Significantly for our debate, I think the self itself is a fake immediacy, at least in the world we know---and I think this is an important position of Adorno's. — Jamal

I agree with this, that for Adorno the immediacy of the self is fake. And it makes sense to me because I put this into a temporal context, as a sort of analogy to help me understand. We are inclined to place the self, with its experience, at the present in time, and this presence supports the assumption of immediacy. But analysis of this experience, which is represented as the immediate, or being at the present, fails to find the present, and all is reduced to either past or future. So the immediacy of the present is illusory.

Not to be dissuaded though, the logical solution would be to unite the two opposing features, past and future, in synthesis, thereby creating the required immediacy of the present, in conception. However, this ultimately fails because the two opposing features are categorically distinct, incompatible, so in actual practise, "the present" becomes a divisor rather than a unifier. Therefore the two cannot properly be opposed in conception nor can they be unified in synthesis.

Now we have the situation which Adorno likes to describe as each of the two in the pair, being mediated by the other. The inclination is to unite the two in synthesis, and the unity would be what is immediate. But this doesn't work because the incompatibility prevents the possibility of synthesis, so that immediacy is fake.. Now we are left with the two distinct features, each mediated, and we have nothing which is immediate.

5. Possibility obstructs utopia, because if utopia is limited to what happens now to be possible, it's not much of a utopia. Focusing on possibility forecloses on utopia. At least a focus on the "immediately realized" allows the utopian ideal to be maintained, because it remains just a hopeful dream. Possibility, on the other hand, by bringing it closer in imagination to what exists, sells it short. — Jamal

Referring to my temporal analogy above, utopia would be found in the immediacy of the present. The future (expressed as "possibility") obstructs utopia through the sense of urgency, as the unending need to produce change. But looking backward in time, the "immediately realized", appears to support a real end to change, the reality of the effect, thereby keeping the dream of utopia alive. In this way the two (possibility, and the realized) mediate each other, and the immediate, as the utopia of now, is never actually present.

The way I see it is that the future is like an immense force, the force of "possibility" which necessitates that we choose. So long as the future is forcing us in this way, utopia is impossible. However, when we see that through choice and action we can bring about real change, as the "immediately realized", this provides hope that we can put an end to the destructive force of possibility, and have utopia.

I agree with this, that for Adorno the immediacy of the self is fake. And it makes sense to me because I put this into a temporal context, as a sort of analogy to help me understand. We are inclined to place the self, with its experience, at the present in time, and this presence supports the assumption of immediacy. But analysis of this experience, which is represented as the immediate, or being at the present, fails to find the present, and all is reduced to either past or future. So the immediacy of the present is illusory.

Not to be dissuaded though, the logical solution would be to unite the two opposing features, past and future, in synthesis, thereby creating the required immediacy of the present, in conception. However, this ultimately fails because the two opposing features are categorically distinct, incompatible, so in actual practise, "the present" becomes a divisor rather than a unifier. Therefore the two cannot properly be opposed in conception nor can they be unified in synthesis.

Now we have the situation which Adorno likes to describe as each of the two in the pair, being mediated by the other. The inclination is to unite the two in synthesis, and the unity would be what is immediate. But this doesn't work because the incompatibility prevents the possibility of synthesis, so that immediacy is fake.. Now we are left with the two distinct features, each mediated, and we have nothing which is immediate. — Metaphysician Undercover

I roughly agree.

Referring to my temporal analogy above, utopia would be found in the immediacy of the present. The future (expressed as "possibility") obstructs utopia through the sense of urgency, as the unending need to produce change. But looking backward in time, the "immediately realized", appears to support a real end to change, the reality of the effect, thereby keeping the dream of utopia alive. In this way the two (possibility, and the realized) mediate each other, and the immediate, as the utopia of now, is never actually present.

The way I see it is that the future is like an immense force, the force of "possibility" which necessitates that we choose. So long as the future is forcing us in this way, utopia is impossible. However, when we see that through choice and action we can bring about real change, as the "immediately realized", this provides hope that we can put an end to the destructive force of possibility, and have utopia. — Metaphysician Undercover

I like this angle on possibility. My only doubt is your interpretation of "immediately realized," which differs from mine. It's difficult to imagine Adorno regarding anything immediately realized as good. Here's the translation in the appendix of the lectures:

Its path is blocked by possibility, never by immediate reality; this explains why it always seems abstract when surrounded by the world as it is.

Immediate reality is surely the world as it is, the false or bad world. Adorno aims to surprise by saying that this is not what obstructs utopia, but rather possibility.

But I like your idea of possibility as an "immense force". Utopia as an actual possibility weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living (to repurpose a quotation from Marx).

My only doubt is your interpretation of "immediately realized," which differs from mine. It's difficult to imagine Adorno regarding anything immediately realized as good. Here's the translation in the appendix of the lectures:

Its path is blocked by possibility, never by immediate reality; this explains why it always seems abstract when surrounded by the world as it is. — Jamal

I think my interpretation is very similar to yours. Possibility blocks the path to utopia, and the realized is opposed to this. That implies good. The "immediately realized" supports the ideal of utopia, while possibility blocks it. In your last post you said:

"At least a focus on the 'immediately realized' allows the utopian ideal to be maintained, because it remains just a hopeful dream." "The good" is what is desired, what supports hope.

Immediate reality is surely the world as it is, the false or bad world. — Jamal

This is the play of the contraries. Plato did an extensive study of the relationship between pleasure and pain, it shows up in a number of different dialogues. The common way of understanding pain is that it is the absence, or want of pleasure. But this creates a problem because we then cannot get to pleasure without first experiencing pain as what is required, as prior to pleasure, being the absence of pleasure which precedes its presence. So Plato speculated that there must be a type of pleasure which is not properly opposed to pain, and this would support the true good, as a more pure form of pleasure which was not derived from pain.

The introduction is not so much an introduction as the heart of the whole work. It's an essay outlining the problem and the program of negative dialectics, namely how to approach the world philosophically in conditions that have eroded the fullness of intellectual-spiritual experience---in other words how to fulfil the promise of philosophy in conditions where conceptuality itself hinders the search for truth.

The centrality of language in this program only became clear to me at the end, and that sent me back to the "Speculative Moment" and "Darstellung" sections:

The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated.
This may help to explain why portrayal [Darstellung] is not a matter of indifference or external to philosophy, but immanent to its idea. Its integral moment of expression, non-conceptually-mimetic, becomes objectified only through portrayal – language. The freedom of philosophy is nothing other than the capacity of giving voice to this unfreedom.

This is then reiterated and emphasized at the end, in the "Rhetoric" section, where he switches from suffering to utopia. So the dimension that language must illuminate expressively, using concepts to reveal their own inadequacy, is the dimension with suffering at one end and utopia on the other. The search for truth is inseparable from ethics (and politics?).

Other important aspects of the introduction are:

- Identity thinking and the consequent failure of idealism and other philosophies
- (Negative) Dialectics
- Anti-system but preserving the spirit of system

:up:

The introduction is not so much an introduction as the heart of the whole work. — Jamal

From what I've gathered, the introduction in ND is a reviewed version of an essay Adorno has written to accompany his lectures, which is featured in LND. This might explain why there are parts missing in the LND translation, and also why some parts are different: the LND appendix translation in based on a different original material. I spent hours trying to validate this for sure, I gave up, it is what I think.

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. — Metaphysician Undercover

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. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, Adorno doesn't interpret the situation, but I would think that whenever he brings up mainstream opinion, that he doesn't think very highly of it. This, bundled with the fact that the furies are never a wise counsel, leads me to believe that Adorno meant it to show the opposition of the common people to dialectical thought, both flavors, if you like.

He finishes his first lecture with:

Now, you all know that when we speak of dialectics in the succinct sense that I have tacitly been assuming – the ancient Greek concept of dialectics coincides more or less with epistemology and logic, and is far more general than what I have been explaining to you – you all know that dialectics in the sense of contradictions both in things and in concepts exists in two major versions: an idealist version which may to a certain degree be regarded as the pinnacle of philosophical speculation, and a materialist version which has been turned into an official world-view that dominates a very large portion of the globe (and as such it has degenerated into the very opposite of itself). And you may well want to ask me why I do not simply declare myself satisfied with this alternative but choose instead to speak of something else, namely a negative dialectics. You may well ask further whether I am not the kind of professor who tries to brew his own little philosophical soup in the hope that one day he may obtain a chapter to himself in Ueberweg-Heinze (or one or other of its continuations). At this point I should like to mention an objection that has been raised by an extremely knowledgeable source, namely by someone from your own circle, someone from amongst those present here today. Given that the concept of dialectics contains the element of negativity precisely because of the presence of contradiction, does
this not mean that every dialectics is a negative dialectics and that my introduction of the word ‘negative’ is a kind of tautology? We could just say that, simply by refusing to make do with the given reality, the subject, thought, negates whatever is given; and that as a motive force of thought subjectivity itself is the negative principle, as we see from a celebrated passage in Hegel’s Phenomenology where he remarks that the living substance as subject, in other words, as thought, is pure, simple negativity, and is ‘for this very reason, the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis.’ In other words, thought itself – and thought is tied to subjectivity – is negativity, and to that extent negativity, and especially dialectical thinking, is negative dialectics from the outset. I should like to respond to this in detail next time. For now I wish only to set out the problem as it has been put to me and to say that it calls for an answer.

So he concedes that his own "negative" dialectics is very similar to Hegel's dialectics, owing to the presence of contradiction, to the point that it might be indistinguishable by some. His whole project, one can say, is to show how it differs, not ignoring the similarities.

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.

The "grinding everything indiscriminately in its mill down into the mere logical form of the contradiction", what I reinterpreted as "reducing everything unto contradiction", is what is similar, and here Adorno is defending every form of dialectics: hegelian (idealistic), marxist (materialistic), negative. The herd doesn't comprehend and is angried.

It's not like that negative dialectics comes to the rescue of our precious polyvalence of experience, which was erroneously sacricifed by bad and faulty hegelian dialectics. There is nothing to restore about it, negative dialectics continues in the same path, even more so.

But this is what one would expect, since negative dialectics is the opposite of hegelian dialectics, right? So where the latter reduces everything to contradiction, discarding polyvalent experience, the former would bring it back, our hero, well no, that's too bad.

So he concedes that his own "negative" dialectics is very similar to Hegel's dialectics, owing to the presence of contradiction, to the point that it might be indistinguishable by some. His whole project, one can say, is to show how it differs, not ignoring the similarities. — Pussycat

I don't think so. At the end of the quoted passage he is dismissing claims that Hegel's dialectics can properly be called "negative". And, at the beginning, he distinguishes a "succinct" sense from a "general" sense. I believe that Adorno is moving toward the general sense. Look at this quote from "Rhetoric":

Dialectics, according to its literal meaning language as the organ
of thought, would be the attempt to critically rescue the rhetorical
moment: to have the thing and the expression approach one another
almost to the point of non-differentiability.

It's not like that negative dialectics comes to the rescue of our precious polyvalence of experience, which was erroneously sacricifed by bad and faulty hegelian dialectics. There is nothing to restore about it, negative dialectics continues in the same path, even more so. — Pussycat

This is clearly not the case. Read "Rhetoric" thoroughly. This is the final paragraph.

Dialectics seeks to master the dilemma between the popular
opinion and that which is non-essentializingly [wesenslos] correct,
mediating this with the formal, logical one. It tends however towards
content as that which is open, not already decided in advance by the
scaffolding: as protest against mythos. That which is monotonous is
mythic, ultimately diluted into the formal juridicality of thinking
[Denkgesetzlichkeit]. The cognition which wishes for content, wishes
for utopia. This, the consciousness of the possibility, clings to the
concrete as what is undistorted. It is what is possible, never the
immediately realized, which obstructs utopia; that is why in the middle
of the existent it appears abstract. The inextinguishable color comes
from the not-existent. Thinking serves it as a piece of existence, as that
which, as always negatively, reaches out to the not-existent. Solely the
most extreme distance would be the nearness; philosophy is the prism,
in which its colors are caught.

But this is what one would expect, since negative dialectics is the opposite of hegelian dialectics, right? — Pussycat

No. The paragraph you provided explains why this is not the case.

From what I've gathered, the introduction in ND is a reviewed version of an essay Adorno has written to accompany his lectures, which is featured in LND. This might explain why there are parts missing in the LND translation, and also why some parts are different: the LND appendix translation in based on a different original material. I spent hours trying to validate this for sure, I gave up, it is what I think. — Pussycat

Yes, it's clear the texts are different, even though the differences are quite minor. We can't quite treat them as alternative translations.

EDIT: Actually I was under impression that the version in the lectures was an amended version of the introduction. I think ND was finished by the time he did the lectures.

I'll say some more about the introduction, particularly the linguistic angle.

1. Isn't the emphasis on expression a subjectivization of cognition? Doesn't it elevate personal perspective over truth, or even---which is worse---equate them?

He actually addresses this objection in the introduction itself, where he says that what is contingent and subjective is not mere, by which I mean that the contingent and subjective cannot be legitimately cast as the inferior pole of a Socratic opinion vs. knowledge dimension. This is because the subective is objectively determined, and the contingency of perspective is not a random anything-goes contingency:

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. — QUALITY AND THE INDIVIDUATED

It [individual experience] 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. — QUALITY AND THE INDIVIDUATED

This is quite Kantian, but none the worse for that: objectivity via the subject. What it comes down to for Adorno is a refusal to accept the primacy, characteristic of science, of the view from nowhere and the abstraction which attempts to reach it. It might have been fruitful for science, but applied to philosophy it is a fundamental mistake, since critical insight is inseparable from the subject and understanding has in actuality been impoverished across the board by the purported objectivity of abstraction, classification, and mere signification, under the imperatives of economy and bureaucracy.

Or as Roger Foster puts it:

[Adorno] is arguing that the subject-neutral perspective cannot reflect, within itself, on what kind of truth it is. That is to say, it cannot reflect on its own dependence on historical experience. For Adorno, this is not merely an oversight; it is rather structural, because the denial of its dependence on history is in effect built in to the subject-neutral perspective. — The Recovery of Experience

2. Isn't it an argument for philosophy as poetry, sacrificing logical justification?

Adorno is very aware of this objection, which is why in the introduction and in the lectures he emphasizes that negative dialectics rigorous, stringent, and so on.

The way I think about it is that argument and expression have to work together (this is along the same lines as the "Argument and Experience" section, though that was about experience more generally, whereas here we are looking at language).

So argument is most successful when the material it works with is most truthful, which means rich in the qualitative content revealed best by linguistic expression. And expression is most successful when it is answerable to and motivated by the compulsion of logic.

But that's all I have right now on that question.


3. What does it mean in practice to use concepts expressively? What does the Darstellung of negative dialectics look like?

The obvious answer is to point to ND and his other works. But this doesn't tell us much.

It helps to see that within concepts themselves there is a reflection of that non-identical remainder which belongs to things. We can use concepts in a way that allows their contextual associations to speak, associations that exceed or are suppressed by the concepts' definitions. It's like poetry: there are no true synonyms---every word has its special associations and sounds, and flattening these out or thinking of them in terms only of their defintions would be a regression from understanding and truth. Adorno maintains that the same is true in philosophy for concepts.

One thing this means in practice is a refusal to state or settle on definitions or on a single conception of an object or state of affairs. This would explain his tendency to circle around a topic, using different concepts along the way. It is in the interplay of concepts and their associations that we catch glimpses of the truth.

Adorno believes that the task of philosophical writing is to reverse the tendency of concepts to detach themselves from the nuances of contextual significance. Making concepts receptive to the moment of expression is therefore to allow the context in which a concept is experi enced to inform its cognitive significance. — Roger Foster

I actually don't know if any of that constitutes an answer to the question, but it goes some way towards it.

I'm really enjoying the first section of "The Ontological Need". It's Adorno as we don't often get to see him so clearly, as staunch defender of the Enlightenment. He pretty much comes out and says it in the first few lines: Heidegger's ontology is philosophical support for fascism.

I'm still working through it though.

Adorno is very aware of this objection, which is why in the introduction and in the lectures he emphasizes that negative dialectics rigorous, stringent, and so on. — Jamal

This theme is what I think attracted me to pursue reading Adorno, along with your and everyone else's help.

Stringency, rigor, reason -- these are things I care about and only argue against because I care about them.

And Adorno is taking up dialectics, which I've always struggled with, so it helps in my understanding there too.

The Ontological Need: QUESTION AND ANSWER

The ontologies in Germany, particularly the Heideggerian one, remain influential to this day, without the traces of the political past giving anyone pause. Ontology is tacitly understood as the readiness to sanction a heteronomous social order, exempted from the justification of consciousness. That such considerations are denied a higher place, as misunderstanding, a falling astray into the ontic, and a lack of radicalism in the question, only reinforces the dignity of the appeal: ontology seems all the more numinous, the less it solidifies into a definite content, which the impertinent understanding would be permitted to get a hold of. Intangibility turns into unassailability. Whoever refuses to follow suit, is suspected of being someone without a fatherland, without a homeland in being, indeed not so differently from the idealists Fichte and Schelling, who denigrated those who resisted their metaphysics as inferior. In all of its mutually combative schools, which denounce each other as false, ontology is apologetic. Its influence could not be understood, however, if it did not meet an emphatic need, the index of something omitted, the longing that the Kantian verdict on the knowledge of the absolute ought not to rest there.

Adorno, here very much on the side of reason, begins by attacking Heideggerian irrationalism and accusing it and other such "fundamental ontologies" of tacit complicity with fascism.

For Heidegger, asking for justification for his ontology is already to have gone wrong. Thus he sets up his ontology as exempt from justification, and this is presented as proof of its profundity.

Notice Adorno says that Heideggerian philosophy exempts itself not just generally from justification, but specifically from the justification of consciousness. The point here is to assert consciousness against Heidegger's rejection of consciousness-centred philosophy and thus to emphasize that justification, and therefore also reason and critical autonomy, is constitutively subjective—or is always subjectively mediated. In all of modern philosophy it is from consciousness that reason arises and from there is imposed intersubjectively to achieve objectivity. Every philosopher in his own subjective reasoning must submit to the agreed rules of justification—but after all it is the subject who reasons. This attitude is most obvious from Kant through to German Idealism, in which the subject is elevated to a universal "I".

The appeal to unmediated access to Being is irrational because only through subjective mediation is reason applied, and in asking us to deny our own conscious reason Heidegger clears the ground for an uncritical acceptance of heteronomous authority, i.e., the social order imposed from outside consciousness in the name of "Being".

Moving on from his cursory assertion of neo-ontology's ideological function as fascist apologetics, he considers why this philosophy seems so attractive. It would not have been so influential, he says, had it not met a need.

But before I continue, I'm going to do this:


Heidegger's fundamental ontology & what Adorno doesn't like about it

I only know Being and Time from secondary literature and lectures; I have not read the work itself. What follows then is at best a rough sketch, but I think it'll be enough for an understanding of Adorno's casually delivered accusation of support for fascism, if not for an adequate assessment of it.

Heidegger in B&T begins with a revival of the question of the meaning of Being. Philosophy has spent most of its time investigating beings and their properties, not Being itself. This is the ontological difference; the investigation of beings is concerned with the ontic, whereas Being itself is ontological.

To begin his investigation of Being he focuses on the one particular being for whom Being is an issue, namely the human being. His name for this being is Dasein, which means "being-there". This analysis is entitled "The Analytic of Dasein".

Dasein is special because it already has a direct, pre-theoretical familiarity with Being. So instead of building a theory built on justification, Heidegger lays out the structures of Dasein's existence, giving us an "existential analytic". That this is all beyond the reach of rational critique is the central problem for Adorno.

EDIT: To be more precise, the central problem is that Heidegger's ontology is based on or consists of a rejection of rational critique. The traditional language of justification and the subjective is held to be superficially ontic. Since the ontology is therefore exempt from intersubjective reason, what you end up with is a new dogmatic philosophy.

According to Heidegger the nature of Dasein's existence means that the subject-object framework is wrong. Dasein is not a detached spectator but is rather characterized by being-in-the-world, where Dasein's world is a context of significance. Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world describes two ways Dasein encounters things: ready-to-hand, meaning they are made use of practically as familiar unquestioned parts of our world; and present-at-hand, meaning things are observed in a detached, theoretical manner, as in science.

Also part of what it is to be Dasein:

- Care: Dasein's basic structure, the condition of being concerned with its own being, projecting itself towards the future.
- Thrownness: Dasein always finds itself thrown into a context it didn't choose.
- The They: the conformist public which blocks Dasein's authentic potential.
- Authenticity: via anxiety and confronting one's own mortality one can act independently of The They.

These structures, the Existentialia, are presented by Heidegger as neutral insights which apply transhistorically to human existence. But for Adorno, rather than the eternal truths of Being, they grew out of a specifically German and conservative context and played an ideological role. And they were able to do this, and to pose as eternal and natural, because they were from the outset abstract, drained of substantive content: what does Dasein care about, and why? Into what kind of society is it thrown? Granted that Dasein's existence is one of being-in-the-world, but why should we just accept the given state of that world? Heidegger brackets the social and material conditions that shape it, treating them as ontologically neutral, so as to get at Dasein's being. But Adorno points out that this very effort and this crucial bracketing is to abandon the central philosophical task of critiquing all that exists. The result can only be social conformism and ideology, no matter how appealing and partially true Heidegger's analysis is.

But the real ideological danger is that the Existentialia are not as abstract and empty of content as they pretend to be. Although they're presented as formal structures, they're actually saturated with conservative, specifically German content: Thrownness implies Volk, Fatherland, and destiny; The They is part of an anti-Enlightenment critique of liberal modernity; etc. This move allows Heidegger to universalize what is actually a particular German Romantic worldview, giving it the authority of ontological necessity.

Nice exposition of Heidegger's relevance to this text.

And making sense of why Adorno is tying the question to the answer: i.e. one could assert that Heidegger's opening of the question is the work, whereas Adorno wants to put that line of thought to rest in noting that for philosophy the question asked often is already connected to the answer.

This does not mean, however, as in the
constant parroting of Kierkegaard, that the existence of the questioner
would be that truth, which searches in vain for the answer. Rather in
philosophy the authentic question almost always includes in a certain
manner its answer.

Idealism would like to drown out precisely this, to always
produce, to “deduce” its own form and if possible every content...
[But]...There can be no
judging without the understanding any more than understanding
without the judgement. This invalidates the schema, that the solution
would be the judgement, the problem the mere question, based on
understanding

Although I think he wants to target all phenomenologists including Husserl with this, just to make that explicit (not that you said otherwise), and not just Heidegger -- but Sartre, and Bergson, and anyone who might lay claim to "the things themselves" absent ratio: this being a sort of "flip side" to Hegel who claimed everything is "analytic" --- the idea goes from one to the next as any philosopher could judge -- where now by looking to the non-identical we are trying to set aside our desiderata in favor of the things where we cannot do so without some sort of ratio for the things themselves to be mediated by.

EDIT: I finished Being, Subject, Object and see I was following along with the general pattern of thinking -- he notes the difference between these thinkers there while grouping them.

Adorno talks about Heidegger's system of regions, as subject areas, and how the will attempts to grasp the whole without those self-imposed boundaries. This would form another philosophy of the absolute.

The categorical construct, exempt from any
sort of critique, as the scaffolding of existing relationships, is confirmed
as absolute, and the unreflective immediacy of the method lends itself
to every sort of caprice.

I love the next line, probably the only short sentence in the chapter. Though I can't say I totally understand it:

The critique of criticism becomes pre-critical.

Then the idealistic philosophy turned against academia. However, this "audacity" "knows enough to cover itself by general accord and through the most powerful educational institutions." The result, is the opposite to the beginning, a rebound into abstraction.

The problematic is the need itself, i.e. the need for ontology. In the German tradition the question is more important than the answer, and Adorno seems to qualify this by saying the following:

Rather in philosophy the authentic question almost always includes in a certain
manner its answer.

This is where I start to lose track of his train of thought. I don't understand how the question contains the answer, or if this is just metaphorical. He explains briefly by saying that the question is modeled by experience, but I cannot say that I understand what he is getting at.

Then it only gets worse for me when he starts to talk about judgement. I'm not sure if the two paragraphs on judgement express what he believes, or if it is meant as a criticism of idealism, but the described relationship between understanding and judgement doesn't make sense to me.

Only what is true, can truly be understood philosophically. The
fulfilling completion of the judgement in which understanding occurs
is as one with the decision over true and false. Whoever does not
participate in the judging of the stringency of a theorem or its absence
does not understand it. It has its own meaning-content, which is to be
understood, in the claim of such stringency.

There appears to be no place here for misunderstanding. I believe that a judgement constitutes a sort of (subjective) understanding, but a further, third party judgement would be required to determine whether that 'understanding' is not in fact a misunderstanding. But then that third party judgement itself would need to be judged in the same way, because it might also be misunderstanding. So we never get the pure (absolute) relationship between judgement and understanding which Adorno refers to.

So the following gets even worse, appearing to be illogical to me.

Therein the relationship of understanding and judgement
distinguishes itself from the usual temporal order. There can be no
judging without the understanding any more than understanding
without the judgement. This invalidates the schema, that the solution
would be the judgement, the problem the mere question, based on
understanding. The fiber of the so-called philosophical proof is itself
mediated, in contrast to the mathematical model, but without this
simply disappearing.

Without establishing a relationship between understanding and misunderstanding, "understanding" becomes meaningless, and it is used in a whimsical way here. He wants to say that understanding is dependent on judgement, and judgement is dependent on understanding, so that neither is prior to the other temporally. But in reality, judgement could be based in misunderstanding, and any supposed understanding which follows from this judgement is not truly understanding. Therefore we cannot say "There can be no judging without the understanding", because this judging could be based in a failed understanding (misunderstanding).

Anyway, if anyone sees through this better than I do, I'd appreciate an explanation of how to make sense of it.

When you ask a question, you're seeking to understand. Understanding has a passive character where you're open and waiting. Judgement, on the other hand, is active. When you judge, you raise the right answer above the others. St. George is an image of judgment (where he's killing the wrong answer).

When you ask a question, potential answers begin to take shape, and their shapes are coming from the nature of your question. Judgment and Understanding are prominent figures in the western esoteric tradition, where the two always temper one another, so there are a lot of harmonics to it.

Adorno was into Kabbalah at one point in his life. If you're familiar with Kabbalah, that shows up vividly from time to time.

When you judge, you raise the right answer above the others. — frank

It's what you think is the right answer, but it still might not be the right answer.

When you ask a question, potential answers begin to take shape, and their shapes are coming from the nature of your question. — frank

This makes no sense to me. Answers do not take shape just from asking the question. Besides, "potential answers" does not imply that the answer is in the question. Multiple choice gives you choices, but it does not give "the answer".

Generally, the person asking has no idea of the answer or else they would not be asking. And, the person hearing the question must understand the words, then potential answers might take shape, but the answer must be sought through a process. It is not provided by the question.

Answers do not take shape just from asking the question. — Metaphysician Undercover

I put some effort into explaining that without going full mystical mumbo jumbo. You could at least mull it over for a second. :razz:

I'm totally on board with what Adorno is saying in this section, so maybe I can explicate it. For the moment I'll just address the bit about answers being included in philosophical questions.

Adorno is accounting for the ontological need, the dissatisfaction with neo-Kantianism and positivism that prompted the creation of philosophies such as Heidegger's:

That is why ontology has surrounded itself with its miasma. In keeping with an old German tradition, it considers the question more important than the answer; where it owes what it has promised, it has raised its failure for its part to a consoling existential.

So one reason the need continues to be felt is this idea in philosophy that the question is what is most important. You often see this even today, and not just in this German tradition: the fetishizing of the question.

BUT!

In fact questions [ do ] have a different weight in philosophy than in the particular sciences, where they are abolished through their solution, while their rhythm in the history of philosophy would be more akin to duration and forgetting. This does not mean, however, as in the constant parroting of Kierkegaard, that the existence of the questioner would be that truth, which searches in vain for the answer. Rather in philosophy the authentic question almost always includes in a certain manner its answer. It does not follow, as in research, an if-then pattern of question and answer. It must model its question on that which it has experienced, so that it can catch up to it. Its answers are not given, made, produced: the developed, transparent question recoils in them.

I've added the bolded "do" to make it clear what Adorno is saying. He is saying that the idea has some truth to it.

First, I think we can all agree with Adorno that philosophical questions are generally/often not "abolished through their solution." That is, what appear as solutions are not really solutions at all, and the questions become reformulated or perhaps discarded as uninteresting, never solved with the gathering of data as in science. This is why "their rhythm in the history of philosophy would be more akin to duration and forgetting." The rhythm is not question -> data/proof -> solution.

Now, the way that a good philosophical question "almost always includes in a certain manner its answer" is that a good philosophical question already shows us what we are looking for; it tells us the kind of answer that will satisfy us—but unlike science this is not external. The question embodies a particular experience, one rooted historically and socially. So the answer is not external to the question, as it is with empirical data in science, but immanent to the genesis of the question. This is the meaning of "It must model its question on that which it has experienced, so that it can catch up to it."

None of this is meant to imply that we can immediately read off the answer straight from the question. Nor does it mean that the answer can be deduced in the manner of mathematics or formal logic, as if all philosophical questions implied the whole philosophical system of the world in microcosmic tautology.

Take for example this question: "How do body and soul interact?"

Descartes had a hypothesis:

The part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain. It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain’s substance and suspended above the passage through which the spirits in the brain’s anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities. The slightest movements on the part of this gland may alter very greatly the course of these spirits, and conversely any change, however slight, taking place in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of the gland. — The Passions of the Soul

If you can imagine this role of the pineal gland having been empirically confirmed, the question would have then disappeared. It would have turned out to have been a scientific question.

But as a philosophical question—which we now see that it is—it expresses the conditions of its genesis, defining a horizon of meaning. It presupposes that there are two distinct things and that they are problematically related. This expresses a worldview which is already part of the kind of answer that might satisfy the question. The answer would be the answer it was owing to its dualism, and this was in the question already.



The situated experience that constituted the genesis of the body-soul or mind-matter question would be one of feeling divided. I won't fill in the details but one can see how this feeling could be a result of social forces: we experience ourselves as thinking and willing agents, but also as objects in a world of mechanism and calculation; and because of the division of labour we see manual and intellectual work as entirely distinct. Adorno and Marx might put this in terms of alientation.

So Adorno isn't saying that asking a question magically gives you the answer, rather that in philosophy, the way a question is framed already expresses an insight into what it seeks. The question is not a neutral, disinterested request for information but the expression of an experience. Thinking it through, not importing information, is what brings answers to light.

So for Adorno, philosophy's task is to make questions transparent enough that they reveal their own truth-content.

EDIT: This is related to what I was saying elsewhere on TPF recently about genesis and validity. In a nutshell, the validity of a philosophical idea is never entirely unrelated to its genesis.

Although I think he wants to target all phenomenologists including Husserl with this, just to make that explicit (not that you said otherwise), and not just Heidegger -- but Sartre, and Bergson, and anyone who might lay claim to "the things themselves" absent ratio: this being a sort of "flip side" to Hegel who claimed everything is "analytic" --- the idea goes from one to the next as any philosopher could judge -- where now by looking to the non-identical we are trying to set aside our desiderata in favor of the things where we cannot do so without some sort of ratio for the things themselves to be mediated by.

EDIT: I finished Being, Subject, Object and see I was following along with the general pattern of thinking -- he notes the difference between these thinkers there while grouping them. — Moliere

:up:

Yes, totally. It's not just about Heidegger, but he is in a way paradigmatic.

I'm still struggling slowly through "Question and Answer".

I put some effort into explaining that without going full mystical mumbo jumbo. You could at least mull it over for a second. — frank

I apologize for being short. But I already spent much time mulling over what Adorno said, and I didn't find that your brief effort really added anything significant.

I've added the bolded "do" to make it clear what Adorno is saying. He is saying that the idea has some truth to it.

First, I think we can all agree with Adorno that philosophical questions are generally/often not "abolished through their solution." That is, what appear as solutions are not really solutions at all, and the questions become reformulated or perhaps discarded as uninteresting, never solved with the gathering of data as in science. This is why "their rhythm in the history of philosophy would be more akin to duration and forgetting." The rhythm is not question -> data/proof -> solution. — Jamal

I completely agree to this point. I find there is a lot of truth to that perspective, that in philosophy the question is usually more important than the answer. But for me, the reason for this is that the questions asked are ones that never get completely answered. So we have from the time of ancient Greece, and probably even before that, (but we can't properly interpret what was asked before that) the very same questions being ask even up to today. These are questions about divinity, good, time, space, infinity. These questions get answered over and over again by every philosopher who approaches ontology, but the answers never satisfy us, so the questions persist, to be addressed over and over again, maintaining importance, while the proposed solutions are discarded.

Now, the way that a good philosophical question "almost always includes in a certain manner its answer" is that a good philosophical question already shows us what we are looking for; it tells us the kind of answer that will satisfy us—but unlike science this is not external. The question embodies a particular experience, one rooted historically and socially. So the answer is not external to the question, as it is with empirical data in science, but immanent to the genesis of the question. This is the meaning of "It must model its question on that which it has experienced, so that it can catch up to it." — Jamal

I do see that he is proposing some form of empiricist perspective, philosophy "must model its question on that which it has experienced". But that premise does not produce the conclusion which he draws, "the authentic question almost always includes in a certain manner its answer". If it is true, as a fact, that we question our experience, this does not produce the conclusion that the answer to those questions is necessarily within that experience.

In fact, this attitude which Adorno seems to be proposing at this point, may be a big part of the reason why these questions never get answered. We look toward experience to answer the questions we have about experience, but this will never produce a solution because the reason why experience induces these questions is that these questions are the products of deficiencies of experience, where experience fails us in providing an explanation. This is what Plato indicates when he says that the senses deceive us, and we must use the power of the intellect to overrule the influence of the senses.

So to answer these questions which experience throws at us, due to its deficiencies, we turn to speculation. But speculation doesn't seem to provide the ultimate answers and the same questions, derived from the deficiencies of experience, remain through much speculations.

None of this is meant to imply that we can immediately read off the answer straight from the question. Nor does it mean that the answer can be deduced in the manner of mathematics or formal logic, as if all philosophical questions implied the whole philosophical system of the world in microcosmic tautology. — Jamal

I understand this, and that is why he says the question includes the answer "in a certain manner". This might be applicable to questions of empirical sciences, where there is a eureka moment of discovery. The question is formulated with precision such that it indicates exactly what the answer must be. But questions of ontology are vague and not like this. That is why the same question may have a multitude of different answers, each answer claiming to be the correct answer. The ontological questions really have nothing to indicate the criteria which the answer must fulfil.

This is significant, and it points to the incorrectness of what Wittgenstein says about the regions where words fail us, that we must be silent. In reality, philosophical questions must direct us into these areas which we have no words for, thus providing the initiative for the evolution of language and knowledge toward understanding. But this implies that the certitude of the question is its uncertainty. The only think the question takes for granted, as certain, is uncertainty. In other words, the question is simply an attempt to point at the uncertainty, as that which appears impossible to know, and asks how can we devise a way to know it. But the uncertainty inheres within the very question because even the direction which the question must point is uncertain. Therefore the question cannot even provide an indication as to what the answer will be.

But as a philosophical question—which we now see that it is—it expresses the conditions of its genesis, defining a horizon of meaning. It presupposes that there are two distinct things and that they are problematically related. This expresses a worldview which is already part of the kind of answer that might satisfy the question. The answer would be the answer it was owing to its dualism, and this was in the question already. — Jamal

I don't see this. The question presupposes dualism, because that is how the problem presents itself to us in experience, as the appearance of dualism, and dualism creates the problem of interaction. But the question might be resolved either by a dualist proposal, or a monist proposal. So the dualist presupposition is simply the empirical presentation of the problem. That presupposition ought not, and actually does not, impose any dualist conditions on the answer. The answer to the problem might be that the empirical presentation itself (the dualist representation), is itself incorrect (the senses deceive us), and the solution is monist.

I believe, that in the case of ontological questions, to think that the formulation of the question imposes such restrictions on the potential answer, is a mistaken idea. Ontological questions deal with the content itself, and the formulation of the question ought not distract us from that. This is why we can understand that the very same ontological questions pervade all cultures and languages, so long as we do not focus too closely on the formulation of the questions.

So Adorno isn't saying that asking a question magically gives you the answer, rather that in philosophy, the way a question is framed already expresses an insight into what it seeks. The question is not a neutral, disinterested request for information but the expression of an experience. Thinking it through, not importing information, is what brings answers to light. — Jamal

This is where I would disagree with Adorno then. I believe that to make this conclusion, Adorno is placing the ontological question into the same category as a question of empirical science, though he notes a difference between the two. "The way a question is framed", refers to an empirical description of the problem. If we say that the framing of the question places necessary restrictions on the possible answer, then we exclude the possibility that "the way a question is framed" is the problem (mistake) itself. Like the dualism example, the question may contain mistaken assumptions.

And I believe that in a world of changing knowledge, evolving cultures and languages, reframing of the question is very often the best approach in ontology. For example, Aristotle took the ancient question "why is there something rather than nothing", and showed how the question is much better posed as "why is there what there is rather than something else".

Anyway, I'll leave it at that. I seem to have developed a slight disagreement with Adorno at this level, but perhaps it will prove to be insignificant. My perspective is that the reason why the question is more important than the answer, is due to the need to determine the appropriate question. To be consistent with Adorno, maybe that's the answer which inheres within the question, that the question itself is wrong.

I do see that he is proposing some form of empiricist perspective — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not anything I recognize as empiricism. The idea is rather that questions are socially and historically mediated, never completely separable from their formation. And they are also mediated subjectively in the intellectual experience of the philosopher, whose thinking is shaped by their situation. The concrete social and historical conditions produce certain questions, so we understand and attempt to answer the questions partly through understanding these conditions.

The person asking the question may not know the answer, but the question itself is not a blank slate. A question like What is freedom? asked in 5th century Athens and 18th century France are different questions. The historical context, the social struggles, the available language all mediate the question and pre-structure the field of possible answers.

Anyway, I know that many philosophers would object to this approach, but that's what Adorno is saying.

I'm still struggling slowly through "Question and Answer". — Jamal

Oh yes much more can be said on each of the sections. I sort of jumped ahead because the text started to flow, but in that way where I'm just seeing one pattern -- i.e. if something didn't quite click I let it go to keep going and move with the thoughts as I was perceiving them.

Just noting it as a mark for where we're at roughly. (I've found myself rereading each of the sections multiple times so far in our reading group and never regretting the reread like it was a waste of time. the text is very dense, in the good way)

To get more specific about the concept of system, he distinguishes the relevant philosophical sense from mere systematization. The latter is some kind of organizational schema applied selectively, as in sociology; but a philosophical system develops from a basic principle to "draw everything into itself" so that nothing escapes it. It is totalizing. — Jamal

The question of "systems" is a subtle one. On my view it can be summed up more simply. A systematic thinker is someone who tends to think always in the same categories or through the same lens. This means, for example, that someone whose human activities are unvaried will tend to be a systematic thinker, and Kant would be a good example here.

Erich Przywara has an ontological reason to bar overly systematic thinking, namely his conviction (and the Catholic dogma) that anything which can be said about the Ultimate Reality, however right it is, is more wrong than right (so to speak), and that all of reality flows from the Ultimate Reality (i.e. the Creator).

This can be seen more concretely in a quote such as this:

What may be called linear thinking goes straight out from one pole or from one idea of the cosmos of ideas, which every true philosophy is. This idea, cut off from its interrelations and interdependencies with the cosmos, it then fanatically thinks to a finish. Thus it becomes radical individualism or socialism or totalitarianism or anarchism. This linear thinking, so characteristic of the modem mind and its countless isms, is a stranger to Catholic political philosophy. For Catholic political philosophy is ‘spheric’ thinking. Of the interdependencies and the mutual relations between ideas as united in a spheric cosmos and the concordance of these, spheric thinking must be always aware. — Heinrich Rommen, The State in Catholic Thought, 22-23

Others have pointed out that the Catholic Church and Rommen himself have often missed the mark on this point, but the quote remains instructive. There is an indefinable "circularity" to the sort of thought that resists a linear mode. It is natural, organic, unforced, and without "rough edges."

OK, I think I know what he's getting at, and I now think you're right. Provincial philosophies are latently systematic in that they secretly maintain that impulse to tie everything together by imposing their ready-made schemes (systematization), but they fail to take what is good about system, which is the organic development of such a system. In other words, they follow the letter, not the spirit, of system (pun not intended).

I don't think it's important so sort out this confusion (although the confusion might be entirely mine). What matters is:

1. Philosophy should treat phenomena as interconnected within an organized whole
2. This is possible without system in the traditional sense
3. And this takes what is good about system rather than merely abandoning it dismissively
4. Imposing one's own scheme on the phenomena from the outside is to take what's bad about system---the phenomena should be allowed to speak for themselves — Jamal

What he says about philosophical systems is a justification of his attempt to make sense of the world as an objective reality whose parts are connected without imposing an overarching metaphysical principle, such as spirit. — Jamal

But our disagreement here is just the result of the real ambivalence in his position, which is dialectical: he is both against and for system. — Jamal

Here I'm tempted as always to resolve the contradiction by saying that his position is not really one of dialectical contradiciton, that it's more like: he is against X aspects of system but he is for Y aspects of system, which replaces the contradiciton with a simple differentiation. But Adorno always resists this, believing that this is identity-thinking in action.

So I should ask myself: is something lost when I resolve the contradiciton in that way?

[...]

EDIT: The key here is that the persistence of contradictions is a mode of truth.

That's a bit weak but I'll leave it there. — Jamal

It is true that persistence of contradiction is a mode of truth, and this is part of Przywara's point (not to mention Nicholas of Cusa's coincidentia oppositorum, which influences Przywara).

Yet what I see in Adorno is a form of systematization around an opposition to "identity-thinking." I want to say that there is no thought that is not susceptible to systematization, and that every thinker is more or less systematic. But the curious question asks whether a thinker like Adorno who is emphatically opposed to "philosophical systems" in a thoroughgoing way could ever himself avoid a system erected around this goal—a goal that he energetically devotes himself to.

System-thinking is a form of monomania, and therefore anyone who is especially devoted to a singular cause will tend to be a system-thinker in one way or another. I would argue that the only way for the devoted person to avoid this is by devoting themselves to a cause that is not singular, and this is what the analogia entis or the coincidentia oppositorum attempts to provide. Causes which are negative and therefore act in opposition have an especially difficult time avoiding monomania. Adorno's cause is not only negative, but the thing that he opposes (identity-thinking) itself strikes me as being singular. At the same time, it does involve a certain ambiguity and subtlety which makes it vaguely familiar to Przywara's or Rommen's approach, but I think it will fail to avoid systems-thinking precisely because it is insufficiently ontologically grounded.

But again, I think the ultimate test here has to do with the way of life of the philosophers in question. Figures like Przywara or his student, Josef Pieper, intentionally lived lives that were resistant to systematization. Their activities, engagements, readings, and relationships were all significantly varied, which is what ultimately leads one away from monomania. Supposing that Adorno desperately wanted to oppose the Holocaust and its (logical) pre-conditions, the point here is that one can actually want to avoid the Holocaust too much, strange as that may seem. One can be led into a form of monomania even in their project to oppose pure evil (and this is a basic reason why evil is so pernicious). In order to avoid systems-thinking one is required to engage systems and even evil systems in paradoxical ways (e.g. Luke 6:29). Totalitarian thinking is very likely to breed totalitarian thinking, either by propagation or, more likely, by opposition. When one says, for example, "This must never happen again!," they inevitably commit themselves to a coercive and systematizing approach. They are forced to offer a program which will guarantee a certain outcome, and guarantees require systems.

(Literary depictions of this principle are present in the binding of Isaac, and also in the mirror opposite provided in the remarkable film, A Monster Calls. In a sub-story within that film, an apothecary refuses to heal a parson's child, precisely because the parson will stop at nothing to have his child healed. In a certain sense the parson had become a monomaniac, and the paradox is that his cause would have succeeded if not for his monomania.)

The idea is rather that questions are socially and historically mediated, never completely separable from their formation. And they are also mediated subjectively in the intellectual experience of the philosopher, whose thinking is shaped by their situation. The concrete social and historical conditions produce certain questions, so we understand and attempt to answer the questions partly through understanding these conditions. — Jamal

I think I see the point, I just don't agree. I think the nature of ontological questions is such that they transcend all social and historical conditions. That's why I said the same questions are asked throughout history and by every different culture. What varies is the formulation of the question. So the questions appear to differ but they really ask the same thing, i.e. how do we approach the unknown. The unknown has a different appearance depending on the social historical mediation, therefore the question has a different formulation depending on these factors.

What did you think of my proposal of how to make my perspective consistent with Adorno's? If we recognize that since the formulation of the question is always going to be mediated by social and historical conditions, and we know that this is going to make the question asked, the wrong question, then we can conclude that the answer is always already within the question. The answer being that the question itself is mistaken, or the wrong question.