Could you provide the exact quote from Negative Dialectics? — Number2018

We're reading the lectures at the moment, haven't got to ND itself. In lecture 1:

I believe that these considerations will suffice for the moment to show you how we are compelled from the vantage point of objective reality to apply the concept of contradiction, not simply as the contradiction between two unrelated objects, but as an immanent contradiction, a contradiction in the object itself. — p.9

In the notes for the lecture it's laid out like this:

Basic conception: structure of contradiction, in a twofold sense:

(1) the contradictory nature of the concept, i.e. the concept in contradiction to the thing to which it refers

[...]

(2) the contradictory character of reality: model: antagonistic society. — p.1

Adorno explicitly points out the existence of a gap between 'a part of the object' and 'the definitions imposed on it by thinking.' — Number2018

On the face of it, that's consistent with the claim that reality is contradictory.

This is a blurb from the Adorno entry in the SEP.


"In contrast to the “scientific dualism” of word and thing, formal logic and inference, Adorno calls for an explicitly “aesthetic” method of “configurative language”: “a dialectically intertwined and explicatively indissoluable unity of concept and thing” (ibid., 38) which makes disclosive truth possible. In Negative Dialectics he captures this idea with the claim that “In dialectics … the rhetorical element is on the side of content” (1966a [1973, 41]). Recent scholarship has attempted to bring Adorno’s thinking about language (and rationality) into critical discussion with certain Wittgensteinian, pragmatist, and neo-Hegelian strains of anglophone philosophy (Demmerling
1994;"

It sounds a lot like Russell/early-Witt where the world is "all that is the case" which indicates unity of true propositions and world, or content and thing. I'm guessing that we're supposed to have ejected ontological commitments prior to reading Adorno. We're ontological anti-realists.

How do we interpret Adorno’s insistence that predicative judgments imply identities, i.e., that bringing two things under the same concept amounts to equating them? So far I’ve had to settle with the view that there is such a tendency — but Adorno’s claim is stronger. — Jamal

Yes, I have difficulty with this as well. In simple predication, "A is B" signifies a subject and a predicate. In no way is the subject identical to the predicate. However, the predication may be taken as an identity statement in the sense that it could function to help identify which objects correspond with the named subject, A. In another sense we might identify a named object A, as being of the type or classification of B. We'd say "A is a B". This is a stronger sense of identity.

What I think, is that when Adorno mentions "predicative judgements", he is referring to predicate logic, or "first order logic". If I understand correctly, predicate logic allows objects to be classed together according to predicates, as a set, and this establishes an equality between the individual objects. So for example, if we name something A only if the thing has property B, then all As have B. This allows us to say "if A then B", and there is an equality established amongst all the things named A by that relation to B. For that specific purpose then, all things named A are the same, identical, in the sense that B is implied.

The deeper issue, which I believe Adorno will address, is that equating things is this way is not truly giving the things an identity because the equality is based on the predicate, and proper identity is assigned to the object itself. So when a logician asserts that this type of equality is identity, that is a pretense. And if it is necessary to accept this form of equality as identity, in order to make the logical procedure, that is what he called logical coercion.

I believe that these considerations will suffice for the moment to show you how we are compelled from the vantage point of objective reality to apply the concept of contradiction, not simply as the contradiction between two unrelated objects, but as an immanent contradiction, a contradiction in the object itself. — p.9

This I believe could constitute a challenge to the law of identity itself. If contradiction inheres within the object itself, this would seem to imply that the object could have no identity. But he does not clarify what he means in this statement, and the ancients allowed contradictory predications so long as they are not at the same time. This is how change was understood, a negation of the property, a property come form its contrary. That requires temporal extension.

This I believe could constitute a challenge to the law of identity itself. If contradiction inheres within the object itself, this would seem to imply that the object could have no identity. But he does not clarify what he means in this statement, and the ancients allowed contradictory predications so long as they are not at the same time. This is how change was understood, a negation of the property, a property come form its contrary. That requires temporal extension. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, he does immediately give the prime example he has in mind of what "the object" is: antagonistic society. And despite our worries about formal logic and predication vs identity (and your concern about identity vs equality), it doesn't seem far-fetched to say that society is contradictory at least in some sense (and he gives examples).

Although it's tempting to say no, it's just that the concepts we apply to society contradict with it (like the freedom example), he wants to say that the contradiction is actually in the object, society itself, because, I think, for material reasons there are immanent social antagonisms and they cannot be dissolved by reframing. The logical move to dissolve the contradiction (like I did here) obscures the antagonism and does violence to what's really going on.

But the fact that I used "antagonisms" a couple of times there, instead of "contradictions", gets to the root of the problem. And indeed, I think some modern Hegelians prefer to use that kind of language (antagonisms, tensions, conflicts), abandoning the idea that logical contradictions reside in the object. I expect we can come back to this issue after we've seen him operate, and after he addresses it in ND itself.

There's a useful section in Espen Hammer's book, Adorno's Modernism (the section "Predication, identification, and truth" in chapter 4, which can be read online here), which concludes with Hammer's own assessment:

Although no a priori “logics” dictates that such a tendency should emerge, modern agents are prone to use concepts in overly subsumptive ways, focusing on universality and generality while downplaying, and in some cases bracketing, the conceptualized particular. They do this not because the nature of language forces them to do so, but, rather, because social and economic pressures are such that quantification, orientation towards exchange value, commodification, calculation, and so forth, are being privileged (both epistemically and in cruder social and everyday terms) over attention to the particular (at least for its own sake).

In other words, Adorno is wrong to claim that logic and language themselves are responsible for the coerciveness of identity thinking. He is right that thinking in modernity leads to the extinguishing of valuable particularity, but he is wrong about the ultimate cause; the cause is not an inherent tendency in logic and language, but is something to do with social and economic pressures.

That strikes me immediately as eminently reasonable and common-sensical — but Adorno would say we should be on guard against common sense. It has to be said that Hammer seems generally a lot less sympathetic to Adorno than other commentators, so I'm not taking his as the final word on the topic — after all, we want to apply the principle of hermeneutic charity at all times in this reading.

EDIT: So what I'm thinking now is that I'm quite happy to accept a twofold structure of contradiction, with the caveat that the contradictions in the object are more like antagonisms than true contradictions. And that raises the question as to whether it really matters, as Adorno seems to say it does, if we drop the idea of logical contradiction when talking about the object (reality, society).

Well, he does immediately give the prime example he has in mind of what "the object" is: antagonistic society. And despite our worries about formal logic and predication vs identity (and your concern about identity vs equality), it doesn't seem far-fetched to say that society is contradictory at least in some sense (and he gives examples). — Jamal

I have a short, and hopefully concise, reply to make to this, and then we can leave the subject until it resurfaces. In my opinion, "society" refers to a concept rather than an object. I believe Aristotle imposed the law of identity as a means for distinguishing objects from concepts. An object has an identity, a concept does not. This allowed him to create a separation between material things, as primary substance, and the "mathematical objects" of Platonism which are not substantial. A material thing constitutes "primary substance", and there are no material things which words like "society" and "freedom" refer to. They are lacking in substance and are purely conceptual.

Notice, that the law of identity, as I present it, provides the basis for the Identity logic which Adorno rejects. If it is an object it has an identity, and vise versa, and this constitutes the secondary sense of "identity" as the logical identity, of what it means to be an object, to have this predication, "identity". After Hegel denied the usefulness of the law of identity, we have many logicians who blur the category distinction between object and concept. But this creates difficulty in determining when and where the law of identity is applicable. Along with this, the applicability of the other two laws, contradiction and excluded middle are questionable, as demonstrated by Peirce. Further, without grounding truth in primary substance (material object) the applicability of different types of logic, like modal logic and fuzzy logic for example, is not well disciplined. That I believe, is the principal issue involved with blurring the category separation between object and concept, unclear rules for the applicability of different logic types.

In other words, Adorno is wrong to claim that logic and language themselves are responsible for the coerciveness of identity thinking. He is right that thinking in modernity leads to the extinguishing of valuable particularity, but he is wrong about the ultimate cause; the cause is not an inherent tendency in logic and language, but is something to do with social and economic pressures. — Jamal

I agree with this, and the "social and economic pressures" could be generalized as a rapidly changing world with evolving knowledge and social conditions. However, I believe that we must take "the coerciveness of identity thinking" from the very top, or very bottom depending on how you look at it to understand it properly. At the very bottom is the law of identity and the strict category distinction between object and concept. The coerciveness is analogous to an ethical principle. In a rapidly changing world, new situations and circumstances arise which extend far beyond the applicability of the old rules, and we need to adapt quickly. Efficiency generally guides us, but what principles distinguish good ends from bad ends, or truth from falsity? This is the inevitable result of refusing the division between method and result, or process and content. Emphasis is placed on getting the job done without due consideration as to what is being done. We are left with a hole where "truth" or "good" used to be.

In my opinion, "society" refers to a concept rather than an object. — Metaphysician Undercover

In my opinion, which I believe I share with Adorno, when we talk about society we are not talking about a concept, therefore “society” doesn’t refer to a concept. Sure, it’s not a bundle of moderately sized dry goods (paraphrasing Austin), but it’s something real with an objective structure all the same. What matters to Adorno is the subject-object polarity, with the philosopher or whoever as the subject and, most relevantly, society or a part or aspect of society as the object.

Otherwise…

I agree with this — Metaphysician Undercover

I just want to point out that what you’re agreeing with here is not my own position but is my rewording of Espen Hammer’s position.

(I agree it’s best to revisit this topic down the line; I’m not sure what else to say about it)

But the fact that I used "antagonisms" a couple of times there, instead of "contradictions", gets to the root of the problem. And indeed, I think some modern Hegelians prefer to use that kind of language (antagonisms, tensions, conflicts), abandoning the idea that logical contradictions reside in the object. I expect we can come back to this issue after we've seen him operate, and after he addresses it in ND itself. — Jamal

That paragraph is particularly perspicuous.

...the cause is not an inherent tendency in logic and language, but is something to do with social and economic pressures. — Jamal

Indeed.

Addenda: I left this thread and went to , where I found what is apparently a case in point of the approach that is seen as problematic. So we read 'A ball would be round because it is called "round," as opposed to being called round because it is round.' At issue is the problem of why the ball might be grouped with other round things. But here I can't shake off the view that Adorno might mistakenly be regarding identity (a=a) as much the same as predication.

This is another introduction to Negative Dialectics by Susan Buck-Morss.

It's brilliant, but I definitely wouldn't call it an introduction. It traces Adorno's thinking through his interactions with Walter Benjamin, Lukacs, Brecht, etc.

It's brilliant, but I definitely wouldn't call it an introduction. It traces Adorno's thinking through his interactions with Walter Benjamin, Lukacs, Brecht, etc. — Jamal

Maybe background would be a better word then. One of Adorno's preoccupations was with the difference between the concept of the thing and an example of the thing in the wild. Imagine that your mind is trying to hold the world in its hands, but the world is like sand and some of it always slips through your mind's fingers. I want to know why that was so important to Adorno.

:up:

But I'm giving Adorno the benefit of the doubt at this stage.

As am I. I'm interested becasue of ethical concerns, and the appeal of respect for the suffering of particular beings that are "crushed" by universalising systems... from Habermas; together with the explicit move toward escaping systematisation by refusing the closure of synthesis. But I'm biting my tongue.

In my opinion, which I believe I share with Adorno, when we talk about society we are not talking about a concept, therefore “society” doesn’t refer to a concept. Sure, it’s not a bundle of moderately sized dry goods (paraphrasing Austin), but it’s something real with an objective structure all the same. What matters to Adorno is the subject-object polarity, with the philosopher or whoever as the subject and, most relevantly, society or a part or aspect of society as the object. — Jamal

That you, Adorno, and others believe that "society" refers to an object, rather than to a concept, because it is something real with "an objective structure", does not really prove that this is the truth. Platonists believe that numbers and other mathematical concepts are objects. But the fact that these concepts have what can be called "an objective structure" does not justify the claim that these concepts are objects. This is because there is much ambiguity in the meaning of "objective", and we would need a clear definition of "object", and base "objective" on that definition, to make that judgement without a likelihood of equivocation.

This is where the law of identity plays a role. We can define "object" as something that has an identity which inheres within itself, rather than the identity which we assign to it, and this excludes artificially created axiomatic concepts from being objects. If however, we deny the applicability of the law of identity, as Hegel did, and take up a position of "non-identity", then what will serve as the means for distinguishing objects from concepts? And if contradiction is seen to inhere within concepts, then it will also be seen to inhere within objects, if we do not apply the principle that an object is a type of thing which has an identity and obeys the law of non-contradiction.

Anyway, I'm more than happy to drop this digression and continue with the reading. I'm interested to see where he is leading us.

That you, Adorno, and others believe that "society" refers to an object, rather than to a concept, because it is something real with "an objective structure", does not really prove that this is the truth. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I just took a first stab at making it apparent. But if you're looking for a refutation of idealism in Adorno you might be disappointed.

But consider: it is the case that I live in an organized group of people, and that the way this group is organized has effects on me, providing opportunities for and imposing limits on my actions. Since it is so important, it is one of the things I think about, one of the things I reason about with concepts.

Some philosophers might say that money, government, and society are not things, even are not real, variously because those purported objects do not have physical properties, are socially constructed, are unstable chunks of discourse, are secretly the names of mental constructs, and so on. Mereological nihilists will even say there are no composite objects at all.

I don't intend to refute those philosophers — some of those positions are probably consistent with mine anyway. The point is that individual human beings live in the context of groups that have effects on those individuals and which are also affected by them — and which those individuals can think about, making society an object of thought experienced as something beyond their thoughts, and thus an object.

Most importantly for Adorno, what we think about does not become thereby exhausted by our thought, i.e., it is more than conceptual. It's true that he hasn't refuted idealism, and he won't try. He will try to give you his picture of the world. This will happen through a kind of persuasion.

Insisting that society is not an object seems to miss the point — but it's possible I did not understand you.

EDIT: Important to note though that while we are treating society as an object in this bare, abstract fashion, Adorno is very much against reification and hypostatization, so there is some interesting complexity here.



:cool:

So that leads me to frame Adorno's project in the following way. Real things don't quite fit our mental categories, but we cannot just deal with this using different categories, because all conceptualization involves abstraction, generalization, and exclusion, so different concepts will just obscure resistant particularity in different ways. Thus the problem is deep in conceptualization itself, and only a new way of thinking, amounting to a new way of using concepts — one that is always negative, that is, declining to shout "YES" and sit back with satisfaction at having matched reality or reached a synthesis — can give space to particularity and to the richness and messiness of the real world.

Without knowing much about the method of constellations that he will introduce later, from what I can glean it's something like very deliberately using clusters of partially successful concepts, no doubt always flexible and shifting. Is that along the lines of Zizek's use of parallax, I wonder?

But wouldn't that count as a positive answer to the problem of identity thinking? :chin:

Excellent.

A version for those of a more analytic persuasion, b y way of checking my understanding:

Reality always exceeds the concepts we apply to it, in such a way that no concept, however refined, can say all there is to say. Changing concepts doesn’t solve this, because any alternate concepts will also miss saying something... So we have to acknowledge this, accepting the messiness of the real world.

How we do that, remains to be seen.

Looks good.

So making it analytic basically involves saying the same thing but without the rhetorical flourishes and excessive Latinate verbiage? :wink:

Well... :smirk:

Reality always exceeds the concepts we apply to it, in such a way that no concept, however refined, can all there is to say. — Banno

Maybe it's this;

We know our concepts are limited because the world surprises us, disappoints us, goes all to hell in ways that our theories didn't predict. In this is a kind of materialism. The evidence for materialism is on-going suffering.

So if we spent time poking our heads out of old concepts like a turtle from its shell, would we discover solutions to suffering that we were oblivious to?

But consider: it is the case that I live in an organized group of people, and that the way this group is organized has effects on me, providing opportunities for and imposing limits on my actions. Since it is so important, it is one of the things I think about, one of the things I reason about with concepts. — Jamal

The issue which brought us to this disagreement is the epistemological implications of one's ontological judgement, as to what qualifies as "an object". If I allow that an organized group of people is an object, simply because that group is important to me, though it may well be the case that some members of that group believe X is good or true, while others believe X is bad or false, then we allow that contradiction inheres within that object. At this point, we forfeit the identity principle, i.e. the law of identity, which states that an object has an identity, and along with that forfeiture we lose the applicability of the law of non-contradiction.

The point being that by doing this, we no longer have as a tool, the principle by which we distinguish which type of existents the fundamental laws of logic are applicable to, and which type are not, therefore we lose the rule by which those laws are applied, inviting arbitrary exceptions. We allow that contradiction inheres within objects, therefore objects do not necessarily have an identity.

Consider a dual meaning of "object", one being a unified body of material substance, and the other being a goal, or end. I think you'll agree that these two are very different meanings, and to mix them up would be equivocation. Now think about the "organized group of people", and how this is "important" to you. The use of "important" indicates that this is a goal based meaning of "object", rather than a material substance based meaning of "object". Further, we can see that all value (in this word's most general sense) based "objects", extending through ethics, money, mathematics, etc., are grounded in the goal, or end, meaning of "object", rather than the material substance meaning.

So we find that contradiction readily inheres within goals, intentions, and ends, "objects" in this sense. An individual attempts to rectify such contradictions in deliberating on actions. Now the question is, do we want to annihilate the distinction between the two types of objects, allow that contradiction may inhere in all objects, and forfeit the applicability of the fundamental laws of logic. That might involve a complete denial of epistemological principles. Or, can we maintain some sort of rules as to where these laws are applicable, and not, as Peirce attempted. I'm interested to see how Adorno might proceed with his negative dialectics.

This little quote clears a couple of things up for me. It explains why Adorno backed away from supporting any sort of political activism. It affirms that he was an ontological anti-realist, and he would have sympathized with surrealism. I put the extra line spaces in:

Adorno's position did have an inner logic based on
his intellectual experiences, which by 1931 had convinced him of three things:

that any philosophy, and Marxism was certainly no exception, lost its legitimacy
when it overstepped the boundaries of material experience and claimed metaphysical knowledge (this had been the lesson of Cornelius's neo-Kantianism);

that the criterion of truth was rational rather than pragmatic, and hence theory
could not be subordinated to political or revolutionary goals;

and that avant·garde art, even when as with Schonberg's music it had no consciously political intent, could be progressive rather than simply bourgeois decadence, that it was
not mere ideology, but, at least potentially, a form of enlightenment as well . — Buck-Morss

I don't know what to say about all that MU. Your notion of concepts and objects seems incommensurable with mine, such that we're talking past each other. I'm ready to move past it, but I'll be interested to see if your questions are answered later on.

This little quote clears a couple of things up for me. It explains why Adorno backed away from supporting any sort of political activism. It affirms that he was an ontological anti-realist, and he would have sympathized with surrealism. — frank

I don't think the quotation explains his reluctance to support political activism, I don't think it affirms that he was an ontological antirealist, and I don't think he was an antirealist.

EDIT: Actually I suppose the idea that theory ought to be independent of praxis was at the root of his scepticism towards activism — but it doesn't explain his opposition to the concrete form that activism took in the sixties, i.e., why exactly he did not think much of the student protesters around 1968.

LND, Lecture 1 (continued)

I'll briefly look at one more thing in lecture 1. It's the passage where he puts his cards on the table:

But I have the best of intentions about showing you that the factors that define reality as antagonistic are the same factors as those which constrain mind, i.e. the concept, and force it into its intrinsic contradictions. To put it in a nutshell, in both cases we are dealing with the principle of mastery, the mastery of nature, which spreads its influence, which continues in the mastery of men by other men and which finds its mental reflex in the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is introduced to it or that it encounters into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of influence. — p.9

In other words, both in thought (the concept) and in society (the object), contradiction stems from or reveals the drive to master nature, which becomes also the drive to master people. This is because mastery as enacted in the world is reflected mentally in the principle of identity, which is the drive to make everything like oneself or subject to oneself.

So in ND he is reiterating and generalizing what he and Horkheimer were saying almost twenty years before in Dialectic of Enlightenment:

It is the identity of mind and its correlative, the unity of nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities.

The generality of the ideas developed by discursive logic, power in the sphere of the concept, is built on the foundation of power in reality. — Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Concept of Enlightenment

In that earlier work, the target is enlightenment, but in ND he is looking deeper, so as so find a method or model of thinking. I won't say more about it at this stage but it's good to keep in mind.

but it doesn't explain his opposition to the concrete form that activism took in the sixties, i.e., why exactly he did not think much of the student protesters around 1968. — Jamal

Buck-Morss says that was the same opposition he'd always had. The Frankfurt group began to doubt Marx regarding the power of the proletariat to transform the world when Hitler came to power. When the war started, that belief was entirely gone. Adorno had never believed Marx was right though.

I think it’s precisely because they had ceased to believe the proletariat was the revolutionary class that they — Marcuse, most notably — had such hope in the students. But Adorno didn’t share that hope.

Otherwise yeah.

Right. Adorno had never believed we can use philosophy to predict historical events, so the only part of Marxism that interested him was the part that was transmitted through Lukacs.

Lukacs was basically saying the mind-body problem originates in the separation between labor and product that takes place when a commodity takes on exchange value. In other words, the abstraction we call money is the source of the mind-body problem.

I mean, we know that everywhere the concept of money went, mathematics blossomed. Math needs that boost of abstraction to get off the ground. I think Lukacs may have been right. Adorno was definitely convinced.

Your notion of concepts and objects seems incommensurable with mine, such that we're talking past each other. — Jamal

Yes I noticed this. We employ different principles for categorization.

In other words, both in thought (the concept) and in society (the object), contradiction stems from or reveals the drive to master nature, which becomes also the drive to master people. — Jamal

I interpret that passage like this. In the case of "reality", nature is constrained by the laws of nature. In the case of thought, mind is constrained by the principle of identity.

With reference to what I said earlier, about the problem with conflating "process and result", "method and content", we have no principles here to help us judge whether this process called "mastery", is good or not.

Further, we ought to be skeptical of Adorno's representation when he says that these constraints "force it into its intrinsic contradictions". It may actually be the case that these constraints act to exclude contradictions which are already immanent. If "contradiction" becomes the basis for a judgement of bad, then this becomes a very important question, concerning the described mastery.

I don't think it affirms that he was an ontological antirealist, and I don't think he was an antirealist. — Jamal

I went back looking for where I may have been mistaken. Ontological anti-realism is skepticism about ontology. One formulation would be to say we just don't have the God's-eye-view necessary to determine whether the world is made of mind-stuff or non-mind-stuff.

Through his life, Adorno was along the lines of a phenomenologist. In the 1920s he was surrounded by people who were giving up altogether on reason as a path to truth. For some Marxists, reason was tainted. Adorno rejected both of these lines of thought, but still ended up as, well, an ontological anti-realist. All knowledge is "within the bounds of experience."