Praxis, delayed for the foreseeable future, is no longer the court of appeals against self-satisfied speculation, but for the most part the pretext under which executives strangulate that critical thought as idle which a transforming praxis most needs.

Obviously, the target here is Marxism, but it's interesting here to considered Adorno's differences with Hegel and how they might spring from early understandings of "praxis" in terms of philosophical/contemplative exercises and "philosophy as a way of life." At least, if we take more theological treatments of Hegel, or Magee's "Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition" (to be fair, we should take that one with a grain of salt, but it's interesting) seriously, this could be one of the contributing factors in the dominance of necessity and identity (through the "true infinite").

There is an interesting "sociology of philosophy" question of how praxis across epochs affects an understanding of the "intelligible" and "identity," including Adorno's particular view of philosophical experience pace the German idealists.

I am a big fan of a later of the Frankfurt's thinkers, Axel Honneth, so I will try to follow along. I also share Adorno's dismay for the tendency in Hegel to wash out particularly and for his thought to serve as an apologia for everything in "providential history," although I'm more amenable to "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual" of "properly understood."I am not sure if critiques on this front are always fair to the best parts of Hegel, but they certainly seem to be fair critiques of parts he included in his texts—his worse inclinations perhaps (sort of akin the charge of Spinozist pantheism, which he always vehemently denied, but which there is plenty of evidence for).

Hegel, on of Adorno's big sources, is very much an Aristotlian in key ways, and I think it's worth noting that Adorno's focus on non-identity really does seem to make him a "materialist" in the Aristotlian sense, since it is matter which is the principle of unintelligibility and potency in things (although he cannot embrace the Aristotlian idea of matter as essentially nothing [what sheer being reveals itself to be in the Logic!] at the limit—in some ways then non-identity might retain more of the Kantian noumenal).

I am hoping Adorno might help me with a critique of Hegel. I have begun to suspect that, because he starts without the true (good) infinite already actual it not only fails to actually be a true infinite, but radically destabilizes his whole outlook, opening it up to this sort of critique. This aspect of Hegel is essentially an inversion of the past philosophy he borrows from. There, the "emanations" of the Absolute are "lower" and "after," and I think the inversion might be broken and also leads towards the totalitarian providential aspects Adorno is famous for critiquing.

BTW, is Marjorie Taylor Green right and they force fifth graders to read this!?!?

I have begun to suspect that, because he starts without the true (good) infinite already actual it not only fails to actually be a true infinite, but radically destabilizes his whole outlook — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you think of actuality as the infinite's Other, then it's an outpouring down into actuality, and then a return journey to the infinite.

Yes, that's a very good point. I think that's something like what Robert Wallace would say of his version of Hegel.

:up: It would fit with Aristotle's finitism.

In the opening lines of the prologue, we're told that we've inherited a tradition that says dialectics leads to something positive. An example would be this:

A: masculinity
not-A: femininity
synthesis: gender

You can see how masculinity gets its meaning (ultimately) as the negation of femininity, and vice versa. They're two parts of a whole. For instance, imagine you're on a spaceship with all men. They have a device they use to create people and they've been travelling for millennia, so there's no femininity in their world at all. What does "masculinity" mean to them? Since there's nothing to compare it to, it doesn't mean anything. All they have is humanity, even though from our point of view, they're male.

So it's not just the positive traits of a thing, such as masculinity, that lend it meaning. It's also the presence of its opposite. This would appear to be pervasively true: that rationality depends on oppositions. Ultimately, you are the negation of everything that's not you. This insight goes back to Plato, and is present in the cyclical argument in Phaedo.

For Hegel, Gender is the concept. It's made up of an opposition: male and female. But we can also see dialectic as a kind of journey. For instance:

A. Everything is united
B. Everything is discrete

This is an ancient opposition that played out in Greek philosophy. The tradition Adorno mentioned suggests to us that this opposition has to be resolved in a synthesis, and in fact, that synthesis is part of the mystical domain Hegel was introduced to by Franz von Baader.

Adorno suggests that the teleology present here blew up during the Enlightenment. We're going to have a better world by way of reason. This is particularly interesting to me, because there are fairly recent writers who have rejected this teleology, but not because of the Holocaust.

If anyone would want to correct my way of understanding the prolog, please do.

Based on SEP, something like Hegelian dialectic, or just that, appears to be Adorno's target.

I am not sure if Adorno is saying teleology failed in enlightenment. I am speculating, but perhaps he may argue that the "teleology" (or point of arrival) of Enlightenment is self-destruction (have you ever spent a really long time thinking about something, it's exhausting). Maybe telos' relation to enlightenment is discussed in DoE.

Yeah, I think he wants to maintain the negatives that appear to result in synthesis as "determinate" or unqualified or unsynthesized, rather than saying that those negatives are committed to any kind of teleological function. In fact, a telos to negatives would mean the sort of positive affirmation that Adorno wishes to deny, or "negate."

I am equating telos with synthesis, but I guess they could be disparate concepts.

Why those negatives constitute a dialectic is not clear, but maybe that's the point, the recognition of negatives in their negativity is to negate the dialectic itself.

Based on SEP, something like Hegelian dialectic, or just that, appears to be Adorno's target. — NotAristotle

I also turned to the SEP after a while. It looks like he's going to take a deep dive into German Idealism.

We start with the Lectures on Negative Dialectics (LND), which is based on recordings of Adorno's lectures in 1965-66, just after he'd completed the six-year task of writing the book. The lectures took place at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Unfortunately it looks like there were no extant recordings or transcripts for lectures 11 to 25, so we only have some notes for those. Even so, I think the first ten work as a nice introduction to ND, not least because they're much less condensed and difficult than his formal writings.


Geist

First, a reminder at the outset (largely for me) to keep in mind the translator's note. When the translation has "spiritual," the word Adorno is using is geistig, in the same way as used by Hegel.

The fact is that the term Geist falls somewhere between the available English words — spirit, mind, intellect — with all of which it also overlaps.

Editor's foreword

Most of the foreword is written from the standpoint of a familiarity with Adorno's theoretical philosophy and is therefore not very useful to us at this point. It focuses on three things:

1. Negative dialectics as advocating and exemplifying subjective philosophical/intellectual/spiritual experience, as opposed to (or as well as) a methodology

2. The attempt, with negative dialectics, to give "fair treatment" to the sphere of the non-conceptual, that in the world which exceeds our concepts, which Adorno believes is the proper concern of philosophy.

3. The method of constellations, designed to get around a huge problem produced by (2) above, namely that in giving fair treatment to the sphere of the non-conceptual, philosophy has no choice but to operate with concepts.

These will make more sense down the line, so I won't dwell on them now.


LND, Lecture 1

Adorno opens the lecture with a tribute to the recently deceased Christian philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, revealing that Tillich had effectively saved Adorno's life by approving his Habilitation thesis in 1931, which allowed him to get a job at Oxford and thereby secure an exit visa to leave Germany in 1934, before the Nazis closed in. For us, this is not particularly relevant to negative dialectics, but it's much more than a mere personal tidbit, since it supplies some crucial biographical context for the development of his thinking, particularly the thinking that led to Dialectic of Enlightenment.

He begins the lecture proper by saying that due to time constraints he has decided to use his book, Negative Dialectics, as the material for the lectures, rather than create a course with its own dedicated material consisting of the results of his research. In the guise of a preliminary pedagogical remark, this is a clever way of introducing negative dialectics, making the case for a certain kind of philosophical practice:

I am very aware that objections may be raised to this procedure, in particular those of a positivist cast of mind will be quick to argue that as a university teacher my duty is to produce nothing but completed, cogent and watertight results. I shall not pretend to make a virtue of necessity, but I do believe that this view does not properly fit our understanding of the nature of philosophy; that philosophy is thought in a perpetual state of motion; and that, as Hegel, the great founder of dialectics, has pointed out, in philosophy the process is as important as the result; that, as he asserts in the famous passage in the Phenomenology, process and result are actually one and the same thing. — p.4

The students are urged not to expect finished results, but rather, I would say, to share in that intellectual experience which is both the method and the content of his philosophy.

(Incidentally, Adorno in these lectures often addresses himself to the "positivists" in his audience, and seems to make reference to their various non-philosophical specialisms. This leads me to believe that the lectures were attended by, I'm guessing, postgraduate sociologists and psychologists, rather than just or even primarily philosophy students.)

He states the plan for the lecture course:

I should like to introduce you to the concept of negative dialectics as such. I should like then to move on to negative dialectics in the light of certain critical considerations drawn from the present state of philosophy. — p.5

This brings him to considerations of justification by methodology, anticipating a question in the minds of his listeners and readers: "how does he actually arrive at this?" Related to the distinction of process vs. result, Adorno expresses here a scepticism about the familiar distinction of method vs. content:

I maintain that so-called methodological questions are themselves dependent upon questions of content. — p.5

We might come back to this issue as we go through the lectures, but in a nutshell, Adorno criticizes philosophical method "in the precise sense," e.g., that of Descartes in his Discourse on the Method, as an attempt to force the world into a pre-established, abstract conceptual schema. As ready-made methodology applied to the matter at hand, it sees what it expects to see, because in its original formation it has been (a) abstracted too much from the real world and (b) ossified by its formalization. Not only that, but it elevates the rational subject, the philosopher, to the status of an arbitrating, neutral overseer. In contrast, dialectical thought emphasizes the entwinement of method and content, and of subject and object, thus of the philosopher and the world (hence the need, incidentally, for what is known in critical theory as immanent critique, critique as an inside job).

Moving on, next we get a simple definition: negative dialectics...

sets out to be a dialectics not of identity but of non-identity. — p.6

I am not well-versed in Hegel, so I feel like making some small effort to answer the general question, what is dialectics, before looking at Adorno's explanation, and before looking at his own kind of dialectics and thus the question, what is non-identity?


What is dialectics?

Adorno warns us against the popular triadic formulation of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which came from Fichte and which Hegel did not embrace wholeheartedly ("we sometimes see this form used in a way that degrades it to a lifeless schema" — Phenomenology of Spirit, §50). This warning is not only for the reason that the formulation is not very Hegelian, but also because to the extent that it is Hegelian, it emphasizes (I think) exactly the thing about Hegel that Adorno doesn't like: the neat wrapping up of contradictions in a positive synthesis (in negative dialectics, synthesis is downgraded).

And because I'm not familiar with it, I'm also going to avoid the formulation that Hegel does use, in the Encyclopedia Logic, i.e., abstract-dialectical-speculative. Hegelians reading this are welcome to go into that.

So, here goes. Dialectics is a way of thinking that actively traces the contradictions and movements within concepts and things, and avoids freezing them into definitions and treating things as fixed and complete. Dialectics is the way of thinking that recognizes — or put differently, the dialectic is — the process characterized by the instability of concepts and objects, in which concepts and objects are not graspable in their finality but are transformed through an inner, or immanent, mediation between their contradictory aspects.

An example, from the materialist end of the Hegelian spectrum, is capitalism. Dialectical thinking helps us see that capitalism is not a fixed, natural, eternal state of affairs, but is a moment (meaning a phase or a part) of a dialectical process, a dynamic phase in something ongoing.

And generating the dynamism of this process are contradictions. A couple of examples: the drive for profit has created the unprecedented means to meet human needs on a massive scale, but precisely that drive prevents production from being directed to satisfying those human needs; the freedom of the market, i.e., freedom of choice and the freedom to trade, is based on compulsion: most people have no choice but to sell their labour to survive.

Note the way that this account emphasizes mutual and immanent dependency: it is not that capitalism has created the means to meet human needs on a massive scale despite the profit motive; and it is not that the market is a domain of freedom despite compulsion.

It might be objected that dialectical thinking is not in fact required for all this. You don't have to be a dialectician to be an economic historian who understands the historical nature of capitalism, or to believe that society evolves. But it's notable that the historical nature of socioeconomic structures was not much appreciated prior to Hegel and Marx — or when it was, it was viewed in Enlightenment fashion as simple linear Progress. And this indicates the lasting value of dialectics: it's only dialectical thinking which is always on the alert, always sensitive to the existence, in the here and now, of tensions and potentials that can go unrecognized.

EDIT (I somehow lost this bit when I first posted it):

It follows that there are conventionally acceptable frozen concepts in use right now which dialectical thinking could usefully call into doubt. An example that springs to mind is consciousness. In a lot of philosophy, from the early moderns right up to present day analytic philosophy, consciousness is treated as a fixed property of individuals — perhaps with a locus in the brain — whereas if we take a dialectical approach we might think of it as socially embedded, as substantially a feature or product of the mediation between self and other instead of a product of the brain.

I won't elaborate on that any further, since what I'm trying to show right now is just that dialectical thought might still be useful, and might even remain the best way of thinking philosophically — and that it's not just an obsolete step in knowledge's forward march.


Why must everything be a matter of contradictions?

Another objection, which Adorno actually addresses on page 7 and 8, is that these tensions, conflicts, and discrepancies are not really contradictions, that calling them contradictions is at best metaphorical, and at worst the artifact of a fault in one's conceptual scheme, one's logic, or one's choice of language — and finally, that they can be dissolved just by framing things differently. Adorno is strongly motivated to convey to the audience that dialectics is definitely not merely figurative, suggestive, faulty, illogical, or a bewitchment of language, but really means what it says, logically and rigorously.

On page 7 he illustrates the meaning of contradiction in the concept using the example of freedom. The predicative statement "A is B" functions as an identity statement, A = B [what, generally?]:

Freedom = Self-determination as ensured by the constitution

But the concept of self-determination as defined in such a constitution doesn't capture everything that freedom is:

the concept of freedom contains a pointer to something that goes well beyond those specific freedoms, without our necessarily realizing what this additional element amounts to. — p.7

He doesn't say what this something is, but we can guess: a life unmarked by coercion and compulsion in general, the ability to experience love and pleasure and beauty every day, the chance to exercise one's creativity and thereby to flourish. These are not covered by legal self-determination, thus the A = B identity statement is false, and in fact A ≠ B, thus we arrive at a contradiction in the concept of freedom.

What matters is that traditionally in logic one strives to get rid of contradictions, but in dialectics one faces up to them. It can't be denied that contradictions can be ironed out, but do we really want to do that? Dialectics says no, definitely not.

That Adorno quotation there also makes me think of Wittgenstein's family resemblances and the idea of open concepts. I don't know if it's worth going into that.

Anyway, what do you think? Is it the case that Hegel and Adorno are saying, generally, that a predicative judgment is actually an identity statement in disguise? I doubt this, since it seems to me obviously false and certainly controversial, but the way Adorno lays it out makes it look like the relevant concept of contradiction depends on this claim.


Part and whole

Another way of framing dialectics is in reference to the interdependence of the part and the whole (or particular and universal), which is an important (or the only?) site of contradiction, where the object is in tension with the concept. Dialectical thinking seeks to view the phenomenon as a manifestation of something larger, and thus seeks to go beyond the phenomenon to an expansive concept or system of concepts — but without leaving the phenomenon behind. To be known, the phenomenon cannot be apprehended alone (a dead specimen) and equally cannot be seen as a mere manifestation of something higher, as if all that mattered was this subsumption — but must also be seen anew in its double aspect as a manifestation and at the same time as living and active individual, living and active through its very participation in the whole.


The twofold structure of contradiction

Adorno says that the concept of contradiction has a twofold meaning:

1. The contradictory nature of the concept and the resulting contradiction between the concept and the thing to which it refers.

2. The contradictory nature of the thing itself — for Adorno's purposes, antagonistic society.

This brings him to the question: why does this "disharmony" exist? He gives a striking answer:

To put it in a nutshell, in both cases we are dealing with the principle of mastery, the mastery of nature, which spreads its influence, which continues in the mastery of men by other men and which finds its mental reflex in the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is introduced to it or that it encounters into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of influence. — p.9

This is probably now straying away from dialectics as such and towards specifically negative dialectics. Anyway, I'll end it here, and maybe in another post I'll take a stab, without straying beyond the first lecture, at that second question, specific to Adorno's philosophy of negative dialectics: what is non-identity?

Meanwhile, feel free to post about lecture 1 or about what I've said so far. But I'm in no rush.

@Count Timothy von Icarus, @frank: Welcome aboard. It'll be a while before we get to ND itself so I'll hold off commenting on the prologue and introduction.

Dialectics is a way of thinking that actively traces the contradictions and movements within concepts and things, and avoids freezing them into definitions and treating things as fixed and complete. — Jamal

@Joshs can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think by concept, we mean an overarching category. So we have the idea expressed by the word up. But this idea is not yet a concept. The concept is vertical direction, made up of the opposition between up and down. What makes vertical direction a concept is that its parts have no meaning except relative to one another. Ultimately, up is the direction that is not down, and vice versa.

With a lot of logic, we just follow along with intellectual necessity. Dialectic is not like this. It's a little startling to grasp that all the things you think of as having some kind of... positiveness, concreteness, weight, substance.. it's hard to pick the word that describes it. But it's that you always thought a word like masculinity gets its meaning from the things that are unique to masculinity. This would be a positive definition. When you see that it's actually one face of a two-sided coin, that it can't exist independently of that coin, it's like you've fallen into an idealist world. In other words, understanding dialectics should be accompanied by an "Oh shit!"

I won't elaborate on that any further, since what I'm trying to show right now is just that dialectical thought might still be useful, and might even remain the best way of thinking philosophically — and that it's not just an obsolete step in knowledge's forward march. — Jamal

If it's the best way of thinking philosophically, then it's true philosophy, and will never be obsolete so long as there are human beings.

I'll do what I can to keep up with the reading, but that's a lot of material. So I'm happy that you're in no rush.

I think I concur with your gist, but...

When you see that it's actually one face of a two-sided coin, that it can't exist independently of that coin, it's like you've fallen into an idealist world. In other words, understanding dialectics should be accompanied by an "Oh shit!" — frank

Marx, Adorno, Zizek, Malabou, Pippin and Brandom seem to have been able to go through that "oh shit!" moment without falling into idealism. We can ditch that, don't you think?

(Unless you just mean, not that you become an idealist, but that you fall into the world of Hegel and the German idealists)

If it's the best way of thinking philosophically, then it's true philosophy, and will never be obsolete so long as there are human beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

But it's not obvious to me that so long as there are human beings, there will be true philosophy. But even if it does follow, maybe what matters more is whether such thinking prevails.

I'll do what I can to keep up with the reading, but that's a lot of material. So I'm happy that you're in no rush. — Metaphysician Undercover

Great :smile:

I'd be interested to see others' thoughts on the objection that Adorno attempts to respond to: Why must everything be a matter of contradictions? In my example of market freedom quoted below — the market is a domain of freedom and the market is a domain of coercion — the contradiction can be dissolved by a re-framing that contains qualifications, and in a Left-wing manner too:

The market is a domain of freedom for these people and a domain of coercion for those people. No contradiction.

(Like, a zoo is not necessarily contradictory just because it allows people to walk in and out of its territory at will but doesn't allow the penguins to do the same)

I'll attempt my own answer. What has often mattered for Marxian dialectical thinkers (I'd hope there are non-Marxian examples too) is the critique of ideology, i.e., of the set of ideas that dominate in society. Like liberalism. Liberalism, roughly speaking, maintains that the market just is a domain of freedom simpliciter, since legally it is equally free to anyone, and how you make use of that freedom to secure your income is up to you, and wage-work is a contractual arrangement made between two free and equal parties, everyone is equal before the law, and so on. Liberalism has to do this because, roughly speaking, it denies that liberal-democratic capitalist society is essentially class-based or structured according to the relations of production.

So what's happening here is that you refuse to allow the contradiction to be dissolved because you are taking the liberals at their word to expose their contradictory ideology. However, I guess this suggests that the contradiciton is only in the ideas, not in capitalist reality itself, and it occurs to me that this is an old debate in Marxism that I wouldn't want to get bogged down in — though I would like to see what people think about the status of contradictions. It's important for the reading because Adorno maintains that the contradicitons are indeed in reality, not only in concepts.

A couple of examples: the drive for profit has created the unprecedented means to meet human needs on a massive scale, but precisely that drive prevents production from being directed to satisfying those human needs; the freedom of the market, i.e., freedom of choice and the freedom to trade, is based on compulsion: most people have no choice but to sell their labour to survive.

Note the way that this account emphasizes mutual and immanent dependency: it is not that capitalism has created the means to meet human needs on a massive scale despite the profit motive; and it is not that the market is a domain of freedom despite compulsion. — Jamal

Marx, Adorno, Zizek, Malabou, Pippin and Brandom seem to have been able to go through that "oh shit!" moment without falling into idealism. We can ditch that, don't you think? — Jamal

Yes. But when Adorno talks about materiality, he's talking about the unintelligible or the unidentified. He's not talking about rocks.

I think I see what you mean. Adorno doesn’t like idealism because it’s too arrogant, presuming an identity between subject and object, not because he denies a subject-object intertwinement (which, however, is non-totalizing).

Adorno doesn’t like idealism because it’s too arrogant, presuming an identity between subject and object, not because he denies a subject-object intertwinement (which, however, is non-totalizing). — Jamal

I agree. The path that led me to that feeling of being in a world of ideas would have eventually shown me that I don't have it all figured out (as Hegel seemed to). I just needed to follow it further.

In a way, materialism is about being open to what I don't know yet, don't grasp yet. It's about allowing the process of understanding to be forever open ended.

That’s suitably dialectical, and agreeable.

As for the lectures, copies of LND are widely available, but let me know if you have trouble locating one. — Jamal

I've been searching, but haven't found anything free online yet, and it's an expensive book.

Why must everything be a matter of contradictions? — Jamal

From what I've read in a free sampling of LND, his idea of "contradiction" is not really conventional. It seems more like difference, or contradicting in the sense that not-same negates sameness.

It is that the concept of contradiction will play a central role here, more
particularly, the contradiction in things themselves, contradiction in
the concept, not contradiction between concepts. At the same time –
and I am sure that you will not fail to see that this is in a certain
sense the transposition or development of a Hegelian motif – the
concept of contradiction has a twofold meaning. On the one hand,
as I have already intimated, we shall be concerned with the contradictory
nature of the concept. What this means is that the concept enters
into contradiction with the thing to which it refers.

So he goes on to explain this difference between concept, as a sort of whole (perhaps a type), and the individuals or particulars which are named by the concept. There is a specified sameness which each particular has, which forms the concept, by abstraction, and since the concept does not include every aspect of each individual, it is in that sense less than the individual. However, at the same time, the concept mysteriously has something more than that abstracted value, which extends beyond that entire set of individuals, and this is what provides it with the potential to be applied indefinitely. I believe that his is the basis of that "contradictory nature of the concept". It is at the same time less than each individual thing, but also more than all the individual things.

When a B is defined as an A, it is always also different from and more than the A, the
concept under which it is subsumed by way of a predicative judge
ment. On the other hand, however, in a sense every concept is at the
same time more than the characteristics that are subsumed under it.

Here is another important aspect of his outlook:

I shall not pretend to make a virtue of necessity, but I do believe that this view
does not properly fit our understanding of the nature of philosophy;
that philosophy is thought in a perpetual state of motion; and
that, as Hegel, the great founder of dialectics, has pointed out, in
philosophy the process is as important as the result; that, as he asserts
in the famous passage in the Phenomenology, process and result are
actually one and the same thing.

...

...I do not recognize the usual distinction between method and content...

I believe that it is important to note this position, because it denies the assumed separation between the means and the end. In one sense, the appearance that teleology is avoided can be created this way, by saying all is process, and there is no desire for conclusion. However, it's just an appearance, as the end is now the means, so priority is placed on perfecting the method. In this way, it may be possible to come as close as possible to avoiding prejudice, by having no preconceived goal to influence the direction of the process.

It's interesting that he positions Hegel as the founder of dialectics rather than Plato. It appears to me, like what Adorno is offering is a dialectics more closely related to Plato's than Hegel's. He dismisses "synthesis" completely, and focuses on a deconstruction of the concept. It may be characterized as deconstructionist. This is very similar to the Platonic dialectical method. Plato took varying definitions of the same term to break down the assumed concept, and expose contradiction within the supposed "concept", demonstrating its weaknesses. it is a skeptical method.

Thank you for your effort and commitment to advancing Adorno’s philosophical project. While my familiarity with his works is still limited, I greatly appreciate his influential anti-fascist and anti-oppressive positions.

Dialectics is a way of thinking that actively traces the contradictions and movements within concepts and things, and avoids freezing them into definitions and treating things as fixed and complete. Dialectics is the way of thinking that recognizes — or put differently, the dialectic is — the process characterized by the instability of concepts and objects, in which concepts and objects are not graspable in their finality but are transformed through an inner, or immanent, mediation between their contradictory aspects. — Jamal

I'd be interested to see others' thoughts on the objection that Adorno attempts to respond to: Why must everything be a matter of contradictions? In my example of market freedom quoted below — the market is a domain of freedom and the market is a domain of coercion — the contradiction can be dissolved by a re-framing that contains qualifications, and in a Left-wing manner too:
The market is a domain of freedom for these people and a domain of coercion for those people. No contradiction. — Jamal

It would be benefitial to explore how the thorough method of employing contradictions aligns with the focus on non-identity. Your definition of negative dialectics emphasizes a process of mediation between contradictory aspects. As a result, the opposites should dissolve their identity through a different form of difference that both preserves their appearance and displaces them. But what can prevent here the emergence of another form of identity? For Žižek, the Marxist method of maintaining oppositions has come to represent a form of ideological presumption. “The 'progressive' tradition also bears witness to numerous attempts to conceive (sexual, class) antagonism as the coexistence of two opposed positive entities: from a certain kind of 'dogmatic' Marxism that posits 'their' bourgeois science and 'our' proletarian science side by side, to a certain kind of feminism that posits masculine discourse and
feminine discourse or 'writing' side by side. Far from being 'too extreme', these attempts are, on the contrary, not extreme enough: they presuppose as their position of enunciation a third neutral medium within which the two poles coexist; that is to say, they back down on the consequences of the fact that there is no point of convergence, no neutral ground shared by the two antagonistic sexual or class positions” ( Zizek, ‘Mapping ideology’, p 23)
It is precisely the implicit neutral position that creates a blind spot, enabling the return of identity and sustaining an ideological function. Žižek’s solution is to relate the mediating process to a different form of Otherness, one that cannot serve as an anchoring point for defining the subject’s identity. Regarding your example of the market situation, it suggests that the same people could simultaneously exercise their freedom in some respects while being affected by coercion in others."

Having started the introduction but with no specific quotations in mind, my impression is that "contradiction of concept" may also refer to the tension between the thing and the noetic thing/concept. That is, a concept at the same time is and is not that that it conceptualizes.

Or, thought, that is to say negation, concretizes itself so that the thing is what it is to the mind, thereby negating, in a sense, the real individual thing and replacing it with a conceptual/mental object. Concretion?

Just a hypothesis so far.

Thank you for your contribution, Number. I'm not sure how to answer until I know more, and I'm not familiar with Žižek's critique. My suspicion is that either Žižek is wrong, or you are wrong in using Žižek to critique Adorno. It remains to be demonstrated that Adorno does what you or Žižek says he does rather than doing the cool radical thing that Žižek thinks he is doing himself. On the face of it, what Žižek seeks to do doesn't seem far from what I see as Adorno's goal, though one can seriously doubt that the latter's thinking leads anywhere good, politically. But the idea that Adorno ends up on neutral ground doesn't really fit with how I read his Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, where (arguably) we see negative dialectics in action.

But basically it's too early for me to get into those debates, and maybe you're right.

It is precisely the implicit neutral position that creates a blind spot, enabling the return of identity and sustaining an ideological function. Žižek’s solution is to relate the mediating process to a different form of Otherness, one that cannot serve as an anchoring point for defining the subject’s identity. Regarding your example of the market situation, it suggests that the same people could simultaneously exercise their freedom in some respects while being affected by coercion in others." — Number2018

Interestingly, I think this part of your Žižekian critique of Adorno is actually a pretty good defence of Adorno, because it goes some way to answering my sceptical doubt about Adorno's position (which I imagine is shared by Žižek) that reality itself is contradictory, that the contradictions are not just in and between the concepts that are applied to it. My reframing, to remove the contradiction, was hasty and thoughtless; as you point out, things are more complex, and (I want to put it stronger than this but I'm not sure how) we need to keep ourselves open to the existence of contradictions. Because that is how we actually experience the world. (that's a bit better)

Your interpretations look good to me MU.

It's interesting that he positions Hegel as the founder of dialectics rather than Plato. It appears to me, like what Adorno is offering is a dialectics more closely related to Plato's than Hegel's. He dismisses "synthesis" completely, and focuses on a deconstruction of the concept. It may be characterized as deconstructionist. This is very similar to the Platonic dialectical method. Plato took varying definitions of the same term to break down the assumed concept, and expose contradiction within the supposed "concept", demonstrating its weaknesses. it is a skeptical method. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's quite interesting. I forgot to go back to Plato when I was describing dialectics. When I last read the Republic, last year, it actually helped to think of it in more Hegelian terms, along the lines of this:

It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists. — Hegel, Science of Logic

Applied to up and down, light and shadow, knowledge and opinion, to name a few of Plato's polarities, we're able to see that Plato is not often simply saying one is bad and the other is good, or similar.

Anyway, your idea that Adorno is more Platonic in his dialectics than he is Hegelian is interesting. I guess you're referring to the Socratic method in the more dialectical of the dialogues, i.e., the earlier ones that end in aporia. Yeah, that's a good observation I think. Just as Adorno aims to preserve the contradictions, Socrates exposes the contradictions in his interlocutors' opinions, and just leaves it there, without a synthesis.

So maybe we can say, not that Adorno was a Platonic post-Hegelian, but that he was a Socratic one.

So maybe we can say, not that Adorno was a Platonic post-Hegelian, but that he was a Socratic one. — Jamal

I'm fine with that, but I generally look at what you call "the Socratic method" as the Platonic method. This is how Socrates is portrayed in Plato's dialogues, so this method is really indicative of Plato's thought process.

It's very good to separate the Platonic method (Platonic dialectics) from Platonism, because the latter has developed a meaning in modern usage which is actually in contradiction with what Plato expressed. "Platonism" is commonly understood as the conception of eternal unchanging ideas. But this is exactly the concept which Plato subjected to skepticism, with what you call the Socratic method. Following Plato, you'll see that Aristotle continued with a full refutation of Pythagorean idealism (my name for what is now called "Platonism"), by applying the concept of potential, and he also started on a reconstruction, a sort of synthesis where potential, as "matter", plays a very important role. Classical Neo-Platonists on the other hand attempted to cling to the vestigials of Pythagoreanism, forcing "matter" into the world of mysticism.

Also, I think for context, it would very useful to understand the ancient notion of contradiction. This is a logical principle expressed by Parmenides as the difference between being and not being. Being and not being are understood not in an absolute sense, as we are prone to think of these, but in a qualitative sense as "B is A", and "B is not A". This is the way that the ancients understood change, as a thing moving from being what it is, to not being what it was. So change was understood as active contradiction, supported by a temporal separation between the contrary states.

It wasn't until Aristotle's work, that the principles of predication were firmly established. Aristotle defined the separation between subject and predicate. This allowed that the subject could maintain its identity as "B", and contradiction was relegated to its predicates, "is A", "is not A". In this way, a thing, with its identity as itself, could never evolve into not being itself, because what changes, or moves between contradictories, is the thing's properties. Hegel subjected this idea "identity" to skepticism, doubting the need to assume an underlying subject which maintains its identity as itself. This forces us back to reconsider the pre-Socratic notion, that the entirety of a thing's being is negated at each moment of change.

It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists. — Hegel, Science of Logic

I don't think "contradiction" is a good word for it. It's an inextricably bound opposition. It's the yin-yang symbol.

The market is a domain of freedom for these people and a domain of coercion for those people. No contradiction. — Jamal

Right . It's not a contradiction. It's that we understand the concept of freedom by comparing it to its negation: a lack of freedom. It's just like Merleau-Ponty's dot. You know about the black dot because of the white background it contrasts with. The existence of the black dot is dependent on its background.

Most things are like that. We know what freedom is because we're contrasting it with a background of un-freedom. Where we find that un-freedom in the world depends on our agendas.

We start with the Lectures on Negative Dialectics (LND), which is based on recordings of Adorno's lectures in 1965-66, just after he'd completed the six-year task of writing the book. The lectures took place at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Unfortunately it looks like there were no extant recordings or transcripts for lectures 11 to 25, so we only have some notes for those. Even so, I think the first ten work as a nice introduction to ND, not least because they're much less condensed and difficult than his formal writings. — Jamal

Caught up to LND Lecture 2. I'm fine with just doing the first 10 then hopping over. The SEP and LND offer some exciting reasons to keep going -- not least of which is that by hearing him contrast himself to Hegel it gives me a better feel for Hegel (and, in these first bits I've read, it appears we share a suspicion of Hegel's claims to the Absolute Method, so Adorno's treatment of dialectics is easier for me to swallow)

What I'm latching onto at the moment is the bit where Adorno says he is de-emphasizing the role of synthesis in the dialectical process, and..."one motif of such a negative dialectics is to try to find out why I resist the concept of synthesis so strongly"

I'm not sure that everything must be contradiction, but rather there are positive uses for a dialectics rather than it being what is often thought: a fanciful way of talking that can be reduced to a logic of identity.

The capitalist example rings true to me -- people who don't own property and have to sell their labor to live don't have the same material interests as those who own property and hire people in order to direct their labor for exploitation. Master and Slave from Hegel is another example that makes sense to me of the dialectical relationship -- both defining and being in conflict with one another.

What I'm latching onto at the moment is the bit where Adorno says he is de-emphasizing the role of synthesis in the dialectical process, and..."one motif of such a negative dialectics is to try to find out why I resist the concept of synthesis so strongly" — Moliere

Yeah it’s interestingly odd that he openly states that a motif — maybe we can say a theme — of his philosophy is working out why he hates synthesis so much, as if it's a journey of self-discovery. As if his personal antipathy to synthesis is a clue to what's bad about it.

So the way I see it, synthesis represents the positive, hence Adorno's negative dialectics — though he has other reasons for opposing positivity too, with different senses of positivity in mind. In one of the lectures, as I recall (I read bits a couple of years ago) he seems to criticize the ordinary everyday sort of annoying attitude that today is called "toxic positivity". He's not above an opposition to that sort of popular cultural phenomenon, and I've been thinking about that part of his critique in the context of my interest in optimism vs hope, etc.

The capitalist example rings true to me -- people who don't own property and have to sell their labor to live don't have the same material interests as those who own property and hire people in order to direct their labor for exploitation. Master and Slave from Hegel is another example that makes sense to me of the dialectical relationship -- both defining and being in conflict with one another. — Moliere

I also really liked Adorno's example of nuclear weapons:

the ability of our society to withstand crises, an ability that is generally held to be one of its finest achievements, is directly linked to the growth in its potential for technological self-destruction.

I'm not sure that everything must be contradiction — Moliere

But contradictions are absolutely central, and he emphasizes that he doesn’t just mean discrepancies (nor, we can assume, does he just mean tensions, antagonisms, or inextricably bound oppositions (in @frank’s words), so that’s why I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of the contradiction concept.

So, going back to a question of mine...

Is it the case that Hegel and Adorno are saying, generally, that a predicative judgment is actually an identity statement in disguise? — Jamal

Adorno does seem to say that logic treats predicative judgments as if they were extensions of the law of identity, as if we could go straight from ∀x, x = x to A = B, and formal logic couldn’t tell the difference. But we know that formal logic does not in fact allow this, so what's going on?

The answer has to be that he's not claiming that this confusion occurs within formal logic itself. What he's saying is that in philosophical and scientific thought — and perhaps also in, say, law, military strategy, and business administration — insofar as they lay claim to logical rigour, there is a tendency to collapse the distinction. So predicative judgments come to be treated as if they were identity statements, and whatever resists full identity is experienced as contradiction. We saw this with his freedom example.

This leads back to the questions: (1) Are dialectical contradictions actual contradictions? (2) Are the contradictions in concepts only or both in concepts and also in the reality that the concepts are about? At least it’s clear what Adorno believes (yes and both).

o the way I see it, synthesis represents the positive, hence Adorno's negative dialectics — Jamal

I wonder if it's because synthesis seems to offer a final answer: as if we've arrived at the Real out of the darkness of shifting meaning. But even the idea of synthesis has an opposite. And the Absolute, which represents final unity, also has to be conceived against a backdrop of disunity. The method never ends.

But contradictions are absolutely central, and he emphasizes that he doesn’t just mean discrepancies (nor, we can assume, does he just mean tensions, antagonisms, or inextricably bound oppositions (in frank’s words), so that’s why I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of the contradiction concept. — Jamal

If that's true, we aren't really talking about Hegel. Hegel's logic isn't about contradiction per se. It's about oppositions. But I think there are parts of Marx (where he's talking about supply and demand?) that have been taken by some to be an exercise in dialectic, but on closer examination, it's not. It's just an inverse relationship.

I wonder if it's because synthesis seems to offer a final answer: as if we've arrived at the Real out of the darkness of shifting meaning. But even the idea of synthesis has an opposite. And the Absolute, which represents final unity, also has to be conceived against a backdrop of disunity. The method never ends. — frank

Yes, and some would accuse Adorno of misinterpreting Hegel at this juncture.

If that's true, we aren't really talking about Hegel. Hegel's logic isn't about contradiction per se. It's about oppositions. — frank

Yes, point taken, but we’re talking about lecture 1, where he makes out like it’s more about contradiction than anything else.

Yes.

There's only one thing that I can't let go of -- I think that judgments of the form "A is B, A = B" are the identity statements, but I'm not sure that Adorno's claiming that all predicative judgments are secretly of this form.

But yes to everything else. Just rereading the paragraph where he's talking about this:

.Any such predicative judgement that A is B, that A = B, contains a highly emphatic claim...etc.

So I read the subject of the sentence as all judgments of the form A is B, rather than stating that all judgments fit the form.

But this is very minor. I find your interpretation helpful in reviewing the lecture, and find no qualms in it.