What appears important to me, in this section, is the temporal references. The prior section had ended with a passage about how existential philosophy leaves human beings "chained to the cliff of their past". In this section now, we see how the mediation of the existent is "the hyle [Greek: primary matter] of its implicit history". When existence is apprehended as "things-are-so-and-not-otherwise", this is not a simplicity, but a complexity. It is a matter of "came to be under conditions".

This becoming disappears
and dwells in the thing, and is no more to be brought to a halt in its
concept than to be split off from its result and forgotten. Temporal
experience resembles it. In the reading of the existent as a text of its
becoming, idealistic and materialistic dialectics touch. However, while
idealism justifies the inner history of immediacy as a stage of the
concept, it becomes materialistically the measure not only of the
untruth of concepts, but also that of the existing immediacy.

What I see as important is that the becoming of the thing, a becoming which is internalized in the thing's conceptualization as "existent", is not halted by this conceptualization which designates it "existent". So the true, real thing, continues in its becoming, beyond what is assigned to it, by the naming of it as an existent. This, I apprehend as the reason why the thing itself always extends beyond its concept. This extension is referred to as the thing's "possibility".

What negative dialectics drives through its hardened objects is the possibility which their reality has betrayed, and yet which gleams from each one of these.

Now there is a gap explained, between the thing's conceptualized existence (its past), and "the hope of the Name", what's wanted in its future. So in the closing sentence, the relation between word and concept is described as "solely a moment", and I take "something external to it", as its future.

Even the insistence
on the specific word and concept, as the iron gate to be unlocked, is
solely a moment of such, though an indispensable one. In order to be
cognized, that which is internalized, which the cognition clings to in the
expression, always needs something external to it.

I agree. Hegel thought of Becoming as primal, being the synthesis of being and non-being.

To grasp Becoming, we analyze it. In becoming, you leave behind what you were. That person is now gone, and so exemplifies non-being. And stepping out of the past into the present, you're here now, something unique, which the world has never seen before. To exemplify Being is to be new, in contrast to the old, which is gone. And everything that comes into Being, is bound to return to the nothingness from which is came, as it steps toward the future, it dies, and is reborn.

When we bring being and non-being back together, we return to what Hegel thought of as the Truth: Becoming. Being and non-being are partial truths, since they're dependent on one another. But all such Truths are beyond full comprehension. The mind can only approach it in its analyzed state: split in two, laid out like the parts of a clock. But the Truth isn't dismantled like that, so it's like we've encountered a boundary of the mind.

What appears important to me, in this section, is the temporal references. The prior section had ended with a passage about how existential philosophy leaves human beings "chained to the cliff of their past". In this section now, we see how the mediation of the existent is "the hyle [Greek: primary matter] of its implicit history". When existence is apprehended as "things-are-so-and-not-otherwise", this is not a simplicity, but a complexity. It is a matter of "came to be under conditions". — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree.

What I see as important is that the becoming of the thing, a becoming which is internalized in the thing's conceptualization as "existent", is not halted by this conceptualization which designates it "existent". So the true, real thing, continues in its becoming, beyond what is assigned to it, by the naming of it as an existent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes indeed. Well put.

This, I apprehend as the reason why the thing itself always extends beyond its concept. This extension is referred to as the thing's "possibility". — Metaphysician Undercover

Now there is a gap explained, between the thing's conceptualized existence (its past), and "the hope of the Name", what's wanted in its future. — Metaphysician Undercover

This interpretation is made in the right spirit, but I think it's too reductive. Let's not make the mistake of replacing one reification (the existent) with another (the thing's becoming, or its sedimented history, or its temporal dimension including its future). We don't need to pin down the non-identical as its temporal dimension or its never-ending becoming, and we should not, because there are other dimensions to it: there is a synchronic remainder too, comprised of the thing's unique configuration of characteristics that are never fully captured by concepts, i.e., the thing's thisness. Also, the thing's mediations and relations are not merely understood as temporal. I admit that the temporal cannot be left out of the picture---we cannot analyze the thing as if frozen in time, separating the dimensions in the mode of science---but it's not everything. The hope of the name is that we can fully comprehend the thing, including its temporal dimension.

What I always react to in your posts is your apparent wish to pin down the essence, as if you've discovered the secret, the true definition. But this might not be a big disagreement, because except for the reductiveness your understanding here is very Adornian.

In my last post I forgot to mention that I think Adorno in this section solves one of our disputes. He admits that the existent as we conceptualize and describe it, e.g., as worker, commodity, society, is a false things-are-so-and-not-otherwise---and yet at the same time the word and concept are indispensible:

Even the insistence on the specific word and concept, as the iron gate to be unlocked, is
solely a moment of such [ideological identity], though an indispensable one.

And this brings up the wider problem that he wants to address, namely how to get around this. The answer, as he has been saying in various ways since the lectures, is to use concepts to repair the damage done by concepts. This section is the first appearance of the word "constellation" in ND.

Walter Benjamin famously proposed ... that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. That is to say, ideas are no more present in the world than constellations actually exist in the heavens, but like constellations they enable us to perceive relations between objects. It also means ideas are not the same as concepts, nor can they be construed as the laws of concepts. Ideas do not give rise to knowledge about phenomena and phenomena cannot be used to measure their validity. This is not to say the constellation is purely subjective or all in our heads. The stars in the night sky are where they are regardless of how we look at them and there is something in how they are positioned above us that suggests the image we construct of them. But having said that, the names we use for constellations are embedded in history, tradition and myth. So the constellation is simultaneously subjective and objective in nature. It is not, however, a system, and this is its true significance for Benjamin, who rejects the notion that philosophy can be thought of as systemic, as though it were mathematical or scientific instead of discursive. Benjamin developed this notion further in his account of the arcades in 19th-century Paris. Theodor Adorno adopts and adapts constellation in his account of negative dialectics, transforming it into a model. The notion of constellation allows for a depiction of the relation between ideas that gives individual ideas their autonomy but does not thereby plunge them into a state of isolated anomie. — Oxford Reference

Introduction: TRADITION AND COGNITION

From the last section, which looked at the temporal, historical dimension of philosophical thought, to this section in which Adorno looks at how this dimension has fared in modern philosophy: only dialectics is keeping it alive, the mainstream being thoroughly de-historicized.

One can no longer paddle along in the mainstream – even the word sounds dreadful – of modern philosophy. The recent kind, dominant until today, would like to expel the traditional moments of thought, dehistoricizing it according to its own content, assigning history to a particular branch of an established fact-collecting science.

"The recent kind" could refer to phenomenology, logical positivism/analytic philosophy, and also perhaps to existentialism. They are all ahistorical in their own ways.

These academic schools of philosophy, on the model of scientific specialization, regarded history as belonging only within its own department, away from philosophy, whose content was not purely philosophical if concerned with the historical.

Ever since the fundament of all cognition was sought in the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given, there have been attempts, in thrall to the idol of the pure presence, as it were, to drive out the historical dimension of thought. The fictitious one-dimensional Now becomes the cognitive ground of inner meaning. Under this aspect, even the patriarchs of modernity who are officially viewed as antipodes are in agreement: in the autobiographical explanations of Descartes on the origin of his method and in Bacon’s idol-theory.

Not only empiricism but also rationalism and more recently phenomenology seek the foundation of cognition in "the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given," although in Descartes this would be innate ideas and the cogito rather than sensory stimuli. Adorno is describing a kind of foundationalist philosophy that founds its claims on presumed-to-be immediate, dehistoricized, this-and-not-otherwise givens.

It's interesting that he says ever since Bacon and Descartes, philosophers have been trying to drive history out of philosophy. The standard view is that there was no historical dimension to philosophy at all until Vico and Hegel. Before them, there was no historical dimension to be driven out.

But Adorno is just saying that such was the ahistorical nature of philosophy from the early moderns through to Kant (and beyond, among those who ignored Hegel), that anything historical would always be driven out. It was actively anti-historical without even trying.

What is historical in thinking, instead of reining in the timelessness of objectivated logic, is equated with superstition, which the citation of institutionalized clerical tradition against the inquiring thought in fact was. The critique of authority was well founded. But what it overlooked was that the tradition of cognition was itself as immanent as the mediating moment of its objects.

Modern philosophy and the Enlightenment equated history with religious tradition, superstition, and authority, but it went too far and came up with ways of thinking that left no space for the historical.

The bolded statement means that enlightened philosophy overlooked the fact that its own cognition was formed historically, because the tradition itself is immanent to thought, i.e., history is always already bound up in our ideas. Philosophical thought has an immanent historicity whether philosophers acknowledge it or not.

Cognition distorts these, as soon as it turns them into a tabula rasa by means of objectifications brought to a halt. Even in the concretized form in opposition to its content, it takes part in the tradition as unconscious memory; no question could simply be asked, which would not vouchsafe the knowledge of what is past and push it further.

The mainstream philosophers distort objects when they freeze them in place---pinning them down---with their atemporal objectifications, erasing their history, the "texts of their becoming". In seeking greater objectivity, philosophy has only succeeded attaining a distorted understanding.

And even a new philosophical movement which opposes the philosophical content of the tradition, with a form such as dialectics, will be marked by it. Through an unconscious memory, this determines the questions that will be asked and the approaches that might be taken.

This is true for negative dialectics, but it's not a bad thing. In asking those questions we take up ideas with a history, and carry them forward while transforming them.

The form of thinking as an intra-temporal, motivated, progressive movement resembles in advance, microcosmically, the macrocosmic, historical one, which was internalized in the structure of thought.

The dialectical method, a process happening in time, looks like the movement of history in microcosm. This is because that historical movement is immanent to thought.

Among the highest achievements of the Kantian deduction was that he preserved the memory, the trace of what was historical in the pure form of cognition, in the unity of the thinking I, at the stage of the reproduction of the power of imagination.

Kant makes the synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition depend on the imagination, which connects concepts to successive appearances, and Adorno interprets this as the trace of history, since it determines inner sense, i.e., the form of the succession of appearances, that is, time.

Because however there is no time without that which is existent in it, what Husserl in his late phase called inner historicity cannot remain internalized, pure form. The inner historicity of thought grew along with its content and thereby with the tradition.

Kant's notion of time is inadequate. The immanent historicity of thought that I mentioned earlier is not just a separable pure form as time is in Kant.

The pure, completely sublimated subject would be on the other hand that which is absolutely traditionless. The cognition which experienced only the idol of that purity, total timelessness, coincides with formal logic, would become tautology; it could not grant even a transcendental logic any room.

Philosophy without history would be formal logic ("one gigantic tautology," as he said somewhere else)---pure form with no content.

Timelessness, towards which the bourgeois consciousness strives, perhaps as compensation for its own mortality, is the zenith of its delusion. Benjamin innervated this when he strictly forswore the ideal of autonomy and dedicated his thinking to a tradition, albeit to a voluntarily installed, subjectively chosen one which dispenses with the same authority, which it indicts autarkic thought of dispensing with.

It's no coincidence that philosophy began to strive for a timeless objectivity in the period of capitalism: the bourgeois consciousness strives for immortality as the logical culmination of its project of sovereign autonomy (free of all history and practical contraints).

Walter Benjamin brought life and energy to this observation by explicitly rejecting the ideal of the philosopher as sovereign autonomous individual. He knew he could not be free of a tradition. However, the tradition he embraced was one he put together himself, combining Jewish mysticism, modernism, and parts of Marxism.

Perhaps this for Adorno is the model of the correct approach to tradition. If we are aware that tradition is at work in our thoughts, we can make use of it deliberately, as Benjamin did.

Although the counter-force [Widerspiel] to the transcendental moment, the traditional one is quasi-transcendental, not a point-like subjectivity, but rather that which is actually constitutive, in Kant’s words the mechanism hidden in the depths of the soul. Among the variants of the all too narrow concluding questions of the Critique of Pure Reason, one ought not to be excluded, namely how thought, by having to relinquish tradition, might be able to preserve and transform it; nothing else is intellectual experience.

Tradition is the opposite of the transcendental. The latter is, despite the imagination's role in the synthetic unity of apperception, ahistorical. As far as time gets into the transcendental deduction it is a pure form belonging to an individual subject. It has nothing to do with historical or collective time, therefore tradition opposes it.

The transcendental ego is not only lacking in history but is lacking in almost anything at all, as a point-like unity. The real subject is not like this: it is thicker, full of history and the "empirically real," all the way down.

However, tradition is also in a sense transcendental, in that it is the condition for the possibility of subjective experience. Kant wrote that the mechanism of the application of the categories to sensible intuitions "is a secret art residing in the depths of the human soul". Adorno says the secret is tradition, or history (But I don't want to suggest that Adorno is answering Kant's precise question).

Intellectual experience means relinquishing tradition while also preserving and transforming it. This looks a lot like sublation or determinate negation. And next we get...

The philosophy of Bergson, and even more so Proust’s novel, abandoned themselves to this, only for their part under the bane of immediacy, out of loathing for that bourgeois timelessness which anticipates the abolition of life in advance of the mechanics of the concept. The methexis of philosophy in tradition would be however solely its determinate repudiation [Verneinung]. It is constructed by the texts which it criticizes. In them, which the tradition brings to it and which the texts themselves embody, its conduct becomes commensurable with tradition. This justifies the transition from philosophy to interpretation, which enshrines neither what is interpreted nor raises the symbol to the absolute, but seeks what might be really true there, where thought secularizes the irretrievable Ur model of holy texts.

Philosophy, as the determinate negation of the tradition, means the interpretation of texts, without enshrining them or treating them as vessels of absolute truth.

This interpretation is made in the right spirit, but I think it's too reductive. Let's not make the mistake of replacing one reification (the existent) with another (the thing's becoming, or its sedimented history, or its temporal dimension including its future). We don't need to pin down the non-identical as its temporal dimension or its never-ending becoming, and we should not, because there are other dimensions to it: there is a synchronic remainder too, comprised of the thing's unique configuration of characteristics that are never fully captured by concepts, i.e., the thing's thisness. Also, the thing's mediations and relations are not merely understood as temporal. I admit that the temporal cannot be left out of the picture---we cannot analyze the thing as if frozen in time, separating the dimensions in the mode of science---but it's not everything. The hope of the name is that we can fully comprehend the thing, including its temporal dimension. — Jamal

OK, that sounds reasonable.

What I always react to in your posts is your apparent wish to pin down the essence, as if you've discovered the secret, the true definition. But this might not be a big disagreement, because except for the reductiveness your understanding here is very Adornian. — Jamal

We all have our idiosyncrasies. I suppose I have to "pin down" something, i.e. to assume to have understood something, in order to have something to talk about. This pinning down is an application of force which others may find irritating. To me, understanding is an application of force, like when Adorno talks about doing violence to the concept. It's sort of unavoidable because understanding requires that concepts get melded together.

I'm starting to really like Adorno. He was a bit difficult to understand at the beginning, but with time I'm catching on to his style. I like him because he actually goes very deep with his ontology. It's common to just select idealism, or materialism, and this provides principles which allow the philosopher to end the analysis, or begin the ontology. But Adorno doesn't stop here, he sees flaws in both, and that drives him deeper.

In my last post I forgot to mention that I think Adorno in this section solves one of our disputes. He admits that the existent as we conceptualize and describe it, e.g., as worker, commodity, society, is a false things-are-so-and-not-otherwise---and yet at the same time the word and concept are indispensible: — Jamal

I think so too. We can say indispensable for any sort of understanding, but at the same time understanding always contains some degree of misunderstanding, so a falsity as well.

We all have our idiosyncrasies. I suppose I have to "pin down" something, i.e. to assume to have understood something, in order to have something to talk about. This pinning down is an application of force which others may find irritating. To me, understanding is an application of force, like when Adorno talks about doing violence to the concept. It's sort of unavoidable because understanding requires that concepts get melded together. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah that makes sense.

I'm starting to really like Adorno. He was a bit difficult to understand at the beginning, but with time I'm catching on to his style. I like him because he actually goes very deep with his ontology. It's common to just select idealism, or materialism, and this provides principles which allow the philosopher to end the analysis, or begin the ontology. But Adorno doesn't stop here, he sees flaws in both, and that drives him deeper. — Metaphysician Undercover

Awesome.

I think so too. We can say indispensable for any sort of understanding, but at the same time understanding always contains some degree of misunderstanding, so a falsity as well. — Metaphysician Undercover

:party: :grin:

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

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

There is nothing said about right, or correctness. How can your conclusion be supported?

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

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

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

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

What I see is a distinction being made between the traditional bourgeois timelessness, a sort of presentism which holds the Now of experience as the only reality, and a philosophy which recognizes the reality of the past, as history and memory. Adorno seems to believe that there is a real need to respect the reality of the past.

Among the highest achievements of the Kantian deduction
was that he preserved the memory, the trace of what was historical in
the pure form of cognition, in the unity of the thinking I, at the stage of
the reproduction of the power of imagination.

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

What I see is a distinction being made between the traditional bourgeois timelessness, a sort of presentism which holds the Now of experience as the only reality, and a philosophy which recognizes the reality of the past, as history and memory. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, makes sense.

Adorno seems to believe that there is a real need to respect the reality of the past. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, definitely. But since one of the big questions for Adorno is "how thought, by having to relinquish tradition, might be able to preserve and transform it," we can see that, as ever, it's dialectical. As I noted, I think he has sublation in mind, and sublation negates, preserves, and lifts up.

In its opposition to the tradition, negative dialectics respects it.

It just occurred to me that Adorno is purposefully conflating philosophical tradition with the past as such.

Introduction: RHETORIC (i)

We've finally reached the end of the introduction. I really enjoyed this section and found it kind of mindblowing. I wasn't expecting a linguistic turn.

So first of all, reading the previous section I was surprised and disappointed when he seemed to say that philosophy now is just the interpretation of texts:

The methexis [participation] of philosophy in tradition would be however solely its determinate repudiation [Verneinung]. It is constructed by the texts which it criticizes. In them, which the tradition brings to it and which the texts themselves embody, its conduct becomes commensurable with tradition. This justifies the transition from philosophy to interpretation, which enshrines neither what is interpreted nor raises the symbol to the absolute, but seeks what might be really true there, where thought secularizes the irretrievable Ur model of holy texts.

Assuming he approves of this transition, this seems like a reversal. Aren't we supposed to be opening ourselves up to the things, adapting ourselves mimetically to objective reality while still thinking conceptually? And isn't Adorno one of the great defenders of philosophy against its assimilation or enfeeblement? And doesn't his masterpiece Minima Moralia contain hundreds of brilliant micrological analyses of the stuff of everyday life?

We can imagine a resolution along the lines of: philosophy is two-sided, with the interpretation of texts on one side and the interpretation of the world on the other (in "the reading of the existent as a text of its becoming"). But that doesn't seem to be what he is saying here. I'll leave that hanging for now.

When I read this section, by a stroke of luck I also happened to be reading the chapter about language in Roger Foster's book Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (which I am finding brilliant). The importance of Darstellung is becoming clearer. Redmond translates this as portrayal but most others have expression and/or presentation.

Things clicked for me when Foster explained that Adorno doesn't really accept the standard view in linguistics that signs are arbitrary. Arbitrary signification, insofar as it is real, is not just the way things are but is a historical result of modernity's depletion of language. Expressive Darstellung, that is, rhetoric, is what is needed for philosophy to resist this and to do justice to the objects.

It helped me to look back at my discussion with @Moliere, in which I said the following:

Darstellung or the moment of expression is the deliberate interpretation of the given facts, whereas Vorstellung, the representation, is the given fact itself. The latter may also be a product of interpretation, but this interpretation is unknowing and ideological, such that things that are the product of ideology are taken as given. Darstellung on the other hand is an interpretation of an interpretation; that is, a re-appraisal, by means of expression in concepts and language, of the given facts. Or better put, it is the construction of a space, by means of dialectical confrontations and movements, in which reality can reveal itself. — Jamal

---

The "Rhetoric" section begins like this:

Through the now apparent, now latent delimitation to texts, philosophy confesses to what it vainly denied under the ideal of the method, its linguistic essence. In its modern history, it is, analogous to tradition, denigrated as rhetoric. Tossed aside and degraded into a means of realizing effects, it was the bearer of lies in philosophy.

That is, it was regarded as the bearer of lies. An example of this attitude to language is Bertrand Russell, who was motivated by the promise of an ideal language:

The essence of Russellian Logical Atomism is that once we analyze language into its true logical form, we can simply read off from it the ultimate ontological structure of reality. The basic assumption at work here, which formed the foundation for the Ideal Language view, is that the essential and fundamental purpose of language is to represent the world. Therefore, the more ‘perfect’, that is ‘ideal’, the language, the more accurately it represents the world. A logically perfect language is, on this line of thought, a literal mirror of metaphysical reality. Russell’s work encouraged the view that language is meaningful in virtue of this underlying representational and truth-functional nature. — IEP

The expressiveness of language is precisely what these philosophers hate. And this goes back a lot further than Russell.

Incidentally, it's a shame that Adorno didn't get around to reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He would have found a lot to dislike but at the very least I think he would have approved of (1) the rejection of the idea of an ideal language, (2) the primacy of practice, and probably (3) the private language argument.

Rhetoric represents in philosophy, what cannot otherwise be thought except in language. It maintains itself in the postulates of portrayal [Darstellung], by which philosophy differentiates itself from the communication of already cognized and solidified contents. It is in danger, like everything which represents, because it slides easily towards the usurpation of what thought cannot directly obtain from the portrayal. It is incessantly corrupted by convincing purposes, without which however the relation of thinking to praxis would once again disappear from the thought-act. The allergy against expression in the entire official philosophical tradition, from Plato to the semanticists, conforms to the tendency of all Enlightenment, to punish that which is undisciplined in the gesture, even deep into logic, as a defense mechanism of reified consciousness.

The bolded bit is important, because what's happening here is that Adorno is contrasting philosophical expression with the mere communication of facts. This connects back to the "Privilege of Experience" section, in which he addressed the charge of elitism, saying that ...

every step towards communication sells truth out and falsifies it

Back then I read this as justification for his tortured prose style. It is that, but it's important to see why that's fundamental. The disappearance of the subject, the flattening of experience, and the blindness to suffering of the modern world is baked right into language. We see it in the painstaking "clarity" of the analytic philosopher, the cold language of military strategy that hides a horrific reality ("collateral damage"), and the lifeless language of bureaucracy.

And this, I suppose, is why the turn to language is not a turn away from the world of things at all.

If the alliance of philosophy with science tends towards the virtual abolition of language, and therein of philosophy itself, then it cannot survive without its linguistic effort. Instead of splashing about in linguistic falls, it reflects on such. There is a reason why linguistic sloppiness – scientifically put: the inexact – is wont to ally itself with the scientific mien of incorruptibility through language.

Adorno is fun to read because he often throws in these provocations without any fanfare. He is associating linguistic sloppiness not with rhetoric, philosophical expression and Darstellung, which would be the normal thing to do, but with the other side, the scientism of instrumental communication. It is precisely when language is inexact that it clings to science or scientistism.

This makes me think of poetry. Forgive me for quoting myself again, from 3 years ago in a thread about definitions:

Poetry much more than prose aims for precision. Unlike prose, good poetry doesn’t settle for the handy phrase or for common imagery. Its metaphors are bespoke, not off the rack. Clichés are to be avoided because they do our thinking for us (and imagining, feeling, etc), or they shut out thinking; and the same could be said of some up-front definitions in philosophy. — Jamal

I suggest that this is exactly the sense in which philosophical expression can be precise. (Having said that, I wouldn't want to concede too much to the folks who say that continental philosophy is more poetry than philosophy.)

For the abolition of language in thought is not its demythologization. Thus deluded, philosophy sacrifices with language whatever might have related to its thing otherwise than as mere signification; only as language is that which is similar capable of cognizing the similar.

Philosophers, particularly those envious of science and mathematics like Descartes, Kant, and Russell, thought that by mimicking science and mathematics in their abolition of subjective expressiveness they could approach an objectivity free of myth, superstition, and religion. But they were wrong: without mimesis/expression/rhetoric, the thing cannot be adequately described or understood, thus (a) what appears as precision is nothing of the sort, and (b) a new mythology is introduced, that of the neutrally communicated fact and the exhaustive category/concept.

But as usual, we don't get to relax:

The permanent denunciation of rhetoric by nominalism, for which the name bears not the least similarity to what it says, is not meanwhile to be ignored, nor is an unbroken rhetorical moment to be summoned against such.

Language is not just rhetorical. We don't want to attach ourselves to some imagined expressive purity. There is some truth in the idea that signs are arbitrary.

So...

Dialectics, according to its literal meaning language as the organ of thought, would be the attempt to critically rescue the rhetorical moment: to have the thing and the expression approach one another almost to the point of non-differentiability.

Now we have yet another version of the central task of philosophy, and this one has pride of place in what looks rather like the conclusion to the introduction. And it clarifies the importance of mimesis.

I'll look at the final paragraph in a later post.

Expressive Darstellung, that is, rhetoric, is what is needed for philosophy to resist this and to do justice to the objects. — Jamal

To remind you of our earlier discussion, I read "object" in this section as oneself, the human subject. The idea that the concept is immediate has been shown to be faulty. Alternatively, the object can be understood as immediate, but only as oneself. So I understand the object as the self.

Language is essentially "a means of realizing effects". So in philosophy it has become a bearer of lies. The "thing itself" in this paragraph is thought, the activity of the object. And the separation "which Plato complained about" is the layered representation, sometimes translated from the ancient Greek as "narrative". As described by Plato, the two layers are like this. The physical language is a representation of the thought, and the narrative is a representation of the language (how the language is interpreted or understood I assume). Hence the narrative is separated from the thing itself by two layers of representation. I believe this may be related to Derrida's concept of repetition.

So, we can see how this layering, between the thought and the understanding of what is expressed as a representation of the thought allows for corruption as deception in the way described by Adorno.

"It is incessantly corrupted by convincing purposes, without which however the relation of thinking to praxis would once again disappear from the thought-act."

Science is described as having developed a double dose of corruption. The first is that it pretends a "mien of incorruptibility through language", then through this pretense "linguistic sloppiness" is allowed to propagate uncontested, or unnoticed, because it's veiled by the mien.

The next paragraph provides a general definition of "dialectics", as distinct from the more specific "Hegelian dialectics".

Dialectics, according to its literal meaning language as the organ
of thought, would be the attempt to critically rescue the rhetorical
moment: to have the thing and the expression approach one another
almost to the point of non-differentiability.

According to what I wrote above, "the thing" here is thought itself. So the goal of dialectics would be to rescue the rhetorical moment by establishing a sort of identity between the thought and the expression of the thought, "almost to the point of non-differentiability". This would exclude the corruption of lies and deception, attributable to the intent of "convincing". When our language diverges from our intention, because the intention is to convince for one reason or another, this constitutes deception. Dialectics therefore allows that truth is a relation between expression and content.

I suggest that this is exactly the sense in which philosophical expression can be precise. — Jamal

The need for precision I read like this. The precision of the thought ought to be accurately represented by the precision of the language. So poetry may consist of imprecise thoughts expressed by imprecise language, so that truth and honesty are there in that relation. But if imprecise thoughts are expressed as precise, this is a dishonesty. Dialectics, as described, is an attempt to maintain this consistency between thought and the expression of thought.

The final paragraph is difficult, and fittingly imprecise. I think of it as a description of the relation between content and form, and how dialectics mediates this relation. I see it like this. Content, as open and free, provides the concrete possibility of utopia. But "what is possible" obstructs utopia as what is abstract within the concrete. This is the non-existent (the abstract) within the existent content (the thinking). But then thinking treats the non-existent as if it is the existent, the content, and this is the way that thinking approaches the non-existent, negatively.

Through the now apparent, now latent delimitation to texts, philosophy confesses to what it vainly denied under the ideal of the method, its linguistic essence. In its modern history, it is, analogous to tradition, denigrated as rhetoric. Tossed aside and degraded into a means of realizing effects, it was the bearer of lies in philosophy.

That is, it was regarded as the bearer of lies. — Jamal

I'd just like to correct this interpretation and say more about this passage. Adorno is saying that rhetoric was tossed aside and degraded until it became just "a means of realizing effects," in other words sophistry. As such, it really was the "bearer of lies".

So Adorno isn't defending sophistry, but rather making the claim that rhetoric need not be mere sophistry. It is only because rhetoric, the power of subjective expression, was increasingly marginalized that it became a bag of persuasive tricks.

But throughout this section Adorno conflates rhetoric with language as such. This is intentional, because he wants to normalize or rehabilitate language as rhetoric, and also wants to provoke, to directly challenge those who would turn language into formal logic.

According to what I wrote above, "the thing" here is thought itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Even though Adorno's writing in ND is singularly dense and difficult, and even though this is intentional, he is open and honest and says what he means. If he meant the thought he would say so. The thing is the object of thought, the thing we're thinking about.

However, there's a sense in which you're on to something. The thing is never the thing in itself; it's the thing mediated by thought.

Even though Adorno's writing in ND is singularly dense and difficult, and even though this is intentional, he is open and honest and says what he means. If he meant the thought he would say so. The thing is the object of thought, the thing we're thinking about. — Jamal

Well, I'm not going to offer a big defence of my interpretation, as I've done in the past, because this just produces an argumentative atmosphere. But I will point out that he mentions Plato more than once. Also, I'll point to the passage I quoted, which starts "Dialectics, according to its literal meaning...", indicating that he is describing a more Platonic form of dialectics which seeks to conform the language to the thought in representation, not vise versa.

Plato, in the cave allegory makes thinking the real thing in the creation of his layers of representation. It must be understood in this way to properly allow for the role of "the good" (interpreted by Aristotle as that for the sake of which), and also to understand the nature of sophistry, persuasion, rhetoric, and ultimately deception in general.

Otherwise, I'll mention that I am happy that you agree that, in a way, I am on to something.

The thing is never the thing in itself; it's the thing mediated by thought. — Jamal

All you need to do now, to see my perspective, is to see that to get the best understanding of "the thing" we need to rid ourselves of the mediation. To produce the best understanding of the thing, we want to apprehend "the thing" as immediate. Also, the most immediate is the most real, and the most real to us, ontologically, is "the thing". So we can designate this, the most immediate, as "the thing".

Now the thinking is never thinking about the thing, unless it is thinking about itself, because "the thing" has been designated as the most immediate, and this is thinking itself. So what thinking is really thinking about, when its not thinking about itself as the immediate thing, is the good, what is intended, how to get what it wants. So the physical representations which it creates (language included), truly represent this, the thinking being's efforts to get what is wanted. The language does not represent some assumed thing in itself, which the thinking is supposed to be thinking about, it represents the thinking being's efforts to get what it wants. That is why pragmatism has gained traction, but it also exposes the significance of rhetoric.

more Platonic form of dialectics — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't believe Platonic dialectics is actually different from Hegel's. Hegel was influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy. See the Cyclical Argument in Phaedo. It's the same thing.

All you need to do now, to see my perspective, is to see that to get the best understanding of "the thing" we need to rid ourselves of the mediation. To produce the best understanding of the thing, we want to apprehend "the thing" as immediate. — Metaphysician Undercover

As you so lucidly explained, part of the practice of spiritual/intellectual experience which goes by the name of negative dialectics is the understanding of things' sedimented history, their temporal dimension. This is a kind (maybe the most important kind) of mediation:

In this section now, we see how the mediation of the existent is "the hyle [Greek: primary matter] of its implicit history". — Metaphysician Undercover

What I see as important is that the becoming of the thing, a becoming which is internalized in the thing's conceptualization as "existent", is not halted by this conceptualization which designates it "existent". So the true, real thing, continues in its becoming, beyond what is assigned to it, by the naming of it as an existent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Philosophy which would have this stripped away to a purported immediacy, such as phenomenology, empiricism, Descartes' cogito, etc., are doing it wrong, according to Adorno.

I'm really not trying to be argumentative, and I really don't care who is right. As you can see, I really appreciate your insights. But Adorno's philosophy clicks with me more than any other philosophy I've encountered. I've been reading bits and pieces off and on for the past year or two and I feel like I'm getting a grip on it. It matters to me that nobody here goes down the wrong path, which is always a risk with the way he writes.

Adorno's perspective is the opposite of the perspective you express in the first quotation above. Or have I misunderstood you?

Platonic dialectics looks at different ways in which the same word is used, in an attempt to determine the true referent. Compare this to what Adorno said of dialectics, "to have the thing and the expression approach one another almost to the point of non-differentiability".

The only real difference is that Plato is clear to indicate that "the thing" (referent) is the thought, whereas Adorno is ambiguous as to what "the thing" refers to. However, it ought to be quite clear that to have the thing and the expression approach one another almost to the point of non-differentiability, requires that this ambiguity be resolved. That's what Platonic dialectics strives to do, resolve ambiguity.

Philosophy which would have this stripped away to a purported immediacy, such as phenomenology, empiricism, Descartes' cogito, etc., are doing it wrong, according to Adorno. — Jamal

What I see is the importance of activity, and this is "becoming". So the stripping "away to a purported immediacy" at this point, seems to be a matter of replacing being with becoming as the immediate. It is when we impose the necessity of an identifiable thing, an object, or being, that we impose mediation, the mediation is conception.

What I think Adorno is demonstrating is that we cannot strip away to an immediate, identifiable object, like Descartes "I", or the "being" of phenomenology, just like you think so. However, you seem to take this as a demonstration that all is mediated, there is nothing immediate. I take it as an indication that the immediate is not what we think it is, what traditional philosophy leads us to believe. Intuition tells me that something must be immediate.

At this point, I think both, yours and mine, are valid interpretations.

Adorno's perspective is the opposite of the perspective you express in the first quotation above. Or have I misunderstood you? — Jamal

I'm not quite sure what you are asking. I approach philosophical understanding with the attitude that the best, most accurate understanding will be obtained when the thing to be understood is immediate. Mediation suffers the tinted glass analogy. I think Adorno approaches philosophy with a similar attitude, that which is immediate must be understood first. The glass must be examined for tinting.

The issue which Adorno points to is the difficulty in determining what is immediate. So, in the previous sections, starting with Privilege of experience, he attempted to look at the human subject, oneself, as the immediate object. This failed because "substance" had to be assigned to society, leaving that proposed object as unsubstantiated.

I do not think, as you seem to, that he has given up on the quest for the immediate. I think he is now considering the possibility of the activity of thinking as immediate. In Aristotle there is a categorical separation between activity "becoming", and the status of an object, or thing, as "being". The two are incompatible. So "the thing which is immediate" is actually contradictory under this understanding, because what is immediate cannot be a thing at all. But this does not completely negate "the immediate".

Even though Adorno's writing in ND is singularly dense and difficult, and even though this is intentional, he is open and honest and says what he means. If he meant the thought he would say so. The thing is the object of thought, the thing we're thinking about. — Jamal

Reading ahead in the next section, I've found evidence that we are both, in a way correct in our interpretations. I interpreted "the thing" as the thinking, you as the object of thought. Here, Adorno seems to say that the thing being thought about, and the thinking itself, are inseparable, a unity where each depends on (is mediated by) the other.

Words like problem and solution ring false in philosophy, because they
postulate the independence of what is thought from thinking exactly
there, where thinking and what is thought are mediated by one another.

In a way, we're both right. But in another way, we're both wrong because we each move to exclude the other, when we're supposed to include the other, to understand the requirement of the two being in some form of unity.

In a way, we're both right. But in another way, we're both wrong because we each move to exclude the other, when we're supposed to include the other, to understand the requirement of the two being in some form of unity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hm, I quite like that.

I'm finding this useful for the beginning. I reread the first paragraph several times before deciding to find someone else's interpretation just to get started. It is dense.

:cool:

Yeah I often find the text opening up once I find the key to it.

OK with your help I finished the introduction now. Thing, Language, History I read as Adorno's answer, actually -- and the follow up is a "close second" through Benjamin's adherence to a tradition rather than the immediate. The last section sets out what Negative Dialectics aims to do in philosophy: save rhetoric as something more than a mere means to an end or something to be discarded as trickery.

I find the metaphor for how philosophy can be positive -- as the prism that directs the light -- Interesting.
Adorno is using one of the oldest metaphors in philosophy here that, to my mind, would run somewhat counter in some readings to what I think I've read so far. Maybe not -- the concept is not the thing (the prism is not the light) but that which operates upon the thing in order to render it perceptible. The light was there but only became a perceivable object by passing through the prism of concepts forged by philosophy.

Or maybe philosophy is the hand which spins the prism, itself the idea. . .

Something like that. It's an interesting metaphor to think through.

An attempted (very, obscenely brief) summation of the Introduction:

Philosophy is a discipline unto itself, and ND is an attempt at sketching a method for philosophy in light of its various previous attempts such that it is not slap-dash, not arbitrary, but still up to the classic task of philosophy: truth of the world we find ourselves in -- the truth of the non-conceptual through concepts.

Philosophy is a discipline unto itself, and ND is an attempt at sketching a method for philosophy in light of its various previous attempts such that it is not slap-dash, not arbitrary, but still up to the classic task of philosophy: truth of the world we find ourselves in -- the truth of the non-conceptual through concepts. — Moliere

Nice. I would add that the underlying problem the introduction sets out to solve is that this requisite method, conceptual and linguistic as it must be, has to overcome the withering of intellectual/spiritual experience characteristic of modernity with a deliberate use of language: "rhetorical" at the same time as rigorous; expressively extreme without abandoning logical consistency; and mimetic in the mode of art, magic, and play, without abandoning concepts.

There is much more to say, of course. I might try.

I do not think, as you seem to, that he has given up on the quest for the immediate. I think he is now considering the possibility of the activity of thinking as immediate. I — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I think it's like this: immediacy in circumstances of modernity is always fake, a result of reification. Those things that present themselves as this-and-just-so, like money or commodities---what's more immediate than a banknote or a smartphone in your hand?---are reifications of historical developments and social relations, so immediacy under these conditions is ideological. BUT Adorno hangs on to the utopian ideal of thinking, namely of the lack of separation between subject and object.

Significantly for our debate, I think the self itself is a fake immediacy, at least in the world we know---and I think this is an important position of Adorno's. The self is a reflection of, or is parasitic on, one's society. There is no pure self underneath all the contingent mediations. Immediacy, if possible, would itself be historical and contingent.

Things have changed since Adorno's day, but we can still recognize his analysis of the modern subject as a construction of the Enlightenment: the autonomous bourgeois individual in command of himself who unproblematically introspects and comes to rational decisions and then acts on them.

Anyway, I've been looking at his other works and there is a lot to recommend your view; he is often writing approvingly of immediacy, although at the same time he is warning us not to grasp for it. A particularly pessimistic instance is in the dedication to Minima Moralia:

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewellery, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer. — Minima Moralia

In other words, immediacy is presently unreachable, and any claim to have reached it desecrates its utopian promise.

Immediacy in circumstances of the "bad mediation" cannot help but be a perversion, and at best turns into another kind of mediation:

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter. It is not merely that pure feeling, so far as it is still possible within the determinate system of the economy, becomes precisely thereby society’s alibi for the domination of interests and bears witness to a humanity that does not exist. The very involuntariness of love, even where it has not found itself a practical accommodation beforehand, contributes to the whole as soon as it is established as a principle. If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter-pressure. — Minima Moralia

And yet, as you say, he retains immediacy as the utopian promise. In a sense, the movement of the concept towards understanding is a manifestation of the desire for immediacy.

There is much more to say, of course. I might try. — Jamal

I agree. There's much more that needs to be said for a proper summary.