I interpreted Adorno differently. I don't want to drag the thread through parts of the text that have already been covered, but just to explain, these passages made me think Adorno was using or alluding to the specialized meaning Hegel gave to the word concept: — frank

I think our views can probably be made to come out as consistent. :up:

Introduction: Privilege of Experience (ii)

When Adorno uses the term "experience" recall that the introduction is meant to be an account of intellectual/spiritual/philosophical experience, the experience necessary to retain critical freedom in a debased society.

In sharp contrast to the usual scientific ideal, the objectivity of dialectical cognition needs more subject, not less. Otherwise philosophical experience shrivels. But the positivistic spirit of the epoch is allergic to this. Not everyone is supposed to be capable of such experience. It is held to be the prerogative of individuals, determined through their natural talents and life-history; to demand this as the condition of cognition, so runs the argument, would be elitist and undemocratic.

The critical theorist is a radical democrat who wants to make the world better for everyone, but at the same time requires a level of philosophical engagement that is highly demanding of individuals; only a privileged few can satisfy these demands. What wants to be democratic is necessarily undemocratic—or so it seems ("so runs the argument").

It is to be conceded that not everyone in fact is capable of the same sort of philosophical experiences, in the way that all human beings of comparable intelligence ought to be able to reproduce experiments in the natural sciences or mathematical proofs, although according to current opinion quite specific talents are necessary for this. In any case the subjective quotient of philosophy, compared with the virtually subjectless rationality of a scientific ideal which posits the substitutability of everyone with everyone else, retains an irrational adjunct. It is no natural quality. While the argument pretends to be democratic, it ignores what the administered world makes of its compulsory members. Only those who are not completely modeled after it can intellectually undertake something against it. The critique of privilege becomes a privilege: so dialectical is the course of the world. It would be fictitious to presume that everyone could understand or even be aware of all things, under historical conditions, especially those of education, which bind, spoon-feed and cripple the intellectual forces of production many times over; under the prevailing image-poverty; and under those pathological processes of early childhood diagnosed but by no means changed by psychoanalysis. If this was expected, then one would arrange cognition according to the pathic features of a humanity, for whom the possibility of experience is driven out through the law of monotony, insofar as they possessed it in the first place. The construction of the truth according to the analogy of the volonté de tous [French: popular will] – the most extreme consequence of the subjective concept of reason – would betray everyone of everything which they need, in everyone’s name.

It's true that only a few are able to engage in such experience, but this is not so much an elite privilege born of natural talent or good breeding, but is the tragic result of an administered society that leaves so little room for independent thought that only a few, by chance, make it through with their wits in order. The argument against Adorno's elitism "pretends to be democratic," purportedly arguing on behalf of the people, but what it's really doing is arguing on behalf of the administered society, taking the debased state of intellectual culture as the democratic standard. Thus the democratic objection is quite dangerous, since it attacks the very thing—independent, original critical thought—that might help diagnose society's problems correctly:

The construction of the truth according to the analogy of the volonté de tous [French: popular will] – the most extreme consequence of the subjective concept of reason – would betray everyone of everything which they need, in everyone’s name.

You don't take a vote on what is true. This notion actually stems from the relativism of the subjective concept of reason. The individual is the measure of truth, therefore the collective of all these individuals is the ultimate arbiter. The people themselves are thus betrayed by the idea that the popular will can decide what is and is not so.

So Adorno has redescribed the argument against elitism like this:

The administered society, the capitalist system, and narrow scientific and technical training have together produced stunted minds, conditioned to accept the status quo. But then they say that the statements of the intellectual should be acceptable to these minds, i.e., they should fit with standard lines of thought, must not be erratic and eccentric, etc. These, they say, are all signs of elitism. So critical thinking is automatically disqualified and conformist thinking prevails, seen as true, reasonable, realistic etc.

To those who have had the undeserved good fortune to not be completely adjusted in their inner intellectual composition to the prevailing norms – a stroke of luck, which they often enough have to pay for in terms of their relationship to the immediate environment – it is incumbent to make the moralistic and, as it were, representative effort to express what the majority, for whom they say it, are not capable of seeing or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see. The criterion of truth is not its immediate communicability to everyone. The almost universal compulsion to confuse the communication of that which is cognized with this former, all too often ranking the latter as higher, is to be resisted; while at present, every step towards communication sells truth out and falsifies it. In the meantime, everything to do with language labors under this paradox.

He insists on the necessity for independent critical thinking carried out by a lucky few, but insists that they are just that: lucky. Adorno is, then, elitist in a certain sense, but radically democratic at heart.

Still, it does look pretty elitist: it's incumbent on the intellectuals to think on behalf of the benighted masses, who cannot do it themselves, such are their crippled, pathological minds. On the other hand, this is just an uncharitable description of something that's natural and unavoidable, or perhaps rather morally imperative, in present conditions: insofar as any society-wide social movement needs intellectuals, they will be few in number and must try to focus and distil the thoughts and feeling of the non-intellectuals, and lead the way.

The criterion of truth is not its immediate communicability to everyone.

Adorno is facing up to the following problem: given that intellectuals have a responsibility to think for the general population, how will they communicate it to them, especially considering that people are structurally conditioned not to see the truth? Easily digestible, dumbed-down info nuggets are easy to communicate, but not up to the task of conveying difficult truths.

Adorno says there is a tendency to confuse communicability with truth, and this has to be resisted. But he goes further:

at present, every step towards communication sells truth out and falsifies it

This seems hyperbolically pessimistic, but I don't believe he means it quite like that. I think he means to bring out the deep conflict or "paradox" as he puts it: communicative language distorts the truth, but such language is necessary to convey the truth.

Obviously this goes back to what we were saying about his difficult prose style. In this section, he justifies it. (Some might counter that other intellectuals in the Frankfurt School, particularly Horkheimer and Marcuse, were able to write clearly and accessibly while effectively communicating the same or similar truths.).

Later on, after the glimpse of his theory of truth, which I've already covered, he returns to the theme of elitism:

Elitist arrogance has not the least place in philosophical experience. It must give an account of how much, according to its own possibility in the existent, it is contaminated with the existent, with the class relationship. In it, the chances which the universal desultorily affords to individuals turn against that universal, which sabotages the universality of such experience. If this universality were established, the experience of all particulars would thus be transformed and would cast aside much of the contingency which distorted them until that point, even where it continues to stir. Hegel’s doctrine, that the object would reflect itself in itself, survives its idealistic version, because in a changed dialectics the subject, disrobed of its sovereignty, virtually becomes thereby the reflection-form of objectivity.

"Elitist arrogance has not the least place in philosophical experience" because philosophical experience depends on a humility with regard to its own abilities, for example an awareness of the subject's own class interests. More plainly, philosophical experience demands self-reflection: e.g., what social and historical factors have shaped my perspective? Answering questions like these is to reveal how one's philosophical practice is "contaminated with the existent". The intellectuals, while able to see a bit deeper than others to see how the social totality conditions our thoughts, do not float free of the world like all-knowing guiding angels; they are as mediated and conditioned as everyone else.

Put differently, true elitists believe that in their philosophical experience they have a sovereign subjectivity, pure and uncontaminated and above the herd. Adorno, in contrast, says the philosophers must start with the knowledge that they are already contaminated, and work out how. Then, in negative dialectics...

the subject, disrobed of its sovereignty, virtually becomes thereby the reflection-form of objectivity.

Last bit:

The less that theory comes across as something definitive and all-encompassing, the less it concretizes itself, even with regard to thinking. It permits the dissolution of the systemic compulsion, relying more frankly on its own consciousness and its own experience, than the pathetic conception of a subjectivity which pays for its abstract triumph with the renunciation of its specific content would permit. This is congruent with that emancipation of individuality borne out of the period between the great idealisms and the present, and whose achievements, in spite of and because of the contemporary pressure of collective regression, are so little to be remanded in theory as the impulses of the dialectic in 1800. The individualism of the nineteenth century no doubt weakened the objectifying power of the Spirit – that of the insight into objectivity and into its construction – but also endowed it with a sophistication, which strengthens the experience of the object.

Fascinating stuff. It turns out that the privilege of experience is not just a stroke of personal luck but is an achievement of modernity: the possibility of this non-conformist kind of philosophical thought that the world needs was generated by bourgeois individualism, especially the hundred years or so of stability and progress that led up to the First World War (and Adorno's birth a few years before that).

But there are two sides to it, of course.