Good summaries! — Moliere

But, then, I also may just be thinking that because it gets along with my own notions, and Adorno really does think that philosophy is superior in the sense that the qualitative distinction is what "grounds" the quantitative method -- being able to differentiate what something is from what it is not is the basis of being able to count and individuate, i.e. think quantitatively. — Moliere

a generic defense of philosophical thinking in a scientistic society — Moliere

Another dialectical twist. Does it mean that only in our alienated modern society in which everyone must be an exclusive specialist of some sort could there be people, like Adorno and his peers, capable of focusing intently and deeply on the qualities of things? If so, this is a natural follow-on from the "Privilege" section. — Jamal

There is no quantifiable insight which does not first receive its
meaning, its terminus ad quem [Latin: end-point], in the retranslation
into the qualitative.

The qualitative subject awaits the potential of its qualities in the thing, not its transcendental
residue, although the subject is strengthened solely thereto by means of restrictions based on the division of labor.

The more meanwhile its own reactions are denounced as presumably merely subjective, the more the qualitative determinations in things escape cognition.

The qualitative moment is dismissed within the social context, as "subjective", and therefore is neglected and escapes cognition. This relates back to what he said about truth in "Privilege of experience" — Metaphysician Undercover

The "capability of distinction" is a relation between the nonconceptual object, and the conceptual subject, within the individual person. It is a judgement the person carries out. — Metaphysician Undercover

Although I obviously don’t think this relation itself is “within the individual person,” it’s true that Adorno is interested, in the introduction, in intellectual experience, so the precise way that the philosophical subject relates to the object is the main focus at this stage. So I think we probably agree on at least this: that he wants to see subjective qualitative judgement make a comeback. — Jamal

I'm not willing to engage with it any more. — Jamal

Subject and object cannot be pried apart, he insists. To begin with, subjects are always and only embodied: there is no such thing as a subject that is not also an object. Transcendental subjectivity itself therefore turns out to presuppose material objects that are not themselves synthesized a priori by pure reason. For if there were no such objects, there would be no bearers of reason to do the synthesizing. Admittedly, there exist objects that are not subjects—and in this respect the relationship between subject and object is a-symmetrical. Adorno famously refers to this a-symmetry as the “primacy of the object.” But of the objects that are not subjects, many are artifacts that are made by subjects. Moreover—and more important for Adorno—any object that is an object for a subject is thereby directly mediated, for the subject, by the socially-mediated subjectivity that is his or her embodied consciousness. Even if one does not want to go as far as Kant does in the Critique of Pure Reason in saying that it is transcendental subjectivity that constitutes phenomenal objects as objects, nevertheless it would seem to be that, for subjects, there is no access to objects that bypasses subjectivity. Indeed, the very concept of pure materiality presupposes a subject to conceive it. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno suggests that the most basic epistemic challenge is to ensure that the unavoidable mediation of objects by subjects, in our experience of them, does as little damage as possible. — Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology, and Method

To those who have had the undeserved good fortune to not be
completely adjusted in their inner intellectual composition to the
prevailing norms – a stroke of luck, which they often enough have to
pay for in terms of their relationship to the immediate environment –
it is incumbent to make the moralistic and, as it were, representative
effort to express what the majority, for whom they say it, are not
capable of seeing or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves
to see.

The Party is supposed to
have a cognitive power a priori superior to that of every individual
solely due to the number of its members, even if it is terrorized or
blinded.
The isolated individual [Individuum] however,
unencumbered by the ukase, may at times perceive the objectivity more
clearly than a collective, which in any case is only the ideology of its
committees.

This contingency meanwhile is not so radical as the criteria of scientivism would wish. Hegel was peculiarly inconsistent when he arraigned the individual consciousness, the staging-grounds of intellectual experience, which animated his work, as the contingent and that which is limited. This is comprehensible only out of the desire to disempower the critical moment which is tied to the individual Spirit. In its particularization he felt the contradictions between the concept and the particular. Individual consciousness is always, and with reason, the unhappy one. Hegel’s aversion towards this denies the very state of affairs [Sachverhalt] which he underlined, where it suited him: how much the universal dwells within that which is individual. According to strategic necessity he denounces the individuated as if it were the immediate, whose appearance [Schein] he himself is destroying. With this however the absolute contingency of individual experience disappears, too.

It would have no continuity without concepts. Through its participation in the discursive medium it is, according to its own determination, always at the same time more than only individual. The individuated becomes the subject, insofar as it objectifies itself by means of its individual consciousness, in the unity of itself as well as in its own experiences: animals are presumably bereft of both. Because it is universal in itself, and as far as it is, individual experience also reaches into that which is universal. Even in epistemological reflection the logical generality and the unity of individual consciousness reciprocally condition one another. This affects however not only the subjective-formal side of individuality. Every content of the individual consciousness is brought to it by its bearer, for the sake of its self- preservation, and reproduces itself with the latter.

Through self-awareness it is possible for the individual consciousness to emancipate itself, to expand itself. What drives it to this is the misery, that this universality tends to exert its hegemony in individual experience. As a “reality check” experience does not simply mirror the impulses and wishes of the individual, but also negates them, so that it would survive. That which is general in the subject is simply not to be grasped any other way than in the movement of particular human consciousness. If the individuated were simply abolished by fiat, no higher subject purified of the dross of contingency would emerge, but solely one which unconsciously follows orders. In the East the theoretical short-circuit in the view of the individuated has served as the pretext for collective repression. The Party is supposed to have a cognitive power a priori superior to that of every individual solely due to the number of its members, even if it is terrorized or blinded. The isolated individual [Individuum] however, unencumbered by the ukase, may at times perceive the objectivity more clearly than a collective, which in any case is only the ideology of its committees.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. — Communist Manifesto

Brecht’s sentence, the Party has a thousand eyes, the individual only two, is as false as any bromide. The exact imagination of a dissenter can see more than a thousand eyes wearing the same red- tinted glasses, who then mistake what they see with the universality of the truth and regress. The individuation of cognition resists this. The perception of the object depends not only on this, on the distinction: it is itself constituted from the object, which demands its restitutio in integrum [Latin: restitution in whole] in it, as it were. Nevertheless the subjective modes of reaction which the object needs require for their part the unceasing corrective in the object. This occurs in the self-reflection, the ferment of intellectual experience. The process of philosophical objectification would be, put metaphorically, vertical, intra-temporal, as opposed to the horizontal, abstract quantifying one of science; so much is true of Bergson’s metaphysics of time.

In Praise of the Work of the Party

Man has only two eyes;
The Party has a thousand eyes . . .
Man alone can be annihilated;
The Party cannot be annihilated.

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.

Hegel’s aversion towards this denies the very state of
affairs [Sachverhalt] which he underlined, where it suited him: how
much the universal dwells within that which is individual.

That which is general in the subject is
simply not to be grasped any other way than in the movement of
particular human consciousness.

The isolated individual [Individuum] however,
unencumbered by the ukase, may at times perceive the objectivity more
clearly than a collective, which in any case is only the ideology of its
committees.

So it's through participation in language and thought (the "discursive medium") that the individual finds its grounding in the universal. At the same time, the individual becomes subject. These two moments are two sides of the same coin: (1) a reciprocal conditioning where the universal provides concepts and the necessary logical form for self-objectification—including the identification of oneself as a member of a class of objects; (2) the act of self-objectification—becoming a self-aware "I"—is how the universal is actualized in a thinking being. — Jamal

These two moments are two sides of the same coin: (1) a reciprocal conditioning where the universal provides concepts and the necessary logical form for self-objectification—including the identification of oneself as a member of a class of objects; (2) the act of self-objectification—becoming a self-aware "I"—is how the universal is actualized in a thinking being. — Jamal

But the grounding in the universal only comes to be actualized in the subject, so the former is both the condition and the result of the latter. — Jamal

He is standing up for individualism: an expansive critical reason just isn't possible without autonomous subjectivity. "The people," though above and beyond the subject, is not thereby in a better to position to determine the objective. On the contrary, it is the autonomous subject, unshackled in its thoughts by the ukase (official decree), which can better perceive the truth. — Jamal

However, I don't think we'll agree on those details. I enjoyed the idea that Aristotle's accidents are equivalent to Adorno's non-identical, but in the end of course, they are very different. I'm not sure I understand the rest. If your central point is that for Adorno, concepts = bad and intuitions = good, that's not right at all. — Jamal

To be clear, I am not saying that Aristotle's accidents are equivalent to Adornos non-identical. Equivalence itself is taken as an identity type of relation which would be misleading in this context. I am using Aristotle's approach to the object, defining it as primary substance, as an analogy to help understand Adorno's approach. So I am pointing at a similarity between the two. — Metaphysician Undercover

So I am definitely not saying concepts=bad, and intuitions=good — Metaphysician Undercover

Objectively, however, the whole which is
expressed by theory is contained within the particular to be analyzed,
not first through the cognizing subject. The mediation of both is itself
substantive, that through the social totality.

In their inalienably general elements, all philosophy, even those
with the intention of freedom, carries along the unfreedom in which
that of society is prolonged. It has the compulsion in itself; however this
latter alone protects it from regression into caprice. Thinking is capable
of critically cognizing the compulsory character immanent to it; its own
inner compulsion is the medium of its emancipation. The freedom
towards the object, which in Hegel resulted in the disempowerment of
the subject, is first of all to be established. Until then, dialectics diverges
as method and as one of the thing. Concept and reality are of the same
contradictory essence. What tears society apart antagonistically, the
dominating principle, is the same thing which, intellectualized, causes
the difference between the concept and that which is subordinated
under it. The logical form of the contradiction however achieves that
difference, because every one which does not suborn itself to the unity
of the dominating principle, according to the measure of the principle,
does not appear as a polyvalence which is indifferent to this, but as an
infraction against logic.

In this section, I think Adorno attributes substantiality to society. — Metaphysician Undercover

The mediation of both is itself substantive, that through the social totality.

The "totality" referred to in the first passage is described as formal, and "that of exchange". The second passage is more difficult but I take Adorno to be saying that the substantiality referred to is logical. — Metaphysician Undercover

That generation, also Simmel, Husserl, and Scheler, sought in vain for a philosophy which, receptive to the objects, would render itself substantive. What tradition dismissed is what tradition desired. This does not obviate the methodological consideration, of how substantive particular analysis stands in relation to the theory of dialectics. The idealistic-identity philosophical avowal that the latter dissolves itself in the former is unconvincing. Objectively, however, the whole which is expressed by theory is contained within the particular to be analyzed, not first through the cognizing subject. The mediation of both is itself substantive, that through the social totality.

We can absolutely not rest content with “mere words” […]. Meanings inspired only by remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions—if by any intuitions at all—are not enough: we must go back to the “things themselves”. — Husserl, Logical Investigations

the whole which is expressed by theory is contained within the particular to be analyzed

It is however also formal due to the abstract nomothetism [Gesetzmaessigkeit] of the totality itself, that of exchange. Idealism, which distilled its absolute Spirit out of this, encrypted something true at the same time, that this mediation encounters phenomena as a compulsory mechanism; this lurks behind the so-called constitution-problem. Philosophical experience does not have this universal immediately, as appearance, but as abstractly as it objectively is. It is constrained towards the exit of the particular, without forgetting what it does not have, but knows. Its path is doubled, similar to the Heraclitean one, the upwards and the downwards. While it assures itself of the real determination of the phenomena through its concept, it cannot profess this ontologically, as what is true in itself. It is fused with what is untrue, with the repressive principle, and this lessens even its epistemological dignity. It forms no positive telos in which cognition would halt. The negativity of the universal solidifies for its part the cognition into the particular as that which is to be rescued. “The only thoughts which are true are those which do not understand themselves” [Adorno quotes himself, from Minima Moralia].

In their inalienably general elements, all philosophy, even those with the intention of freedom, carries along the unfreedom in which that of society is prolonged. It has the compulsion in itself; however this latter alone protects it from regression into caprice. Thinking is capable of critically cognizing the compulsory character immanent to it; its own inner compulsion is the medium of its emancipation.

The freedom towards the object, which in Hegel resulted in the disempowerment of the subject, is first of all to be established. Until then, dialectics diverges as method and as one of the thing. Concept and reality are of the same contradictory essence. What tears society apart antagonistically, the dominating principle, is the same thing which, intellectualized, causes the difference between the concept and that which is subordinated under it.

The logical form of the contradiction however achieves that difference, because every one which does not suborn itself to the unity of the dominating principle, according to the measure of the principle, does not appear as a polyvalence which is indifferent to this, but as an infraction against logic.

everything which does not conform to such, everything qualitatively divergent assumes the signature of the contradiction. The contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity; the primacy of the principle of contradiction in dialectics measures what is heterogenous in unitary thinking. By colliding against its own borders, it reaches beyond itself. — Dialectics Not a Standpoint

Contradiction is non-identity under the bane of the law — Dialectics Not a Standpoint

On the other hand the remainder of the divergence between philosophic conception and follow-through also testifies to something of the non-identity, which neither permits the method to wholly absorb the contents, in which alone they are supposed to be, nor intellectualizes the contents. The pre-eminence of content reveals itself as the necessary insufficiency of the method.

What as such, in the form of general reflection, must be said, in order not to be defenseless against the philosophy of the philosophers, legitimates itself solely in the follow-through, and is negated therein in turn as method. Its surplus is with respect to its content abstract, false; Hegel already had to accept this discrepancy in the preface to the Phenomenology. The philosophical ideal would be to render the accounting one would give for what one does superfluous, by doing it.

Between philosophical conception and follow-through (execution) there is a divergence because of the divergence between concept and object already described. But in the execution there is a remainder, which I think is either a receptivity to the non-identical, or is just the non-identical itself (which agrees with your interpretation Metaphysician Undercover).

Another way to put that is that Adorno is moving from a description of the divergence between concept and object to an emphasis that in philosophical experience, particularly the execution of dialectical method, this divergence has a substantive remainder, namely the non-identical itself. That is, this gap between concept and object isn't just empty. — Jamal

Here, form is philosophical method, and content or substantiality is what is being analyzed or philosophized about. — Jamal

It's that form and content imply one another (just as subject and object do). It's dialectics lingo/jargon to say the form is in the content. — frank

'm not convinced we disagree, but as frank says, this kind of talk can get convoluted. It's at least partly a fractal kind of thing: you have this dialectical pair, form and content, but within the content this pair is repeated again. So for example, philosophy has its form and its content, where the latter might be a concept or a social relation, but that concept or social relation (the object) itself has both its own form, e.g., the principle of exchange, as well as its content, i.e., the object's specificity and non-identity. It's form/content all the way down. — Jamal

The significance I suppose is that dialectics is the only method which is properly aware of this and which refuses to allow form and content to be separated (although Adorno cricizes Hegel for doing it too) — and actually enacts this in its own practice and self-conception. — Jamal

And this is to say that negative dialectics resists reification, because the separation of form and content is the mechanism of reification. — Jamal

But that's the mistake of dialectical identity thinking which Adorno is exposing with negative dialectics. The two are not properly dialectically opposed, in reality, so we cannot say that each one implies the other. If one (content) extends beyond the other (form), then in the way explained by Aristotle, the former (content) is logically prior to the latter (form). Then, mention of the latter (form) necessarily implies the former (content), but not vise versa. Mention of content does not necessarily imply form. This is the reason for "the remainder", "the pre-eminence of content". — Metaphysician Undercover

Now "substance" is assigned to the societal totality, which from the theory perspective is the whole of "form". So substance correlates better with form here. Accordingly, "philosophical method" is a property of the individual subject and therefore ought to correlate with content. However, the demonstrated remainder denies the actual truth of this correlation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Adorno’s title for this section is Inhaltlichkeit und Methode, where the word we’ve translated as “content” is actually a higher abstraction, something like “contentuality,” if that were a word. You might think of the title as “Method and the Matter of Content.” — Content and Method

I think it's like this: the score of a symphony is like what Adorno means by form. A particular production of the symphony, alive in time, is part of the content. The remainder he's talking about is the unique aspects of a particular performance, like the way the first violinist connected some notes and kept others separate, or the tempo the conductor set. Haven't you ever gone looking for the perfect performance if Mozart's Requiem? You're looking for details don't appear in the score. Yet every performance you come across is OF that one score. The score is like something holy and separate from the world. The content is made of sweat and tears. — frank

The schools which take derivatives of the Latin existere [Latin: to exist] as their device, would like to summon up the reality of corporeal experience against the alienated particular science. Out of fear of reification they shrink back from what has substantive content. It turns unwittingly into an example.

they universally-conceptually philosophize that which does not vanish into its concept, that which is contrary to it, instead of thinking it through. They illustrate existence [Existenz] in the existing [Existierenden].

+---+-----------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
|   | Direction of Thought  | Role of Particular     | Role of Universal    |
+---+-----------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| S | Universal → Particular| Serves as an example/  | Predefined, applied, |
|   |                       | illustration           | illustrated          |
+---+-----------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| A | Particular → Universal| Engine of analysis,    | Revealed, mediated,  |
|   |                       | problem to be unfolded | contradictory        |
+---+-----------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

I think I get what you're saying. Could you point me to where he talks about the "pre-eminence" of content? If it's not too much trouble? — frank

Other ways of rendering it would be "the quality of having content" or "contentfulness" or "that which pertains to or constitutes content" — Jamal

"The pre-eminence of content reveals itself as the necessary insufficiency of the method." — Metaphysician Undercover