The situation today is one that secretly everyone finds deeply dubious, but it is also one that is so overpowering that people feel they can do nothing about it, and perhaps they can in fact do nothing about it. Nowadays – in contrast to what Hegel criticized as abstract subjectivity or abstract negativity – what predominates in the general public is an ideal of abstract positivity ... — p.17

Now, when I speak of ‘negative dialectics’ not the least important reason for doing so is my desire to dissociate myself from this fetishization of the positive ... — p.18

The fact is that what we might call the secret or the point of his philosophy is that the quintessence of all the negations it contains – not just the sum of negations but the process that they constitute – is supposed to culminate in a positive sense, namely in the famous dialectical proposition with which you are all familiar that ‘what is actual is rational’. It is precisely this point, the positive nature of the dialectic as a whole, the fact that we can recognize the totality as rational rightdown into the irrationality of its individual components, the fact that we can declare the totality to be meaningful – that is what seems tome to have become untenable. — p.19

I do not know whether the principle that no poem can be written after Auschwitz can be sustained. But the idea that we can say of the world as a whole in all seriousness that it has a meaning now that we have experienced Auschwitz, and witnessed a world in which that was possible and that threatens to repeat itself in another guise or a similar one – I remind you of Vietnam – to assert such an idea would seem to me to be a piece of cynical frivolity that is simply indefensible to what we might call the pre-philosophical mind. A philosophy that blinds itself to this fact and that in its overweening arrogance fails to absorb this reality and continues to insist that there is a meaning despite everything – this seems to me more than we can reasonably expect anyone who has not been made stupid by philosophy to tolerate (since as a matter of fact, alongside its other functions, philosophy is capable of making people stupid).

... 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. Certainly, the martyrdom and degradation suffered by those in the cattle-cars, completely without precedent, casts a harsh, deathly light on the most distant past, in whose obtuse and unplanned violence the scientifically organized kind was already teleologically at work. The identity lies in the non-identity, in what has not yet been, which denounces what has been. The statement that it’s always been the same, is untrue in its immediacy, true only through the dynamic of the totality. Whoever allows the cognition of the increase of horror to escape them, does not merely fall prey to cold-hearted contemplation, but fails to recognize, along with the specific difference of what is newest from what has gone before, simultaneously the true identity of the whole, of horror without end. — Minima Moralia, 149

Perhaps, to be more precise, with the sole difference that critical theory really signifies only the subjective side of thought, that is to say, theory, while negative dialectics signifi es not only that aspect of thought but also the reality that is affected by it. In other words, it encapsulates not just a process of thought but also, and this is good Hegel, a process affecting things. This critical character of dialectics has to be dissected into a series of elements. The first of these is the one I attempted to explain last time – as you will perhaps recollect – namely the relation of concept to thing. — p.20

Do not forget that the very fact that thinking takes place in concepts ensures that the faculty that produces concepts, namely mind, is manoeuvred into a kind of position of priority from the very outset; and that if you concede even an inch to this priority of spirit – whether in the shape of the ‘givens’ that present themselves to the mind in the form of sense data or in the shape of categories – if you concede even an inch to this principle, then there is in fact no escape from it. — p.21

The lecture is concluded by assertions that he adheres firmly to Hegelian principles — Metaphysician Undercover

I believe furthermore that at present a true philosophical critique of the hypostasis of mind is fully justified because this hypostasis is proving irresistible to philosophy, which after all operates in the medium of the intellect, which thrives exclusively and at all times in the mind.

This is a minor quibble. He says that all of his ideas are contained in Hegel's philosophy, or are contained at least in tendency. That is, interpreted a certain way, everything he's saying can be spun out of Hegel. I don't think that's the same as saying he adheres firmly to Hegelian principles. — Jamal

The enormous power of Hegel – that is the power which
impresses us so hugely today and, God knows,
it is a power that impresses me today to the point where I
am fully aware that, of the ideas that I am presenting to you, there
is not a single one that is not contained, in tendency at least, in
Hegel’s philosophy.

So, to pay respect for the difference you point out, what I see is a trick of rhetoric. He apprehends Hegel as hugely powerful in influencing the minds of men, and he has a desire to tap into that power, perhaps having political objectives. To support this end, he has mentioned some work of the younger Hegel, which is somewhat inconsistent with the older Hegel, and with reference to this, he claims everything he says is "contained" (in a qualified sense) in Hegel.

The trickery is this. He implies that he and the thoughts he presents, originate from, or have been greatly influenced by ("contained") by Hegel, suggesting that he is Hegelian. In reality, he is not, but he knows that Hegel is understood as a powerful authority, and he desires to gain support for his project by appearing to be consistent with Hegel — Metaphysician Undercover

It almost looks like he's chosen the evaluative descriptor, "negative," as a nay-saying gesture, which an uncharitable person might think is hardly better than the yay-saying he criticizes (or thinks is stupid). — Jamal

... are no longer measured against their contents, but instead are taken in isolation, so that people take up attitudes to them without bothering to inquire further into the truth content of what they refer to. For example, if we take the concept ‘positive’, which is essentially a concept expressing a relation, we see that it has no validity on its own but only in relation to something that is to be affirmed or negated. Then we find that simply because of the emotional values that it has acquired, that have accumulated around the word, the term is wrenched out of the context in which it has validity and is turned into an independent and absolute thing, the measure of all things. — p.23

Its principal cause is undoubtedly the irrevocable loss of absolutely binding uniform categories. This means that the less the mind possesses predetermined so-called substantial, unquestioned meanings, the more it tends to compensate for this by literally fetishizing concepts of its own devising which possess nothing that transcends consciousness. In short it makes absolutes of things it has created. And it achieves this by tearing them from their context and then ceasing to think of them further. — p.24

Identity thinking (epistemology)
    ↓
Hypostasization (ontology)
    ↓
Reification (sociology, politics, etc)

But I believe that, if you wish to grasp what I am aiming at but am forced to explain to you in stages, you should be clear in your minds from the outset that we are not speaking here about negativity as a universal, abstract principle of the kind that I was initially forced to develop – or not to develop, but that I placed at the start of my argument because I had to start somewhere, even if I do not believe in an absolute beginning. Instead, the negativity I am speaking about contains a pointer to what Hegel calls determinate negation. In other words, negativity of this kind is made concrete and goes beyond mere standpoint philosophy by confronting concepts with their objects and, conversely, objects with their concepts. — p.25

‘Well, if he has got a negative principle or if he thinks negativity is such an important matter then he ought really to say nothing at all’ — p.26

... there is perhaps a so-called positive motive force of thought ... — p.26

But I believe that precisely this aspect of positivity, which acts as a corollary to negativity, is conjoined with the principle of negativity because it resists being fixed once and for all in an abstract, static manner.

If it is true that every philosophy that can have any claims at all to the truth lives from the ancient fires, i.e. it secularizes not just philosophy, but also theology, then we have identified here, or so I believe, an outstanding point in the secularization process. It is the fact that the prohibition on graven images that occupies a position of central importance in the religions that believe in salvation, that this prohibition extends into the ideas and the most sublime ramifications of thought.

Hence, to make this quite clear, the issue is not to deny the existence of a certain fixed point, it is not even to deny the existence of some fixed element in thought; we shall in due course, I hope, come to discuss the meaning of such a fixed element in dialectical logic in very concrete terms. But the fixed, positive point, just like negation, is an aspect – and not something that can be anticipated, placed at the beginning of everything. — p.26

You may well ask me about what I said earlier on: if you admit that the positive, like the negative, is no more than an aspect, and that neither may be regarded as an absolute – why then do I privilege the concept of negativity so emphatically?

concepts ...

... are no longer measured against their contents, — Jamal

The corporeal moment registers the cognition, that suffering ought not to be, that things should be different. “Woe speaks: go.” That is why what is specifically materialistic converges with what is critical, with socially transforming praxis. The abolition of suffering, or its mitigation to a degree which is not to be theoretically assumed in advance, to which no limit can be set, is not up to the individual who endures suffering, but solely to the species that it belongs to, even where it has subjectively renounced the latter and is objectively forced into the absolute loneliness of the helpless object. All activities of the species make reference to its physical continued existence, even if they fail to recognize this, becoming organizationally autonomous and seeing to their business only as an afterthought. Even the institutions which society creates in order to exterminate itself are, as unleashed, absurd self-preservation, simultaneously their own unconscious actions against suffering. Narrowly restricted indeed by what is their own, their total particularity also turns against this. Confronted with them, the purpose which alone makes society into a society demands that it be so arranged, as what the relations of production here and there relentlessly prevent, and as what would be immediately possible to the productive forces right here and now. Such an arrangement would have its telos in the negation of physical suffering of even the least of its members, and of the innervated reflection-forms of that suffering. It is in the interest of all, at this point to be realized solely through a solidarity transparent to itself and to every living being.

MATERIALISM IMAGELESS
To those who wish that it not be realized, materialism has in the meantime done the favor of its self-degradation. The immaturity which caused this is not, as Kant thought, the fault of humanity itself. In the meantime at least it is reproduced according to plan by the powers that be. The objective Spirit, which they direct, because they require its chaining, adjusts itself to that consciousness, which was enchained for millennia. The materialism which achieved political power has devoted itself to such praxis no less than the world, which it once wanted to change; it continues to chain the consciousness, instead of comprehending it and for its part changing it. Terroristic state-machineries entrench themselves under the threadbare pretext of a soon to be fifty-year-old dictatorship of the long since administrated proletariat as permanent institutions, the mockery of the theory which they pay lip service to. They chain their underlings to their immediate interests and keep them narrow-minded. The depravation of theory meanwhile would not have been possible without the dregs of the apocryphal in it. By leaping summarily outside of culture, the functionaries who monopolize it would like to crudely feign that they would be beyond culture, and thus give sustenance to universal regression. What philosophy wished to liquidate, in the expectation of the immediately impending revolution, was, impatient with its claim, already at that moment lagging behind it. What is apocryphal in materialism reveals that of high philosophy, that which is untrue in the sovereignty of the Spirit, which the prevailing materialism disdains as cynically as bourgeois society had done in secret before. The idealistic sublime is the cognate of the apocryphal; the texts of Kafka and Beckett harshly illuminate this relationship.

Solely indefatigably reified consciousness imagines, or tries to persuade others into imagining, that it would possess photographs of objectivity. Its illusion crosses over into dogmatic immediacy. When Lenin, instead of entering into epistemology, compulsively and repeatedly asserted against this the being-in-itself of cognitive objects, he wanted to demonstrate the complicity of subjective positivism with the “powers that be” [in English]. His political need turned thereby against the theoretical cognitive goal. Transcendent argumentation finishes things off by means of the power-claim, and for ill: by being left unpenetrated, what is criticized remains undisturbed as it is, and is capable, as what has not been properly examined, of being resurrected in transformed power-constellations any which way.

Materialistic theory became not merely aesthetically defective in contrast to the hollowed-out sublime of bourgeois consciousness, but untrue. This is theoretically determinable. The dialectic is in the things, but it would not be without the consciousness which reflects it; no more than it could be dissolved into the latter. In the One pure and simple, undifferentiated, total matter, there would be no dialectic. The official materialistic one skipped over epistemology by decree. The latter’s revenge is epistemological: in the reflection-doctrine [Abbildlehre]. The thought is no reflection of the thing – it is made into this solely by
materialistic mythology in Epicurean style, which discovered that matter sends out little images – but aims at the thing itself. The enlightening intention of thought, demythologization, nullifies the image-character of consciousness. What clings to the image remains mythically ensnared, idolatry. The summation of images forms a wall before reality. Reflection-theory denies the spontaneity of the subject, a movens [Latin: what moves] of the objective dialectic of productive forces and relations of production. If the subject is bound to the stubborn mirror-image of the object, which necessarily lacks the object,
which discloses itself only to the subjective surplus in thought, then the result is the restless intellectual silence of integral administration. — Adorno, Negative Dialectics, page 224 ff, translated by Dennis Redmond

He contrasts abstract negativity, or negativity in itself, with what he is really getting at with his negative dialectics, which is something to do with determinate negation: — Jamal

See I'm practising my negative (critical) thinking, to see how it goes. — Metaphysician Undercover

When he talks about "confronting concepts with their objects and, conversely, objects with their concepts", isn't this exactly the type of identity philosophy which he claims to be rejecting? — Metaphysician Undercover

I think when he says "contents" he's talking about real events that stand as examples of concepts. Like with music, the score is the concept (or form), and a performance is the content. He said it's a mistake to fail to see the way the performance is its own entity, each moment arising out of the history of the performance, and propelled onward from there. The score is literally nothing in the absence of the performance (and vice versa).

That would relate to the mind as when people think of mind as a domain or vault of some kind. They're separating mind from the living flow of events that are the content of the concept of mind. — frank

There's no getting away from the concept-object confrontation; the question is how much of the object is lost in the confrontation, or how much the nonidentical is otherwise part of the experience in which the concept-object confrontation is central (which is so far unexplained). — Jamal

I think they're so ridiculous that they must be motivated by strong prejudice, and I guess I won't be able to argue you out of that. — Jamal

Anyway, I'll try to hold off the criticism until the designated time slot, and enjoy the reading. I find the material well written and very interesting. — Metaphysician Undercover

. I believe that a proper understanding of concepts reveals that there is no necessity of a corresponding object, and this lack of object is not a fault of the concept, but a feature of its utility, versatility, and infinite applicability. This is what we see in mathematics for example, conceptions produced without corresponding objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

By the way, this alienation of subject to object (or concept to content) is what Adorno is calling idealism. — frank

Idealism itself only becomes problematic when ideas are objectified, reified, as I explained is the case with common Platonism. — Metaphysician Undercover

But I believe that precisely
this aspect of positivity, which acts as a corollary to negativity, is
conjoined with the principle of negativity because it resists being fixed
once and for all in an abstract, static manner. — p27

It is here that critical thinking and Hegel have to part company. — 28

Can we speak of a dialectical
process if movement is not brought into play by the fact that the
object that is to be understood as distinct from spirit turns out itself
to be spirit. — p28

What I am attempting
here and would like to show you is the possibility of philosophy
in an authoritative sense without either system or ontology – that is
what I am aiming at. — p32

But we know Plato grooved on the dialectics, so would he have really gotten muted in what Adorno calls idealism? — frank

What we commonly know as Platonism is better named as "Pythagorean idealism". — Metaphysician Undercover

Because of this, I view "Platonism" as a misnomer, because Plato was actually not Platonist. — Metaphysician Undercover

I didn't realize that. — frank

The middle work reveals problems with this form of idealism, such as what we know as "the interaction problem — Metaphysician Undercover

Throughout, Plato's belief in idealism is strengthened, but the prevailing idealism is rejected by what we can call his "negative dialectics". This is his critical analysis of the conventional idealism. It does not refute idealism, but exposes problems, and produces the need to revamp outdated principles. — Metaphysician Undercover