I read through that again, and I really don't know what he means by this. But pre-eminence doesn't mean "prior to."

But that issue aside, when you say content can precede form, are you thinking about existence preceding essence? — frank

Content is logically prior, by Aristotelian logic, in the way I explained. And also the way that Adorn described, "the whole which is expressed by theory is contained within the particular to be analyzed".

i cannot draw any relation to existence and essence. Those terms have not yet been discussed by Adorno, and I don't know how you would understand them.

Content is logically prior, — Metaphysician Undercover

Logically prior. That doesn't compute.

I'll give you an example. I was walking through a park with a forestry student who was learning the latin names for trees. As we walked along, he would name off them. I realized eventually that listening to him do that had put me in a weird frame of mind in which I couldn't even see the trees anymore. All I saw was the species and genus names, not the individual leaves and unique shapes as I was used to. I struggled to get back to my homebase because I didn't like seeing the trees as Latin names.

So you might think that this is a case where form and content are completely isolated from one another. The more immersed in the form, the less I can even see the content. You might think that content preceded form, because I saw the individual trees as just trees before I knew their species names.

But I don't think so. There was no point where, like Sartre staring at the root, I lost consciousness of form. I didn't know species names, but I knew "leaves" and "branches." That idea of formless content is a little bit of a myth, I think. If you could enter that state, where you don't name anything, you wouldn't be able to remember what happened. We use concepts and names, which figure in webs of belief, to mark out any experience at all. Do you agree with that?

Logically prior. That doesn't compute. — frank

Sorry, my mistake, I wasn't thinking when i wrote that. I didn't adequately grasp what you were asking. I didn't say that content precedes form did I? I said content and form cannot be opposed dialectically, and that Adorno mentions the pre-eminence of content. He is saying that the content always extends beyond the conception, and this is due to "non-identity".

:up:

In this section, "Existentialism", I have difficulty to understand what is meant by "particular science", and "substantive content", in the following passage.

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. What they subsume under epochê
[Greek: suspension] revenges itself by exerting its power behind the
back of philosophy, in what this latter would consider irrational
decisions. The non-conceptual particular science is not superior to
thinking purged of its substantive content; all its versions end up, a
second time, in precisely the formalism which it wished to combat for
the sake of the essential interest of philosophy. It is retroactively filled
up with contingent borrowings, especially from psychology. The
intention of existentialism at least in its radical French form would not
be realizable at a distance from substantive content, but in its
threatening nearness to this. The separation of subject and object is not
to be sublated through the reduction to human nature, were it even the
absolute particularization. The currently popular question of
humanity, all the way into the Marxism of Lukacsian provenance, is
ideological because it dictates the pure form of the invariant as the only
possible answer, and were this latter historicity itself.

From the last section, I understand "substantive content" to be the societal totality. And I assume "particular science" would be the science of human nature. But this is quite vague. Any help to understand the use of these terms would be appreciated.

This is my take, shoot it down as you will:

Existentialism says existence is prior to essence. It has a root in Kierkegaard, who emphasized direct experience over form. He noted that there are no words to describe 'that quality of being that comes to rest in the sanctuary of the form.' But once that quality of being becomes the primary topic, the effect of rationality and speech creep in: we end up removed from direct experience because we beat the hell out of it with words.

I think this is what he means by:

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.

He's talking about the forced separation between direct experience (which contains no form, no names, no recognition of ideation) and form itself, which is a key component of knowledge (scientia, science). And it just occurred to me that no one is reading this or likely to respond to what I just said, so if I want to discuss it, I need to go to reddit. I don't know which subreddit, though. I don't think they have an Adorno subreddit. I could start one.

And it just occurred to me that no one is reading this or likely to respond to what I just said — frank

There are at least two or three people reading it. I'm not sure why you want to be famous. You're not even reading Negative Dialectics and yet I allow you to post here because you occasionally have insightful things to say. That's an honour. :smile:

@Metaphysician Undercover

Explain why Adorno isn't a nominalist. It relates to existentialism.

He's talking about the forced separation between direct experience (which contains no form, no names, no recognition of ideation) and form itself, which is a key component of knowledge (scientia, science). And it just occurred to me that no one is reading this or likely to respond to what I just said, so if I want to discuss it, I need to go to reddit. I don't know which subreddit, though. I don't think they have an Adorno subreddit. I could start one. — frank

This does very little for me. Suppose raw experience is as you say, without, and therefore prior to, all form, etc.. That might signify the priority of content, the proposed content being direct experience. But what is "the particular science" then? This could be the application of form to that content. Where would that form come from then, if we allow such a separation? It cannot just emerge out of the raw experience, and ty cannot inhere within it, because then it could not be pure direct experience without form, as is presupposed.

Furthermore, we then have Adorno imposing his proposition of "substantive content" as a required necessity. Content must be substantive. So he appears to be saying that the proposal of existentialism, being the "primacy of corporeal experience", instead of providing pure content, actually removes itself from content, because it is not a true "substantive content". Then it ends up being nothing more than an idealized "I" as a pure form, without any real content.

Notice:

The intention of existentialism at least in its radical French form would not be realizable at a distance from substantive content, but in its threatening nearness to this.

Existentialism imitates "substantive content", to the point where the untrained eye might not even see the difference, but it isn't substantive content. Then the trained eye would grasp the existential proposal as a pure invariant form, even though the intent of the proposition is that it be apprehended as pure content. (This is the fate of any materialism which proposes "prime matter" as matter without form. The proposal of prime matter can only be apprehended as a pure form, and such materialism is therefore reduced to idealism).

The reason for the difference, between the intent and the necessary interpretation, I will explain as the necessity that "substantive content" be a unity of form and content. The existential intent is to propose corporeal experience as pure content. But that is to ask the proposition to do what is impossible of it, to propose something without form. Then the proposition of something pure, "the reality of corporeal experience", in order to maintain the claimed purity, can only be interpreted as a pure form, though it is intended as pure content.

The pure form is "historicity" itself. And this leaves humanity as chained to the past. "Experience" is always either present or in the past. Therefore existentialism provides us no approach to the future.

Existentialism imitates "substantive content", to the point where the untrained eye might not even see the difference, but it isn't substantive content. Then the trained eye would grasp the existential proposal as a pure invariant form, even though the intent of the proposition is that it be apprehended as pure content. — Metaphysician Undercover

Pretty much, yes. You're agreeing with Adorno. I disagree that his critique hits home, but that would be for some other thread.

Not necessarily agreeing, but trying to understand. I cannot agree or disagree until I adequately understand. However, I think that is what is intended by his use of "substantive content", to distinguish it from a false conception of 'pure content'. His dismissal of existentialism requires that we adhere to the principle that content must be substantive.

If we do not adhere to that principle we fall into the trap exposed by Jamal. Rather than having true particulars as our substance, we have examples as our substance. But examples are often fictional. And by example the fiction can penetrate the substance. To avoid the infinite regress of fictional content we must deny its possibility from the start.

I'm aware that all appearance of agreement on your part is accidental.

QUESTION: If Adorno goes from particular to universal, shouldn't we a bit suspicious that he always ends up in the same places: commodification, instrumental reason, bourgeois consciousness, capitalist exploitation, etc? — Jamal

According to Adorno, this is what is supposed to happen, when going from particular to universal, or rather, like he says, when "dialectics develops the difference of the particular from the generality, which is dictated by the generality". The objection is anticipated by Adorno:

If one objected, as has been repeated ever since by the Aristotelian critics of Hegel, that dialectics for its part grinds everything indiscriminately in its mill down into the mere logical form of the contradiction, overlooking – even Croce argued this – the true polyvalence of that which is not contradictory, of the simply different, one is only displacing the blame for the thing onto the method. — DIALECTICS NOT A STANDPOINT

Also:

This law is however not one of thinking, but real. Whoever submits to dialectical discipline, must unquestionably pay with the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience. The impoverishment of experience through dialectics, which infuriates mainstream opinion, proves itself however to be entirely appropriate to the abstract monotony of the administered world. What is painful about it is the pain of such, raised to a concept. Cognition must bow to it, if it does not wish to once again degrade the concretion to the ideology, which it really begins to become. — REALITY AND DIALECTICS

And so, being aware of what total identification does, we always end up in these nasty things you mention.

But what truly interests me now is to find out what Adorno really means by this "bitter sacrifice" mentioned above.

Anyway, I also wanted to say that "Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966", are feature rich, I think that it would be a good idea for them to accompany our reading of ND. It seems to me that both the editor Rolf Tiedemann, as well as the translator Rodney Livingstone, have done a great job, with their notes and footnotes. The appendix of LND features yet another translation of the introduction of ND, with some parts however missing for some reason. And thus the number of translations, Ashton (1973), Redmond (2001), Thorne, together with Livingstone's, comes down to all four. Still waiting for Robert Hullot-Kentor's, to bring the number to 5.

I'm aware that all appearance of agreement on your part is accidental. — frank

Generally, agreement is counterproductive to philosophy.

Generally, agreement is counterproductive to philosophy. — Metaphysician Undercover

There is no disagreement without agreement, and neither can encompass the experience of a living being.

Anyway, I also wanted to say that "Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966", are feature rich, I think that it would be a good idea for them to accompany our reading of ND. It seems to me that both the editor Rolf Tiedemann, as well as the translator Rodney Livingstone, have done a great job, with their notes and footnotes. The appendix of LND features yet another translation of the introduction of ND, with some parts however missing for some reason. And thus the number of translations, Ashton (1973), Redmond (2001), Thorne, together with Livingstone's, comes down to all four. Still waiting for Robert Hullot-Kentor's, to bring the number to 5. — Pussycat

The first 10 pages of this discussion were dedicated to a reading of those lectures. The first words of the OP went like this:

This is a reading group for Theodor Adorno's Negative Dialectics.

We'll begin with Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966 and then move on to Negative Dialectics itself. I'll refer to them as LND and ND from now on. — Jamal

However, we moved on from them pretty quickly after reading the last of the full lectures; and it's great to be reminded of the translation of the introduction, in the form of the appendix entitled "The Theory of Intellectual Experience". To be honest it hadn't occurred to me that it was a different translation. :up:

But what truly interests me now is to find out what Adorno really means by this "bitter sacrifice" mentioned above. — Pussycat

I interpreted it earlier:

This refers back to the previous paragraph, where he mentioned the mainstream complaint that dialectics reduces everything to contradiction and thereby ignores the richness of experience, the polyvalence and difference. His response is another "that's too bad": this reductive approach is "entirely appropriate" for the world we live in, in which polyvalence is reduced in actuality. — Jamal

It's probably a crude summary but I think that's roughly right: dialectics sacrifices the richness and diversity of experience in its pursuit of truth.

On the main point, I agree. And it's not like Adorno ever pretends that negative dialectics is presuppositionless.

To be honest it hadn't occurred to me that it was a different translation — Jamal

Yes, it is a different one, I think it's very good, but some parts are missing. Oh, and not to forget, I found an outright error in Redmond's translation, two actually. In section "FRAGILITY OF THE TRUTH", page
48:

The open thought is unprotected against the risk of going astray into what is popular;

The same also in section "AGAINST RELATIVISM", page 49:

Relativism is null and void simply because, what it on the one hand considers popular and
contingent, and on the other hand holds to be irreducible, originates out of objectivity – precisely that of an individualistic society – and is to be deduced as socially necessary appearance [Schein].

"popular" in both cases above should be replaced with "arbitrary". In Thorne, it is "arbitrary", and Adorno also mentions it in his notes. "Popular" does not make any sense there, it troubled me until I saw the other translations, I couldn't understand what popularity had to do with what he was saying.

It's probably a crude summary but I think that's roughly right: dialectics sacrifices the richness and diversity of experience in its pursuit of truth.

On the main point, I agree. And it's not like Adorno ever pretends that negative dialectics is presuppositionless. — Jamal

Yes, I was just about to post the following before I saw your reply. I remembered this movie I watched lots of years ago.

This law is however not one of thinking, but real. Whoever submits to dialectical discipline, must unquestionably pay with the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience. The impoverishment of experience through dialectics, which infuriates mainstream opinion, proves itself however to be entirely appropriate to the abstract monotony of the administered world. What is painful about it is the pain of such, raised to a concept. Cognition must bow to it, if it does not wish to once again degrade the concretion to the ideology, which it really begins to become. — ND

I think an example of the "bitter sacrifice" can be seen in the following clip from the movie "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", a scene from Adorno's time.



The narrator, Duke, in retrospect, recollects:

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Has it been five years? Six? It seems like a lifetime, the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle '60s, was a very special time and place to be a part of, but no explanation, no mix of words, or music or memories, can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time in the world, whatever it meant. There was madness in any direction. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. And that, I think, was the handle. That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense - we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. — Duke

Then, the bitter sacrifice would be not to get carried away by the commonplace experience of the time, to not "ride the beautiful wave", to not get distracted by this "qualitative polyvalence of experience", to not live in the moment, but to sit back and medidate, to think things through, to warn of the dangers, and to ultimately see the future commodification, the false consciousness and the capitalist exploitation that the movement entails, much like what Adorno did with the revolutionaries of his time, as it can be seen in his interview "Who's Afraid of the Ivory Tower?"

https://cominsitu.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/adorno-spiegel-1969.pdf

This attidude, not only infuriates the revolutionaries, but also their adversaries, as if the latter are conjoined to them, and so it amounts to just about everybody; the party pooper.

But Duke continues:

So now, less than five years later, you can go up a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see the high-water mark, that place where the wave finally broke, and rolled back. — Duke

Why did it roll back? Why was the moment of realization missed?

We're all wired into a survival trip now. No more of the speed that fueled the '60s. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America, selling "consciousness expansion", without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait, for all those people who took him seriously. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy peace and understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure, is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create. A generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the acid culture: the desperate assumption that somebody or at least some force is tending the light at the end of the tunnel. — Duke

Well, it seems like that you can't "buy" true consciousness, immediacy doesn't work, things must be thought and worked thorouglhy through, it is why theory is needed, which is what ND is about. I guess that Adorno would say that the hippie movement, despite its flaws, progressed towards true emancipation, but that eventually became part of the disease, and not the cure.

Why was the moment of realization missed? — Pussycat

Where do you get the sense that the realization was missed? A wave is a temporal event, it comes to an end, and its energy is dispersed. But this does not imply that the realization of its energy is necessarily "missed". It is only missed by those who do not follow the threads of transformation. That is why the polyvalence of experience is a requirement.

Where do you get the sense that the realization was missed — Metaphysician Undercover

This, I took from ND's introduction:

Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed. — ON THE POSSIBILITY OF PHILOSOPHY

The realization was missed because the hippie movement failed to transform the world in its image, but was commodified and commercialized, liquitated even. What could have been a revolutionary movement, capable of subverting entrenched power and liberating consciousness, was instead absorbed into institutional authority, tamed by it. Much like, as Adorno says, what happened with Hegel's dialectic.

A wave is a temporal event, it comes to an end, and its energy is dispersed. But this does not imply that the realization of its energy is necessarily "missed".
It is only missed by those who do not follow the threads of transformation. That is why the polyvalence of experience is a requirement. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand, who or what requires the polyvalence of experience? Why then would Adorno say that (negative) dialectics demands the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience?

Anyway, I just wanted to try to visualize this sacrifice, by taking images from the arts.

The realization was missed because the hippie movement failed to transform the world in its image, but was commodified and commercialized, liquitated even. What could have been a revolutionary movement, capable of subverting entrenched power and liberating consciousness, was instead absorbed into institutional authority, tamed by it. Much like, as Adorno says, what happened with Hegel's dialectic. — Pussycat

OK, that's one way of looking at it. But being "absorbed into institutional authority" doesn't necessarily imply being "tamed by it" rather than "subverting" it. We could look at the presidency of Trump for example, and evaluate whether this is an instance of a revolutionary movement being tamed by authority, rather than subverting authority. We'd probably be able to identify elements of both, but that just means that it's wrong to portray the possibilities as a dichotomy, one or the other.

I don't understand, who or what requires the polyvalence of experience? Why then would Adorno say that (negative) dialectics demands the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience? — Pussycat

I think you misunderstand what Adorno was saying. The "dialectical discipline" is the inadequate way of looking at things. And whoever adopts this method forfeits the true perspective which the polyvalence of experience provides for, as a bitter sacrifice. "Whoever submits to dialectical discipline, must unquestionably pay with the bitter sacrifice...".

Please reread the passage, and you'll see that what follows supports my interpretation.

Then, the bitter sacrifice would be not to get carried away by the commonplace experience of the time, to not "ride the beautiful wave", to not get distracted by this "qualitative polyvalence of experience", to not live in the moment, but to sit back and medidate, to think things through, to warn of the dangers, and to ultimately see the future commodification, the false consciousness and the capitalist exploitation that the movement entails — Pussycat

I agree, with reservations. Adorno would say this beautiful wave isn't real polyvalence, because there is no such thing as fully human experience in this society, and what the hippies grasped at was empty — or what they took to be a beautiful wave was a pitiful substitute.

Why did it roll back? Why was the moment of realization missed? — Pussycat

Yeah. Pynchon's novels all set out to answer that too, particularly Vineland and Inherent Vice, which are about the aftermath of the hippie movement. And earlier in Mason & Dixon and Gravity's Rainbow he looks for the sources, where the seeds of failure were sown.

Finally got to reading it today.

I feel conflicted on a first read: There's a sense in which I can grant his argument and a sense in which I could defend Sartre's in light of this criticism. The part that makes a good deal of sense to me, but which would be called "bad faith" on a Sartre-friendly reading, is that the general may have the will to renounce all of his murderous plans and go live a life within a monastery, but he will be punished by the social powers that be.

I think where Adorno is tying this in an interesting way is his highlight of Sartre's politics; in a sense we could say that doubling down on bad faith in the face of the party apparatus which limits individual freedom is itself a kind of bad faith: To say "We are spontaneous!" in the face of state coercion is still true, but it ignores the real problem at hand: The material conditions.

Where I'm hesitant with that is in thinking that Sartre has a kind of response there. But it needn't be voiced here, either.

One way to read this section, especially in light of the previous section, is its part of the "Burn the Fields" rhetorical strategy: Where a philosopher will take the relevant predecessors who have tried to do similar things but then go through one by one and demonstrate how they are failures in light of some critique which makes way for the growth of a new philosophy.

That seems to be most of what I get out of his criticism: It works well enough for our purposes here. It's not like his target is all in his head: there are real people he's referencing and he's noting how the philosophy actually played out so I can see some merit.

I'm just one of those who can usually find something to say in defense of a philosopher if I want to :D

I like your rendition of the argument just above your question: Nice and clear, and it tracks well enough with my understanding at this point.

If Adorno goes from particular to universal, shouldn't we a bit suspicious that he always ends up in the same places: commodification, instrumental reason, bourgeois consciousness, capitalist exploitation, etc? — Jamal

I don't think so, necessarily. Supposing Adorno is speaking the truth then seeing that universal in a particular should be the re-occurring general themes.

I'm not sure that these are the universals I would come to, but then Adorno's defense of individual thought comes to mind: Adorno speaks what he sees. But he would of course acknowledge that others may be at a different part of the dialectic, also reaching for the universal but finding another universal in the particulars. That is, though these are Adorno's universals that does not then mean that these universals are all the universal there are or are possible.

Make some sense?