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).

The full quote is:

This may help to explain why portrayal [Darstellung] is not a matter of
indifference or external to philosophy, but immanent to its idea. Its
integral moment of expression, non-conceptually-mimetic, becomes
objectified only through portrayal – language. The freedom of
philosophy is nothing other than the capacity of giving voice to this
unfreedom. If the moment of expression tries to be anything more, it
degenerates into a point of view; were it to relinquish the moment of
expression and the obligation of portrayal, it would converge with
science.

From this we/I gather:
1) Philosophy is only mediated through language, language is its only portrayal. No images, gestures, music etc.
2) Philosophy is free as long as it pictures the unfreedom that the non-conceptual suffers under the concept, ie it portrays (its) suffering.
3) There are 2 dangers in this picturing:
a) If philosophy tries to do anything more, eg. justifying it, redeeming it, affirming it, renouncing it etc, then it degenerates into a point of view. It is an imperative from Adorno to let philosophy only be interested in the portrayal, and leave all other matters - consequences, implications, interpretations etc - open. As if it is not philosophy's job to settle the suffering, by direct approach, at least.
b) If philosophy abdicates from its role of giving voice to suffering, from its obligation, then it pseudo-morphises into science.

EDIT: I think for Adorno there are like two philosophies: philosophical science and philosophical philosophy. It seems to me that he is only interested in the latter.

Poor Jamal, I imagine him saying "I asked for a reading group, and all I got was a metaphysician and a smelly cat!" :grin:

I've been thinking for the last few days of an analogy of what Adorno is saying of dialectics, and its relation to physics, namely thermodynamics, the similarities seem to me more than metaphorical, but I can't get my head around it. So I figured I would post these thoughts to the community, as it would know best what to do with them.

So it is basically dynamics, between object-subject, much like thermodynamics, the cold object and the hot subject. Positive dialectics transfers power from the subject to the object, while negative dialectics is the reverse, energy transfer from the object to the subject, with philosophy being the discipline or activity that both describes and affects these two processes.

Also, Adorno seems to be saying that the whole system is isolated, in that no new energy may come from outside the system, ie no "Heraclitean essence", no metaphysics, no transcendence, no divine intervention, no aliens, there ain't no help, the cavalry stayed home: philosophy must work through contradictions within the system, not posit a naive outside, liberation doesn't come from without, it must be immanently worked through.

Objects and subjects, both compete for power, between each other and between them, but since this is an isolated system, it is a zero-sum game we are playing, energetically speaking. The object cannot grow unless it drains power from the subject, and vice-versa, it is the antagonistic whole.

The whole, Adorno says, is an illusion, it's not real. It is what he would want us to resist. It is what Hegel posited in his famous "The true is the whole". We do not discover ourselves in the whole, but we are negated and alienated by it, in a sense we discover ourselves in it, but by negation, because the whole is broken. The object, society, is not passive, it is a negating force that antagonizes us, that in thermodynamic terms burns us with contradictions. Object and subject feed off each other.

And then, there is the thing with entropy. Entropy is related to uncertainty, (dis)order and information loss. Positive hegelian dialectics induces an information loss to the non-conceptual, that much is clear. And so Adorno's negative dialectics, that wants to recover it, can be seen as negative entropy, or negentropy, "a measure of distance to normality".

The thing with entropy in a closed system, as we learn from physics, is that, if no work is done, then the system tends towards maximum entropy, uniformity and statis, ending in a heat-death, a form of unfreedom, where the particles are so distant and alienatied to each other, that no further energy can be produced, in Adornian terms, it is total domination, the "totally administered world". Differences, contradictions, non-identical elements are flattened or neutralized, everything is reduced to exchange value. Subjects are reduced to just cogs in the machine, the object, without meaningful agency, where even no dialectics is possible, no critique and critical theory, nihilism. The throne of Spirit is empty and without meaning, it died due to the maximization of entropy.

Entropy presents us with a paradox, not unlike the one that Adorno is professing: entropy is chaos and disorganization, our institutions - society, the object - prevent against that, by control, at the cost of life and difference, by reducing everything to exchange value, input and output. This very effort reduces entropy, by alienation, which increases entropy in the individual, which then reflects on society, and thus entropy is globally increased. And so philosophy, according to Adorno, I think it has to do with solving this paradox.

Finally, I am thinking of cybernetics, something new and relatively unknown in Adorno's times, with its feedback loops and its rationality for control, but I cannot say, I am new to it.

Well, on reflection, maybe not, since negative theology attempts at something positive. For example, when they say "god is not unjust", it is evident that they mean that "god is just", and so they are playing around with the law of contradiction. Does Adorno warn against this misuse of negative dialectics? But maybe I misunderstand negative theology. But also maybe, these folks somehow understood the violence done to the concept of god via positivity, and so decided to refrain from it, perhaps immaturely.

Seems like negative/apophatic theology, but without the divine and metaphysical connotations.

I don't think we are doing anything but. :joke:

Nice! I put a spell on you! :) I think I read somewhere in the lectures that Adorno was saying something like detachment while still being attached, or something like that, but I can't seem to find it right now.

I am clueless to what it is you are saying. Nevertheless, how does all this follow from the text? I am not saying you are wrong, but maybe you are getting ahead of yourself, like I did with Jamal the other day, and unwittingly confused him.

I think the “this” is either the ludicrousness of philosophy’s confusion of the scholastic with the world-concept, or the retrogression itself (retrogression of philosophy to the scholastic or narrowly scientific).

So Hegel knew this as a mere moment of reality, an activity among others. And he knew it “in spite of the teaching of the absolute Spirit to which he assigned philosophy”.

Adorno is saying that Hegel, though officially claiming that philosophy is the culmination of absolute Spirit, representing total knowledge, actually knew that philosophy was a finite, socially situated activity. I’m not sure how he thereby restricted philosophy, though: just by knowing this about it? Or evidenced in the philosophy? — Jamal

So I guess we agree that, on Adorno's view, Hegel saw philosophy as an activity among others and thereby restricted it. How? I don't know either, I guess we have to take Adorno's word for it, that he wasn't trying to inflate philosophy as to dominate over the other divisions, but to help them emancipate - society, people as well. The fact that he ascribed absolute Spirit to philosophy, doesn't mean that he himself knew everything, but that his method could eventually lead to total knowledge, theoretically. Practically of course, this may never have happened. Hegel believed that his method of (positive) dialectics was the sign of truth, the process through which all divisions of labour, if they would only adopt it, could lead them to all positive things, like knowledge, freedom, happiness etc. Also of note is the fact that Hegel's system is closed, in that, in theory at least, total knowledge is possible, irrespective of the fact that humanity could never attain it, due to its inherent limitations or whatever other reasons. But both socially and historically, philosophy, in Hegel's time, Hegel might have said that it was at its very beginning, after his great discovery of how nature works, in dialectical terms. Hegel even tried to apply his method in science, like mathematics or physics. An interpretation of quantum mechanics, Bohmian mechanics named after physicist David Bohm, who was inspired by Hegel (he carried the Encyclopedia wherever he went), is based on his philosophy.

In the previous paragraph, it’s not just that the attempt to use outdated concepts seems futile, but that it seems futile to those who attempt it. So the line we’re discussing now refers back, implying Hegel knows that philosophy is somewhat futile, or at least is more restricted than he claims outwardly. — Jamal

Here I have to disagree, I know of a few stalinists that certainly don't think that their attempt is futile! :) And also I doubt that Hegel thought that philosophy was futile, quite the opposite. As to the restriction, I think I clarified it above.

This would be more interesting if Adorno explained how this shows itself in Hegel’s philosophy. There is a clue in lecture 9, where he says that in the Logic Hegel writes…

that philosophy is itself merely one element in the actual life of mankind and should therefore not be turned into an absolute.


Unfortunately, the note says that this statement has not been found in the Logic or anywhere else. However, we could assume that Adorno has not just dreamt up this view of Hegel’s, that it might actually be found in his work, though perhaps not stated so clearly as Adorno remembers. I’m not enough of a Hegelian to know. — Jamal

This would be a nice thing to know, or a way of doing critique to Adorno himself, as he would have wanted it, but I don't think that it would benefit us at the present time.

To be clear, I am trying to interpret Adorno. So I think he is saying that philosophy is just another human activity, like politics, science, sociology etc., and that Hegel knew this, and restricted it to just that: to an activity, on the same level as all other activities, the divisions of labor. But then something happened, and philosophy forgot its own restriction, and imposed itself onto the other activities, by means of domination, a power move. So as long as it doesn't recognize this move, doesn't let go of its pretentious dominance over totality, it will never find its immanent truth, which is side-to-side to its brothers and sisters, and not over them.

I am thinking it in terms of separation of powers, much like in the political sense, where each are left to grow on their own terms, with philosophy not intervening, but criticizing and keeping them in check, like journalism for example. Things changed when philosophy forgot this, as being purely critical, and subsumed their role and identity, interwining with them. With "instead of
recognizing how very much its immanent truth depends on such, down to its innermost composition", I believe that Adorno is saying that philosophy, as critical theory, depends on the various "divisions of labours", because without them it would have nothing to be critical of, and by forgeting its limit, it monopolized their content matter.

It had me thinking, if Adorno believes that conceptual thinking is some degrees away from understanding, then how many degrees further would he say is thinking in outdated concepts?

But I think you missed a part:

Hegel knew this, in spite of the teaching of the absolute Spirit to which he assigned philosophy, as a mere moment of reality, as an activity in the division of labor, and thereby restricted it. Since then, its own narrowness and discrepancy to reality has emerged out of this, and all the more so, the more thoroughly it forgot this delimitation and expunged it from itself as something alien, in order to justify its own position in a totality which it monopolizes as its object, instead of recognizing how very much its immanent truth depends on such, down to its innermost composition.

Its where he discusses the scholastic and world-concept of philosophy. I am not quite sure what he meant by "Hegel knew this", what did Adorno believe that Hegel knew? Was it the ludicrousness of philosophy confusing the scholastic with the world-concept? Is Adorno advocating the former or the latter? Or neither? What do you think?