I think this relates directly to what he says about system thinking. The idea of negative dialectics is not to reject systems thinking, but to determine its true form. And this displays how Adorno thinks of criticism. To criticize is not to reject, but a way of bettering the thing being criticized.
There's been some back and forth between you and I in this thread, concerning this issue. First there was the question of whether Adorno accepts or rejects Hegelian principles. Also we had the question of whether what Adorno presents is properly called "dialectics" in the context of Hegelian "dialectics". It's becoming apparent to me, that the process is to neither accept nor reject a given principle, but to criticize it. This leaves synthesis as unnecessary, because acceptance of principles, adoption of belief is not the intended end. The process may or may not enable synthesis, and having synthesis as a goal from the outcome would prejudice the procedure. — Metaphysician Undercover
I think that this is the real issue with the idea of the concept going beyond, or overshooting the object. Relations between objects "affinity" is something categorically distinct from objects themselves. So conceptualization which focuses on objects, and representing objects (identity thinking), really cannot grasp this very significant aspect of reality which is the affinity between objects.
The issue appears to be the difference between the relations between concept and object, and the relations between object and object. When the concept overshoots the object it may establish a scientific relation of prediction. Notice though that this relation is a subject/object relation because that overshooting is directed by intention toward producing an extended conception of the object. What Adorno is interested in is the true object/object relation. This must take as its primary assumption, a separation which produces a multitude, rather than the primary assumption of unity which conceptualizes "the object". The difference being that the primary postulate is separation rather than unity. — Metaphysician Undercover
What he describes with the bitmap analogy, is a difference. As I explained, that difference may enhance, or it may degrade the experience, in relation to the original. Further, it may enhance some aspects, and degrade others, and all sorts of different possibilities for "difference". In other words, the translator knows that there are good translations and bad, and might also even know that his translation is lacking in some areas, if he knew that he didn't adequately understand some areas. Therefore he is warning us to be wary of all translations, even his. — Metaphysician Undercover
If ideology encourages thought more than ever to wax in positivity, then it slyly registers the fact that precisely this would be contrary to thinking and that it requires the friendly word of advice from social authority, in order to accustom it to positivity.
...
While thinking does violence upon that which it exerts its syntheses, it follows at the same time a potential which waits in what it faces, and unconsciously obeys the idea of restituting to the pieces what it itself has done; in philosophy this unconsciousness becomes conscious. The hope of reconciliation is conjoined to irreconcilable thinking, because the resistance of thinking against the merely existent, the domineering freedom of the subject, also intends in the object what, through its preparation to the object, was lost to this latter.
As to whether Adorno would (not only) concur to thinking being one of the greatest pleasures of life, I very much doubt that he would: — Pussycat
And I think that's probably the key to unlocking the puzzle. Even though Adorno wants to focus on particulars, and in a fragmented way, it doesn't mean he thinks these particulars are themselves fragmented or necessarily lie, isolated, within a fragmented world. In other words, he does not want to treat objects as self-contained or atomistic. Rather, objects are always already mediated, connected to other objects in a web of history and society. And this mediation or connectivity is constitutive of the objects. Objects are nodes in networks. I think Adorno thereby avoids your dualism. — Jamal
This would be a subject requiring much discussion and debate. — Metaphysician Undercover
The demand for committalness [Verbindlichkeit] without system is that for thought-models. These are not of a merely monadological sort. The model strikes the specific and more than the specific, without dissolving it into its more general master-concept. To think philosophically is so much as to think in models; negative dialectics is an ensemble of model-analyses.
Philosophy debases itself into apologetic affirmation the moment it deceives itself and others over the fact that whatever sets its objects into motion must also influence these from outside. What awaits within these, requires a foothold in order to speak, with the perspective that the forces mobilized from outside, and in the end every theory applied to the phenomena, would come to rest in those. To this extent, too, philosophical theory means its own end: through its realization.
But what is the connection between the former passage, about thought-models, with the latter passage, about philosophy more generally. I think it's that the only way of achieving the latter is by the former. The only way of directing the power of system unsystematically to allow objects to speak is using thought-models, which do not reduce objects to instances and specimens. — Jamal
The scientific consensus would probably concede that even
experience would imply theory. It is however a “standpoint”, at best
hypothetical. Conciliatory representatives of scientivism demand what
they call proper or clean science, which is supposed to account for these
sorts of presuppositions. Exactly this demand is incompatible with
intellectual experience. If a standpoint is demanded of the latter, then
it would be that of the diner to the roast. It lives by ingesting such; only
when the latter disappears into the former, would there be philosophy.
Until this point theory embodies that discipline in intellectual
experience which already embarrassed Goethe in relation to Kant. If
experience relied solely on its dynamic and good fortune, there would
be no stopping.
Ideology lurks in the Spirit which, dazzled with itself like
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, irresistibly becomes well-nigh absolute.
Theory prevents this. It corrects the naiveté of its self-confidence,
without forcing it to sacrifice the spontaneity which theory for its part
wishes to get at. By no means does the difference between the so-called
subjective share of intellectual experience and its object vanish; the
necessary and painful exertion of the cognizing subject testifies to it. In
the unreconciled condition, non-identity is experienced as that which
is negative. The subject shrinks away from this, back onto itself and the
fullness of its modes of reaction. Only critical self-reflection protects it
from the limitations of its fullness and from building a wall [Wand:
interior wall] between itself and the object, indeed from presupposing
its being-for-itself as the in-itself and for-itself. The less the identity
between the subject and object can be ascertained, the more
contradictory what is presumed to cognize such, the unfettered
strength and open-minded self-consciousness. Theory and intellectual
experience require their reciprocal effect. The former does not contain
answers for everything, but reacts to a world which is false to its
innermost core. Theory would have no jurisdiction over what would be
free of the bane of such. The ability to move is essential to
consciousness, not an accidental characteristic. It signifies a double
procedure: that of the inside out, the immanent process, the
authentically dialectical, and a free one, something unfettered which
steps out of dialectics, as it were. Neither of them are however
disparate. The unregimented thought has an elective affinity to
dialectics, which as critique of the system recalls to mind what would
be outside of the system; and the energy which dialectical movement in
cognition unleashes is that which rebels against the system. Both
positions of consciousness are connected to one another through each
other’s critique, not through compromise.
As to whether Adorno would (not only) concur to thinking being one of the greatest pleasures of life, I very much doubt that he would: — Pussycat
Excuse me for butting in. That passage does not to me show what you think it shows. At most it shows he condemns thinking when it's a complacent or dominating pleasure. The “resistance of thinking against the merely existent” can be pleasurable, I would think. Why not? Adorno of course likely thought that good thinking was both pleasurable and painful. And since he speaks with such approval of play in philosophy, I reckon we can be confident that Redmond’s assessment is right.
Anyway, I think it jumps off the page. He’s enjoying himself. — Jamal
Wouldn't you think that equating thinking with pleasure, is identity-thinking? — Pussycat
There is no lack of related intentions throughout history. The French Enlightenment was endowed by its highest concept, that of reason, with something systematic under the formal aspect; however the constitutive entanglement of its idea of reason with that of an objectively reasonable arrangement of society deprives the system of the pathos, which it only regained when reason renounced the idea of its realization and absolutized itself into the Spirit. Thinking akin to the encyclopedia, as something rationally organized and nevertheless discontinuous, unsystematic and spontaneous, expressed the self-critical Spirit of reason. It represented what was erased from philosophy, as much through its increasing distance from praxis as through its incorporation into the academic bustle: worldly experience, that eye for reality, whose moment is also that of thought.
The freedom of the Spirit is nothing else. Thought can no more do without the element of the homme de lettres [French: person of education] which the petit bourgeois scientific ethos maligns, than without what the scientific philosophies misuse, the meditative drawing-together, the argument, which earned so much skepticism. Whenever philosophy was truly substantial, both moments appeared together. From a distance, dialectics could be characterized as the effort raised to self-consciousness of letting itself be permeated by such. Otherwise the specialized argument degenerates into the technics of non-conceptual experts in the midst of the concept, just as nowadays so-called analytic philosophy, memorizable and copyable by robots, is disseminated academically.
What is immanently argumentative is legitimate where it registers the integrated reality become system, in order to oppose it with its own strength. What is on the other hand free in thought represents the authority which is already aware of what is emphatically untrue of that context. Without this knowledge it would not have come to the breakout, without the appropriation of the power of the system it would have failed. That both moments do not seamlessly meld into one another is due to the real power of the system, which includes that which also potentially surpasses it.
However the untruth of the context of immanence discloses itself in the overwhelming experience that the world, which is as systematically organized as if it were truly that realized reason Hegel so glorified, simultaneously perpetuates the powerlessness of the Spirit, apparently so all-powerful, in its old unreason. The immanent critique of idealism defends idealism, to the extent it shows how far it is defrauded by itself; how much that which is first, which is according to such always the Spirit, stands in complicity with the blind primacy of the merely existent [Seiendes]. The doctrine of the absolute Spirit immediately promotes this latter.
The untruth of the context disclosed by immanence, however, is also revealed to one’s overwhelming experience of a world that has organized itself so systematically that it might as well be rationality made real, Hegel’s very glory, even as that world, in its irrationality, perpetuates the powerlessness of the omnipotent-seeming mind. — Argument and Experience
The scientific consensus would probably concede that even experience would imply theory. It is however a “standpoint”, at best hypothetical. Conciliatory representatives of scientivism demand what they call proper or clean science, which is supposed to account for these sorts of presuppositions. Exactly this demand is incompatible with intellectual experience. If a standpoint is demanded of the latter, then it would be that of the diner to the roast. It lives by ingesting such; only when the latter disappears into the former, would there be philosophy. Until this point theory embodies that discipline in intellectual experience which already embarrassed Goethe in relation to Kant. If experience relied solely on its dynamic and good fortune, there would be no stopping.
Ideology lurks in the Spirit which, dazzled with itself like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, irresistibly becomes well-nigh absolute. Theory prevents this. It corrects the naiveté of its self-confidence, without forcing it to sacrifice the spontaneity which theory for its part wishes to get at. By no means does the difference between the so-called subjective share of intellectual experience and its object vanish; the necessary and painful exertion of the cognizing subject testifies to it. In the unreconciled condition, non-identity is experienced as that which is negative. The subject shrinks away from this, back onto itself and the fullness of its modes of reaction. Only critical self-reflection protects it from the limitations of its fullness and from building a wall [Wand: interior wall] between itself and the object, indeed from presupposing its being-for-itself as the in-itself and for-itself. The less the identity between the subject and object can be ascertained, the more contradictory what is presumed to cognize such, the unfettered strength and open-minded self-consciousness. Theory and intellectual experience require their reciprocal effect. The former does not contain answers for everything, but reacts to a world which is false to its innermost core. Theory would have no jurisdiction over what would be free of the bane of such. The ability to move is essential to consciousness, not an accidental characteristic. It signifies a double procedure: that of the inside out, the immanent process, the authentically dialectical, and a free one, something unfettered which steps out of dialectics, as it were. Neither of them are however disparate. The unregimented thought has an elective affinity to dialectics, which as critique of the system recalls to mind what would be outside of the system; and the energy which dialectical movement in cognition unleashes is that which rebels against the system. Both positions of consciousness are connected to one another through each other’s critique, not through compromise.
Experience is what is gained from action, and intellectual experience appears to be sort of like knowledge in general. Theory appears to be something which is prior to intellectual experience, as necessary for action, but also a sort of response to it, as a corrective to the consequent self-confidence.
I would say that we could theoretically distinguish two types of theory, that which is prior to action and intellectual experience, and that which is posterior. But, since it's all a reciprocating process, all theory would in reality consist of both types, as prior to this experience, and posterior to that experience. — Metaphysician Undercover
Theory and intellectual experience require their reciprocal effect. The former does not contain answers for everything, but reacts to a world which is false to its innermost core. Theory would have no jurisdiction over what would be free of the bane of such.
Whether languages adapted so that to represent and match the dominating ideologies of the times.
— Pussycat
Such a relation would be reciprocal, over lengthy time. Ideology gets shaped by language as much as language gets shaped by ideology. In my reply to Jamal above, the use of profanity in language is described as a rejection of ideology. And, as the profundity of ideology is renounced in the manner described by Adorno, new ideology will fill the void, and this will be shaped by language. Some ideology will severely restrict language use, as was evident with Catholicism and The Inquisition. But ultimately such restriction of freedom induces rejection, then the new ideology which evolves is restricted by the limits of language. — Metaphysician Undercover
It is the assumption that objects are identical to their concepts. — Pussycat
Adorno offers a better image of intellectual experience, a transforming rather than a spectating one: the diner to the roast. It's about digging in, not merely observing from a distance. In eating, neither the diner nor the roast remain unchanged. — Jamal
I don't think anyone believes that objects are identical to concepts. — Metaphysician Undercover
There is a relation of identity between subject and object which is conducive to truth. — Metaphysician Undercover
I don't think anyone believes that objects are identical to concepts. — Metaphysician Undercover
That's idealism. — Jamal
And didn't you, yourself, say that society was no more than a concept? — Jamal
Only critical self-reflection protects it from the limitations of its fullness and from building a wall [Wand: interior wall] between itself and the object, indeed from presupposing its being-for-itself as the in-itself and for-itself. The less the identity between the subject and object can be ascertained, the more contradictory what is presumed to cognize such, the unfettered strength and open-minded self-consciousness. Theory and intellectual experience require their reciprocal effect. The former does not contain answers for everything, but reacts to a world which is false to its innermost core.
where it may be perceived as consisting of Platonic objects — Metaphysician Undercover
What makes you say that? — Jamal
I'm sure you know very well what so and so is. — Outlander
What makes you say that? — Jamal
Not really, Idealism involves a belief that concepts are objects, but not all objects are concepts. So that is not the identity relation referred to by Adorno. — Metaphysician Undercover
Since my earliest youth, I knew that everything that I stood for found itself in a hopeless struggle with what I perceived as the anti-spirit incarnate — the spirit of Anglo-Saxon natural-scientific positivism. — Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience
The relevant idealism is the view that reality is mental (in Hegel, rational-spiritual). It's the reduction of objects to correlates of thought. — Jamal
As to what identity-thinking is, I refer back to my post on page 2: — Jamal
This I see as self-contradicting. "Correlates" implies a duality, so "the reduction of objects to correlates of thought", is inherently incompatible with "reality is mental". "Reality is mental" implies all objects are thoughts. — Metaphysician Undercover
problems of ambiguity — Metaphysician Undercover
Hold on, I was under the impression that "object" means anything that can be known or cognized, the philosopher's subject-matter, like justice, beauty, science, etc, basically everything that is not subject (ourselves). — Pussycat
For example, I want to know what justice is. I take it as object, camel case, then Justice. And then try to conceptualize it, using the concept of justice (lowercase). Then identity thinking is the equality, justice = Justice: my subjective conception of Justice (justice) equals to Justice - the object (of conceptualization).
I'm way off, you think? — Pussycat
Thus we can see negative dialectics, and especially the idea of intellectual experience, as the philosophical elaboration of this instinct: resisting the reduction of experience to its empiricist concept, while insisting that such resistance is not a retreat into irrationalism, nor even a retreat into the subject, but rather a materialist critique of rationality itself. — Jamal
By no means does the difference between the so-called
subjective share of intellectual experience and its object vanish; the
necessary and painful exertion of the cognizing subject testifies to it. In
the unreconciled condition, non-identity is experienced as that which
is negative. The subject shrinks away from this, back onto itself and the
fullness of its modes of reaction. Only critical self-reflection protects it
from the limitations of its fullness and from building a wall [Wand:
interior wall] between itself and the object, indeed from presupposing
its being-for-itself as the in-itself and for-itself.
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