If a joke was what it ever was, then how do you explain the following?

One which cannot fall into the abyss, of which the fundamentalists of metaphysics prattle – it is not that of agile sophistics but that of insanity – turns, under the commandment of its principle of security, analytical, potentially into tautology.

Dont you see this as a suggestion, to "fall into the abyss"? Doesn't he say that those that don't do that, will turn to analytical and tautological statements? What is an abyss, if not something bottomless?

Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement; only mental acrobatics relate to the thing, which according to the fable convenu
[French: agreed-upon fiction] it holds in contempt for the sake of its self-satisfaction.

Doesn't he say here that it is with mental acrobatics that one should approach the extremes? And that the herd will see these moves as nothing more than self satisfied rhetoric, as perhaps it was done with Nietzsche?

Another reference to abyss and bottomless:

In contrast to this, the cognition throws itself à fond perdu [French: into the depths] at objects, so as to be fruitful. The vertigo which this creates is an index veri [Latin: index of truth]; the shock of the revelation, the negativity, or what it necessarily seems to be amidst what is hidden and monotonous, untruth only for the untrue.

Also, as per your suggestion, I had a look at the lectures. The notes on this passage say:

Truth [to be found] only in whatever throws itself away without safety belt, à fonds perdu.

I want to condense Against Relativism in a facetious manner:

Relativism is something which ND opposes.

Not in the way that others do, because (various reasons)

The points I think that are important here are that ND is against relativism, and this is a long overdue time for ND to transition from the epistemic to the ethical.

It would be more fruitful to cognize relativism as a delimited
form of consciousness.

Sums up his take on the bourgeois form of relativism, I think: Rather than producing arguments against it one can, from a philosophical vantage, see that such kinds of relativism or skepticism aren't worth addressing: But that's not to say that skepticism is not worth addressing (as Adorno has already done)

I'm more inclined to see this as a straight expression, but I don't know. It seems hard to reconcile the notion that Adorno is making fun of this idea while also noting how the place where ontology hits bottomlessness is the place of truth. — Moliere

Where's the difficulty? Think of it as I said, when ontology hits (the bottom of) bottomlessness, there it finds truth. In other words, ontology never finds truth. And, contrary to those who think that truth is never hidden from us, Adorno seems to think it is always hidden from us.

I have a hard time reading this like he's poking fun. — Moliere

Well he has already said that there is humour involved in philosophy.

Dont you see this as a suggestion, to "fall into the abyss"? Doesn't he say that those that don't do that, will turn to analytical and tautological statements? What is an abyss, if not something bottomless? — Pussycat

i don't see your point. When he says that, he is talking about those who think that truth cannot hide from us. That whole paragraph, from which you quoted, is all part and package of that sarcasm involving the relationship between truth and groundlessness. To avoid groundlessness we choose tautology, but tautology is useless, powerless. So metaphysics is nothing but the insane prattle of going from one extreme to the other.

Doesn't he say here that it is with mental acrobatics that one should approach the extremes? And that the herd will see these moves as nothing more than self satisfied rhetoric, as perhaps it was done with Nietzsche? — Pussycat

He's sarcastically making fun of metaphysics. It's mental acrobatics, yes, but it is doing nothing (Wittgenstein's idleness) but insane, ridiculous moves, which we might be entertained by (laugh at). These acrobatic moves are even beyond sophistry in ridiculousness, because at least the agility of sophistry is purposefully directed.

Where's the difficulty? Think of it as I said, when ontology hits (the bottom of) bottomlessness, there it finds truth. In other words, ontology never finds truth. And, contrary to those who think that truth is never hidden from us, Adorno seems to think it is always hidden from us. — Metaphysician Undercover

Probably in us talking past one another in some sense, somewhere.

I don't think I or @Pussycat would disagree with "ontology never finds truth" or that "truth is hidden from us" (not always, tho). I put it this ways because it looks like we agree more or less on "bottomlessness"

But then that's to show how these terms warp around one another more than its an interpretation of the text at hand, no?

We are, after all, still in the introduction :D

Maybe some relativism to the text is worthy to pursue together? Whether we think this or that way?

I don't think I or Pussycat would disagree with "ontology never finds truth" or that "truth is hidden from us" (not always, tho). I put it this ways because it looks like we agree more or less on "bottomlessness" — Moliere

Rethinking here:

Where ontology hits bottomlessness is the place of truth, but that does not, in turn, mean that ontology finds truth.

I am imagining at this point to make sense of things, but I'm thinking that ontology is a sort of beginning whereby we say various things we take to be true with respect to reality: Every event has a cause. No individual can be at two places at once. Space is Euclidean.

But truth is where we begin to see these statements unravel: the groundlessness demonstrates how the ontological statement is false, sometimes, and so unravels its universal expression.

However, theory (ontology) must be sought out again after ontology hits bottomlessness.

The one negates the other at the most extreme point they can and this is how thought progresses to the next point in the dialectic.

But rather than all the assertions of Hegel we get a somewhat open dialectic...

Still speculative at this point, for sure, but the thoughts I'm having.

I believe he's trying to keep the tension, the dialectic, of grounding alive. Descartes grounded certainty in the cogito, as a way to escape dogmatism, and this now has recoiled in just that. I guess for Adorno this is the ultimate fate of any stable grounds, they are sealed and buried, never to be questioned, until they become hollow. But the main reason I engaged with MU the way I did, is because he said that negative dialectics escapes bottomlessness, and that it is a lie. Whereas the way I see it, there is no escape, but Adorno seems to imply dialectical confrontation. — Pussycat

:up:

I agree with this interpretation.

However, theory (ontology) must be sought out again after ontology hits bottomlessness. — Moliere

But how does "ontology hits bottomlessness" make any sense? Suppose ontology progresses indefinitely, as "bottomlessness" implies. When would it "hit" bottomlessness; after two years, a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years? It doesn't make any sense to say that it has hit, or it hits, bottomlessness.

We can judge a specific ontology as groundless, or bottomless, if we think that the claims of that ontology are ungrounded, or unsound, but that would just mean that we disagree with the ontology. Then bottomless, or ungrounded, is just an avoidance. Instead of addressing what we disagree with, we simply dismiss the ontology as groundless or bottomless. So the charge of bottomless, or groundless, is just a nothing charge, useless and meaningless, while those who make the charge are acting out bottomlessness..

This is what he says about infinity. Philosophers talk about infinity, without recognizing that they are really acting it out.

The metacritical turn against prima philosophia [Latin: originary
philosophy] is at the same time one against the finitude of a philosophy,
which blusters about infinity and pays no heed to it.

Further, this is where "play" enters philosophy:

Against the total domination of method, philosophy retains,
correctively, the moment of play, which the tradition of its
scientifization would like to drive out of it. Even for Hegel this was a
sore point, he reproached “…types and distinctions, which are
determined by pure accident and by play, not by reason.”6 The non
naïve thought knows how little it encompasses what is thought, and yet
must always hold forth as if it had such completely in hand. It thereby
approximates clowning. It may not deny its traces, not the least because
they alone open up the hope of that which is forbidden to it. Philosophy
is the most serious of all things, but not all that serious, after all. What
aims for what is not already a priori and what it would have no statutory
power over, belongs, according to its own concept, simultaneously to a
sphere of the unconstrained, which was rendered taboo by the
conceptual essence. The concept cannot otherwise represent the thing
which it repressed, namely mimesis, than by appropriating something
of this latter in its own mode of conduct, without losing itself to it. — p25-26

Despite being the most serious thing, the pretense of truth in ontology, is just clowning.

But how does "ontology hits bottomlessness" make any sense? — Metaphysician Undercover

Didn't I answer this?

As a moment in a dialectic rather than a literal ground we stand upon.

"Hitting bottomlessness", I'd say, is the moment you see the absurd: that which is beyond the categories.

Or, to use Heidegger, ontology hitting bottomlessness is realizing that there's a difference between the present-at-hand (that which has a bottom) and the ready-to-hand (that which has now been fished out of the bottomlessness to contrast with our bottom)

On a personal level I'd say it's the moment when you see multiplicity -- and all you can say is "it's multiplicity, but I'm trying to make sense of it"


Have you ever felt that?

Have you ever felt that? — Moliere

I'm having a hard time, felt what? The moment I saw the absurd, or the moment I saw multiplicity? Or is multiplicity absurd for you? I don't know if I've ever really felt either one.

However, hitting bottomlessness is absurd to me. Therefore, I suppose I can conclude that I have felt that moment of seeing the absurd, as "hitting bottomlessness".

I'm having a hard time, felt what? The moment I saw the absurd, or the moment I saw multiplicity? Or is multiplicity absurd for you? I don't know if I've ever really felt either one. — Metaphysician Undercover

Then the answer is "no" ;)

Dialectics and the Solidified --

Thought is always negative but does not leave what is solid behind. That which is immediately perceived begins as a moment of the solidified and then upon reflection is mediated. While Hegel tried to ground dialectics in this mediated immediacy Adorno claims he did not leave the domination of the object by the subject behind as much as covered it up with "Geist"

The following I'm having trouble disentangling:

The Hegelian Logic foots the bill for this in its thoroughly formal character.
While it must according to its own concept be substantive, it excises, in
its effort to be everything at the same time, metaphysics and a doctrine
of categories, the determinate existent out of itself, in which its
beginnings could have legitimated itself; therein not so far away from
Kant and Fichte, who Hegel never tired of denouncing as the
spokespersons for abstract subjectivity.

Especially the first clause of the second sentence: "While it must according to its own concept be substantive, it excises, in its effort to be everything at the same time, metaphysics and a doctrine of categories, the determinate existent out of itself"

"While it must according to its own concept be substantive" where "it" = the Science of Logic

"it excises..." -- I'm trying to figure out which of the latter clauses this is connecting the first clause to.

"in its effort to be everything at the same time" must not be the clause because it immediately follows so this feels more like a parenthetical notation or an aside from the main point. But "it" is still Hegel's logic.

it's the next two that have me scratching my head: does the logic excise metaphysics and a doctrine of categories, the determinate existent out of itself, or both and the comma is effectively an "and"?


***

Next paragraph:

The spirit wins the battle against the non-existent enemy -- I take it "the enemy" are examples like Krugian's feather, and that Hegel's response is a "stop thief"

I'm guessing "stop thief" is riffing on the common phrase? So Hegel is, effectively, yelling an accusation in order to stop what seems to be a reasonable ask of a universal philosophy? Or is there such a thing as a thief who takes stops from others?

I think Adorno is taking Hegel to task here for being assured in the concept because his logic primarily deals with the conceptual and leaves behind the non-identical. And this is seen by seeing through the autonomy of subjectivity which, in turn, leads to several consequences that unravel to show the solidified beyond the concept.

***

Consciousness has a certain naivete. If it did not then thinking would lose itself and become naive. If the experience of consciousness did not create resistance to the facade (what I'm gathering is this naive experience in consciousness and then the reflection upon that naivete) then thought and activity "would only be dim copies"

I'm gathering that this is the sort of thinking he's speaking against, i.e., identity-thinking: whereas Adorno wants thought to have more to it than merely representing activity or reflecting it.

***

"What in the object goes beyond the determinations laid upon it by thinking, returns firstly to the subject as something immediate; where the subject feels itself to be quite certain of itself, in the primary experience, it is once again least of all a subject."

This naive certainty is not a subject but the return of what is in the object after determinations are laid upon it: we call a ball "round", but that ball could be an American football (it is round after all) or an International football (spherical) -- the object will return what is beyond the concept "round" and we'll be able to distinguish further, but this immediate experience -- the naive realism of the immediate -- is not fully determined by our concepts. There is still the non-identical, and this immediate return of the object is the least subject-like consciousness.

***

"The confidence that the whole seamlessly emerges out of that which is immediate, solid and simply primary, is idealistic appearance [Schein]. To dialectics immediacy does not remain what it immediately
expresses.It becomes a moment instead of the grounds. At the opposite pole, the same thing happens to the invariants of pure thought. "


So this "least subject like' experience is still an idealism when taken as a ground. Only by taking it as a moment in the dialectic, with its opposite (thought) do we obtain truth of the solidified.

And it's interesting how Adorno is speaking against a philosophy which emphasizes invariance as the seat of truth -- Platonic realms underlying the mere shadow of our experience as a classic example. We think "permenance" is the marker of the Solidified, but the marker of ideology is when these moments become solidified as transcendence -- the exact opposite of the Solidified in ND.

But, Adorno finishes, Idealism is not per se ideology, but rather is something which hides in the substructures of "something primary". I'm guessing that this is the conclusion for this section, but I am having more difficulty with it than the previous one.

the "something primary" for Hegel is the dialectic, I think. Whereas Adorno is trying to bring in the non-conceptual Hegel is the example he's using to note how the identical, and the unchanging, are markers of the solidified, but that for ND the solidified is taken in a negative, non-idealistic capacity.

However, hitting bottomlessness is absurd to me. Therefore, I suppose I can conclude that I have felt that moment of seeing the absurd, as "hitting bottomlessness". — Metaphysician Undercover

To take back what I said far too flippantly yesterday:

This is close, I think, but I want to make a distinction between the absurd and the groundless on the basis of the opening to this section: In one sense "the absurd" can be a terminus of thought and in that way I think it'd be wrong to interpret Adorno. Rather it seems "the groundless" is the beginning of thought proper that is not merely mirroring activity.

So rather than an empty and quiet absurdity it seems we have the vertiginous groundlessness which is a beginning rather than an end to thought. So insofar that "hitting bottomlessness" leads to some new thought then I think we're close in our thoughts.

We can judge a specific ontology as groundless, or bottomless, if we think that the claims of that ontology are ungrounded, or unsound, but that would just mean that we disagree with the ontology. — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm thinking that "hitting bottomlessness" is not something we ascribe to other thoughts as much as is an encounter with the vertiginous. We don't judge a specific ontology as groundless as much as, in the course of thinking identity as primary, we encounter the failings of thinking.

If bottomlessness is where we find truth then, no, we don't just disagree with an ontology: We're seeing something new through the act of negation rather than simply denying it as false.

Then bottomless, or ungrounded, is just an avoidance. Instead of addressing what we disagree with, we simply dismiss the ontology as groundless or bottomless. So the charge of bottomless, or groundless, is just a nothing charge, useless and meaningless, while those who make the charge are acting out bottomlessness..

Hopefully the above addresses your concerns so that this does not follow.

If bottomlessness is where we find truth then, no, we don't just disagree with an ontology: We're seeing something new through the act of negation rather than simply denying it as false. — Moliere

I just can't understand your use of "bottomlessness" Moliere. How is bottomlessness related to the act of negation?

Take Heidegger's distinction between present-at-hand/ready-to-hand.

Prior to Heidegger -- at least so the story goes from his lips -- ontology was focused upon the present-at-hand.

Heidegger disputes that -- negates it.

But he doesn't just say "No"

Instead he broaches a question: How can we make the question "What is the meaning of being?" make sense again?

Broaching the question is the encounter with the groundless/bottomless. But negation had to happen prior -- a realization that our thought is not "all there is" even though we thought, due to this being ontology, that's all there was -- to even form the question which then leads to a distinction as it develops.

The Heidegger analogy is not helping me. The distinction between "ready" and "present" is teleological, the ready being useful, the present simply being there. Even if Heidegger says so, it's not true that ontology was focused on the present-at-hand, because the teleological goes back to Aristotle. Perhaps modern science focuses on the present-at-hand, but that's not ontology.

So i don't see that he negates the ontological perspective, he just indicates how the scientific perspective has strayed from the ontological, and he strives to bring "being" back to its origins. He may be negating the present-at-hand perspective, in preference for the ready-to-hand perspective, as the primary, and more real, thereby bringing truth to bear on the issue.

But in relation to "groundlessness", or "bottomlessness", I think that this is how the perspective which places priority on the "present-at-hand" is apprehended, as bottomless. The sort of objectivity, which scientific inquiry strives for, is produced by removing the teleological aspect. But this effectively removes 'the end", or goal, producing the bottomlessness. This, lack of a goal, is what the final paragraph of the section alludes to.

The distinction between "ready" and "present" is teleological, — Metaphysician Undercover

Perhaps this is no surprise given our disagreement thus far: But I don't think that the distinction is teleological. Which stops your line of reasoning that Aristotle is relevant.

I don't think he is.

It could be we're at an impasse at this point? I've said my bit and you've said yours -- but we're still in the introduction so there's much more to read together. It's OK if we don't see eye to eye. We can still help one another in reading the text from different perspectives.

It could be we're at an impasse at this point? — Moliere

If you don't apprehend "ready-at-hand" to be teleological, when it explicitly relates to purpose, then we probably are at an impasse.

But, I'm fine to let that go, and continue, because it's not really related to the reading. However, the final paragraph in that section, in my mind, alludes to teleology. Heidegger on the other hand, I believe, appeals directly to teleology.

But, I'm fine to let that go, and continue, because it's not really related to the reading. However, the final paragraph in that section, in my mind, alludes to teleology. Heidegger on the other hand, I believe, appeals directly to teleology. — Metaphysician Undercover

Understood.

Given what we've said so far it ought not surprise you that I disagree ;)

But that'd be for a thread on teleology rather than reading a book together.

Like before, since there's a page break, I want to try and summarize this section. With some of the questions I have above about particular passages I could be off, but at a more general level I'm thinking:

This section starts with the vertiginous and moves towards the Solidified. I'm reading the second section as tied to the first: The Vertiginous undermines this sense of an eternal truth which doesn't change, but since truth, as Adorno wants to discuss it, is a fragile affair this isn't something which undermines philosophy.

The middle point is meant to reassure us that ND is not a relativism.

And the final point is meant to bring out the Solidified, which I gather is important given his criticism of Hegel's philosophy dominating the object with the concept -- here, though this is a dialectics, is a material philosophy.

The Privilege of Experience

Now we're getting into some dialectical reasoning: Adorno, by prioritizing the subject and experience thereby obtains the purest objectivity where the subject is the reflection of the objective.

Further the positivistic view of truth is used to reflect on this truth that Adorno is seeking: whereas a managed, positivistic viewpoint eliminates the subject in favor of an objectivity which maximizes communication between nodes, flattened to the point that one can easily substitute for the other Adorno's use of subjectivity allows each truth, invoking Spinoza, to be an index of itself: So this particular care towards the small, individual, unique experience of the object actually requires a subject, and this play between the subject/object forms a sort of overlapping set of truths.

Something I haven't been able to talk about, but am getting an idea about now, is Adorno's use of "philosophical experience".

I think what he's ultimately defending is the notion that philosophy can produce positive knowledge: At one extreme we have Kant's "intellectual intuition" which would forbid a human being from being able to think towards positive thoughts about the metaphysical, for instance, which Adorno is speaking on (not sure what else to call a materialist criticizing Hegel but utilizing his dialectic than at least metaphysical-adjacent)

In a way I am imagining that this philosophical experience is something akin to an intellectual intuition, but not as expansive as Kant's notion of the intellectual intuition -- rather something a bit more human that still requires training, expertise, and so forth (as the sciences also need), but not something that, by so doing, is undercut by the antinomies: In a way we might say, though this is me trying to make sense of things rather than reading other interpretations, that ND is a theory of intellectual intuition insofar as we understand that he's not claiming to have the mind of God or something -- only that philosophy makes progress.

Against Relativism:

The substance of his argument against relativism is pretty much confined to one paragraph. It's a little hard for me to understand and interpret so I'll put up the whole paragraph here.

In truth divergent perspectives have their law in the structure of
the social process, as one of a preestablished whole. Through its
cognition they lose their non-committal aspect. An entrepreneur who
does not wish to be crushed by the competition must calculate so that
the unpaid part of the yield of alienated labor falls to him as a profit,
and must think that like for like – labor-power versus its cost of
reproduction – is thereby exchanged; it can just as stringently be
shown, however, why this objectively necessary consciousness is
objectively false. This dialectical relationship sublates its particular
moments in itself. The presumed social relativity of the intuitions obeys
the objective law of social production under private ownership of the
means of production. Bourgeois skepticism, which embodies relativism
as a doctrine, is narrow-minded.

Anyone want to take a crack at explaining that?

Dialectics and the Solidified:

I believe, "the solidified" is the opposite to groundless, or bottomless, what is solid, substantive. It appears to me like Adorno is saying that substance, solidity, is in some way equivalent to immediacy..

The confidence that the whole seamlessly emerges out of that
which is immediate, solid and simply primary, is idealistic appearance
[Schein]. To dialectics immediacy does not remain what it immediately
expresses. It becomes a moment instead of the grounds. At the opposite
pole, the same thing happens to the invariants of pure thought.

Privilege of Experience:

This section discusses the importance of the subject, to philosophy.

Negative dialectics is a term of irony. Thought negatively appropriates the thing in the conceptual, a concept that is broken off from the non-conceptual (experience, especially suffering is deadened in its conceptual 'reality').

On the other hand, a negative dialectics is...what? Is not a critique, is not a systematization. It is to go beyond the concept, to particularize. To disclose the moments of dialectic in the manner of their disclosure without implications. To realize thought as such.

The concept qua concept is mimetic, but it does not present itself as mimesis. It is as though philosophy were a really good work of art that one has become absorbed in, mistaking the art for the real.

Thinking, conceptual analysis, fails to grasp the thing itself in its totality, though thought pretends that it can do this, imagining itself to have a hold of the essence of things and eschewing the infinite.

I will try. I'm going to do a summary of each of the 5 paragraphs as I see it:

1. Dialectics is opposed to absolutism. Fundamental ontologists believe this is a relativism because of this, but ND is equally opposed to relativism as it is to absolutism. This attack on relativism is overdue because the previous retorts were unpersuasive enough that relativism could continue unabated. i.e. "Relativism presupposes an absolute" is a bad argument, and so relativism continues on, passing it over as an obvious palliative to the non-skeptical which doesn't consider the skeptics ability to negate without absolutes.

2. The first relativism is a bourgeois individualism: Everyone is endowed with rights, and thereby my truth is good for me and your truth is good for you given that we're all equal. This allows us all to keep our opinions to ourselves and go about the business of money and work: material relationships of the capitalist sort are preserved such that thought cannot broach them -- these are private, rather than public affairs, and everyone is free to think as they wish insofar that they work.

3. This can only be maintained in a sort of silence -- once consciousness comes to believe it has a truth thought no longer has a subjective contingency. I.e. relativism is undermined by our shared social reality of which we can cognize truths about. The individual thoughts could not come about without the objective conditions of society which found an individualistic society. "The strata-specific bounds of of objectivity..." are laid down by this sociology of knowledge. And the bourgeois individualistic relativist reveals themselves an objectivist in the sense that there is only one important thing: Where you fall in the pecking order of work, a truth that allows the individual to think their individual thoughts as long as they adhere to these economic forms.

4. Divergent perspectives have their truth in the social whole -- by cognizing this preestablished whole divergent perspectives lose what is non-committal. The capitalist must, lest he be eliminated in the social process, obtain a profit from his workers and treat the exchange of money for labor as an equality. So the individualistic relativism of the bourgeois entrepreneur can be revealed as objectively false, given the equality between wage and labor-power that he must assume, so he follows the objective process that follows from the private ownership of the means of production -- thus is revealed how narrow this skepticism is.

5. "The Perennial hostility to the spirit" I take to be referring relativism, but throughout all time rather than the bourgeois variety. It occurs because the concept of reason within existing relationships of production must fear that the trajectory of the emancipation of the concept of reason will disintegrate those very existing relationships of production -- we can live without the fetters of Church in our state, but not without the fetters of the private ownership of the means of production. "Here thought goes too far!" says our perennial relativist who depends upon Spirit being something outside of this relationship, something where my truth is mine and your truth is yours and we can get back to work.

This critique of relativism is a paradigm of determinant negation (in ND)



Yup that makes sense to me.

4. Divergent perspectives have their truth in the social whole -- by cognizing this preestablished whole divergent perspectives lose what is non-committal. The capitalist must, lest he be eliminated in the social process, obtain a profit from his workers and treat the exchange of money for labor as an equality. So the individualistic relativism of the bourgeois entrepreneur can be revealed as objectively false, given the equality between wage and labor-power that he must assume, so he follows the objective process that follows from the private ownership of the means of production -- thus is revealed how narrow this skepticism is. — Moliere

This is the paragraph that I asked about. What is "the social whole"? This concept appears to form the basis of Adorno's argument against relativism. The opening sentence of the paragraph reads like this:

"In truth divergent perspectives have their law in the structure of the social process, as one of a preestablished whole."

There is a lot to unpack here. There is a "preestablished whole". And there is a "social process". There is a multitude of divergent perspectives, each with its own "law". The question is, how does he leap from the multitude of perspectives to a unity, the "whole"? He has already denied the usual principle, which is the "absolute Spirit". So now he appears to propose a unifying function of "the social process".

He then proceeds to explain the unifying function of the social process, and that's where I get lost. It appears like he starts by saying that cognition of the preestablished whole (that would be absolute Spirit I assume) causes the divergent perspectives to lose their "non-committal aspect". So I assume that they each become committed to the whole, that being supported by cognition of the preestablished whole, absolute Spirit.

We then have an example of an entrepreneur, which he says can be interpreted in two distinct ways. But he concludes with "The presumed social relativity of the intuitions obeys the objective law of social production under private ownership of the means of production."

Now the question is, what is the mentioned "objective law of social production". This appears to be the unifying principle of "social process", whereby the inspiration of commitment, causes the forfeiture of the distinct laws of the divergent perspectives, in favour of the objective law of "social production".

Is this an acceptable alternative to absolute Spirit? It appears to me as if it may just be a different way of describing absolute Spirit. Instead of being indoctrinated through the dogmatic ideologies of absolute Spirit, the individual is inspired through cognition of the "preestablished whole", which is just a different way of saying "absolute Spirit". isn't it?

I really think Adorno is aiming at exposing thought for what it is, namely thought; he wants to show thought qua thought. This is achieved through concretization as a mode of thought, (non-conceptual cognition?).

I think Adorno would say social process is equivalent to ideology. In that way, it is most distinct from Hegel's Absolute Spirit because Absolute Spirit thinks itself to have achieved objectivity. Negative Dialectics, on the other hand, is not a peering into reality, it is not truth through dialectic, rather it is a revelation about the presuppositions that sustain the ideological system.

Negative dialectics stands opposed and is not committed to reality qua thought or thought qua reality. To expose Hegel's Absolute Spirit for what it is, namely subjective thinking is to have achieved a negative dialectics by means of concretized and particularized cognition that is able to discard all non-fundamental elements of the ideology. I think that in this specific paragraph, Adorno's use of the terms "truth" and "objective" may be taken in quotes.

Now the question is, what is the mentioned "objective law of social production". This appears to be the unifying principle of "social process", whereby the inspiration of commitment, causes the forfeiture of the distinct laws of the divergent perspectives, in favour of the objective law of "social production". — Metaphysician Undercover

I read that in a Marxist sense. So the entrepreneur must pay a wage which is below the value produced by the labor-power he employs, else he will not be an entrepreneur for long. "social process" I take it to mean "Capitalism" in the age he's writing in, but as Marx describes it. The "narrowness" of this relativism I took to mean that the bourgeois individualist who allows each of us to have our own truths is far more narrow than he presents -- the equality of labor to its wage is not questioned or relativized to the entrepreneur but is held as a truth that the laborer will have to follow whether they like it or not. So, in fact, we can't all just "have our own truth", at least in accord with this particular relativism, because there is one truth that we must insist upon -- which, more generally, I'd take from the Marxist notions to think about so the economic superstructure of some kind.