What appears important to me, in this section, is the temporal references. The prior section had ended with a passage about how existential philosophy leaves human beings "chained to the cliff of their past". In this section now, we see how the mediation of the existent is "the hyle [Greek: primary matter] of its implicit history". When existence is apprehended as "things-are-so-and-not-otherwise", this is not a simplicity, but a complexity. It is a matter of "came to be under conditions".

This becoming disappears
and dwells in the thing, and is no more to be brought to a halt in its
concept than to be split off from its result and forgotten. Temporal
experience resembles it. In the reading of the existent as a text of its
becoming, idealistic and materialistic dialectics touch. However, while
idealism justifies the inner history of immediacy as a stage of the
concept, it becomes materialistically the measure not only of the
untruth of concepts, but also that of the existing immediacy.

What I see as important is that the becoming of the thing, a becoming which is internalized in the thing's conceptualization as "existent", is not halted by this conceptualization which designates it "existent". So the true, real thing, continues in its becoming, beyond what is assigned to it, by the naming of it as an existent. This, I apprehend as the reason why the thing itself always extends beyond its concept. This extension is referred to as the thing's "possibility".

What negative dialectics drives through its hardened objects is the possibility which their reality has betrayed, and yet which gleams from each one of these.

Now there is a gap explained, between the thing's conceptualized existence (its past), and "the hope of the Name", what's wanted in its future. So in the closing sentence, the relation between word and concept is described as "solely a moment", and I take "something external to it", as its future.

Even the insistence
on the specific word and concept, as the iron gate to be unlocked, is
solely a moment of such, though an indispensable one. In order to be
cognized, that which is internalized, which the cognition clings to in the
expression, always needs something external to it.

I agree. Hegel thought of Becoming as primal, being the synthesis of being and non-being.

To grasp Becoming, we analyze it. In becoming, you leave behind what you were. That person is now gone, and so exemplifies non-being. And stepping out of the past into the present, you're here now, something unique, which the world has never seen before. To exemplify Being is to be new, in contrast to the old, which is gone. And everything that comes into Being, is bound to return to the nothingness from which is came, as it steps toward the future, it dies, and is reborn.

When we bring being and non-being back together, we return to what Hegel thought of as the Truth: Becoming. Being and non-being are partial truths, since they're dependent on one another. But all such Truths are beyond full comprehension. The mind can only approach it in its analyzed state: split in two, laid out like the parts of a clock. But the Truth isn't dismantled like that, so it's like we've encountered a boundary of the mind.

What appears important to me, in this section, is the temporal references. The prior section had ended with a passage about how existential philosophy leaves human beings "chained to the cliff of their past". In this section now, we see how the mediation of the existent is "the hyle [Greek: primary matter] of its implicit history". When existence is apprehended as "things-are-so-and-not-otherwise", this is not a simplicity, but a complexity. It is a matter of "came to be under conditions". — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree.

What I see as important is that the becoming of the thing, a becoming which is internalized in the thing's conceptualization as "existent", is not halted by this conceptualization which designates it "existent". So the true, real thing, continues in its becoming, beyond what is assigned to it, by the naming of it as an existent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes indeed. Well put.

This, I apprehend as the reason why the thing itself always extends beyond its concept. This extension is referred to as the thing's "possibility". — Metaphysician Undercover

Now there is a gap explained, between the thing's conceptualized existence (its past), and "the hope of the Name", what's wanted in its future. — Metaphysician Undercover

This interpretation is made in the right spirit, but I think it's too reductive. Let's not make the mistake of replacing one reification (the existent) with another (the thing's becoming, or its sedimented history, or its temporal dimension including its future). We don't need to pin down the non-identical as its temporal dimension or its never-ending becoming, and we should not, because there are other dimensions to it: there is a synchronic remainder too, comprised of the thing's unique configuration of characteristics that are never fully captured by concepts, i.e., the thing's thisness. Also, the thing's mediations and relations are not merely understood as temporal. I admit that the temporal cannot be left out of the picture---we cannot analyze the thing as if frozen in time, separating the dimensions in the mode of science---but it's not everything. The hope of the name is that we can fully comprehend the thing, including its temporal dimension.

What I always react to in your posts is your apparent wish to pin down the essence, as if you've discovered the secret, the true definition. But this might not be a big disagreement, because except for the reductiveness your understanding here is very Adornian.

In my last post I forgot to mention that I think Adorno in this section solves one of our disputes. He admits that the existent as we conceptualize and describe it, e.g., as worker, commodity, society, is a false things-are-so-and-not-otherwise---and yet at the same time the word and concept are indispensible:

Even the insistence on the specific word and concept, as the iron gate to be unlocked, is
solely a moment of such [ideological identity], though an indispensable one.

And this brings up the wider problem that he wants to address, namely how to get around this. The answer, as he has been saying in various ways since the lectures, is to use concepts to repair the damage done by concepts. This section is the first appearance of the word "constellation" in ND.

Walter Benjamin famously proposed ... that ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars. That is to say, ideas are no more present in the world than constellations actually exist in the heavens, but like constellations they enable us to perceive relations between objects. It also means ideas are not the same as concepts, nor can they be construed as the laws of concepts. Ideas do not give rise to knowledge about phenomena and phenomena cannot be used to measure their validity. This is not to say the constellation is purely subjective or all in our heads. The stars in the night sky are where they are regardless of how we look at them and there is something in how they are positioned above us that suggests the image we construct of them. But having said that, the names we use for constellations are embedded in history, tradition and myth. So the constellation is simultaneously subjective and objective in nature. It is not, however, a system, and this is its true significance for Benjamin, who rejects the notion that philosophy can be thought of as systemic, as though it were mathematical or scientific instead of discursive. Benjamin developed this notion further in his account of the arcades in 19th-century Paris. Theodor Adorno adopts and adapts constellation in his account of negative dialectics, transforming it into a model. The notion of constellation allows for a depiction of the relation between ideas that gives individual ideas their autonomy but does not thereby plunge them into a state of isolated anomie. — Oxford Reference

Introduction: TRADITION AND COGNITION

From the last section, which looked at the temporal, historical dimension of philosophical thought, to this section in which Adorno looks at how this dimension has fared in modern philosophy: only dialectics is keeping it alive, the mainstream being thoroughly de-historicized.

One can no longer paddle along in the mainstream – even the word sounds dreadful – of modern philosophy. The recent kind, dominant until today, would like to expel the traditional moments of thought, dehistoricizing it according to its own content, assigning history to a particular branch of an established fact-collecting science.

"The recent kind" could refer to phenomenology, logical positivism/analytic philosophy, and also perhaps to existentialism. They are all ahistorical in their own ways.

These academic schools of philosophy, on the model of scientific specialization, regarded history as belonging only within its own department, away from philosophy, whose content was not purely philosophical if concerned with the historical.

Ever since the fundament of all cognition was sought in the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given, there have been attempts, in thrall to the idol of the pure presence, as it were, to drive out the historical dimension of thought. The fictitious one-dimensional Now becomes the cognitive ground of inner meaning. Under this aspect, even the patriarchs of modernity who are officially viewed as antipodes are in agreement: in the autobiographical explanations of Descartes on the origin of his method and in Bacon’s idol-theory.

Not only empiricism but also rationalism and more recently phenomenology seek the foundation of cognition in "the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given," although in Descartes this would be innate ideas and the cogito rather than sensory stimuli. Adorno is describing a kind of foundationalist philosophy that founds its claims on presumed-to-be immediate, dehistoricized, this-and-not-otherwise givens.

It's interesting that he says ever since Bacon and Descartes, philosophers have been trying to drive history out of philosophy. The standard view is that there was no historical dimension to philosophy at all until Vico and Hegel. Before them, there was no historical dimension to be driven out.

But Adorno is just saying that such was the ahistorical nature of philosophy from the early moderns through to Kant (and beyond, among those who ignored Hegel), that anything historical would always be driven out. It was actively anti-historical without even trying.

What is historical in thinking, instead of reining in the timelessness of objectivated logic, is equated with superstition, which the citation of institutionalized clerical tradition against the inquiring thought in fact was. The critique of authority was well founded. But what it overlooked was that the tradition of cognition was itself as immanent as the mediating moment of its objects.

Modern philosophy and the Enlightenment equated history with religious tradition, superstition, and authority, but it went too far and came up with ways of thinking that left no space for the historical.

The bolded statement means that enlightened philosophy overlooked the fact that its own cognition was formed historically, because the tradition itself is immanent to thought, i.e., history is always already bound up in our ideas. Philosophical thought has an immanent historicity whether philosophers acknowledge it or not.

Cognition distorts these, as soon as it turns them into a tabula rasa by means of objectifications brought to a halt. Even in the concretized form in opposition to its content, it takes part in the tradition as unconscious memory; no question could simply be asked, which would not vouchsafe the knowledge of what is past and push it further.

The mainstream philosophers distort objects when they freeze them in place---pinning them down---with their atemporal objectifications, erasing their history, the "texts of their becoming". In seeking greater objectivity, philosophy has only succeeded attaining a distorted understanding.

And even a new philosophical movement which opposes the philosophical content of the tradition, with a form such as dialectics, will be marked by it. Through an unconscious memory, this determines the questions that will be asked and the approaches that might be taken.

This is true for negative dialectics, but it's not a bad thing. In asking those questions we take up ideas with a history, and carry them forward while transforming them.

The form of thinking as an intra-temporal, motivated, progressive movement resembles in advance, microcosmically, the macrocosmic, historical one, which was internalized in the structure of thought.

The dialectical method, a process happening in time, looks like the movement of history in microcosm. This is because that historical movement is immanent to thought.

Among the highest achievements of the Kantian deduction was that he preserved the memory, the trace of what was historical in the pure form of cognition, in the unity of the thinking I, at the stage of the reproduction of the power of imagination.

Kant makes the synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition depend on the imagination, which connects concepts to successive appearances, and Adorno interprets this as the trace of history, since it determines inner sense, i.e., the form of the succession of appearances, that is, time.

Because however there is no time without that which is existent in it, what Husserl in his late phase called inner historicity cannot remain internalized, pure form. The inner historicity of thought grew along with its content and thereby with the tradition.

Kant's notion of time is inadequate. The immanent historicity of thought that I mentioned earlier is not just a separable pure form as time is in Kant.

The pure, completely sublimated subject would be on the other hand that which is absolutely traditionless. The cognition which experienced only the idol of that purity, total timelessness, coincides with formal logic, would become tautology; it could not grant even a transcendental logic any room.

Philosophy without history would be formal logic ("one gigantic tautology," as he said somewhere else)---pure form with no content.

Timelessness, towards which the bourgeois consciousness strives, perhaps as compensation for its own mortality, is the zenith of its delusion. Benjamin innervated this when he strictly forswore the ideal of autonomy and dedicated his thinking to a tradition, albeit to a voluntarily installed, subjectively chosen one which dispenses with the same authority, which it indicts autarkic thought of dispensing with.

It's no coincidence that philosophy began to strive for a timeless objectivity in the period of capitalism: the bourgeois consciousness strives for immortality as the logical culmination of its project of sovereign autonomy (free of all history and practical contraints).

Walter Benjamin brought life and energy to this observation by explicitly rejecting the ideal of the philosopher as sovereign autonomous individual. He knew he could not be free of a tradition. However, the tradition he embraced was one he put together himself, combining Jewish mysticism, modernism, and parts of Marxism.

Perhaps this for Adorno is the model of the correct approach to tradition. If we are aware that tradition is at work in our thoughts, we can make use of it deliberately, as Benjamin did.

Although the counter-force [Widerspiel] to the transcendental moment, the traditional one is quasi-transcendental, not a point-like subjectivity, but rather that which is actually constitutive, in Kant’s words the mechanism hidden in the depths of the soul. Among the variants of the all too narrow concluding questions of the Critique of Pure Reason, one ought not to be excluded, namely how thought, by having to relinquish tradition, might be able to preserve and transform it; nothing else is intellectual experience.

Tradition is the opposite of the transcendental. The latter is, despite the imagination's role in the synthetic unity of apperception, ahistorical. As far as time gets into the transcendental deduction it is a pure form belonging to an individual subject. It has nothing to do with historical or collective time, therefore tradition opposes it.

The transcendental ego is not only lacking in history but is lacking in almost anything at all, as a point-like unity. The real subject is not like this: it is thicker, full of history and the "empirically real," all the way down.

However, tradition is also in a sense transcendental, in that it is the condition for the possibility of subjective experience. Kant wrote that the mechanism of the application of the categories to sensible intuitions "is a secret art residing in the depths of the human soul". Adorno says the secret is tradition, or history (But I don't want to suggest that Adorno is answering Kant's precise question).

Intellectual experience means relinquishing tradition while also preserving and transforming it. This looks a lot like sublation or determinate negation. And next we get...

The philosophy of Bergson, and even more so Proust’s novel, abandoned themselves to this, only for their part under the bane of immediacy, out of loathing for that bourgeois timelessness which anticipates the abolition of life in advance of the mechanics of the concept. The methexis of philosophy in tradition would be however solely its determinate repudiation [Verneinung]. It is constructed by the texts which it criticizes. In them, which the tradition brings to it and which the texts themselves embody, its conduct becomes commensurable with tradition. This justifies the transition from philosophy to interpretation, which enshrines neither what is interpreted nor raises the symbol to the absolute, but seeks what might be really true there, where thought secularizes the irretrievable Ur model of holy texts.

Philosophy, as the determinate negation of the tradition, means the interpretation of texts, without enshrining them or treating them as vessels of absolute truth.

This interpretation is made in the right spirit, but I think it's too reductive. Let's not make the mistake of replacing one reification (the existent) with another (the thing's becoming, or its sedimented history, or its temporal dimension including its future). We don't need to pin down the non-identical as its temporal dimension or its never-ending becoming, and we should not, because there are other dimensions to it: there is a synchronic remainder too, comprised of the thing's unique configuration of characteristics that are never fully captured by concepts, i.e., the thing's thisness. Also, the thing's mediations and relations are not merely understood as temporal. I admit that the temporal cannot be left out of the picture---we cannot analyze the thing as if frozen in time, separating the dimensions in the mode of science---but it's not everything. The hope of the name is that we can fully comprehend the thing, including its temporal dimension. — Jamal

OK, that sounds reasonable.

What I always react to in your posts is your apparent wish to pin down the essence, as if you've discovered the secret, the true definition. But this might not be a big disagreement, because except for the reductiveness your understanding here is very Adornian. — Jamal

We all have our idiosyncrasies. I suppose I have to "pin down" something, i.e. to assume to have understood something, in order to have something to talk about. This pinning down is an application of force which others may find irritating. To me, understanding is an application of force, like when Adorno talks about doing violence to the concept. It's sort of unavoidable because understanding requires that concepts get melded together.

I'm starting to really like Adorno. He was a bit difficult to understand at the beginning, but with time I'm catching on to his style. I like him because he actually goes very deep with his ontology. It's common to just select idealism, or materialism, and this provides principles which allow the philosopher to end the analysis, or begin the ontology. But Adorno doesn't stop here, he sees flaws in both, and that drives him deeper.

In my last post I forgot to mention that I think Adorno in this section solves one of our disputes. He admits that the existent as we conceptualize and describe it, e.g., as worker, commodity, society, is a false things-are-so-and-not-otherwise---and yet at the same time the word and concept are indispensible: — Jamal

I think so too. We can say indispensable for any sort of understanding, but at the same time understanding always contains some degree of misunderstanding, so a falsity as well.

We all have our idiosyncrasies. I suppose I have to "pin down" something, i.e. to assume to have understood something, in order to have something to talk about. This pinning down is an application of force which others may find irritating. To me, understanding is an application of force, like when Adorno talks about doing violence to the concept. It's sort of unavoidable because understanding requires that concepts get melded together. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah that makes sense.

I'm starting to really like Adorno. He was a bit difficult to understand at the beginning, but with time I'm catching on to his style. I like him because he actually goes very deep with his ontology. It's common to just select idealism, or materialism, and this provides principles which allow the philosopher to end the analysis, or begin the ontology. But Adorno doesn't stop here, he sees flaws in both, and that drives him deeper. — Metaphysician Undercover

Awesome.

I think so too. We can say indispensable for any sort of understanding, but at the same time understanding always contains some degree of misunderstanding, so a falsity as well. — Metaphysician Undercover

:party: :grin:

This is exactly the point. To reduce everything to contradiction is the faulty process because that misses out on "the richness of lived experience". In other words it doesn't grasp the reality of the situation, therefore it is not the appropriate philosophical process. So, I propose to you, that you are mistaken in classing Hegelian dialectics and negative dialectics together, in the same category, as reducing the polyvalence of experience to contradiction. I think that negative dialectics, being the negative to Hegelian dialectics, recognizes the importance of the opposite, noncontradiction, as the foundation for this polyvalence. That is the richness of lived experience which escapes conceptualization when conceptualization is bounded by contradiction. — Metaphysician Undercover

So when Adorno says: "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", there by "dialectics" he means Hegelian dialectics, and not negative dialectics? (so that to not class them together). And therefore that mainstream opinion has every right and is correct in being infuriated?

There is nothing said about right, or correctness. How can your conclusion be supported?

I think it is more like he is stating this as an observation. The infuriation is what it is, as the way Adorno interprets the situation, whether or not it is right or correct for them to be infuriated is not being discussed.

This is one thing I've noticed about Adorno, he seldom, if ever makes judgements of good or correct. He judges nonidentical, false, and things like that, but not right, or correct, and things like that. I assume that's a feature of negative dialectics.

Yes, he doesn't say anything about right, I was asking you.

Your interpretive position is that the impoverishment of experience through dialectics (due to the sacrifice of qualitative polyvalence of experience) is wrong, based on faulty hegelian dialectics, right? To this Adorno adds that this impoverishment infuriates mainstream opinion. So do you think that the mainstream rightly object so vehemently to it?

What I see is a distinction being made between the traditional bourgeois timelessness, a sort of presentism which holds the Now of experience as the only reality, and a philosophy which recognizes the reality of the past, as history and memory. Adorno seems to believe that there is a real need to respect the reality of the past.

Among the highest achievements of the Kantian deduction
was that he preserved the memory, the trace of what was historical in
the pure form of cognition, in the unity of the thinking I, at the stage of
the reproduction of the power of imagination.

I can't say that I understand what you are asking. If X infuriates you, then it is right that you object to it. Don't you agree? The question of whether or not X is objectively right, and whether you ought to object to X by some third party principles, is not relevant.