So Hegel starts with the something but drops it in favour of the concept. And this is how Hegel manages to equate being with nothing. — Jamal

This is exactly the way I see it. By doing violence to the concept of "Identity" Hegel removes being from the object itself, and makes it something we say about the object, a concept. This allows him to negate "being" with "nothing" when "being" has this form of identity, rather than the identity of "a being", because there is no longer an object which would otherwise prevent this negation. It's a sort of trick of switching the category of what "being" refers to, from the traditional understanding of substantial objects (as developed by Aristotelian studies), back to the Parmenidean proposal which equates being with knowledge. But a study of the history of ideas will demonstrate that this proposal enables Parmenidean based sophistry such as Zeno's.

The conclusion of Lecture 6 is interesting. He returns to the idea expressed in lecture 5, philosophy's practice of distancing itself rom practice, results in what was called in Lecture 5 "bad practice", but he now changes to "false practice". This change of terminology I believe is supported by this discussion of how the concept has been separated from the object, leaving no basis for truth in the sense of correspondence. That's what I believe denying the law of identity does, removes the basis for "truth".

So he proceeds to criticize formalism, and the way that it attempts to remove content from philosophy. Heidegger is the chosen example. He explains that Heidegger does this to avoid vagueness, randomness and arbitrariness, and he advises that this is the other extreme to be avoided.

And the question or the problem facing philosophy is simply about
how it can have both content and rigour at the same time. And that
indeed can only become possible if the philosophers succeed in escaping
from the equation of universal concepts with the substantive
contents about which they have agreed to this day.

I don't think this is a necessary conclusion. I think what is implied is that the forces of production overcoming the limits set by society is in some sense inevitable, but revolution is not. So overcoming the limits of society may occur in ways other than revolution. Look at the way modern technology has 'revolutionized' communications for example. The technology has globalized communication capacity to an extent far beyond the laws imposed by some societies. Changes in technology are faster than the capacity of the lawmakers to keep up, so laws are sort of posterior to the changes already brought on, they are reactive. Now, things like genetic manipulation, and AI are just beginning, and they will overcome limits of society which were not designed to reign them. This type of overcoming the limits doesn't necessitate revolution, but it indicates the need for significant, even structural, or radical societal change to keep pace with globalization. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, that's fair. It looked like he was referring only to the revolutionary seizure of the means of production because he was taking on Marx's viewpoint, temporarily setting aside for the sake of argument his very real concerns along the lines you've set out here.

Adorno applies substantial criticism to Hegel at this point. I believe the central issue here is the violence which Hegel does to the traditional "law of identity" derived from Aristotle. — Metaphysician Undercover

Always with the Aristotle, MU. :wink:

I guess you've reached the same conclusion as Adorno's linguistic analysis but from an Aristotelian perspective, which would be perfectly fine with me except that I wonder if it's right. It looks like an accidental alignment.

When Hegel writes about the indeterminate, he is not talking about beings, as in individual objects, but about what is indeterminate. In using the adjective indeterminate one grammatically points to a substantive, a logical something awaiting determination—but this is lost when he moves to indeterminateness, because the latter is a free-standing abstract quality, a universal. It's a subtle shift from a realist grammar to an idealist grammar, even though the whole time he's just talking about being. It's more a linguistic point than one about identity.

So he proceeds to criticize formalism, and the way that it attempts to remove content from philosophy. Heidegger is the chosen example. He explains that Heidegger does this to avoid vagueness, randomness and arbitrariness, and he advises that this is the other extreme to be avoided. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. Expect more of this in lecture 7, which has a brief critique of Heidegger's recourse to agrarian motifs, which I looked at here.

(Should I wait and allow people to catch up? Should we set a schedule from now on?) — Jamal

I plan on catching up tomorrow. So far lack of schedule has worked for me, but if you'd feel better with it I'm not opposed either.

No, I'm happy the way it is and I'm in no rush, except that I enjoy the material. :cool:

When Hegel writes about the indeterminate, he is not talking about beings, as in individual objects, but about what is indeterminate. In using the adjective indeterminate one grammatically points to a substantive, a logical something awaiting determination—but this is lost when he moves to indeterminateness, because the latter is a free-standing abstract quality, a universal. It's a subtle shift from a realist grammar to an idealist grammar, even though the whole time he's just talking about being. It's more a linguistic point than one about identity. — Jamal

What you call "a logical something awaiting determination" is actually a material thing, that constitutes what is called by Adorno "a substratum". Notice, "the concept of the indeterminate does not distinguish between concept and thing". This is because "indeterminate" in concept, implies no thing. This allows that the thing which is named as "the indeterminate", is negated by the self-contradicting concept, to leave only the concept. So the concept of "indeterminate" does not differentiate between concept and thing, but since it cannot be a thing, it can only be a concept.

Hegel intended to bypass Aristotle's law of identity, as indicated in my early discussion with Jersey Flight, referenced above. The law of identity puts the identity of the thing in the thing itself, by saying that to be a thing is to have an identity. Now Hegel uses a trick (I'd say sophistry) to replace the thing which has an inherent identity, with "the indeterminate", which Adorno takes to mean a lack of determination. But since to be a thing is to be determinate, and therefore to have an inherent identity, Hegel robs identity from the material world by saying it is not necessary that the material world consists of determinate things. Determinate things, things with identity, can be replaced with "the indeterminate" as the substratum. But the indeterminate is really nothing, no thing, and as such it can only be a concept, it cannot be something material. This actually denies the intelligibility of the substratum, leaving the concept of "indeterminateness", and puts identity into the concept rather than the thing.

Just reflect for a moment on the difference between ‘the indeterminate’ and
‘indeterminateness’. The language is right to make a distinction here.
‘The indeterminate’ is in the nature of a substratum. To be sure, the
concept of the indeterminate does not distinguish between concept
and thing, but precisely because there has been no determination the
distinction between the determinant, namely the category, and the
thing does not emerge as such in this term. But in this absence of
differentiation appropriate to it, it does possess both: both the concept
and the thing that is undetermined. — p61

Lecture 7:

The question of "breaking out" of the conceptual is central, and the issue appears to be how it could even be possible to move beyond the conceptual without getting into arbitrary randomness.

I find the following passage may possibly be a hint at a solution:

[quote=p73If a breakout is at all possible, it cannot be the product of the postulate
of something alien to the subject; it cannot result from postulating a
Not-I – we know of course from the history of philosophy that the
subjective postulate of the Not-I was in fact the zenith of idealism.15
Rather, if such a breakout exists as a possibility, the only path leading
to it is that of the critical self-reflection of the subjective sphere. In
the course of that self-reflection, this insight recognizes itself – in a
compelling, conclusive manner – as something that is not merely
subjectivity, but as something that necessarily presupposes a relation
to the very thing that, as idealist, it had hoped to be able to bring
into being. In other words, the subject is shown that it is itself some
thing postulated, or, at any rate, that it is also something postulated,
and not simply by demonstrating that the Not-I is itself a postulate. [/quote]

What I think, is that the proposed way of "breakout" is through the internal self, i.e. self-reflection. We tend to think of the objective world as what is external, what is evident to the senses. However, we ourselves partake of the material world through our very being, and the material cause of our being, so we may be able to break out of the conceptual through the internal, self-reflection. In this way we approach the unconscious aspect of ourselves and cross into the nonconceptual without having to do the impossible which would be to breakout externally. Instead of crossing the boundary of the conceptual externally, we cross it internally. This would be the reason for his mention of Freud and the unconscious, early in the lecture.

This also provides a reason to reject systematization type thinking. Systems theory assumes a boundary between the system and the external environment, but it does not provide the principles for an internal boundary. What lies beyond the system to the inside?

I find the following passage may possibly be a hint at a solution: — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes! I was going to say something about that. But I think what it means is that the breakout from the conceptual can only happen conceptually, through the perpetual self-criticism of the concepts we're using—not that we can stop thinking in concepts and just attend to images and intuitions as Bergson might be seen to be recommending.

But it goes a bit deeper than that. It is saying something about the self-recognition of the subject as subject, or as one pole of a relation. I don't really understand this bit:

In other words, the subject is shown that it is itself something postulated, or, at any rate, that it is also something postulated, and not simply by demonstrating that the Not-I is itself a postulate. — p73

EDIT: OK, I get it. Rather than thinking of what is outside the subject as constituted by the subject, it should be the other way round: the subject depends on, is in a manner of speaking postulated by, something outside itself. One has take the indirect route, recognizing that the self is not primary and self-sufficient, before one can grasp the nonconceptual. To breakout directly is again to impose one's concepts uncritically on the nonconceptual, which is what Bergson and Husserl did. But it's not enough to just show this, i.e., that one's (direct) assertion of the existence and character of what is outside the subject is a reflection of the subject, which is why he says "not simply by demonstrating that the Not-I is itself a postulate." One has to analyze the subject's role, not just state that it has one.

I think we reached similar understandings @Metaphysician Undercover

What you call "a logical something awaiting determination" is actually a material thing, that constitutes what is called by Adorno "a substratum". Notice, "the concept of the indeterminate does not distinguish between concept and thing". This is because "indeterminate" in concept, implies no thing. This allows that the thing which is named as "the indeterminate", is negated by the self-contradicting concept, to leave only the concept. So the concept of "indeterminate" does not differentiate between concept and thing, but since it cannot be a thing, it can only be a concept.

Hegel intended to bypass Aristotle's law of identity, as indicated in my early discussion with Jersey Flight, referenced above. The law of identity puts the identity of the thing in the thing itself, by saying that to be a thing is to have an identity. Now Hegel uses a trick (I'd say sophistry) to replace the thing which has an inherent identity, with "the indeterminate", which Adorno takes to mean a lack of determination. But since to be a thing is to be determinate, and therefore to have an inherent identity, Hegel robs identity from the material world by saying it is not necessary that the material world consists of determinate things. Determinate things, things with identity, can be replaced with "the indeterminate" as the substratum. But the indeterminate is really nothing, no thing, and as such it can only be a concept, it cannot be something material. This actually denies the intelligibility of the substratum, leaving the concept of "indeterminateness", and puts identity into the concept rather than the thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

It looks to me like you're talking about what Hegel does prior to the move from indeterminate to indeterminateness that Adorno examines, because Hegel is talking about pure being from the start (from the start of the passage that Adorno analyzes). I think you've turned a linguistic critique with metaphysical consequences into a metaphysical critique from start to finish. What Adorno identifies as the substratum, the logical something, is definitely not a material thing in this case, but merely a logical subject, that which you predicate things of.

EDIT: The metaphysical consequences flow from Hegel's elimination of the implied referent in the grammar of "indeterminate." So the move to "indeterminateness" ensures that being is then exhaustively conceptual, with no thought of a substrate.

That aside, your position on Hegel's prior move away from objects looks kind of like it might be consistent with Adorno, but I'm not sure.

LND lecture 7 (continued)

On to the critique of Bergson's and Husserl's attempted breakouts:

Both men, incidentally, were acting under the coercion of the same situation; both were resisting the universal dominance of causal, mechanical thinking and reacting to the unsatisfactory implications of cause-and-effect thinking for the desire to comprehend. — p70

He starts by summarizing their views.

Bergson's solution was to come up with a cognitive dualism: at the deep, primary level there is a profound ituitive grasp of the world, and then on top of that is classificatory knowledge arrived at by abstraction. His philosophy meant to locate higher truth in the former, thus resisting the mechanical thinking of science. Against rationalism, intuitive knowledge is superior to conceptual knowledge.

Husserl, while also going for some kind of intuitive grasp, did not go along with Bergson's opposition to rationalism. Instead of downgrading conceptual cognition, Husserl located concepts in objects themselves, which we grasp through "eidetic intuition".


Bergson

I really like Adorno's bit about how Proust implicitly refutes Bergson's dualism. The famous passage about the madeleine, often taken to be Bergsonian, starts with an involuntary memory—and this is the Bergsonian part—but proceeds to conceptual interpretation. There is no attending to images and intuitions without interpretation. Whereas Bergson situates higher truth in a kind of direct grasp, Proust only finds the meaning in the images with difficulty, admitting that he did not understand them at first. He also finds the need for metaphors, which Bergson regards as secondary, belonging to the classifying intellect.

I've read part of In Search of Lost Time and can confirm that it is much more intellectually elaborate than a mere registering of images. And this is inevitable: even a stream-of-consciousness narrative would be interpretative.

So, where Bergson sees a dualism in which the intellect fails to capture the deeper truths, Adorno, and performatively Proust, see a dialectical relation in which there is no truth in images and intuitions at all without intellectual interpretation.


Husserl

I'm not sure what to say about the critique of Husserl, partly because Adorno provides only a few comments. I casually read Logical Investigations years ago and have read some other bits and pieces by him, and I kind of see what Adorno is saying, but I don't think I can look at the matter in detail.

The strange fact in Husserl – and here too astonishingly little has been written about it in the relevant literature – is that what gazes out at us when I extract the pure entities from the individuations or the individual phenomena (instead of appropriating them by a process of comparison) – that what gazes out is at bottom nothing but the good old concepts of classificatory logic. So what we have here is really no more than an attempt at an ontological vindication of the concepts that are supposed not to be concepts established by the cognitive mind, but to belong intrinsically to the things themselves. But if we then look at what individual experience yields up in Husserl, what opens up to individual experience, we simply find abstract categories that are just like the categories of ordinary scientific discourse. And in consequence, in his late phase, when he sought to underpin this entire theory with a transcendental logic, these were categories with which he could effortlessly communicate. — p72

So Husserl's breakout is fake. When he strips away the empirical particulars to find the essences that reside in the objects (and which are not put into them by the mind), what he's left with is actually just the concepts handed down through science, philosophy, and logic.


Wittgenstein

For this reason, I would maintain that Wittgenstein’s statement that ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ is the anti-philosophical statement par excellence. We should insist instead that philosophy consists in the effort to say what cannot be said, in particular whatever cannot be said directly, in a single sentence or a few sentences, but only in a context. In this sense it has to be said that the concept of philosophy is itself the contradictory effort to say, through mediation and contextualization, what cannot be said hic et nunc; to that extent phi- losophy contains an inner contradiction, that is, it is inwardly dialectical in itself. And this perhaps is the profoundest vindication of the dialectical method, namely, that philosophy in itself – as the attempt to say the unsayable, before it arrives at any particular content or any particular thesis – is dialectically determined. — p74

Incidentally, I think I've seen a few dismissive comments about Wittgenstein scattered through the works of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, and what stands out is that they probably never read late Wittgenstein, and carried on regarding him as a mere logical positivist, one of the bad guys. Sometimes when Adorno and Horkheimer use other philosophers as "occasions" for the development of their own ideas, this results in misrepresentation.

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.


The infinite

To end the lecture he begins talking about philosophy's treatment of the infinite. I think this is continued in the next lecture so I won't say anything about it here, but what I like in this section is his comments about exhaustiveness:

Even when I was still at school, I never understood why teachers would write at the end of an essay that the topic had not been fully ‘exhausted’. This was because even then I was aware that the human mind was concerned with intensity, depth of immersion, and not a sort of quantitative completeness – of the kind, incidentally, that has an honourable pedigree going back to Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, where exhaustiveness according to the criteria of right knowledge has an explicit role to play. — p74

I found this quote, shortly after where you left off, hit me right. "Get out of my head!?!" type feeling:

If the method I am trying
to describe to you constantly tends towards micrology, in other
words to immerse itself in the minutest details, it does so not out of
philosophical pedantry, but precisely so as to strike a spark, and my
predilection for such matters is connected with factors such as these.
For in general the concept tends to magnify its objects; it perceives
in them only what is large enough to compare with other objects.

I also found his dismissal of Krug's quill off-putting. For me it's the perfect sort of example to reflect through Hegel's philosophy. If it can't derive the quill pen, then maybe it's not so universal after all. In which case "what is important" becomes a matter of the taste of the philosopher writing.

EDIT:Adding more quotes as I finish up --

You may well reply: then why
philosophize at all – and I can give you no answer to that.

:D

That made me smile, but his following remarks are actually interesting:

Nevertheless, if you feel such a need, it cannot be satisfi ed without an element
of confi dence in the possibility of a breakout. And this confi dence
itself is inseparable from the confi dent utopian belief that it ought
after all to be possible to obtain access to that which is not already
shaped in advance, staged or reifi ed. For this reason, I would maintain that Wittgenstein’s statement that ‘What we cannot speak about
we must pass over in silence’16 is the anti-philosophical statement par
excellence.

Considering Wittgenstein wanted to cure philosophers of doing philosophy I can see a certain truth there.

The task of philosophy, then – and I would like to fi nish today on
this programmatic note – is to concern itself with what is different
from itself, heterogeneous, and not with the attempt to import everything that exists into itself and its concepts. Its task is not to reduce
the entire world to a prefabricated system of categories, but rather
the opposite, viz. to hold itself open to whatever experience presents
itself to the mind. And I should like to say more about this concept
of experience and the altered relation towards infi nity in my next
lecture on Thursday

What a conclusion.

So, to break it down to simple bits --

This lecture is mostly about Adorno's project. He differentiates his project from Hegel's because of their closeness. The difference is in an interest in the non-conceptual. Other attempts have been made to "break out" towards the "dregs of the phenomenal world", namely Bergson and Husserl.

The problem with them is that they remain idealist, just like Hegel, so there is no breaking out. For Bergson he devolves everything to images, as from an individual subject, and for Husserl at the end of it all we have the basic logical categories. Both are idealistic, and after Auschwitz the world has no meaning, so this is untenable.

And he ends with some requirements for what this philosophy would do, and even notes how it is contradictory in itself. In a way I wonder if his anti-utopian stance means that negative dialectics will never reach the cognitive utopia he mentions.

Good summary.

I also found his dismissal of Krug's quill off-putting — Moliere

But maybe there were mitigating circumstances. Imagine, with the horror of the Holocaust, the onward march of dehumanizing social systems, and the failure of socialism all ever-present in your mind, and believing it's the task of philosophy to change the world, and someone starts talking about a quill (or a mug in the cupboard). He probably found it offensive.

Of course, Krug was writing around 150 years earlier, but my armchair psychologizing might help to explain Adorno's brutal attitude to the mundane. And really it's not that a quill or a mug are not grand enough or are too mundane, more that there are everyday, mundane, social issues that demand attention, whereas quills and mugs can be left aside. Which is fair enough.

In the end though, I still side with you.

That made me smile, but his following remarks are actually interesting — Moliere

Yes, I liked that too, especially "if you feel such a need," which is almost an admission that philosophy is just something some people have to do, whether or not there's a good reason for doing it.

FWIW I kept going and finished LND 8. I really breezed through it because I found it very amenable, though I'll have more to say after it digests.

I just made a list of the points he covers in lecture 8 and may post it tomorrow. I'm looking forward to what you say because, oddly, I don't really have anything to say about it.

I liked his highlighting the concept of infinity changing between Kant and Hegel, and how Kant's notion is pretty clearly inspired by the calculus.

Then his harsh treatment of it in Hegel surprised me because -- well, there's something funny in Hegel where I get the sense that there is some twaddle sometimes, but it's hard to pinpoint where. So this was an interesting point to note how "infinity" became a bit of a looser concept and so could be applied to all sorts of things.

Interesting, though, how he wants to preserve infinity as a basis for understanding what a proper philosophy does -- that it is reaching for what it cannot have, as a mortal thinking mortal thoughts, though perhaps the reflection brings one closer to immortal thoughts. This by way of still differentiating philosophy proper from Leibenphilosophie, or idle chatter, or a philosophy of this or that, but while also laying it out in a dialectical pattern which doesn't grasp the positive -- it's mindblowing stuff because it's making sense to me in a way Hegel didn't really.
***

Where he describes an intellectual experience at first I thought he was speaking hypothetically until he gets to...

The contents of this
experience – and this too sounds highly nominalist – are identical
with the concept of experience as this is contrasted with deduction.
The contents of such experience provide no models for categories,
but they become relevant because they enable the new to show itself
– whereas the fl aw in the entire gamut of current empiricist trends is
the concept of intellectual experience 83
that, as a theory of cognition, empiricism seems to me to be unable
to allow for the possibility of an Other, of something new in principle

Which strikes me as something like, to use his latter example, is an aesthetic experience of the object, but instead towards intellectual ends.

There is something to this, though the example I'd reach for would not be Adorno-appropriate, because I think about how repetition of the same often brings out the different that was hard to spot initially.

Even so, there's something to that 'aha!" moment when you put two and two together about some object and make a correct inference not because of something you already knew about it but because you notice something new that you didn't have words for before. In which case I find myself nodding along with him a lot of the time with respect to salvaging empiricism through dialectical reflection.

I also like his reflection on art because I tend to believe that aesthetics is more than directed at art and has greater applicability to things like epistemology and ethics so while a painting is not an act, there's something to the generality of aesthetics that makes these principles applicable to thought. At the very least they're helpful avenues for exploring why we make inferences, from a philosophical rather than psychological perspective.

Oh, one more quote:

. The fact is that philosophy does not have any particular
guaranteed object of study; it is possible to think philosophically only
where thinking can go awry, where it is fallible.

I agree with that.

Also I think I'd add a cribbing from the Dao, but instead with respect to philosophy: You can do anything you want with it.

a mortal thinking mortal thoughts, though perhaps the reflection brings one closer to immortal thoughts. — Moliere

Yeah, it was inevitable that Adorno was going to say that confining ourselves to mortal thoughts is the only way we can think immortal thoughts. Just like with Zizek, I do want to roll my eyes sometimes at his dialectical shenanigans.

But that's facile and I'll rein it in, because in the end I very much like this approach.

EDIT: I'll say more tomorrow

LND lecture 8

My lecture breakdown:

1. Infinity came into philosophy from the infinitesimal calculus
2. But in German idealism, the concept of infinity degenerated into "commonplace twaddle"
3. In Kant and Hegel, philosophy shrinks to a finite, complete set of principles or axioms that is supposed to encapsulate the infinite, everything that exists
4. This sentimental vision of philosophy is narrow-minded while trying not to be, and is untenable
5. Mortals must think mortal thoughts, and not immortal ones: if philosophy possesses anything at all, then it can only be finite, and not infinite
6. In a sense, this restriction opens philosophy to the infinite once again (we saw that coming!)
7. So we need an open philosophy, not a systematic one
8. Intellectual experience: such an open philosophy would amount to "full, undiminished experience in the medium of conceptual reflection"
9. This would include a dialecticalized salvaging of empiricism
10. Comparison with art, which does something similar
11. Systematic philosophy, on the other hand, is "merely technology in the broadest sense"—critique of enlightenment rationality
12. Bergson's philosophy was a protest against enlightenment rationality
13. "Knowledge that is not dangerous does not deserve to be thought"
14. A thumbs-up for John Dewey

I think the important step is the part I've bolded. He mentioned it in the last lecture but here he emphasizes that he's talking about intellectual experience; it's not about Bergsonian intuitions or immediate givens.

I also like his reflection on art because I tend to believe that aesthetics is more than directed at art and has greater applicability to things like epistemology and ethics so while a painting is not an act, there's something to the generality of aesthetics that makes these principles applicable to thought. At the very least they're helpful avenues for exploring why we make inferences, from a philosophical rather than psychological perspective. — Moliere

Yeah, and he says a lot more about art and aesthetics in lecture 9. He's really on fire in lecture 9, by the way.

In Kant and Hegel, philosophy shrinks to a finite, complete set of principles or axioms that is supposed to encapsulate the infinite, everything that exists — Jamal

This is sort of ridiculed, as trying to "enclose the infinite in a finite network of axioms". It's another instance of narrowness, the "provinciality" which he dislikes. In general, a finite system of categories, like Kant's cannot provide us with secure knowledge.

Mortals must think mortal thoughts, and not immortal ones: if philosophy possesses anything at all, then it can only be finite, and not infinite — Jamal

Only by accepting, and approaching our own narrowmindedness, "reflect upon our own provinciality" can we rid ourselves o that narrowmindedness. This produces an open philosophy rather than a sytematic one.

So we need an open philosophy, not a systematic one — Jamal

However, we must also avoid the type of openness of Lebensphilosopie. This leads to a mollusc-like arbitrariness, where objects are approached openly, but with the intent of manipulating them to the philosopher's purpose.

Intellectual experience: — Jamal

The motor of an experience of this sort, of what drives a person
to seek this sort of intellectual experience – and this is what counts
above all in philosophy – is the admittedly unwarranted, vague,
obscure expectation that every singular and particular that it encounters
ultimately represents the totality that constantly eludes it — p83

This is oddly reminiscent of Aquinas' approach to the divinity. Every single material thing is evidence of the unapprehended divinity which has created it. But Adorno approaches infinity, or the infinite this way, as the gateway to intellectual experience.

Comparison with art, which does something similar — Jamal

I would say that what is described here is that a work of art has infinite meaning. But, it is only by analyzing each minute, finite aspect of meaning, that we move progressively toward an objective knowledge of the true meaning (notice "authentic works of art" is indicated.

I suggest that this process involves a sort of process of elimination, of determining false meaning. And that is how the initial infinite meaning is brought into the finite sphere, by determining falsity. This starts with determining impossibility. It is distinctly different from the scientific process which is positive, this is negative. The intellectual experience is contrasted with the pointedly non-intellectual experience of the empirical sciences.

Great points.

I suggest that this process involves a sort of process of elimination, of determining false meaning. And that is how the initial infinite meaning is brought into the finite sphere, by determining falsity. This starts with determining impossibility. It is distinctly different from the scientific process which is positive, this is negative. The intellectual experience is contrasted with the pointedly non-intellectual experience of the empirical sciences. — Metaphysician Undercover

That’s quite good. I hadn’t thought about it like that.

LND lecture 9

I really enjoyed this lecture, but there is a lot packed into it.

1. The concept of intellectual experience contains an empiricist element, but it is much more than attending to what is "given" through the sense-data (as certain empiricists have it) (p89)
2. Because of the additional and constitutive intellectual element, such experience goes beyond immediate givens, so intellectual experience contains the danger of spiritualizing the world (p89)
3. There is a temptation "to take intellectual phenomena more seriously than perhaps they deserve in reality" (p90)
4. A way of dealing with this is with play (p90)
5. Playfulness has an honourable history in philosophy, even though many of its exemplars are placed somewhat outside the tradition or stand out as unusual (p90)
6. Play is an expression of philosophy's tragicomic existence (p90-91)
7. Inconsistency in Hegel: philosophy is just one part of human life and shouldn't be absolutized, and yet philosophy is one of the moments (elements or phases) of absolute spirit (p91)
8. What is beyond the a priori is uncontrolled and therefore a suitable domain of play (p91)
9. Philosophy needs both rigour and play, discipline and indiscipline, perhaps even rationality and irrationality (p91)
10. The irrational can take the form of the mimetic element, which is essential to philosophy but dangerous (p91-92)
11. Philosophy should appropriate the mimetic impulse, which is an impulse to identify with things and resonate with them—things different from oneself—but not to assimilate them to oneself (p92)
    [thereby mimesis becomes conceptual]
12. The place to look for this is art, which is where the mimetic impulse survives (p92)
13. Both philosophy that strives to be art and art that strives to be philosophy [e.g., conceptual art?] are bad (p92)
14. From mimesis and art, which are largely intuitive, to intuition itself: it's an element in philosophy but nothing very special (p92-93)
15. But intuition is nevertheless essential: it is a way in which thought sometimes works—underground rivers that suddenly come to the surface, or "crystallizations of an unconscious knowledge" (p93-94)
16. The organ of philosophy remains the concept (p94)
17. Philosophy is using concepts to reach beyond concepts, that is to say, it is inescapably speculative (p95)
18. Speculation in this sense is to think "beyond the point where one's thinking is backed up by facts," but in a consistent way (p95)
19. Some say that speculation is essentially idealist, but this is not so (p95)
20. Marx was a speculative thinker even though his intentions were entirely materialist (although in a sense he was actually quite idealist too—the metaphysics of the forces of production as a continuation of the World Spirit) (p95-96)
21. Speculation cannot be rejected; we need a philosophy that goes the whole hog (p97)

Before I get to the meat, one thing I left out of the list above is what he says in passing about definitions. In introducing his definition of philosophy as the use of the concept to reach beyond the concept, he says:

I am not so malicious as simply to hate all definitions and reject them. I just believe that definitions are far better located in the movement of thought, as its terminus ad quem, than as an introduction to it. — p95

It's not important for understanding this particular lecture but I bring it up because, as we approach ND itself, I am thinking about Adorno's style of presentation. It's a fact that his style is very deliberate, something he was always conscious of, and something he was forever pre-occupied by (because he didn't separate form and content). I think it will help to know how to read him, which is not always a matter of finding an answer to "what is he trying to say?" at the level of a paragraph but of keeping multiple descriptions, analogies, etc. in mind over the course of the work.

One aspect is his attitude to definition. It's a principle of his method that in his writing he avoids definitions of concepts, instead circling around them, or approaching them from different angles. (More than that, I suppose he does not even regard them as fixed points that can be honed in on)

Even though these lectures were recorded, not written, I think we've already seen this principle at work. We've seen him going over similar ground repeatedly, never satisfied with a single metaphor or encapsulation.

But I digress.

This lecture is centrally about speculation. The upshot is that he wants a middle way between speculation as metaphysics or idealism, and a kind of philosophy expunged of speculation entirely, on the model of the natural sciences. What he says parallels what he said in a previous lecture about systems: just as he wants to preserve the spirit of system, he wants to do the same for the spirit of speculation; and just as the spirit of system can be liberated from system, speculation can be liberated from its conventional forms, i.e. metaphysics and idealism. (The difference is that he wants to be able to call his philosophy speculative in some sense, but he doesn't want to call his philosophy a system—and this might indicate that the parallel is not exact).

Adorno compares his own concept of the speculative element to Hegel's, but I prefer to use Kant. My nutshell version is that for Kant, speculation is thinking that attempts to go beyond experience, but for Adorno, it is thinking that attempts to go beyond facts, but without leaving the domain of experience (since the nonidentical is part of experience).

He gets to speculation by way of some thoughts about play. What is the connection? One way to put it is that playing is uncontrolled and thereby open to what hasn't already been planned or established—the new and surprising are where it's at—and this is a way of describing speculation as defined by Adorno.

He seems to say that play is an expression of the knowledge of philosophy's tragicomic existence as the most profound and super-serious discipline of all that's nevertheless just a specialism with little social and cultural significance, just one material activity among others. This somewhat absurd situation demands a somewhat (only somewhat) irrational response: to play, to venture into uncontrolled territory.

Talk of the irrational brings him to mimesis. That's two crucial concepts introduced in this lecture, three if you include play. Compared to previous lectures, that's quite a lot.

The irrational, or at least a-rational, attitude of identifying with something is the "mimetic stance". He does not mean the impulse just to imitate the object, but to either adapt oneself to something, or to assimilate it to oneself. I think when he says that the mimetic element can degenerate into "illusion and lie," he is referring to this latter kind of mimesis, a kind of domination. Adorno is recommending the kind of mimesis we see in art, which can be a disclosure of difference.

... only by registering the non-identity of spirit and world, spirit and reality, can philosophy acquire a share in the truth – and the stance that formerly guaranteed this and continues to do so today in a certain sense is the mimetic stance. However – and I believe that this is an important point, so that you will be able to obtain clarity about the very complex relationship between philoso- phy and art – philosophy must preserve [aufheben] this aesthetic dimension, incorporating it into its binding insights into the real. It is a constitutive element of philosophy that it should speak the truth about the real – and not just function for its own satisfaction. — p92

What I see in Lecture 9 is an overall goal of apprehending the creative aspect of thinking. It is an "intrinsic aspect of irrationality" which is essential to rationality This aspect is demonstrated in play, and art, which are wider categories than philosophy, but it manifests in philosophy as the intuitive and the speculative. The goal of Adorno here, is to produce a sort of basic understanding of this aspect of thought, through the type of "circling around it" which @Jamal describes.

The creative aspect of thought is extremely difficult to provide an explanation for, especially if we reject idealism. And, we must reject idealism because it is fundamentally flawed. The creative aspect presents us with an aspect of thought which is not grounded in sense experience, but somehow extends beyond sense experience. The idealist approach is flawed because it is a sort of cop-out, instead of trying to understand the truth about this type of thought, it simply assumes an overarching "Spirit" or something like that, to account or it.

I can elucidate the problem with idealism by referring to current concepts of Platonism. Platonism avoids the need to understand the origin of concepts (creativity) by positing that ideas are eternal and independent. The glaring problem is called the interaction problem, and we are left with no way to understand how the human mind is supposed to tap into the eternal independent ideas, and get these concepts into one's own mind. So that's the fault with idealism in general, it does not provide an approach toward understanding the reality of creativity, it simply provides an excuse to avoid it.

What Adorno points out in this lecture, is that this type of idealist evasion, this "spiritualization of the world" is pervasive in modern philosophy. Hegel employs "World Spirit". Kant has "original apperception". And, Adorno argues that even Marx may be considered idealist with his use of "forces of production".

My own opinion is that all forms of materialism are reducible to idealism. This is because "matter" itself is nothing more than a concept which we employ to understand the temporal extension of the sensible world. Therefore giving priority to matter is giving priority to a concept. With rigorous analysis of the term "matter" it is dissolved into "indeterminateness", Aristotle's 'prime matter' being total lack of form. So indeterminateness is necessarily conceptual only, for the reasons explained in lecture 6. Therefore placing priority in matter as a starting point, is no different from placing priority in indeterminateness, and both of the two are demonstrably idealist approaches. Marx presents his materialism as showing the true nature of Hegel's idealism as supportive of a more basic underlying materialism. But actually, this materialism is swallowed up into idealism when its true nature is exposed, and Marx's spin doesn't succeed in getting him out of idealism.

So Adorno's critical rationality makes use of play, intuition, mimesis, and the irrational, but channeled and controlled. This got me thinking about Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis in neuroscience, popularized in Descartes' Error.

The hypothesis is that feelings, associated with emotions, motivate and guide reason in a fundamental way, such that there would be no recognizable rationality without them. If true—and it seems to be significantly backed up by science—then the Cartesian and Kantian dualism of reason and sensibility, which has been reflected in culture for hundreds of years, is wrong. As Adorno says, there is a constitutive element of the irrational in the rational.

There is a lot of overlap with other philosophies here. Nietzsche, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault all in various ways downgraded reason and put it in its bodily (or social and historical) place. For Adorno, the key thinkers were likely Nietzsche and Hegel.

Another connection is the work on metaphor by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. Metaphor isn't just poetic decoration but is fundamental to the way we think. Perhaps without consciously thinking of it this way, Adorno enacts this in his use of play and mimesis, and in his writing—as if his playful, provocative, and paradoxical analogies are constitutive, rather than standing poetically for something more fundamental.



Creativity is a great way of tying it all together. I had been thinking of it as a kind of openness, but that's too passive, more like Kant's sensible receptiveness than the spontaneity of the understanding. Once again, I want to say, but also hesitate to say, that Adorno is taking the middle path.

I like to think about the role that intention plays in art. We tend to think of intention as a direct conscious awareness of a specific goal, guiding the actions toward that goal. But there is an experiment which an artist can do, which is to select a medium, attempt to eliminate all conscious intentions from one's mind, and simply create. The only real consciously directed intention is in the selection of the medium, and the intention to have no intention. Then the guidance of one's actions arises immediately from one's unconscious, and the direction is sort of like dreaming. The inverse of lucid dreaming, instead of taking entering the dream with the consciousness, allow the waking activity to be subsumed by the unconscious.

Experiments like that demonstrate to me, that even in our day to day conscious activity, a vast part o that conscious activity is actually directed by the unconscious. And when we analyze what motivates us in general, why we strive to meet deadlines, fulfil social obligations, etc., it becomes apparent that the unconscious aspect of "intention" plays a much larger role than the conscious. Even if a person is very focused, and driven towards a very specific goal, it is not the conscious mind which keeps the person focused, but the underlying unconscious. So the more that a person is goal oriented, driven toward conscious goals, it's actually the case that the unconscious aspect is playing a bigger role as the cause of that capacity to remain focused on conscious goals, to be determined.

So I've theorized that the conscious self, is actually an inauthentic "self" which the unconscious creates, and pushes out into the world of activity in a sort of trial and error process, where the unconscious is recording the results in memory. The unconscious is the authentic self, and there is a sort of antinomy between it and the conscious (rational/irrational as Adorno says). But it's just the conscious which sets the rational as better than the irrational. The unconscious must distance itself as much as possible from the conscious, because it sets the conscious into a life of self abuse, for reasons which cannot be revealed to the conscious (like Plato's noble lie, in the context of self-deception), and that's what life on earth consists of, as the conscious difference between pleasure and pain and how that is actually conditioned, or derived from the unconscious.

How Freudian of you. You go a bit far when you say that the unconscious is the "authentic self," in my opinion. What's missing from your view is the reciprocity between one and the other, which is more the way Freud and Adorno see it. They don't come down only on one side, so to speak.

But yeah, that art experiment is a good way to think about what Adorno says on the parallels between art and philosophy.

You go a bit far... — Jamal

I generally do.

I do not completely dismiss the reciprocity between the conscious and unconscious, but I've come to think of it as more one way. Vast information goes from conscious to unconscious, continually, in the practice of memory for example. But I realize that the brain is extremely complex in its processes, and administering to consciousness is really only a small part of its functions. This means that everything else which it is doing, continually overseeing, directing, and synchronizing all the internal living systems, must be prioritized over consciousness, as being the major aspect of the brain's activities. This leaves consciousness just as a sort of tip of the iceberg, which raises the question of why all the rest is hidden from the consciousness. The consciousness only receives a vague hint of what the brain is doing with the rest of the body, through pleasures, pains, and the various emotions. Why the separation?

I think you've committed the motte-and-bailey fallacy, moving from a controversial existential claim to an uncontroversial functional one, from talk of what the self is to talk of what the brain does. I don't think you can support the former with the latter.

But what matters is that we agree (I think) that what has been considered irrational is actually a basic component of the rational, and also that rational, conscious cognition is not as independent and in control as once thought.

But for me you are too close to falling into the kind of pure irrationalism criticized by Adorno, viz., reason cannot grasp the truth, and what is hidden is deeper and truer. As it happens, he has something to say about depth in the next lecture.

Habermas faulted Adorno for being too negative, but in these lectures we can see him trying to articulate a philosophy that is not only critical but is also speculative, going beyond what we (think we) know.

Instead of saying “what has been thought of as irrational is a basic component of reason,” Adorno will instead say something like “the rational is also irrational”. In doing so he adopts problematic, reified concepts to expose contradictions in ideology—this is the critical part—but at the same time indirectly suggest a more expansive rationality that could do more justice to the potential of reason—and this is the speculative part.

(Incidentally, although in his writing he is performative in the way I just described, in the lectures he drops the act to a degree and says “ok, here’s what I’m doing when I say that,” in relatively plain language. This is why the lectures work as an introduction, and as a “how to read Adorno”.)

It’s tempting to think of this speculative element as positive, and having the character of reconciliation as in the Hegelian sublation or synthesis. Adorno of course would deny this, but how exactly?

And after all, he is negative for a positive reason. He has goals, for philosophy and for society.

I think the answer is, obviously enough, that any positivity in the method is a negative positivity, that is, it emerges as a result of the negative thrust rather than being asserted alone. Adorno is thus always carefully indirect.

The level of abstraction in what I’m saying here produces the suspicion that it’s lacking in substance. I don’t think it is, but maybe there’s a need to bring it down to earth with concrete examples, more concrete than talk of rationality and irrationality. Maybe later.

The level of abstraction in what I’m saying here produces the suspicion that it’s lacking in substance. I don’t think it is, but maybe there’s a need to bring it down to earth with concrete examples, more concrete than talk of rationality and irrationality. Maybe later. — Jamal

I don't think it's lacking in substance.

(Btw, Tuesday is when I'm catching up on 9)

I don't think it's lacking in substance. — Moliere

:smile:

Btw, Tuesday is when I'm catching up on 9 — Moliere

:cool:

Instead of saying “what has been thought of as irrational is a basic component of reason,” Adorno will instead say something like “the rational is also irrational”. In doing so he adopts problematic, reified concepts to expose contradictions in ideology—this is the critical part—but at the same time indirectly suggest a more expansive rationality that could do more justice to the potential of reason—and this is the speculative part. — Jamal

This relationship between the rational and irrational was a bit perplexing to me. Look at the conscious/unconscious relation we just discussed. The consciousness is the seat of concepts, abstractions, and what idealists attempt to designate as substance. And the unconscious is how we generally relate the conscious to the material human body, through emotions, pleasure, pain, etc.. So the unconscious is supported by the substance of the material body, and these two opposing directions is what dualism latches a hold of. In my last post, I posited "the brain" as a sort of medium between the two, and you corrected me on this. As well, common understanding puts the brain decidedly on the material substance side of any dualism.

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.

It’s tempting to think of this speculative element as positive, and having the character of reconciliation as in the Hegelian sublation or synthesis. Adorno of course would deny this, but how exactly? — Jamal

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.

I think the answer is, obviously enough, that any positivity in the method is a negative positivity, that is, it emerges as a result of the negative thrust rather than being asserted alone. Adorno is thus always carefully indirect. — Jamal

He led me earlier, to believe that he is engaged in a positive negativity. A type of negativity which is somehow grounded in a fixed point which is found to be embedded in the existing positivity, i.e. his form of negativity grounds itself in the negative aspect of the existing positivity, therefore it is critical.