the following before I saw your reply. I remembered this movie I watched lots of years ago.

This law is however not one of thinking, but real. Whoever submits to dialectical discipline, must unquestionably pay with the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience. The impoverishment of experience through dialectics, which infuriates mainstream opinion, proves itself however to be entirely appropriate to the abstract monotony of the administered world. What is painful about it is the pain of such, raised to a concept. Cognition must bow to it, if it does not wish to once again degrade the concretion to the ideology, which it really begins to become. — ND

I think an example of the "bitter sacrifice" can be seen in the following clip from the movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", a scene from Adorno's time.



The narrator, Duke, in retrospect, recollects:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Has it been five years? Six? It seems like a lifetime, the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle '60s, was a very special time and place to be a part of, but no explanation, no mix of words, or music or memories, can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world, whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle. That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense - we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. — Duke

Then, the bitter sacrifice would be not to get carried away by the commonplace experience of the time, to not "ride the beautiful wave", to not get distracted by this "qualitative polyvalence of experience", to not live in the moment, but to sit back and medidate, to think things through, to warn of the dangers, and to ultimately see the future commodification, the false consciousness and the capitalist exploitation that the movement entails, much like what Adorno did with the revolutionaries of his time, as it can be seen in his interview "Who's Afraid of the Ivory Tower?"

https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/adorno-spiegel-1969.pdf

This attidude, not only infuriates the revolutionaries, but also their adversaries, as if the latter are conjoined to them, and so it amounts to just about everybody; the party pooper.

But Duke continues:

So now, less than five years later, you can go up a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark, that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back. — Duke

Why did it roll back? Why was the moment of realization missed?

We're all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the '60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America, selling "consciousness expansion", without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait, for all those people who took him seriously. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy peace and understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure, is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create. A generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the acid culture: the desperate assumption that somebody or at least some force is tending the light at the end of the tunnel. — Duke

Well, it seems like that you can't "buy" true consciousness, immediacy doesn't work, things must be thought and worked thorouglhy through, it is why theory is needed, which is what ND is about. I guess that Adorno would say that the hippie movement, despite its flaws, progressed towards true emancipation, but that eventually became part of the disease, and not the cure.

To be honest it hadn't occurred to me that it was a different translation — Jamal

Yes, it is a different one, I think it's very good, but some parts are missing. Oh, and not to forget, I found an outright error in Redmond's translation, two actually. In section "FRAGILITY OF THE TRUTH", page
48:

The open thought is unprotected against the risk of going astray into what is popular;

The same also in section "AGAINST RELATIVISM", page 49:

Relativism is null and void simply because, what it on the one hand considers popular and
contingent, and on the other hand holds to be irreducible, originates out of objectivity – precisely that of an individualistic society – and is to be deduced as socially necessary appearance [Schein].

"popular" in both cases above should be replaced with "arbitrary". In Thorne, it is "arbitrary", and Adorno also mentions it in his notes. "Popular" does not make any sense there, it troubled me until I saw the other translations, I couldn't understand what popularity had to do with what he was saying.

But what truly interests me now is to find out what Adorno really means by this "bitter sacrifice" mentioned above.

Anyway, I also wanted to say that "Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966", are feature rich, I think that it would be a good idea for them to accompany our reading of ND. It seems to me that both the editor Rolf Tiedemann, as well as the translator Rodney Livingstone, have done a great job, with their notes and footnotes. The appendix of LND features yet another translation of the introduction of ND, with some parts however missing for some reason. And thus the number of translations, Ashton (1973), Redmond (2001), Thorne, together with Livingstone's, comes down to all four. Still waiting for Robert Hullot-Kentor's, to bring the number to 5.

QUESTION: If Adorno goes from particular to universal, shouldn't we a bit suspicious that he always ends up in the same places: commodification, instrumental reason, bourgeois consciousness, capitalist exploitation, etc? — Jamal

According to Adorno, this is what is supposed to happen, when going from particular to universal, or rather, like he says, when "dialectics develops the difference of the particular from the generality, which is dictated by the generality". The objection is anticipated by Adorno:

If one objected, as has been repeated ever since by the Aristotelian critics of Hegel, that dialectics for its part grinds everything indiscriminately in its mill down into the mere logical form of the contradiction, overlooking – even Croce argued this – the true polyvalence of that which is not contradictory, of the simply different, one is only displacing the blame for the thing onto the method. — DIALECTICS NOT A STANDPOINT

Also:

This law is however not one of thinking, but real. Whoever submits to dialectical discipline, must unquestionably pay with the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience. The impoverishment of experience through dialectics, which infuriates mainstream opinion, proves itself however to be entirely appropriate to the abstract monotony of the administered world. What is painful about it is the pain of such, raised to a concept. Cognition must bow to it, if it does not wish to once again degrade the concretion to the ideology, which it really begins to become. — REALITY AND DIALECTICS

And so, being aware of what total identification does, we always end up in these nasty things you mention.

If a joke was what it ever was, then how do you explain the following?

One which cannot fall into the abyss, of which the fundamentalists of metaphysics prattle – it is not that of agile sophistics but that of insanity – turns, under the commandment of its principle of security, analytical, potentially into tautology.

Dont you see this as a suggestion, to "fall into the abyss"? Doesn't he say that those that don't do that, will turn to analytical and tautological statements? What is an abyss, if not something bottomless?

Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement; only mental acrobatics relate to the thing, which according to the fable convenu
[French: agreed-upon fiction] it holds in contempt for the sake of its self-satisfaction.

Doesn't he say here that it is with mental acrobatics that one should approach the extremes? And that the herd will see these moves as nothing more than self satisfied rhetoric, as perhaps it was done with Nietzsche?

Another reference to abyss and bottomless:

In contrast to this, the cognition throws itself à fond perdu [French: into the depths] at objects, so as to be fruitful. The vertigo which this creates is an index veri [Latin: index of truth]; the shock of the revelation, the negativity, or what it necessarily seems to be amidst what is hidden and monotonous, untruth only for the untrue.

Also, as per your suggestion, I had a look at the lectures. The notes on this passage say:

Truth [to be found] only in whatever throws itself away without safety belt, à fonds perdu.

I believe he's trying to keep the tension, the dialectic, of grounding alive. Descartes grounded certainty in the cogito, as a way to escape dogmatism, and this now has recoiled in just that. I guess for Adorno this is the ultimate fate of any stable grounds, they are sealed and buried, never to be questioned, until they become hollow. But the main reason I engaged with MU the way I did, is because he said that negative dialectics escapes bottomlessness, and that it is a lie. Whereas the way I see it, there is no escape, but Adorno seems to imply dialectical confrontation. Between you and me, he might as well think the same, not sure.

The truly groundless move here would be, after hitting groundlessness, to shirk back and create some absolute beginning in order to cover up the truth. (hence leading to its fragility next...) — Moliere

This is how I read it too, like there are two kind of groundlessness, a true and a false one. One that is acknowledged, and one that is not and forgotten.

Therefore the abyss between subject and object which may be evident in Hegel, would in fact be a grounding for negative dialectics. — Metaphysician Undercover

For Hegel, subject and object are ultimately identical, in the Absolute Spirit, and thus this is where his system is grounded, on this identity. Another dyad is thought and being, yet another reason (rationality) and reality: "The real is rational and the rational is real". There is no abyss in Hegel, truly optimistic.

But for someone, like Adorno, that rejects this identity thesis, the world rests on rather shaky grounds. Well, no rest for the wicked, like they say.

Anyhow, the question is whether the groundlessness is real or not, contradiction also, and what is ND's stance against it.

Indeed, in "fragility", it is "groundlessness". However, in "vertigo", it is bottomless:

A dialectic no longer “riveted” to identity prompts if not the objection, which ye shall know by its fascist fruits, that it is bodenlos—bottomless, without ground or soil—then the objection that it is dizzy-making.

Whereas the Thorne translation in "vertigo" is:

The objections leveled at everything groundless should be turned against the principle of a mind or spirit that maintains itself within itself as the sphere of absolute origins. But Wherever ontology, and above all Heidegger, starts banging away at groundlessness—that is where truth dwells.

But curious that you say that, because I was thinking of asking MU whether he thinks that bottomless is any different from groundless. For my part, I think they are all the same, bottomless, groundless, foundationless. The abyss, even.

Wouldn't you think that, as long as subject and object cannot be reconciled, as in Hegel, then an abyss would form between them? And that this abyss would be manifest in any grounding attempts? So far we agree of what negative dialectics would say of others, but what would it say of itself?

This is very consistent with my reading, except I read bottomlessness itself as untruth — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes I know, it is what I was saying, we agree in everything else but this, but this is a very crucial part.

I don't know how to take the following sentence, maybe "is" is a typo which should be "in"? If so, then bottomlessness is clearly an untruth itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

there however, where ontology ... hits bottomlessness, is the place of truth.

Take it as it stands: a true ontology is a bottomless ontology.

He is criticizing attempts to secure the bottomless abyss with tautological absolutes, whereas he'd rather leave the chasm open, engaging with it with mental acrobatics.

I agree with this to an extent. Acknowledgement of the bottomlessness is what touches the truth, but it is an acknowledgement of bottomlessness as untruth. What actually constitutes bottomlessness, is the untruth, and this is what negative dialectic sees in identity philosophy. And, the charge that negative dialectics is bottomless, is itself an untruth. This is evident in the last statement of the section. The bottomlessness of the untruth creates the vertigo which is the index of truth, in the negative approach. In general, the untruth of identity is the truth. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think you read it slightly wrong. My take is that Adorno says that identity philosophy despite claiming bottomlessness with its absolute, solid grounds, and scolding negative dialectics for lack of bottom, is in reality the epitome of bottomlessness. The fact that it doesn't recognize this, consists in its untruth. This is why he says that the objection of bottomlessness "needs to be turned against the intellectual principle which preserves itself as the sphere of absolute origins", it's a turntable, ah you said so yourself. And so the untruth lies in the claim, not in the bottomless itself.

As explained in the lectures, negative dialects is actually pinned to positivism, or identity, in a negative way. It is pinned to the falsity of positivism, and this constitutes the determinate negative. Otherwise negative dialectics would be completely indeterminate, negating anything, and everything, therefore useless. The subject of negative dialectics is the untruth of positivism and identity philosophy, and in this sense it actually is pinned to identity, in a way which allows it to escape the bottomlessness which is actually a part of the identity philosophy it resists. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is a misunderstanding here to what "pinned" means. THE VERTIGINOUS passage starts with "
A dialectics which is no longer “pinned” to identity provokes...". I understood it as Adorno describing negative dialectics, that the dialectics does not presume the identity claim. But like you say, if ND isn't pinned to anything, it will be completely arbitrary, criticizing everything in its pass, with no compass guiding it. Better then to say that ND is pinned to identity thinking, but not to identity. By its holding fast and being tethered to identity philosophy, ND doesn't lose itself and offers valuable critique. It feeds off the latter, and works towards its own dissolution. However, I don't think it escapes bottomlessness, maybe Adorno means that this tension should, as always, be kept standing?

I think it is important to note that this is described by Adorno as untruth. "The falsity of the jettisoned rationality which runs away from itself..." It is falsity because it dissociates thinking from its content, to make thinking, or as you say "Being" absolute. But content is necessary to thinking, so this way of absolutizing Being is a falsity. Therefore the "rationality which runs away from itself" by accepting this false impression of itself, as an absolute, is really irrational. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I agree, it is a regress into myth, as Adorno also noted in his Enlightenment book with Horkheimer.

So it seems that he is really against any absolutizations, then, one would say that he is a relativist, since you must either be the one or the other.

The meaning of such complaints is to be grasped in a usage of the dominant opinion. This refers to present alternatives in such a way that one would
have to choose between one or the other. Administrations frequently reduce decisions over plans submitted to it to a simple yes or no; administrative thinking has secretly become the longed-for model of
one which pretends to be free of such. But it is up to philosophical thought, in its essential situations,
not to play along.

Didn't have time to get to "against relativism" next.

This section appears to describe an approach to truth. Vertiginous is distinguished from bottomlessness. And truth is vertiginous, (makes one's head swim) rather than bottomless as the abyss of untruth. — Metaphysician Undercover

He doesn't say that bottomlessness relates to untruth, rather the opposite, that the acknowledgment of it is what touches truth. Negative dialectics, being foundationless and non-unitarian - better, a dialectics which is no longer “pinned” to identity - will be either accused of:

a) bottomlessness. This accusation, he says, comes from the "fascist fruits", which demand strong foundations, eg race, family, "blood", religion, nation, history etc. And so, a philosophy that does not provide some foundations, is outright and with no much further thought discarded by them as silly, to say the least.

b) vertiginous. Those that think it through, will still discard it, because of the felt vertigo that bottomlessness induces. But this relates to great modern poetry, and moreover is what philosophy needs: "This feeling has been central to great modern poetry since Baudelaire; philosophy, runs the anachronistic suggestion, ought not to participate in any such thing".

Then there is a paragraph that I have difficulty to understand, which appears to be directed against the absolutism of Hegel. There is a jettisoning of that which is first to thought, but the jettisoning does not absolutize it. The jettisoning seems to be intended to remove the content of thought, from thought. But it's irrational to think that the content of thinking could be removed from thinking, because this would leave thinking as something other than thinking. — Metaphysician Undercover

The objection of bottomlessness needs to be turned against the intellectual principle
which preserves itself as the sphere of absolute origins; there however, where ontology, Heidegger first and foremost, hits bottomlessness, is the place of truth.

Here I think he is alluding to Heidegger, not Hegel. Of Heidegger's absolutization of Being. As if he thinks that Heidegger correctly arrived at bottomolessness, to Being, but then he stopped by making it absolute, and left it abstract:

Even in the logical abstraction-form of the Something, as something which is meant or judged, which for its part does not claim to constitute anything existent, indelibly survives that which thinking would like to cancel out, whose non-identity is that which is not thinking.

And so it seems that the above does not apply to Heidegger's Being.

The jettisoning of that which is first and solidified from thought does not absolutize it as something free-floating. Exactly this jettisoning attaches it all the more to what it itself is not, and removes the illusion of its autarky. The falsity of the jettisoned rationality which runs away from itself, the recoil of Enlightenment into mythology, is itself rationally determinable. Thinking is according to its own meaning the thinking of something. Even in the logical abstraction-form of the Something, as something which is meant or judged, which for its part does not claim to constitute anything existent, indelibly survives that which thinking would like to cancel out, whose non-identity is that which is not thinking. The ratio becomes irrational where it forgets this, hypostasizing its own creations, the abstractions, contrary to the meaning of thinking. The commandment of its autarky condemns it to nullity, in the end to stupidity and primitivity. The objection of bottomlessness needs to be turned against the intellectual principle which preserves itself as the sphere of absolute origins; there however, where ontology, Heidegger first and foremost, hits bottomlessness, is the place of truth.

Heidegger, by throwing away first principles, arrived at Being. But this Being, according to Adorno, is neither absolute, nor free in itself, it is still dependent on what is thought. When philosophy forgets this and hypostasizes its own creations - without relation to what is being thought - it becomes irrational, null and stupid.

Anyways, catching up with everyone now. Summers over, schools back in session, and I'm reading again. — Moliere

Well, holidays got to me, eventually.. :cool: Have fun catching up!

I think we need to assume Adorno was attempting to be consistent, and not ambiguous or equivocal. So I see the difference as a matter of perspective. — Metaphysician Undercover

I am sure he was, but the main problem is that all of our concepts have been reified by ideology. And so equivocality is more pertinent than ever. Take the concept of theory in this case. What does it tell you? Is it the same when it is used in "theory of knowledge" as in "critical theory"?

Another way to see the same concept differently, it would be with perspectivism, I suppose. This was advanced foremost by Nietzsche. Not having the concepts of reification and non-identity at hand, and unable to procure them on his own, since he was a psychologist and not a philosopher, lacking theory, he was naturally led to perspectivism.

That is why I spoke of pre-consumption and post-consumption, from the perspective of a particular subject. — Metaphysician Undercover

I take post-consumption to imply a deification process, where theory becomes live and kicking, in the subject, from its reified static and external state.

Consider that theory is fed to the subject as an educational tool in the form of ideology, in the process of the subject's intellectual experience. Also, the subject might freely choose theory for consumption. But post-consumption, theory is within the subject, and is then a tool of that subject. The analogy is one of eating. Food is fed to a child, who then learns to choose one's own food. But in both of these cases, after consumption the food is then used by the subject who consumes. The difference is an external/internal difference, and the point you appear to be claiming is that there is a difference between the thing when it is external, and the thing after its been internalized. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes exactly this is what I am saying, the thing - theory in this case - is transformed after consumption. Before, it was something external, say a set of rules that one learns, and applies them to objects of experience so that to receive knowledge. After, it is in dialectic with experience, the one shaping the other. But I am sorry, I got a bit confused with your food example, isn't this what you are also saying?

Question for you Pussycat. Why do you need to make "theory" analogous with the diner, and "experience" analogous with the roast, so that you end up with the diner being devoured by the roast? Why not just make "theory" analogous with the roast, and "experience" analogous with the diner? Then you have experience devouring theory just like the diner devours the roast, without the absurdity which you propose. — Metaphysician Undercover

Cause Adorno was coerced into giving a standpoint, as you well know he was against standpoints. So I would imagine he would offer one as absurd as it gets, in order to mock those asking for it. Theory, in the passage I attempted to interpret, is not like the theory in the passage after. The first theory points to a traditional theory of knowledge, like Kant's, ahistorical, atemporal, totalizing and universal, the very kind Adorno opposes. And so he says, if theory of knowledge is one you want, it would be one that is devoured by experience, and that this experience will also devour the philosophical seasoned subjects supporting it, the diners. Its supposed to be sarcastic. This is how I see it, anyway.

"Experience" is proper to the subject right? "Theory" is a bit more complex though, because it may be ideology (objective), or it may be speculative (subjective). Notice above, that experience consumes theory. But in the next paragraph, post consumption, theory can also be used to resist ideology. — Metaphysician Undercover

Experience is proper to the subject, yes, but I think its also more broad than that, as to all the happenings in the world. For example, Auschwitz was an experience, no matter if we didnt experience it. And since Adorno's death in the late sixties, new experiences were added in the world: the moon landing experience, the sixties movement, the bringing down of the Berlin wall, the internet experience, now the AI experience etc. Have our philosophical theories been able to keep pace with technological progress? Because progress seems to be running pretty fast, and our heavy feet are a problem.

In the next paragraph, I think he's talking about critical theory, unlike the first one.

I don't think it's a matter of seeing that there is a right way and a wrong way of describing things. I think it's a matter of understanding the way that he describes things. if, in the end, it doesn't work for you, you cannot perceive what he is describing, then reject it. Is that what you are doing? — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course there is. Anyway, hear me out:

The scientific consensus would probably concede that even experience would imply theory.

Jamal was right to remember Kant, since he was the one that started with all these "conditions of possible experience", thereby formulating a theory consisting of stuff like forms of intuition, categories of understanding etc, a universal, objective and all-encompassing system. In his famous prolegomena (to any Future Metaphysic that can Present itself as a Science), for example, he writes:

The laws that govern our ways of knowing also govern the objects that we know, as long as these are considered as objects of experience and not as they are in themselves. There are two things we can say:
(1) A judgment of perception can’t count as valid for experience unless the mind in which it occurs conforms to the following law: When any event is observed to happen, it is connected with some earlier event that it follows according to a universal rule.
(2) Everything that we experience as happening must be caused to happen. — Kant

And so in this way, he was able to reject certain experiences (the ones that didn't fit in his schemata) as either invalid knowledge claims, unscientific, or otherwise meaningless, for all times, impervious to critique.

It is however a “standpoint”, at best hypothetical. Conciliatory representatives of scientivism demand what they call proper or clean science, which is supposed to account for these sorts of presuppositions.

But pejorative science - scientivism - demands theory, or a standpoint, should the accounts of one's experiences be taken seriously. If a critic does not choose a clear predefined standpoint - there sure are many to choose from - or doesn't supply a clear one of his own, then we'd better not listen to him, understandably.

Another interpretation is that conciliatory scientivism, ie some more charitable and less stringent scientists, would still allow a hypothetical standpoint, but only provided that there is a proper or clean science to back it up.

Exactly this demand is incompatible with intellectual experience.

Adorno says that intellectual experience cannot be coerced by theoretical frameworks. He could also have said that this demand stems from a bourgeois prejudice, as he's done elsewhere.

If a standpoint is demanded of the latter, then it would be that of the diner to the roast.

But if representatives of scientivism want a standpoint, he will indulge them and provide them with one: the diner to the roast. So he reluctantly gives them one, not one they were expecting, for sure. It is his way of ridiculing, both them, their compulsion, as well as epistemology - the theory of knowledge - in general, which takes itself as prior and superior to actual experience, with this waiting for theory to justify and validate it. Much like the roast that is waiting for the diner to come and call it a roast, like it would be nothing without the diner, the epistemological and proud philosopher. This nevertheless creates a false dichotomy between theory and experience, with no room for movement between them.

It lives by ingesting such; only when the latter disappears into the former, would there be philosophy.

But still, there's a twist in the story, with Adorno there always is, and even this sarcastic and ironic jab can be transformed: instead of the diner eating the roast, the roast eats the diner. Now I guess there is some confusion with the former and the latter, where the former actually maps to experience and the latter to theory, but in "the diner to the roast", the former is the presumptious philosopher with his theory of knowledge and the latter is experience. At least I was confused, which is why I said that "experience is consumed into theory". So it seems that I was half-right: the diner to the roast is the old-school wrong traditional epistemology, and the diner (theory) being devoured by the roast (experience) is the correct one. We can see this in what Adorno had been saying regarding Auschwitz, that after this dreadful experience, our theoretical philosophical frameworks no longer work, they have been, or at least should have been, discredited by what experience showed us, they were invalidated to the point of bankruptcy.

Until this point theory embodies that discipline in intellectual experience which already embarrassed Goethe in relation to Kant.

Question mark here, as I am completely ignorant of Goethe.

If experience relied solely on its dynamic and good fortune, there would be no stopping.

So after all this, we get the impression that Adorno crowns experience king. Alas no, yet another twist, as he is preparing for his dialectical moment which continues in the next paragraph.

I'm starting to believe that the "diner to the roast" is the wrong old school model. And that experience is consumed into theory, not the opposite.

Then identity thinking is the equality, justice = Justice: my subjective conception of Justice (justice) equals to Justice - the object (of conceptualization).
— Pussycat

This is not how I understand Adorno's reference to identity thinking. I understand that he is talking about an identity relation between concept and object. — Metaphysician Undercover

Im confused... How is this different from what I said??

Hold on, I was under the impression that "object" means anything that can be known or cognized, the philosopher's subject-matter, like justice, beauty, science, etc, basically everything that is not subject (ourselves).

For example, I want to know what justice is. I take it as object, camel case, then Justice. And then try to conceptualize it, using the concept of justice (lowercase). Then identity thinking is the equality, justice = Justice: my subjective conception of Justice (justice) equals to Justice - the object (of conceptualization).

I'm way off, you think?

Whether languages adapted so that to represent and match the dominating ideologies of the times.
— Pussycat

Such a relation would be reciprocal, over lengthy time. Ideology gets shaped by language as much as language gets shaped by ideology. In my reply to Jamal above, the use of profanity in language is described as a rejection of ideology. And, as the profundity of ideology is renounced in the manner described by Adorno, new ideology will fill the void, and this will be shaped by language. Some ideology will severely restrict language use, as was evident with Catholicism and The Inquisition. But ultimately such restriction of freedom induces rejection, then the new ideology which evolves is restricted by the limits of language. — Metaphysician Undercover

So a dialectic between ideology and language. I guess nowadays we have political correctness and woke culture, but it is not clear which is promoted by dominant ideology and which is resistance to it. Dialectics is surely complicated!

But regarding linguistic evolution, from what I read, there was a linguistic shift from subject-object-verb (SOV) towards subject-verb-object (SVO) order, that came together with the loss of inflection, ultimately strictly prioritizing the subject, both grammatically and conceptually. I don't think this to be a mere coincidence or accidental, but that it goes hand-in-hand with the ideology of domination, imperialism and colonization. It nevertheless reflects a cultural shift towards a human-centric perspective, as a way to dominate nature, which is not only grammatical, but also epistemological, ethical and metaphysical.

It is why I insisted previously on SVO and inflection, with the report on the differences between the german and the english languages. I think that this is in tune with Adorno's genealogy account and his evolutionary natural history, as far as a series of historically conditioned stories go, with language being the third in line. English, as the common language for the administered, bureaucratic and calculative world, lingua infranka.

It is the assumption that objects are identical to their concepts. I think the denial of this, is the only principle of negative dialectics, everything else follows and derives from it. And so, in principle, if I'm right of course, one should be able to construct and re-construct everything Adorno says. But what do you think?

Now, by saying that thinking is pleasure, one is not really equating thinking with pleasure, as it would be absurd to think that thinking equals pleasure, one is only saying that thinking produces pleasure, or that thinking partakes in pleasure, or else. So how does this fit into identity thinking? I think it is something of this sort:

The two concepts of thinking and pleasure are bound together, each in their own identity, and without any qualification, thereby producing a grossly positive and ambiguous statement. For what thinking are we talking about? And what kind of pleasure? What of the non-identical residue in both of those concepts? It seems to me that one may talk like that only for static and reified concepts, where we seem to know exactly what thinking and pleasure are, contrary to ND. But this is the least of the statement's problem.

For it implies that there are a great many pleasures in life, that these are ordered hierarchically, and that thinking would be on top. Isn't this system building and categorization, of which Adorno was against?

The statement is blatantly positive and affirmative, and wallows in aestheticized positivity, where is the negativity? It paints thinkers as comfortably sitting in their armchairs, pipe at hand, thinking, and having the time of their lives. "Let them do their thing", one would say, "they found true happiness amongst their thoughts". What started off as something that didn't sound at all right for me, it now turned to something else. The more I think of it, the more I think that Adorno would anathematize it. I guess its because I take him to have been a deeply troubled man, most possibly suffering from PTSD and/or survivor's guilt, like Auswitz never left him. And so I cant really imagine him partaking in any pleasure, lest for the sake of a possible future reconciliation.

As to whether Adorno would (not only) concur to thinking being one of the greatest pleasures of life, I very much doubt that he would: — Pussycat


Excuse me for butting in. That passage does not to me show what you think it shows. At most it shows he condemns thinking when it's a complacent or dominating pleasure. The “resistance of thinking against the merely existent” can be pleasurable, I would think. Why not? Adorno of course likely thought that good thinking was both pleasurable and painful. And since he speaks with such approval of play in philosophy, I reckon we can be confident that Redmond’s assessment is right.

Anyway, I think it jumps off the page. He’s enjoying himself. — Jamal

Wouldn't you think that equating thinking with pleasure, is identity-thinking?

What he describes with the bitmap analogy, is a difference. As I explained, that difference may enhance, or it may degrade the experience, in relation to the original. Further, it may enhance some aspects, and degrade others, and all sorts of different possibilities for "difference". In other words, the translator knows that there are good translations and bad, and might also even know that his translation is lacking in some areas, if he knew that he didn't adequately understand some areas. Therefore he is warning us to be wary of all translations, even his. — Metaphysician Undercover

I was thinking regarding the "false-color bitmap image of the planetary surface", whether it is one of ideology's ways to make us forget about the earthly problems, the ugliness, by presenting beautiful images from outer space.

As to whether Adorno would (not only) concur to thinking being one of the greatest pleasures of life, I very much doubt that he would:

If ideology encourages thought more than ever to wax in positivity, then it slyly registers the fact that precisely this would be contrary to thinking and that it requires the friendly word of advice from social authority, in order to accustom it to positivity.
...
While thinking does violence upon that which it exerts its syntheses, it follows at the same time a potential which waits in what it faces, and unconsciously obeys the idea of restituting to the pieces what it itself has done; in philosophy this unconsciousness becomes conscious. The hope of reconciliation is conjoined to irreconcilable thinking, because the resistance of thinking against the merely existent, the domineering freedom of the subject, also intends in the object what, through its preparation to the object, was lost to this latter.

This is one of Adorno's alternate way, one of many, of saying what he said before, namely to go beyond the concept by means of concept.

"The thought which may positively hypostasize nothing outside of the dialectical consummation overshoots the object with which it no longer has the illusion of being one with": this is exactly the negative dialectics claim, principle. Dialectical consummation, speculation, still happens, the thought overshoots, transcends the object, a form of critical transcendence, but thought is not under the illusion that it grasped the object. If hypostasization ever takes place, it would have to be within the dialectic, never outside of it, which is what Hegel did.

Since we are not reading the original, I take it you think my recent post about how Adorno performs the content of his philosophy in the form of his writing is completely misguided? — Jamal

What, you mean this?

It just occurred to me: Adorno's style is mimesis in action, showing in the form of his writing the real contradictions of the world. — Jamal

This can indeed be so in his other works, but in ND, his only metatheoretical work? Hm, it should be, if we consider that there is no higher language, and let ND be a language in and for itself. For if there were a higher language than ND through which ND is being presented, it would undermine it. If, on the other hand, ND is being exposed in a lesser language, that would insult it.

But I guess I would agree with Gillian Rose:

If Minima Moralia is written from 'the subjective standpoint', then Negative Dialectic is written from 'the objective standpoint'. The second of these books, although fragmentary like the first, constitutes the most direct statement of Adorno's ideas, free of irony. Minima Moralia is much less formal in its tone and often lyrical in style and relies greatly on 'indirect methods', especially ironic inversion.This indirect and more idiosyncratic way of presenting his ideas is what Adorno means by 'the subjective standpoint'. In Minima Moralia Adorno's use of ironic inversion is most explicit, while in other texts the inverted ways in which he presents his ideas about society are less obvious because the irony is less
obvious. Adorno, like many essayists and ironists, has thus been read far too literally, and this is partly because some of his texts are stylistically much more meticulous than others. — Gillian Rose - The Melancholy Science

I read the translator's notes, and they say nothing about what you are claiming. There is no mention of "style", and I do not see the issue with style which you are talking about. I can read Plato's dialogues, translated from ancient Greek, which is far more distant to English than German is, and with a decent translation, the style comes through quite well. Some of the meaning is lost though, often because of ambiguity. This is what is referred to in the translator's notes, when he describes how he translates specific words. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ancient greek and german share common structure and grammar, they are both SOV and inflected languages, unlike modern greek which is SVO, but managed to keep some of its inflection.

Redmond follows Benjamin's theory of translation:

Yet any translation that intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but communication-hence, something inessential. This is the hallmark of bad translations. But do we not generally regard that which lies beyond communication in a literary work-and even a poor translator will admit that this is its essential substance-as the unfathomable, the mysterious, the "poetic"? And is this not something that a translator can reproduce only if he is also-a poet? Such, actually, is the cause of another characteristic of inferior translation, which consequently we may define as the inaccurate transmission of an inessential content. — Benjamin - The Task of the Translator

Overall though, the aesthetic comes through, and this is what the translator means when he says: — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, quite a positive outlook on translation he has. Which is curious why subsequently he'd write:

Though I’ve done my best to render something of the subtlety, grace, tact and sheer power of Adorno’s original, bear in mind that what you’re reading is nothing but the false-color bitmap image, as it were, of the planetary surface of the original. — Redmond

Remastering, if it is done well, enhances the experience, it does not degrade it. So the difference between a good translation and a bad one, is the difference between enhancing and degrading the experience. This might be closely linked to how the style is presented by the translator, but there is nothing to indicate that a good translator cannot enhance the style. It takes knowledge of both languages, effort, and skill. — Metaphysician Undercover

But then, if the experience has been enhanced, why should we be wary of the false-color bitmap surface image?

And before that, he says:

Thinking, said Brecht, is one of the greatest pleasures of life, and on this score Adorno, who certainly had his share of disagreements with Central Europe’s greatest modernist playwright, would not only concur, but match Brecht’s own aesthetic praxis step for dialectical step by writing some of the most gorgeous theory ever written. — Redmond

There it is again, the positivity, "thinking is one of the greatest pleasures of life". Isn't this an ideological standpoint?

I really don't know what you are asking here. — Metaphysician Undercover

Whether languages adapted so that to represent and match the dominating ideologies of the times.

The point that I would have liked to make was that in the translated material, we can see its meaning, the semantics of it, but not its aesthetic, its style, which for Adorno is crucial. To make this point, I figured a comparison between the german and the english language would suffice, to show how much can be lost in translation between the two. There is a translator's note in the pdf, if you would like to read it. Now, regarding my haughty statement that german is a "highly dialectical language", compared to english which is less, you are right, I didn't explain it. However it wasn't me that baited the AI, it was rather the other way round. But tell me, do you think that languages are historically conditioned?

That would be nice indeed. However, I must note that there is an extra difficulty in doing so in english, for us non-german speakers, on top of everything else. I asked the ai to compare german to english with respect to flexibility:

========

German vs. English: Flexibility in Expression (Especially for Philosophy)

How grammatical structure shapes philosophical expression

INFLECTION & WORD ORDER

German:

• Inflection: ✅ Moderate: retains case endings (4 cases - nominative, accusative, dative, genitive), verb conjugations, adjective endings
• Word Order Flexibility: ✅ Relatively flexible: thanks to case endings, word order can vary for emphasis or poetic effect (inflection)
• Case System: ✅ Nominative, accusative, dative, genitive
• Verb position: ✅ Verb-second in main clauses; verb-final in subordinate clauses
• Gendered Nouns and Agreement: ✅ Strong gender system (masc/fem/neut) affects articles and adjectives
• Precision in Logical/Philosophical Phrasing: ✅ High: long compound structures, nested clauses, abstract nominal forms

English:

• Inflection: ❌ Minimal: relies mostly on word order and helper words
• Word Order Flexibility: ❌ Rigid SVO: changing word order usually alters or obscures meaning
• Case System: ⚠️ Only in pronouns (I/me, he/him); nouns rely on position
• Verb position: ❌ Verb typically fixed in second position (subject-verb-object)
• Gendered Nouns and Agreement: ❌ No gender in nouns, minimal agreement (he/she/it)
• Precision in Logical/Philosophical Phrasing: ✅ High, but tends toward analytic and linear structure

EXAMPLES OF WORD ORDER FLEXIBILITY

Case Endings Free Up Word Order

German marks grammatical roles using case, so it can move subjects, objects, and indirect objects around without losing clarity.

In German, all of the following mean “I give the man the book”:

• Ich gebe dem Mann das Buch
• Dem Mann gebe ich das Buch
• Das Buch gebe ich dem Mann

In English:

• "I give the man the book" – ✅standard
• "The book, I give the man" – awkard or poetic
• "To the man, I give the book" – ✅but stylistically elevated, rare

German allows word reordering for emphasis because grammatical roles are clear from case endings. English relies on strict position, changing the order tends to make the sentence sound poetic, archaic, or even confusing, because grammatical function depends on position, not form.

VERB POSITION (flexibility)

German has verb-second (V2) word order in main clauses, but verb-final in subordinate clauses:

German:
Ich denke, also bin ich.
..., weil ich denke.

English:
I think, therefore I am.
..., because I think.

German subordinate clauses allow the verb to appear at the end. English requires the verb to appear early. The ability to postpone the verb to the end of a dependent clause allows suspense, precision, or logical layering — which German philosophers like Kant and Hegel used extensively. English can't do this. Subordinate clauses still demand the verb early:

• "...because I think" ✅
• "...because I the truth through reason grasp" ❌

PHILOSOPHICAL WRITING STYLE

German favors recursive, meditative, and hierarchical thought structures:

• Used by Kant, Hegel, Heidegger
• Verbs at the end allow a thought to build slowly toward a conclusion
• Example (Kantian style):
  “The understanding, by means of the categories, the manifold of intuition into a unified representation brings.”

English prefers clear, sequential, analytic sentence structure:

• Used by Russell, Locke, Rawls
• Forces premature commitment to action/verb early in sentence
• Same sentence becomes:
  “The understanding brings the manifold of intuition into a unified representation by means of the categories.”

Both are accurate and communicate the same idea, but the German allows more suspense and emphasis on process (to build toward the final verb) — which is useful for complex or abstract reasoning.

SUMMARY:

German:
- Flexible word order due to case system
- Verbs often come at the end in dependent clauses
- Emphasis can be shifted through syntax
- Ideal for layered, dialectical, or meditative reasoning

English:
- Fixed word order, limited inflection
- Emphasis relies more on tone or word choice
- Ideal for analytic, step-by-step argumentation

Let me know if you'd like a version comparing German to Latin, Sanskrit, or Ancient Greek!

========

SVO/SOV and inflection, as the main problems I see. :rofl: And so it would seem that the project is severely hampered and severed from the outset. The translated material we are working with is mostly analytic and not dialectical, as it has been mediated through the english language. This poses an additional challenge, as english readers can't be helped by language, the dialectic is neither immanent nor immediate in it. But I guess this is the whole point, mediation, which even in a highly dialectical language such as german, cannot be avoided. As to our own style and presentation, tone or syntax tricks must be employed, at the peril of making one sound like Yoda. Yet another challenge we brought ourselves against, who wouldn't love a challenge anyway, what else is there?

"Exegesis" is the wrong word (sorry for the pedantry) but yes, he is giving a genealogical account of what it was that "drove the philosophical Spirit towards the system." Since he does this in terms of class analysis and ideology, the appropriate conception of the philosophical Spirit becomes "the bourgeois consciousness." — Jamal

Guess it was, funny, it sounded fitting at the time.

Nice angle. But how far we should take literally the claim that in the 17th century the philosophical Spirit qua bourgeois consciousness expanded its autonomy into the system and exercised its freedom in thought to produce the Monadology, Cartesianism, and Spinozist pantheism, because it feared it was not able to produce the freedom it had promised in the real world—whether that should be taken literally is another matter. — Jamal

Well, I don't know, but it seems plausible, at least. I will attempt to break it down.

In the history of philosophy the systems of the seventeenth century had an especially compensatory purpose.

The first thing that comes to mind when reading "compensatory purpose", is that of the rich guy that compensates for his minimalistic sexualia with a big car. But in the paragraph above, we also note:

According to Nietzsche's critique, the system documents only the narrow-mindedness of the educated, who compensated for their political powerlessness by means of the conceptual construction of an administrative right-of-domain, as it were, over the existent.

So, Nietzsche's view is that system builders are those wishing to compensate for their political inexistence with totalizing structures over existence, using philosophy to do so. Adorno disagrees, as if he defends philosophy's systematic need:

But the systematic need – that which prefers not to disport itself with the membra disiecta [Latin: dissected members] of knowledge, but achieves it absolutely, whose claim is already involuntarily raised in the conclusiveness of every specific judgement – was at times more than the pseudomorphosis of the Spirit into irresistibly successful mathematical, natural-scientific methods.

Adorno believes that the attempt to glue seemingly heterogeneous pieces together unto a unifying whole, is not always purely psychological (like Nietzsche believes), in that it is not driven by envy of the success of the other divisions of labour, mathematics, physics, politics etc. Spirit still pseudomorphises into evidently successful scientific theories, but there is also something else, something involuntary, compulsory even, amidst this move.

And then he goes on to explain that this other was fear: fear of chaos, and fear of the new ruling class being displaced, just like it did itself to the previous one, they would be the ones to know! So basically self-preservation, a defence mechanism, towards the "strengthening of the social order", by imbuing itself into the system it created.

I'd probably be interested in Baudrillard's criticism of genealogy but I don't understand it from what you've quoted or from the interview it's taken from. I did, however, nod along to the mention of "the mysterious point where he [Foucault] stops and finds nothing more to say."

His portrayal of Adorno and Benjamin as both dialectical and non-dialectical fits quite well with my understanding. It's his way of describing their anti-Hegelian kind of dialectics. Adorno himself says he is doing dialectics but without the progressive unfolding of reason in history. This negativity is what Baudrillard is talking about. — Jamal

What I've gathered from Baudrillard, a prima vista, is that he is over pessimistic over the current affairs. I think he means that genealogy, however valid it may be, has been sublated, appropriated by the dominant system. The same he thinks of dialectics, the one between subject and object, that it is no longer working, since both subject and object do not point to anything real, and we would be doing dialectics between fake images, resulting in the loss of dialectical critical power, and basically of critique in general. He believes that this lament over the loss of dialectics is evident, a presentiment, in Adorno's writings, giving rise to a profound melancholy through nostalgia, what was once great, or what could have been, but has since died. Needless to say, I don't like it, I don't like him at all!

But I was trying to find whether any subsequent thinker continued Adorno's work on negative dialectics, which led me to thinkers like Foucault and Baudrillard. I thought that they would represent the next generations of critical theory or the Frankfurt School, but it turns out I was wrong, the established view is that Jurgen Habernas is 2nd, and Axel Honneth 3rd, and they all have a teacher-student relationship. But it is true that a lot of people engaged, criticized, interpreted and were influenced by Adorno, however none of them actually followed in his steps, not even his so-called successors, his thinking wasn't explored by the next generations. Because who practiced negative dialectics, who did put emphasis on style and content as critique, who gestured towards the non-identical, who did all this, in all, who played the game? Nay, Adorno stands alone.

Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault all do this kind of thing (though not from the same political perspective), and we call it genealogy. I'm very partial to it, myself, — Jamal

Well, Jean Baudrillard criticized Foucauldian genealogy, in that it loses (or has lost) its critical power:

For a time I believed in Foucauldian genealogy, but the order of simulation is antinomical to genealogy. If you take this logic to the extreme, what you get is the reabsorption of all genealogy. That's why I believe Foucault was unable to make the leap. What interests me is the mysterious point where he stops and finds nothing more to say. — Baudrillard

But then again, the same he believes for Adorno's negative dialectics:

Benjamin is someone whom I admire deeply. In addition, there is a striking similarity between the tonalities of both periods- a very original combination, in Benjamin as well as Adorno, of a sort of dialectics with a presentiment of what is no longer dialectical: the system and its catastrophe. There is both dialectical nostalgia and something not at all dialectical, a profound melancholy. There is indeed a sort of testimony to the fatality of systems ... — Baudrillard

I make a note of all this not to criticize Adorno, but because you invoked Foucault and seemed sceptical about genealogy. Moreover, from what I read, Foucault is supposed to be 2nd generation critical theorist, and Baudrillard 3rd. I think it is interesting to see how critical theory has developed since the sixties, well, if one believes there has been continuation.

But to return to the matter in hand, at the end of the beginning paragraph of this section, Adorno writes:

In a historical phase where the systems, insofar as they take content seriously, have been relegated to the ominous realm of thought-poetry and have left only the pale outline of organizational schemata behind, it is difficult to really imagine what once drove the philosophical Spirit towards the system. — Adorno

Do you think that in the later passage that you quoted, Adorno is trying to provide an exegesis for exactly that?

how literally are we supposed to take it? — Jamal

Quite literally, I would say. If we take Adorno's "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, remains alive because the moment to realize it was missed", seriously, together with his demand that philosophy becomes conscious as to what it's been doing (to the non-conceptual), then I think we can safely conclude that all philosophies prior to negative dialectics were unconscious reactions to stimuli of their time.

There is another quote that you also might find of interest:

Dialectics is the consistent consciousness of non-identity. It is not related in advance to a standpoint. Thought is driven, out of its unavoidable insufficiency, its guilt for what it thinks, towards it.

It seems to me that what Adorno is saying here, is that guilt is an integral part of philosophy. That without guilt, there would be no philosophy. Or, if negative dialectics is the engine of philosophy, then that guilt would be its fuel. Then maybe guilt is the criterion that delineates a good philosophy from a bad one (at best), or from a completely aphilosophical one (at worst).