Now, Adorno proposes a rational/irrational relationship, and these two seem to be codependent. Of course the rational can be associated with the consciousness, but where does the irrational fit? My first inclination was to place it in the unconscious, as the source, or category, of the emotions, or something like that, a property of the body in a traditional Platonic dualism sense. But now I think what he means is that the irrational is right in consciousness, as a part of the intellect itself, the irrational part. This would describe this feature, what I called the artistic aspect, which manifests as the intuitive, the speculative, as a sort of irrational part of the intellect. It's irrational in the sense that it doesn't follow the habits and rules of rationality, yet it is still intellectual. It's creative, and creativity defies rationality. The rational part would get lost in itself without the irrational part to throw it a bone to sniff at, and the irrational part would make totally arbitrary decisions without the influence of the rational part. So the two are codependent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Adorno problematizes the binary while also talking in terms of that binary. The first view of the irrational as associated only with the unconscious is the common view, in philosophy and in culture. The second view, that the irrational is part of consciousness, is (a) what Adorno is advocating as a deliberate philosophical practice, and (b) actually how reason works without our necessarily being aware of it. What Adorno thus advocates under the name of speculation is a self-aware use of the irrational within reason.

I think by the interpretation I gave above, we'd have to say that the speculative is negative, in the sense of being irrational. The speculative part is what negates the existing, the status quo, to get beyond it, then the rational reestablishes itself through some sort of synthesis. — Metaphysician Undercover

So according to the way I've put it above, the speculative is the intentional appropriation of the irrational by reason. Now, whether this is positive or negative is the issue that I feared was lapsing into insubstantial nonsense. Depending on how you look at it, each can be characterized as either positive or negative relative to the other, since each is such at all only relative to the other.

So I see what you mean, and you are right. And as I noted, Adorno would (might?) deny that speculation in this context is positive—he would deny the synthesis. But I still want to say that my framing is crucial (and this is my "how you look at it"): speculation in Adorno is positive or quasi-positive in that it aims to realize the potential of reason to get beyond facts and existing concepts. It's the positive bounce-back of reason's (negative) critique of existing concepts.

I'm not saying this way of looking at it ought to be privileged, only that it is crucial to see things in this way sometimes, so that we can see that there is more than negativity to critique—there is also an emergent reach for truth, or perhaps just, it is also the reach for truth.

And this aligns well with the traditional conception of speculative philosophy, which is characterized as dogmatic as opposed to sceptical/critical/pragmatic/etc—in the sense that it offers postive doctrines (but Adorno doesn't go that far, so his speculation remains also negative, and this is why I said it was a negative positivity).

The assignment of positive and negative is somewhat arbitrary, but only somewhat. There is a range of important historically sedimented meanings for these words that can be made use of or called into question deliberately, and that's what I take Adorno to be doing.

Whether or not it's unnecessarily confusing, I couldn't possibly comment (Adorno's reply: "No, it is necessarily confusing).

EDIT: Coming up for air now, the general point here is that without the positivity I've identified, Adorno is merely nihilistic or self-defeating.

His view of utopia might shed some light on this. He thinks the utopian impulse, the sense that there is a way we could live that would be much better than the way we live now, is vitally important. But he also thinks that making it explicit can be bad: we should not turn it into a more concrete vision or programme.

Here's the point. Utopia as merely implicit or semi-secretly motivating can be characterized as negative, opposed to utopia as an explicitly asserted, positive vision. But utopia as such is also fairly characterized as positive, in that it is in opposition to total hopelessness, cynicism, and the bad society itself, whether or not it is implicit or explicit. It depends how you look at it.

EDIT: Adorno would prefer dystopian science fiction like Nineteen Eighty-Four to the utopian variety like Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the former is in a sense also utopian in that it shows us the opposite of what we want to happen, bringing to consciousness the latter. 1984 is negative (utopia negatively defined) and TNG is positive (utopia positively defined) but the utopia implied or negatively defined in 1984 is, as a utopia, itself positive, thus 1984 is in a sense positive too.

EDIT2: Question: would negative form, positive function be too reductive?

What Adorno thus advocates under the name of speculation is a self-aware use of the irrational within reason. — Jamal

I question your use of "reason". Generally we associate reason with rational, and this aspect of the mind is not at all rational, even opposed to it. Irrational, implies opposition and that's a very strong idea. Maybe it's opposition in the sense of rebellious, in the way that teenagers sometimes rebel against the authority of their parents. The trouble with reason, or rationality (using the two words interchangeably now) is that it tends to trap itself into a vicious circle through the adherence to laws of reasoning. Then we ask, where did these laws come from, and if they are not imposed by God, or derived from an eternal realm of Platonic Forms, they must be created by human beings. That implies that human beings must, break out from the existing, outdated laws, providing the impetus to actually do that with the rebellious, creative attitude.

The breaking out, from the laws, puts reason (if we can still call it reason, as reasoning outside the laws of reason, speculation) face to face with infinite regress. And infinity, I think, is the manifestation of the irrational, first derived from irrational ratios like pi. The unruly speculative mind allows the irrational, as the infinite, to penetrate all sorts of logic, as it does in mathematics today, and infinite possible worlds. Reclosing the circle, to restrict the irrational, would be a sort of synthesis.

You continue to resist the reciprocity, then. For Adorno, it's not a dualism between separate forces so much as a dialectical entanglement between reason and that which is in reason but often excluded by it to its detriment.

I think Adorno would agree that reason needs to broken free of rigid frameworks, but this is reason's way of correcting itself, not an irrationalist rebellion.

The discussion re keeping particularity and difference in focus came to mind when I came across this G.K. Chesterton quote again recently (from Orthodoxy):

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.

IIRC he is here reflecting on Saint Augustine's reflection re miracles that the rising of the sun is quite miraculous and that if it has only occured once in a generation we would still be talking about it generations later. I thought it was an interesting celebration of sameness in difference, and of repetition as repetition in particulars.

The philosophy of history is interesting in that it is always particular, and yet it is the particular in which all universals are instantiated if they are instantiated at all (e.g. cosmic or natural history), and so represents the individualization of all universals in their larger context. That is, "materialism" is one way to focus on difference and particulars, favoring a sort of "smallism," but one also reaches maximal particularity through a sort of "bigism," the frame of history.

I think Adorno would agree that reason needs to broken free of rigid frameworks, but this is reason's way of correcting itself, not an irrationalist rebellion.

Right, and if you combine this with something like MacIntyre's view of traditions it could be the traditions themselves that are "rigid frameworks," but not necessarily! Calcified historical frameworks can also be the "matter" of such traditions, perhaps even a sort of material sickness frustrating the actualization of form (i.e. the tradition's attainment of rationality), sort of in the way that all animals are different and yet they all strive for life and form, and yet can be frustrated in this by material deficits.

One would be led to this view though only if one actually accepted the adage in PR that "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual" (Hegel at his more Aristotlelian).

Right, and if you combine this with something like MacIntyre's view of traditions it could be the traditions themselves that are "rigid frameworks," but not necessarily! Calcified historical frameworks can also be the "matter" of such traditions, perhaps even a sort of material sickness frustrating the actualization of form (i.e. the tradition's attainment of rationality), sort of in the way that all animals are different and yet they all strive for life and form, and yet can be frustrated in this by material deficits. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nice. But...

One would be led to this view though only if one actually accepted the adage in PR that "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual" (Hegel at his more Aristotlelian). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That’s precisely what Adorno will not accept. For him, the actual is the site of reason's failure, not its fulfillment.

That’s precisely what Adorno will not accept. For him, the actual is the site of reason's failure, not its fulfillment.

Indeed, and I think this makes sense given his starting point in Kant, Hegel, and the broader framework of Enlightenment philosophy, which tends towards "philosophy as a system," and a distinct totalizing tendency within these "systems." This tendency is particularly acute in Hegel's philosophy of history.

Maritain is similarly motivated in his claim that philosophy can never be a system, and can never be closed, but is rather man's openess to being. It's a problem a lot of people seemed to be grappling with during this time period.

The common appeals to the Holocaust in these discussions, now the better part of a century later, start to strike one as properly historical in particular. If reason must lose its luster, or even its authority after the Holocaust, then it should have already shed these in the wake of the Thirty Years War, the conquistador conquests, the Mongol sweep across Asia, the aftermath of the sack that gave us the Book of Lamentations, etc. Wiesel, for his part, picks the 17th century's pogroms, as opposed to the 20th's, as the setting for his Trial of God," and while Enlightenment, "rational," Dr. Pangloss style metaphysical optimism ends up being the tool of Satan, neither does the play end up seeming to exclude the Logos of the generation of Jews who saw Masada fall. In this aspect, these debates sometimes remind me of Dostoevsky's Pro and Contra section of the Brothers Karamazov, that is, there is a "I humbly return my ticket," element.

My thoughts have tended more towards rejecting the particular Enlightenment notion of reason and systematicity tout court, but I can see why, within that tradition, Adorno's proposals make sense. There has to be an irrationality in consciousness because "rationality" has become so bound up in rules and systematicity (ratio) that it seems incapable of providing its own content and impetus. It is far from the old "infinite fecundity" and the erotic. Indeed, it's downright sterile. Other thinkers of this period also had to look for "new sources" in consciousness, Jung being a good example.

But this particular mention of Wittgenstein is not actually one of the egregious ones, and it highlights important differences between them. Adorno is unwilling to give up on philosophy's great goals (in some strange version anyway), whereas for Wittgenstein philosophy helps to fix bad thinking but the really important stuff is outside of its domain, except to achieve clear description. For Adorno, the meaningful in life remains a matter for theory, but for Wittgenstein it doesn't. — Jamal

Isn't Adorno's non-identical similar to Wittgenstein's mystical, in that both resist conceptualization?

Wittgenstein, early at least, suggests quietism, while Adorno believes it will be revealed via negative dialectics.

You seem to be both more radical and also more conservative than Adorno. You go further than him in your rejection of Enlightenment reason, but defang this critique in your appeal to the pre-modern and anti-rational. Adorno, modernist through and through, would say you are regressive, retreating from reason's critique of itself to irrational comforts.

So your defanged critique floats above history and flattens it, failing to perceive historical specificity while claiming to properly historicize events:

The common appeals to the Holocaust in these discussions, now the better part of a century later, start to strike one as properly historical in particular. If reason must lose its luster, or even its authority after the Holocaust, then it should have already shed these in the wake of the Thirty Years War, the conquistador conquests, the Mongol sweep across Asia, the aftermath of the sack that gave us the Book of Lamentations, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Adorno addresses this in Minima Moralia (maybe you're alluding to that, I'm not sure):

[...] neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the British colonial administration of India deliberately burst the lungs of millions of human beings with poison gas ...

One cannot bring Auschwitz into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states in terms of a mere gradual increase of horror, regarding which one preserves one’s peace of mind.

I think this Holocaust exceptionalism is justified. It was an industrialized, bureaucratic genocide, unimaginable without the means. Not impracticable without the means but literally unimaginable for pre-industrial people. It's not that Germans had always been wanting to exterminate the Jews but just didn't have the ability; it's that the shape, scale, and goal of the Holocaust was engendered by the means of its execution (bureaucratic classification and calculation, mass production, racial science, and instrumental rationality itself). This was unprecedented in both scale and character, I believe.

So the materialist critique that characterizes the Holocaust specifically as capitalism's collapse into barbarism seems a stronger one, and thus in a sense more radical, than a theological or existential critique; whereas you, I suppose, see the materialist critique as also implicated in reason-gone-wrong. The thing is, only reason can critique reason.

Well, this is not really the place for a more thorough debate about it, but it's given me a lot of food for thought. :up:

Isn't Adorno's non-identical similar to Wittgenstein's mystical, in that both resist conceptualization?

Wittgenstein, early at least, suggests quietism, while Adorno believes it will be revealed via negative dialectics. — Pussycat

That's roughly right as far as it goes, but I think it probably minimizes vast differences, between (a) the nonidentical and the mystical, and of course (b) what to do about it.

Good summary, and noting how this lecture is conceptually dense in that it's using more original terms than the first 8 lectures have.

So throughout I was thinking about his take on "intuition", and how it gets at something right in terms of practice, but perhaps we could still "hold onto" intuition through a modification in theoretical thinking.

For Adorno, what you noted, is that the limits of "intuition" were beyond "the facts", but simultaneously he's committed to the notion that philosophy is a conceptual activity, whereas art can get away with this because it's not even trying to speak in the conceptual way but reveal truth in the non-conceptual in the artwork.

Obviously this goes back to Kant, and like you said this means "experience" and "beyond experience", where intuition is within experience but justifies our intellectual wonderings. For Adorno it seems it's mostly just that sense of an insight, but ultimately he's not interested in defending a hard distinction but rather trying to salvage the good parts of intuition while maintaining a difference between philosophy and art.

I can tell he's very interested in differentiating art from philosophy, but aside from that being an interesting question I think him speaking plainly about what he roughly means works as well as a precise definition -- there are philosophers which present their philosophy artistically, and artists who create philosophical works of art, and these activities are both human but different in some capacity. But we can adhere to Adorno's warnings on the two bad ways of treating intuition -- positivistically or idealistically -- without having to have a theory of what differentiates philosophy from art, even while we reflect on the nature of art and borrow those concepts for understanding philosophy.

I wonder to what extent he means the bad kinds of philosophy and art that try to do what the other is doing -- does he have particular examples?

***

Marx as speculative philosopher: when he talks about the two unifying speculative concepts Marx must maintain I was inclined to read his interpretation along similar lines as the notion that theories are always underdetermined, and yet the guide the research. Marx couldn't appeal to the obvious facts -- a pile of government economic records and newspapers -- but had to utilize them and order them in a speculative (good-kind) manner.

As an aside I think it's this noticing how theoretical constructs serve as a kind of order for our facts/intuitions/what-have-you is where people get an idealist impression. But here Adorno utilizes Marx as an example of a materialist who is at the same time speculative.

The reason I mention the above is while I get the sense that Adorno is hounded, I also get the sense that the positivists are wrong about science too :D -- science is a speculative endeavor. It doesn't just give you a list of facts, but explains the facts, orders them, predicts them and so forth.

I wonder to what extent he means the bad kinds of philosophy and art that try to do what the other is doing -- does he have particular examples? — Moliere

As I recall (I don't have the lectures to hand right now) he mentions a few examples of art that tries to be philosophical. Mystical French and German painters whose work had self-consciously metaphysical themes (it's possible that's in lecture 10, not sure). But these days we can think of better examples, since the rise of conceptual art. It's in the name after all.

I went to a gallery once and in one room there was a bunch of bananas on the window sill. The label had the title "bananas, urine injected". Another, much earlier example is Duchamp's "Fountain". The artists are provoking philosophical questions.

EDIT: I posted that by mistake and I hadn't even got to philosophy that tries to be art. I'll put that in another post.

Cool. And, OK, good examples.

I don't think he mentions anyone, but examples of philosophy that tries to be art might be the novels of Sartre and Camus, late Heidegger, and maybe some of the more poetic Nietzsche like TSZ—Adorno was heavily influenced by Nietzsche but he might have been less keen on the arty stuff, but I'm not sure.

The reason I mention the above is while I get the sense that Adorno is hounded, I also get the sense that the positivists are wrong about science too :D -- science is a speculative endeavor. It doesn't just give you a list of facts, but explains the facts, orders them, predicts them and so forth. — Moliere

This is a very good point. It's too easy when reading Adorno (and Horkheimer) to interpret them as always viewing science as the enemy, but that's likely not the case, and what you say here is a bridge to a better way of thinking about it.

A question to keep in mind for myself, then -- I thought of Sartre and Camus, but would defend them as "good" examples of blending the disciplines while keeping them separate too.

That's roughly right as far as it goes, but I think it probably minimizes vast differences, between (a) the nonidentical and the mystical, and of course (b) what to do about it. — Jamal

Sure, there are differences, first and foremost because they belong to different traditions.

However, both thinkers seem to be pointing to the same thing or structure, each from their own perspective, and each demand that it is recognized as the most important.

Wittgenstein, in TLP, suggests that once every sayable, scientific, and logical question is resolved, when language reaches its limit, what remains is not nothing, but the mystery itself, which is not expressed - because it is beyond propositional knowledge - but revealed, shown. This might explain his insistence on linguistic clarity.

Adorno, on the other hand, thinks that a thing can never be fully grasped by a concept, the non-identical is the residue, what remains, of whatever is beyond the limit of its own concept, which is revealed through negation and critique.

They are both playing with limits and are in the business of demystification.

What to do about it is certainly different, Adorno is active, whereas (early) Wittgenstein is passive. I think that early Wittgenstein was/became disillusioned with philosophy, that it cannot be salvaged, believing in its purely epistemological/scientific nature. This of course later changed in his Philosophical Investigations. Whereas Adorno never lost faith, believing that philosophy can be restructured so as to yield what it was always meant to and promised, negative dialectics being the way forward.

What to do about it is certainly different, Adorno is active, whereas (early) Wittgenstein is passive. — Pussycat

There's a type of activity, which is sort of passive, what Wittgenstein called idling. Wittgenstein criticized this, but he was wont to demonstrate in his use of words, what he criticized with the meaning of his words, in a sort of hypocritical way.

Now, as much as Adorno calls thinking and theorizing an activity, simply thinking is really not doing anything. So Adorno seems to request a balance between the Marxist's call for action, and the logical requirement of theory. To avoid irrational acts we must make rationality into an act itself, so that it can qualify as virtuous.

However, both thinkers seem to be pointing to the same thing or structure, each from their own perspective, and each demand that it is recognized as the most important. — Pussycat

I used to think so too, but now I’m not so sure. Is one pointing at the same thing when one says it's unsayable as when one says that concepts are distorting it by the exclusion of particularity? One is pointing at the unrepresentable, while the other is pointing at the misrepresented. The former is transcendental, the latter is immanent. So their differing views on what to do about it can be seen as presuming different ontologies, i.e., a different "it".

Take the example of pain. Adorno would say that the pain scale does conceptual violence to pain by reducing particular suffering to numbers—the pain as experienced is nonidentical with pain as measured (this is not to say he was against its use in medicine). But Wittgenstein would not say that pain is unsayable or mystical; that one cannot “say” one's private experience is unproblematic, because that's not what language does.

I’ve alluded in this post to both early and late Wittgenstein without distinguishing them. It might matter but I’m not sure.

LND lecture 10

In this lecture he talks about essence vs. appearance, philosophical depth, and reaffirms the importance of negation. He's circling around concepts already introduced, trying new ones, especially to elaborate on his version of speculation.

The basic thrust of the lecture is to argue for a philosophy that smashes through the facade of appearances.

He clears the ground by rejecting the traditional quest for absolute certainty. Oddly, he seems to associate this with positivism. I think he does this because he thinks the latter, in condemning thought that goes beyond facts, functions in the same way as the demand for certain foundations. In both cases, one supposedly needs an established ground before one can philosophize legitimately.

This brings him to appearance vs. essence, which we can think of as appearance vs. reality so as to remove any hints of essentialism: the essence behind the appearance is not anything transcendent, but rather the form of something which is specific to the conditions—usually, of course, social and historical conditions.

He is committed to maintaining the centrality of this distinction, because of ideology. In case there's any confusion, Adorno always uses this term in the Marxian sense:

Ideology is a system of concepts and views which serves to make sense of the world while obscuring the social interests that are expressed therein, and by its completeness and relative internal consistency tends to form a closed system and maintain itself in the face of contradictory or inconsistent experience.

The word is used with a wide variety of connotations, even among Marxists; Terry Eagleton, in his Ideologies, lists a range of meanings:

[*] the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;
[*] a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
[*] ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
[*] false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
[*] systematically distorted communication;
[*] that which offers a position for a subject;
[*] forms of thought motivated by social interest;
[*] identity thinking;
[*] socially necessary illusion; the conjecture of discourse and power;
[*] the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
[*] action-oriented sets of beliefs;
[*] the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
[*] semiotic closure;
[*] the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;
[*] the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality;

Marxists seek to subject all ideology to critique, uncovering the internal contradictions in an ideology and exposing the social interests expressed by it. — marxists.org

"Smashing through the facade" and "blasting open the phenomena" are ways of describing philosophy's attempt to uncover the social reality behind appearances, and the method is the critique of ideology in the context of a new epistemology, i.e., negative dialectics.

Then he says something strange: human beings are becoming ideology, and in a sense this would mean the abolition of human beings. (p.100-101)

I think what he means is that in modern industrial capitalism, supported as it is by a culture industry, ideology is now all-pervading and there is little space left for independence of thought and action. Human beings have the potential to be spontaneous, to be free, to question prevailing beliefs, and to resist compulsion—and to some extent they have at times realized these potentials. But now, subjectivity is a standardized construct of ideology rather than the source of freedom and independence as it was in the Enlightenment era.

I think this is even easier to see now than it was in the sixties. Individualism seems to remain strong, and the need to form an identity that expresses one's "true self" is widely felt, and yet the resulting identities are standardized, not unique, and even nonconformity is comformist. In consumer capitalism, individuality is reduced to one's choice of car. And now, what is persistently framed as self-actualization is in fact the curation of a public profile whose features and limits are determined by social media trends and expectations, and algorithmic validation.

For some, the figure of the entrepreneur is the paradigm of individuality, but as such a paradigm it is just a standard template, produced as a by-product of the market. The meaning of autonomy shrinks within the bounds of capital, in which entrepreneurship seems to be the only road to self-actualization and autonomous engagement with the world.

Resistance seems pointless, because resistance itself is branded. The film Barbie was hailed all over the place as "subversive" and yet its feminist and anti-corporate critiques functioned, very deliberately, as marketing for Mattel. But the people who said it was subversive knew all that, so what were they thinking? Similar to autonomy, the meaning of "subversive" has shrunk to a signal.

But what about the "abolition" of human beings? He did say "in a sense," and the sense I think he intended was that there is a qualitative change in the concept and experience of being human. If the human being had once been the authentic, autonomous individual of the Enlightenment and the classic era of the bourgeoisie (which despite everything was a promising avenue for human development), then such a creature was going extinct, replaced by administered puppets with manufactured desires, their resistance pre-emptively co-opted.

On the surface this might seem to rely on a transcendent essentialism of the human, but it's not that. It's a response to specific conditions rather than an appeal to an essential purity. Adorno thought the very ability to think critically was actually in danger, and that what had been the dominant conception of human beings, which was in itself a product of specific historical conditions but at the same time provided space for resistance, was losing its anchor in reality.

Incidentally, philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller, who has a pretty good Youtube channel, has an interesting theory about all this called Profilicity. He sees Adorno as stuck in the age of authenticity and doesn't seem to think the new age of profile-based identity is all that bad.

In profilicity, the old Nietzschean motto of authenticity is modified to “become who you wish to be seen as.” Applying the terminology of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, the shift from authenticity to profilicity can be described as a shift towards thoroughgoing “second-order observation.”

While in authenticity recognition, including self-recognition, is supposed to emanate from authentic selves who see what they see in the mode of individual first-order observation, in profilicity observation is more complex and is fascinated by observing how and what others observe. — Hans-Georg Moeller

Well, that was a lengthy digression. I'll probably post something else about this lecture soon.

NOTE: After I'm done with this lecture I'm going to skim over Adorno's notes for lectures 11-25 and bring things up here if I find them interesting. What I won't be doing do is reading "The Theory of Intellectual Experience," which is printed first alongside the notes to lectures 11-25, and then in full in an Appendix, because this is just the introduction to ND, and we'll be coming to that very soon.

An explanation is unhelpfully buried in the notes to lecture 10:

Since these notes [Adorno's notes for lectures 11-25] for the most part refer to specific pages of the ‘Introduction’ to Negative Dialectics, they are printed on the right-hand side of the page and juxtaposed to the related passage from the Introduction on the left-hand side. The Introduction is given in extenso in the Appendix of the present volume.

After I'm done with this lecture I'm going to skim over Adorno's notes for lectures 11-25 and bring things up here if I find them interesting. What I won't be doing do is reading "The Theory of Intellectual Experience," which is printed first alongside the notes to lectures 11-25, and then in full in an Appendix, because this is just the introduction to ND, and we'll be coming to that very soon. — Jamal

Cool.

It was my understanding that we'd be switching over to ND after Lecture 10.

Pretty much. I'm just saying I might skim read the rest in one go and write a post collecting a few thoughts about what's there, just before starting ND.

:up:

Something I found interesting in this lecture is the connection of speculation to depth, and thereby speculation to the appearance/essence distinction. Part of me wonders if it is better to read it as "essence" since he makes the remark about how Marx was enough of a Hegelian to maintain essence in his philosophy, but I'm not sure. Either way I can see avoiding debates on essentialism is a good idea :D -- I'm just thinking out loud on how to interpret him.

So a quick summary as I understand it: Philosophy is resistance to the facts as they appear. It engages in speculation in order to probe the depths of the phenomena, and while Adorno emphasizes that this is never a complete process it's something that philosophy must do in order to obtain depth, or even be a worthwhile philosophy. He makes some notes about how there's a false depth which is bound up with suffering such that expressions of happiness are taken as a mark of shallowness, and Adorno notes how this is to miss depth for what depth is about. Depth expresses human suffering rather than says "I am suffering, so I am wise" -- analogy to the artists who give impressions, and thereby were more metaphysical painters than the ones who painted explicit scenes of people "touching the source".

Then he says something strange: human beings are becoming ideology, and in a sense this would mean the abolition of human beings. — Jamal

What he says is that subjective behaviour of human beings is just the appearance, while the objective social structure which in a sense is the cause of that behaviour, is the essence. So what we take as the immediate, subjective behaviour, is really the mediated. He turns around the common perspective. Then, he says that this perspective, which we commonly hold, of the immediacy of consciousness, is just appearance, and actually an illusion. Further, this illusion is "socially necessary", so it is ideology.

I would interpret this as similar to Plato's noble lie. The idea of the immediacy of consciousness, and priority of the subjective human existence, is set up by the social structures, as an ideology of deception, because it hides from the individual subject, the reality that the individual being is just an extension of the true essence, which is society.

So, when he says that human beings are ideology, I think he means that the idea of individuality, that we are distinct individual human beings with that sort of freedom, is ideology. So, human beings are ideology. Further, I think he says that this ideology needs to be abolished, because it is an "inhumanity".

He goes on to say, that speculation is the "anti-ideological element". It is hostility towards the ideological, and philosophy is "the power of resistance". He actually proposes this as the only true definition of philosophy. But this resistance must not be irrational, it must develop within a theoretical framework.

That is what brings him to "depth". This is a tricky concept because of the connotations, especially in German thinking, and we must heed them. He reviews a definition of depth as the "theodicy of suffering", which he says is itself shallow, and this itself is viewed as an ideology.

We could say, then, that an essential aspect of the concept of depth
is that the insistence on the idea of depth negates the average
traditional manifestation of it. And the idea of a radical secularization of
the theological meanings, in which something like the salvaging of
such meanings can alone be sought, comes in fact very close to such
a programme of depth. The dignity of a philosophy cannot be decided
by its result. Nor can it be decided by whether it results in something
affirmative or approving, or by whether it has a so-called meaning. — p106

His conclusion: "the mark of depth nowadays is resistance". This is not a shallow resistance of "bleating".

" Depth means to refuse resolutely to remain satisfied with the surface, and to insist on breaking through the façade."

...

" Resistance means refusing to allow the law
governing your own behaviour to be prescribed by the ostensible or
actual facts. In that sense resistance transcends the objects while
remaining closely in touch with them." - p107

"What I am describing to you is philosophical
depth regarded subjectively – namely, not as the justification
or amelioration of suffering, but as the expression of suffering,
something which understands the necessity of suffering in the
very act of expression. " - p 108

What he says is that subjective behaviour of human beings is just the appearance, while the objective social structure which in a sense is the cause of that behaviour, is the essence. So what we take as the immediate, subjective behaviour, is really the mediated. He turns around the common perspective. Then, he says that this perspective, which we commonly hold, of the immediacy of consciousness, is just appearance, and actually an illusion. Further, this illusion is "socially necessary", so it is ideology.

I would interpret this as similar to Plato's noble lie. The idea of the immediacy of consciousness, and priority of the subjective human existence, is set up by the social structures, as an ideology of deception, because it hides from the individual subject, the reality that the individual being is just an extension of the true essence, which is society.

So, when he says that human beings are ideology, I think he means that the idea of individuality, that we are distinct individual human beings with that sort of freedom, is ideology. So, human beings are ideology. Further, I think he says that this ideology needs to be abolished, because it is an "inhumanity". — Metaphysician Undercover

You're quite close to my own idea of ideology, but your interpretation differs from mine at critical points.

First, I think you're missing that Adorno is noting a historical degradation:

It follows that since the immediate consciousness of human beings is a socially necessary illusion, it is in great measure ideology. And when I said in my lecture on society ... that I regarded it as the signature of our age that human beings were becoming ideology, then this is precisely what I meant. — p100

It's not that subjectivity is just ideology, but that it's becoming ideology. He marks a contrast between the era in which the ideology of liberal humanism had something real, or emancipatory, about it; and the late twentieth century, in which it has been entirely hollowed out. My way of putting this was to say that ideology has become all-pervasive due to the total absorption of the masses into the system by means of bureaucracy, all-encompassing commodification, mass media and the culture industry.

The liberal humanism of the Enlightenment was a force of emancipation: from the domination of religion and the traditional feudal network of obligation. Certainly, it was (and still is) ideology in its justification of the rights of property and of capitalist exploitation by the appeal to free and equal exchange and so on, but even so it represented the subject's effort to resist domination. It had this potential because it was produced by real changes in social relations, that is, it was not merely a lie.

I think Adorno is a self-consciously Enlightenment thinker in that he remains wedded to this emancipatory potential of the subject while remaining relentlessly critical, even going so far as to turn the Enlightenment resistance to domination back on itself to expose its fundamental contradictions and tendencies towards domination. Incidentally, I'm tempted to say he was the last Enlightenment thinker: after him you get the domesticated liberalism of Habermas and Rawls on one side (and more recently, in the popular sphere, the triumphalism of Pinker's Enlightenment Now); and postmodernism on the other. [EDIT: But I suppose Zizek carries on the tradition].

So, human beings are ideology. Further, I think he says that this ideology needs to be abolished, because it is an "inhumanity". — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this is a crucial misinterpretation. Look at what he says:

If anyone objects that I am lending support to the claim that in a sense this would mean the abolition of human beings, I can only reply by saying in good American: that’s just too bad.

He is not lending support to the abolition of human beings (in the sense of human subjectivity), but to the claim that human beings are being abolished. He doesn't mean he thinks it's a good thing; he means that we should not not be afraid to point it out. This is backed up by the comments immediately following:

By this I mean that this abolition is being brought about not by the inhumanity of the idea
that describes it [the idea that human beings are being abolished], but by the inhumanity of the conditions to which this idea refers [late capitalism]. And if you will permit me to make a personal remark, it seems to me very questionable for people to take offence at statements that go against their own beliefs, however justified and legitimate these beliefs may be, simply because they find such statements uncomfortable ... — p101

The statement that human beings are being abolished makes people uncomfortable, but the abolition of potentially critical and emancipatory subjectivity, though a very bad thing, is real and we have to face up to it.

Something I found interesting in this lecture is the connection of speculation to depth, and thereby speculation to the appearance/essence distinction. Part of me wonders if it is better to read it as "essence" since he makes the remark about how Marx was enough of a Hegelian to maintain essence in his philosophy, but I'm not sure. Either way I can see avoiding debates on essentialism is a good idea :D -- I'm just thinking out loud on how to interpret him. — Moliere

Yes, good point. Preserving "essence" importantly traces his use of the legacy of Hegel and Marx.

So a quick summary as I understand it: Philosophy is resistance to the facts as they appear. It engages in speculation in order to probe the depths of the phenomena, and while Adorno emphasizes that this is never a complete process it's something that philosophy must do in order to obtain depth, or even be a worthwhile philosophy. He makes some notes about how there's a false depth which is bound up with suffering such that expressions of happiness are taken as a mark of shallowness, and Adorno notes how this is to miss depth for what depth is about. Depth expresses human suffering rather than says "I am suffering, so I am wise" -- analogy to the artists who give impressions, and thereby were more metaphysical painters than the ones who painted explicit scenes of people "touching the source". — Moliere

You have a talent for concision. :up:

A couple of other things I found interesting in lecture 10:

I believe that I need only remind you of those who are quiet in the land for you to realize where this kind of depth is leading, namely, to a pure evasion compared to which we have to stick with Hegel’s insight, and indeed Goethe’s, that depth does not involve immersion merely in the subject which, once it comes to reflect on itself, discovers nothing but an ‘empty depth’, but rather that depth is inseparable from the strength to externalize oneself. If a person is deep, he will be able to make that depth a reality in what he does and what he produces. In contrast to that, the depth a person as an isolated subject is aware of may serve to enable him to think of himself as belonging to an elite, and indeed a declining and endangered elite, but it will have no substance. For if it had substance it could be expressed as an act of externalization. The individual who cultivates himself as an absolute and as the guarantor of depth, and who imagines that he can discover meaning in himself, is a mere abstraction, a mere illusion vis-à-vis the whole. Inevitably, the meanings that he then discovers in himself as an absolute being-for-himself are in reality not his own absolute possession but merely a collective residue, the dregs of the universal consciousness. And this is merely an older form of debasement, I would say, one that differs from its present incarnation only in that it has not quite kept pace with current forms of debasement. So what I believe is that the mark of depth nowadays is resistance, and by this I mean resistance to the general bleating. — p106-107

As a deracinated, debased subject myself, I resemble that remark.

I like his attitude to happiness:

What I am saying, then, is that this concept of depth, which amounts to a theodicy of suffering, is itself shallow. It is shallow because, while it behaves as if were opposed to the shallow, rather mundane desire for sensual happiness, in reality it does no more than appropriate worldly values which it then attempts to elevate into something metaphysical. — p104

The idea that happiness is shallow is itself shallow.

In arguing that the great Impressionists were superior to self-consciously metaphysical painters:

you will perceive something like a certain absence of sensuous happiness, a certain melancholy of sensuous happiness arising out of the picture before you ... — p105

He's not saying that sensuous happiness is shallow and Impressionist paintings are great because they don't depict it, but rather that, in parallel with what I was saying about utopia, they negatively raise the prospect of true happiness to consciousness in the form of longing and melancholoy.

Then at the end:

This speculative surplus that goes beyond whatever is the case, beyond mere existence, is the element of freedom in thought, and because it is, because it alone does stand for freedom, because it represents the tiny quantum of freedom we possess, it also represents the happiness of thought. It is the element of freedom because it is the point at which the expressive need of the subject breaks through the conventional and canalized ideas in which he moves, and asserts himself. — p108

I think we see the influence of Nietzsche here, and I see a parallel between the dismissive "deep" attitude to a supposedly shallow happiness, an attitude which is itself shallow, and the pompous aloofness of some philosophy, especially what we might call fan-philosophy (on the model of fan-fiction), that has contempt for the body.

Adorno is not afraid to stand up for happiness and pleasure. But elsewhere he criticizes the ideology of happiness:

The admonitions to be happy, voiced in concert by the scientifically epicurean sanatorium-director and the highly-strung propaganda chiefs of the entertainment industry, have about them the fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously down stairs when he comes home irritable from his office. It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself he cannot hear the screams of pain. That is the model of an unhampered capacity for happiness. — Minima Moralia 38

Note the extra-Adornian claim I've put in bold (Minima Moralia was written right at the end of the war).

In the same work he has an analysis of happiness that I find true to life:

To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after-image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity. — Minima Morali 72

I have at times thought to myself, "in the future I'm going to think back on this moment as a happy one, so I should try to raise this happiness, which in the normal run of things will only become apparent later, to consciousness in the here-and-now." Now I'm in that future, I think back on those moments and mainly just remember my effort to be consciously happy, so I'm not sure if I really was happy and the memory of this conscious effort is obscuring it, or if I really wasn't happy and that's why I can only remember that conscious effort. This is my punishment for sinning against happiness.

You have a talent for concision. :up: — Jamal

Thanks :)

I find myself conflicted often with his various remarks on happiness, and ideology, and especially the use of the term "bleating" -- reminds me of Nietzsche's disdain for the herd.

There's part of me that agrees a lot with him on happiness in that there is nothing shallow or deep about happiness -- but I'd say the same of suffering and melancholy and pain. And I like his approach because I get the sense that the essence of something comes forth through this back-and-forth process -- but there's still this element of desire as a lack that I generally think is a common but wrong way to think on happiness since I don't think happiness is something that even can be fulfilled or pursued so much as worked towards by stopping doing what we think will make us happy and starting doing what will actually make us happy. But that's not as tragic as Adorno's philosophy :D