All right. Assuming you are at no point finally persuaded by the cumulative effect of Adorno's analyses, we may have to revisit this quagmire in the future.

Introduction: Dialectics and the Solidified

I was confused by this section until I looked at the alternative translations of Festen: fixed. Empiricism and phenomenology take the fixed to be the passively apprehended immediate givens, whereas for Hegel—who famously criticizes faith in immediate givens at the beginning of the Phenomenology—the fixed turns out to be the subject in the guise of Absolute Spirit. Adorno rejects both. He agrees with Hegel that sense-certainty is unreliable—it represents the "bad positive"—but faults him for losing sight of the concrete and producing a merely formal, abstract system in which the fixed thing is a projection of the subject.

In lecture 7 he spoke very unflatteringly of Krug's quill, calling the objection "idiotic," but here he is unembarrassed to be entirely on Krug's side:

In Hegel, of course, the primacy of the subject over the object remains undisputed, despite his many assertions to the contrary. It is the semi-theological word Geist that masks this primacy—Geist, spirit, mind, which cannot help but recall the subjectivity of the individual. The price that Hegel’s logic pays for this is its excessively formal character. Obliged by its own concept to be substantive and content-laden, it, nonetheless, in its striving to be everything at once, both metaphysics and a theory of categories, expels from itself all determinate entities, the very things that could legitimize this approach. It is in this respect not so very far from Kant and Fichte, whom Hegel tirelessly condemns as the peddlars of abstract subjectivity. For its part, the science of logic is abstract in the most basic sense; the reduction of thought to universal concepts eliminates in advance their contrary term, the concreteness that the idealistic dialectic prides itself on carrying and developing. Mind wins its battle against an absent enemy. Hegel’s sneering remarks on the subject of contingent existence, the “Krugian quill” that philosophy can and shall be too lofty to deduce from itself, is a caught-you-red-handed. Hegel’s logic was only ever interested in the concept as medium and refused to reflect on the relationship of the concept to its contents in anything but the most general way; it was thus assured in advance of the absolute character of the concept, despite undertaking to prove that very point. — Thorne & Menda translation

A by-now-familiar point: Hegel's philosophy, though like all other philosophy it has its proper object and content in the non-conceptual, forgets about it and treats its own concepts as its content, becoming thereby merely formal and abstract.

This talk of a fixed point also goes back to my discussion with @Metaphysician Undercover. I suggested there that material reality could stand as the ground in Adorno's thought. Here in the "Solidified" section, he makes the point that generally speaking what is given in immediacy and unrelfected-upon is not a good candidate for a fixed point, because these things are mediated in ways that are non-obvious. Immanent critique begins in concrete material reality, but it doesn't take it for what it appears to be; it must analyze the ways in which the concrete givens are mediated socially, historically, and via their "affinities". In other words, the material (the social) is indeed some kind of ground or fixed point, but it is not an unquestionable foundation.

On the other hand, even though the immediately given has to be assumed to be intrinsically problematic...

Not every experience which appears to be primary is to be denied point-blank.

So he is more subtle than might be expected. Recall the vital importance in intellectual experience of openness. The non-identical may be glimpsed at such moments of raw unreflective experience.

I found this section difficult, and what I've said here avoids getting caught up in the details, which I didn't really untangle—so I'd be interested in what others think.

Lastly, I will just comment on the prose itself. I find it remarkably difficult. Maybe even intentionally opaque? There are a lot of allusions I do not understand and the method of expression is not in any way explicit or easy to elucidate. Still, I appreciate the level of interpretation the text allows because of its complexity. — NotAristotle

This is something that Adorno put a lot of effort into, so basically yes, it’s meant to be hard. Adorno was deeply suspicious of the fixation on “clarity” seen especially in Anglo philosophy. He thought that clarity, under the guise of neutrality and transparency, delivered pre-digested ideas along pre-defined rails, and he thought this was part of the “administered society,” representing the bureaucratization of philosophy and individual insight. He believed that clarity was conformity.

He also saw clarity and accessibility as features of the culture industry: they enable cultural products to be easily standardized and therefore commodified, and they encourage passive consumption. His prose style rebels against this; I think we can agree that he succeeded in preventing his work from being easily packaged and disseminated in mass culture. And it's certainly the case that you can't read ND without working through it—for me, I can't understand a passage of ND until I begin to type it in my own words or respond, in writing, sentence by sentence. Just reading it like a regular book is impossible.

Personally, I think he was an amazing prose stylist and I even enjoy the particularly difficult prose of ND, precisely for the way it makes me slow down and then rewards me with startling insights and arguments once I've distentangled it.

BUT! It should be said that ND is particularly hard compared to his other work, and this might be a translation issue. It's standard in scholarship now to use the Redmond translation, as we are doing, but it's clunky and inelegant in a way that I suspect the original is not, and it hasn't even been properly published—no decent official English translation, in proper book form, is available.

In contrast, the prose of Minima Moralia is often stunningly brilliant.

For a much cuddlier and more conversational Adorno, his lectures are good, as are his popular essays and radio broadcasts.

Anyway, in this thread I've already said a few things about his prose, which you might find interesting:

as we approach ND itself, I am thinking about Adorno's style of presentation. It's a fact that his style is very deliberate, something he was always conscious of, and something he was forever pre-occupied by (because he didn't separate form and content). I think it will help to know how to read him, which is not always a matter of finding an answer to "what is he trying to say?" at the level of a paragraph but of keeping multiple descriptions, analogies, etc. in mind over the course of the work.

One aspect is his attitude to definition. It's a principle of his method that in his writing he avoids definitions of concepts, instead circling around them, or approaching them from different angles. (More than that, I suppose he does not even regard them as fixed points that can be honed in on)

Even though these lectures were recorded, not written, I think we've already seen this principle at work. We've seen him going over similar ground repeatedly, never satisfied with a single metaphor or encapsulation. — Jamal

But this section goes deeper than that, since he is talking about his own mode of expression, i.e., it's meta. Expression in language that aims to uncover reality in the way described above should itself enact dialectics in its mode of expression. Thus, we get Adorno's way of writing: style as substance, form as content (I'm glad we've finally got back to this topic, which I think I mentioned on the first page of this thread). Rather than obscurantism, this is the fullest stringency (EDIT: or maybe better put, the best balance between expression and stringency). He does not want to explain and describe, but to performatively expose. The same applies to negative dialectics as applies to screenwriting: show don't tell. — Jamal

Before diving into a more comfortable rewording, it's worth stopping to wonder why he wrote like this. It is initially quite annoying. I don't think it's an intentionally inflated pomposity or pretentiousness, although it reads a bit like it is. It's a serious attempt to performatively express content in form. Difficult substance, difficult style. The idea, I suppose, is that the mode of clarity and linearity would be too comfortable to elicit proper intellectual engagement. Personally, I'm 50/50 on this issue. Sceptical but also sympathetic. In a way, this kind of writing is easier than a plainer kind of style, because you don't have to constantly remind yourself to slow down as you do when reading, say, Plato; it's forced on you. — Jamal

Adorno's style is mimesis in action, showing in the form of his writing the real contradictions of the world. — Jamal

Do you think Adorno talks about Marxism as if it were objectively true? If so, why? Given the terrible things done under Stalin during Adorno's lifetime, does it really make sense to read Adorno as a Marxist? Or, does criticality towards capitalism not imply Marxism?

This seems to be a tension inherent in the book; ND rejects abstract theorizing, why is Marxism the exception to this rule? Or, do you disagree that Marxism is theoretical and abstract? — NotAristotle

Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School were deeply affected by Stalinism. It was one of the things that convinced them that Marxism had to be revised. It was part of the catastrophic failure of socialism that critical theory was meant to help to fix.

What we do see in Adorno's work throughout his life is a commitment to (a) the Marxist theory of exploitation; (b) Marx's theory of commodity fetishism; and (c) the goal of emancipation. It does seem that Adorno treats these (the first two) unquestioningly as successful results of social science—and as fundamental and indispensable categories for a critical theory of society—in the same way as he takes for granted Freud's identification of the unconscious as the primary driver of behaviour.

But he rejects a few things too: (a) the inevitability of revolution and the teleology of history (Marx himself was ambivalent on this but it is certainly a feature of traditional Marxism); (b) the proletariat as the revolutionary subject and the gravedigger of capitalism; (c) techno-optimism: Marx and Marxism celebrated man's mastery of nature far too much for Adorno's taste; (d) economic determinism and the base-superstructure model, far too simplistic for Adorno.

At this point I'm not going to look at why he felt he could rely so completely on those Marxian theories that he did agree with, without ever arguing for them, but it's a fair question.

It occurs to me that rather than induction or deduction, there are two alternative ways of characterizing his reasoning: abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation) and transcendental argument. In fact, looking at the SEP entry for transcendental arguments, I notice the suggestion has been made that transcendental arguments are abductive rather than deductive as they are commonly taken to be. This means that abductive reasoning and transcendental argumentation might be two ways of describing the same process of reasoning.

In a transcendental argument you infer what must be the case for this fact, whatever it is, to be possible, and thereby determine its necessary conditions. In abductive reasoning you ask what hypothesis best explains the fact. You can see how these can go together.

So, I aim to answer this...

But this implies that we ought to be able to analyze and judge the inductive reasoning involved in concluding the "preestablished whole". — Metaphysician Undercover

...with a couple of examples of Adorno's reasoning.


1. The entrepreneur

Adorno begins with the fact of objectively necessary false consciousness: a capitalist must believe in a fair exchange between himself and the worker, even though this belief is objectively false. The transcendetal question is "What must be the case for this illusion to be—not just possible, but necessary?" Or "What must be the case for the maintenance of this paradox to be possible?" And here is where the abductive reasoning comes in to hypothesize the social whole as the best explanation, completing the transcendental argument by identifying the conditions. (Obviously this is just an outline)


2. Free time

Adorno gave a radio lecture entitled "Free Time" in 1969, published these days in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, among other places, and also available online on its own as a PDF. The fact to be explained is that free time, supposedly a realm of freedom, is experienced as boring, compulsory, and empty, e.g., obligatory hobbies, regimented vacations. The common views are either to shrug and say that's just what free time is like—an unproblematically mindless recovery from work; or to put it on the individual, who fails to make proper use of their free time, perhaps because people are just bad at leisure, or some such notion.

Here is where the immanent analysis begins, which identifies a contradiction, namely that free time is "shackled to its contrary" to the extent that it is experienced as unfreedom. The transcendental question then is "What must be the case for this specific, systematic perversion of free time to be possible? How can the state of freedom be experienced as a state of unfreedom?"

Reasoning abductively, the hypothesis that makes this fact intelligible is that free time is not an autonomous sphere as its name might suggest, but is entirely determined by the "totality of societal conditions," which holds sway outside work as much as in it, particularly since so-called free time is required by capital to maintain its workers. Free time is a "continuation of labor as its shadow".

Only people who have become responsible for themselves would be capable of utilizing their free time productively, not those who, under the sway of heteronomy [a kind of alienation], have become heteronomous to themselves.

The needs and impulses of individuals have been so thoroughly shaped by a society based on profit, control, and the "rigorous division of labor" that people are "heteronomous to themselves." They no longer know what authentic desire or freedom would feel like.


Adorno's work is full of such arguments or analyses, and the pattern is always the same: you start with a puzzling, painful, or contradictory fact about our experience, show the inadequacy of popular explanations, and then demonstrate that the fact becomes intelligible only when seen as a necessary consequence of the capitalist whole. Maybe this is what negative dialectics is in a nutshell.

Introduction: Against Relativism (continued)

So far in this section Adorno has (a) dismissed the popular argument against relativism; (b) described the historical and social genesis of relativism; and (c) directly criticized relativism from an epistemological perspective. Now, he presents his positive alternative to relativism.

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

Once you view things in the context of the pre-established whole, i.e., capitalist society, you will no longer want to say "everything is relative," because this would be to reject the successful explanations you've reached. Once you have situated things in the social whole, you will no longer be satisfied with reducing all thoughts to their genesis in the interests of individuals or groups, since you will have established their truth or falsity with respect to objective reality, that is, the social whole.

The capitalist is compelled by competition to exploit the worker but simultaneously think of this exploitation as a fair exchange: "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay". The fact of the matter is revealed only in the context of the social whole, the capitalist system. This dialectic "sublates its particular moments in itself," in other words, the two moments of objective necessity of exploitation and that of the false picture of fairness are synthesized into a higher-level structure. Sublation not only synthesizes but preserves the contradictory elements, and this is the case here: we can see both simultaneously as bound together and interdependent. And this is a demonstration of immanent critique and determinate negation, and the validity of moving through these to the higher level context, significantly the way that we can understand objective reality through its contradictions.

Yet the perennial hostility to the Spirit is more than a feature of subjective bourgeois anthropology. It is due to the fact that the concept of reason inside of the existing relations of production, once emancipated, must fear that its own trajectory will explode this. This is why reason delimits itself; during the entire bourgeois epoch, the idea of the autonomy of the Spirit was accompanied by its reactive self-loathing. It cannot forgive itself for the fact that the constitution of the existence it controls forbids that development into freedom, which lies in its own concept. Relativism is the philosophical expression of this; no dogmatic absolutism need be summoned against it, the proof of its own narrowness crushes it. Relativism was always well-disposed towards reaction, no matter how progressive its bearing, already displaying its availability for the stronger interest in antiquity. The critique of relativism which intervenes is the paradigm of determinate negation.

Here, he gets Freudian, applying a psychological analysis to a personified reason: relativism is a defence mechanism to protect reason in capitalist society from its own emancipation, which is liable to undermine that society. Thus relativism is a symptom of a deep conflict between potentially emancipatory reason and the needs of the society that produced this reason. The result is a kind of "self-loathing".

And ultimately relativism is defeated not by an opposing doctrine but by its narrowness, meaning its inability to see the wider conditions of its own genesis, which is immanently revealed by negative dialectics when it (ND) shows that what relativism takes to be fundamental is actually derivative of an enveloping context.

Since the social whole changes, isn't Adorno himself just another relativist, but on a bigger scale? — Jamal

It seems like we'd have to say "no" in keeping a charitable reading. That the social whole changes will change consciousness, but I'm thinking that this is a false consciousness. In this case I'm relying upon Marx's analysis of capital to state "the social law" only because the social whole is capitalist, and this notion of the bourgeois relativist is also only interesting because these are the circumstances we find ourselves in.

But, on the other hand, it seems that since there's never a final synthesis ala Hegel we can still reach for this more general view of things -- but the relativist of tomorrow, like the relativist of ancient Greece, will have its own particular false consciousness.

It seems to me that Adorno believes that the relativist can be demonstrated objectively false on their own terms -- not because they must have a presupposition (since a relativist can always take the skeptics route of denial over affirmation), but because the social whole will require a kind of truth that is beyond this relativism.

In a way I get the feeling that the relativism he's pointing out in particular is one that thinks things done: We're at the end of history living in liberal democracies in this viewpoint, and so we're all free to believe as we wish within our individual consciousness.

And, it seems then, that this attitude will be perennial -- if the social structure changes the form of relativism will change, but it will still be embedded within a social whole which said relativist will not be a relativist towards. — Moliere

:up:

Is there a difference between the relativism of truth and the historical situatedness of truth? — Jamal

I'd say so.

In a simple way suppose that the cat wanders off the mat. Then "The cat is on the mat" is false, where it was once true. Truth isn't relative here, but the situation changes the truth value of a particular expression. — Moliere

That might be the perfect encapsulation of my own thoughts about it. It's objectively true that the cat was on the mat. This is not relative to a framework or perspective, e.g., the cat's or the cat's owner's; it's a truth about the house at that time (where the house stands for the social whole).

I agree, he basically says that the actual consequences of relativism are what refutes it. The problem i find is that the social "whole" which he refers to is not well validated. — Metaphysician Undercover

We can talk about preestablished social conditions, but the relativist will claim that they are relativistic conditions. Adorno needs the "whole" to support his objective law. — Metaphysician Undercover

If one wanted to be sceptical of Adorno at this juncture, this would be a reasonable way to go about it.

I think the social whole is, or potentially is, validated by the explanatory power of Adorno's critiques, namely of Enlightenment, of the culture industry, the countless objects of his micrological analysis in Minima Moralia, and within ND, for example precisely this critique of relativism, which is able to explain its genesis and reveal its weakness. The presence of the social whole in his thought ties things together. Without it, things in all their contradictory nature just don't make sense. Thus, the social whole is a valid inference. I admit, of course, that he nowhere deduces it.

This objective whole is really nothing other than Spirit in principle, as that which unites. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't understand this interpretation. I mean, I can accept that Adorno inherited the very idea of a totality from Hegel, but he explicitly distinguishes it from Spirit.

Care to share a reference for the secondary material? — Moliere

I know the question wasn't directed at me but I feel like listing the ones I’ve liked so far:

• The one I've just finished is A Precarious Happiness: Adorno and the Sources of Normativity by Peter Gordon. Specifically counters the idea that Adorno was a dour negativist with no conception of human flourishing, but amounts to a comprehensive re-interpretation of all his work. An easy read, but not shallow.
• A great overview/introduction is Brian O'Connor's Adorno in the Routledge Philosophers series.
• A brilliant but eccentric (eccentric in what she chooses to focus on and leave out) introduction is The Melancholy Science: An Introduction to the Thought of Theodor W. Adorno by Gillian Rose.
• Two collections of essays by Adorno scholars, covering all his work in a fairly accessible way, are well worth reading: Theodor Adorno: Key Concepts edited by Deborah Cook, and the Blackwell Companion to Adorno.

Introduction: Against Relativism (continued)

Next, Adorno moves from historicizing relativism to tackling it head-on. To stop at historicism would be no better than relativists themselves, because it would be the same reductionist move, namely taking the genesis of the idea, as opposed to its validity, to be all that matters.

Recalling that he had already characterized relativism as an attitude of vulgar materialism...

Utterly hostile towards the Spirit, such an attitude remains necessarily abstract. The relativity of all cognition can only be maintained from without, for so long as no conclusive cognition is achieved. As soon as consciousness enters into a determinate thing and poses its immanent claim to truth or falsehood, the presumably subjective contingency of the thought falls away. 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]. The modes of reaction which according to relativistic doctrine are unique to each individual, are preformed, always practically the bleating of sheep; especially the stereotype of relativity. Individualistic appearance [Schein] is then extended by the cannier relativists such as Pareto to group interests. But the strata-specific bounds of objectivity laid down by the sociology of knowledge are for their part only deducible from the whole of the society, from that which is objective. If Mannheim’s late version of sociological relativism imagined it could distill scientific objectivity out of the various perspectives of social strata with “free-floating” intelligence, then it inverts that which conditions into the conditioned.

Despite its roots in vulgar materialism, relativism is always only an abstract thesis that survives only insofar as it is "maintained from without," i.e., pretending to transcendence—because when one is on the inside of the thing, immanently achieving a determinate conclusion, the purported relativism of the thought becomes irrelevant.

Relativism is "null and void" because the particularly conditioned and yet also sacrosanct opinion of the individual is, as a matter of objective fact, produced in the first place by society, a society that needs such an appearance, i.e., the appearance that everyone has their own equally valid truth is "socially necessary". Despite the celebrated individuality of these opinions, they are to a large degree "preformed," amounting to "the bleating of sheep." The very thesis of relativity is one such fashionable off-the-shelf idea.

But of course, it isn't very fair to take this primitive individualist relativism to be the primary example of relativism per se, so Adorno brings up a more sophisticated variety, that of Vilfredo Pareto, for whom truth is relative not to individuals but to social groups such as economic classes. Pareto argued that what appear to be logical arguments are usually nothing more than rationalizations that hide the underlying interests of particular groups.

This is more plausible, and even seems close to something Adorno might say himself, but he is against it too. This relativism, having the same structure, is structurally flawed in the same way: there is a larger social context shared by the various groups, just as there is a larger social context shared by various individuals, and it is this context—society as a whole—which produces groups and ideas.

QUESTION: Since the social whole changes, isn't Adorno himself just another relativist, but on a bigger scale? Is there a difference between the relativism of truth and the historical situatedness of truth?

Introduction: Against Relativism

Adorno says dialectics (including negative dialectics) is as much against relativism as it is against the absolute. However, he thinks the popular argument against relativism, namely that it is self-refuting, is "wretched".

The popular argument against Spengler since Leonard Nelson, that relativism presupposes an absolute, namely its own validity and thus contradicts itself, is wretched. It confuses the general negation of a principle with its own ascent to an affirmation, without consideration of the specific difference of the positional value of both.

He is saying that one can legitimately negate a principle, in this case with "there is no absolute truth," and that the popular argument against relativism mistakes this negation for an illegitimate, self-defeating affirmation. The popular argument is thus lacking in nuance. For Adorno, it is no more than a logical gotcha that misses the point that relativism is a critical stance, or perhaps a sceptical tool, rather than a positive, universal proposition. This is what he means when he mentions their "positional value": the popular argument flattens out these differences and treats everything like a positive claim.

So that's not the way to defeat relativism. Instead...

It would be more fruitful to cognize relativism as a delimited form of consciousness. At first it was that of bourgeois individualism, which for its part took the mediated individual consciousness through the generality for the ultimate and thus accorded the opinions of every single individual the same right, as if there were no criterion of their truth. The abstract thesis of the conditionality of every thought is to be most concretely reminded of that of its own, the blindness towards the supra-individual moment, through which individual consciousness alone becomes thought. Behind this thesis stands a contempt of the Spirit which prefers the primacy of material relationships, as the only thing which should count. The father’s reply to the uncomfortable and decided views of his son is, everything is relative, that money, as in the Greek saying, maketh the man. Relativism is vulgar materialism, thought disturbs the business.

Here he avoids taking on relativism directly and instead historicizes it. It begins with bourgeois individualism, expressed in classical liberalism, for which the individual is sovereign and independent. It thereby "accorded the opinions of every single individual the same right"; the individual is the ultimate source and arbiter of truth.

The problem is that although this relativism sees that all thoughts are conditioned by context—in this originary case the context of individual consciousness—it fails to see the conditions of this very idea itself, which feature a constitutive blindness to the social inheritance of thought.

In other words, Adorno is saying that relativism is, not logically self-refuting, but hypocritical. It makes use of thoughts inherited from the social world to produce the thought that thoughts are entirely the product of the individual.

Behind this thesis stands a contempt of the Spirit which prefers the primacy of material relationships, as the only thing which should count.

I'm finding it hard to work out how he makes this leap from the thesis of relativism to the contempt for Spirit. I understand the distinction he means, which is that between (1) useful productive work and the financial, class, in general materialist (in the popular sense, as Adorno says, "vulgar") concerns that go along with it; and (2) art and ideas, love and beauty, and God if you're so inclined. But how does relativism produce the exclusive focus on (1) and dismissal of (2)?

Maybe the answer is in the analogy:

The father’s reply to the uncomfortable and decided views of his son is, everything is relative, that money, as in the Greek saying, maketh the man.

The father is unimpressed by his son's critical views. He can dismiss them without argument, because in the real world, that is, the world of materialist interests, all that matters is money, and the son's ideas amount to nothing in comparison.

In practice, then—given the socio-economic system we have—relativism puts the seal of approval on any action of the individual that improves or maintains its financial or class status, and at the same time protects such individuals and the systems they participate in from criticism.

So relativism is not a profound philosophical position but is just an affirmation of the bourgeois individual's right to enrich himself, and is thereby a shallow, spiritless product of a shallow, spiritless society.

So the connection here has to do with the distinction made in intellectual history between genesis and validity. By reductively treating ideas as nothing more than the expression of their conditional origins (be it an individual or a class), relativism dismisses the claims of Spirit, and any truth that aspires to a validity beyond its genesis. This reduction is the methodology of vulgar materialism, which sees material interests as the only reality. The relativist's "everything is relative" is in effect a tool for this dismissal.

To be continued.

This truth, that their foundations are false, and that they are actually groundless, is the grounding of negative dialectics.

I'll refer to the Lectures, lecture 3, "Whether negative Dialectics is Possible", where he discusses Hegel's concept of the determinate negation. I believe that Adorno demonstrates the falsity of Hegel's conception of "synthesis". This falsity becomes the true determinate negation for Adorno, therefore a fixed point, a grounding for negative dialectics — Metaphysician Undercover

Interesting point. I think it might be a bit misleading, and this hinges on whether such a fixed point can act as, or is equivalent to, a ground, foundation, or first principle, in the traditional philosophical sense that Adorno is addressing. I'm not sure it can. Determinate negation as fixed point is not so much a foundation—it is not a positive proposition on which a system can be built—but is more like method, critical orientation and commitment.

I mean, you could take the fixed point to be the ground, but is it interpretatively useful to do so?

EDIT: Maybe the answer to the last question is yes. Another way of putting it is that ND is in a sense grounded insofar as it starts from the solid ground of the knowledge that there is no ground, and this is the dialectical point Adorno himself makes. Ultimately, to me this seems more rhetorical than strictly accurate.

EDIT2: And there's another candidate for the ground of negative dialectics: material reality, or "the object" as in "the priority of the object". As he has been saying in the Frigility of Truth section, ND starts in the concrete and works out from there. So why not that? I happen to think this is wrong or misleading too, but I won't go into that now.

And the last passage of the Fragility section:

No unreflective banality can, as the imprint of the false life, still be true. Every attempt today to hold back thought, for the sake of its utility, by talk of its smug overwroughtness and non-committal aspect [Unverbindlichkeit], is reactionary. The argument can be summarized in its vulgar form: if you want, I can give you any number of such analyses. Therein each becomes devalued by every other. Peter Alternberg gave the answer to someone who in a similar fashion was suspicious of his compressed forms: but I don’t want to. The open thought is unprotected against the risk of going astray into what is popular; nothing notifies it that it has adequately satisfied itself in the thing, in order to withstand that risk. The consistency of its execution, however, the density of the web, enables it to hit what it should. The function of the concept of certainty in philosophy has utterly recoiled. What once wished to overtake dogma and tutelage through self-certainty became the social insurance policy of a cognition which does allow anything to happen. Nothing in fact happens to anything which is completely unobjectionable.

Those whose thinking consists of unreflective banalities and is motivated by the concern for utility see each analysis as an interchangeable commodity. "I can give you any number of such analyses," says the bad philosopher. The authentic philosopher, on the other hand, is represented by Peter Alternberg, who dismissed criticism of his short, compressed poetic fragments. But Adorno does not state exactly what the demand is that is being answered with "But I don't want to". We have to reconstruct it. I imagine it's the demand that Alternberg expand upon what is in those fragments to make them easier to understand, or to produce versions of his fragments that are more developed or sophisticated, or that he explain what the fragments are supposed to mean.

Adorno thinks philosphers should be like Alternberg. In philosophy one faces the demand to ensure that one's philosophical insights are fully justified, resting securely on their foundations, reproducible and concisely reportable, or developed into a consistent system. Adorno says "But I don't want to," because he rejects the demand and the way of thinking that generates it.

Looking at the last few sentences: Adorno says that the concept of certainty has degenerated from a liberating one—Descartes, as a precursor to the Enlightenment, made his philosophy depend not on religious authority but on his own reason—to a stifling one in which caution is so important that making new breakthroughs and reaching new insights become impossible, and "nothing happens".

Nothing in fact happens to anything which is completely unobjectionable.

We should make our thinking in some sense objectionable, to make things happen. We should be objectionable to those who adhere to convention, security, comfortable modes of argument, demands for certainty, and so on.

Some more stuff about the Fragility of Truth section.

What is different from the existent is regarded by such as witchcraft, while in the false world nearness, homeland and security are for their part figures of the bane. With these human beings fear they will lose everything, because they have no other happiness, also none within thought, than what you can hold on to yourself, perennial unfreedom. What is demanded is at the very least a piece of ontology in the midst of its critique; as if not even the smallest unaffiliated [ungedeckte] insight could better express what is wished for, than a “declaration of intention” [in English] which stays at that.

[...]

It sways gently, fragile due to its temporal content; Benjamin penetratingly criticized Gottfried Keller’s Ur-bourgeois maxim that the truth cannot run away from us. Philosophy must dispense with the consolation that the truth cannot be lost. One which cannot fall into the abyss, of which the fundamentalists of metaphysics prattle – it is not that of agile sophistics but that of insanity – turns, under the commandment of its principle of security, analytical, potentially into tautology. Only those thoughts which go to extremes can face up to the all-powerful powerlessness of certain agreement; only mental acrobatics relate to the thing, which according to the fable convenu [French: agreed-upon fiction] it holds in contempt for the sake of its self-satisfaction.

Adorno makes a parallel here. There is the lack of general happiness and freedom in society, which causes us to reach for what is close: "homeland and security," representing the only possible happiness in a world in which human potentiality is stifled. Adorno sees the consolation of ontological security as a form or symptom of this wider lack of happiness and freedom.

In negative dialectics, on the other hand, you bite the bullet. You accept that you won't be able to encompass the object of thought completely, you expose yourself to the vertigo of bottomlessness (reading ND as philosophical exposure therapy), and you relinquish the consolation that the truth cannot be lost.

Incidentally, there is a clear Nietzschean flavour to this. To be a proper philosopher, one must bravely reject easy comforts and the will to certainty and follow the will to truth, and one must be unafraid of the vertigo-inducing abyss, of extremes and acrobatics. Adorno's celebration of independence and creativity is a lot like Nietzsche's.

This confirms an experience in philosophy which Schoenberg noted in traditional musical theory: you only really learn from this how a passage begins and ends, but nothing about it itself, its trajectory. Analogous to this, philosophy ought not to reduce itself to categories but in a certain sense should compose itself [komponieren: to compose musically]. It must continually renew itself in its course, out of its own power just as much as out of the friction with that which it measures itself by; what it bears within itself is decisive, not the thesis or position; the web, not the inductive or deductive, one-track course of thought. That is why philosophy is essentially not reportable. Otherwise it would be superfluous; that it for the most part allows itself to be reported, speaks against it. But a mode of conduct which protects nothing as the first or the secure, and yet, solely by power of the determination of its portrayal, makes so few concessions to relativism, the brother of absolutism, that it approaches a doctrine, causes offence. It drives past Hegel, whose dialectic must have everything, and yet also wished to be prima philosophia (and in the identity-principle, the absolute subject, was indeed this), to the breaking-point. — The Fragility of Truth

It occurs to me that a better musical analogy is jazz—unavailable to Adorno because he failed to appreciate jazz—which surely has the power to "continually renew itself in its course, out of its own power" through improvisation. It is not the score, the "thesis or position," of the composer, that is decisive, but the performance itself. Likewise in philosophical thinking, it is not the thesis or position or principle (or conclusion, I suppose) which are decisive, but the philosophy as performed.

And just as a particular musical performance—especially a jazz performance—cannot be faithfully conveyed in a report (even a recording will not do justice to it), negative dialectics in action cannot be summarized and reported in digestible form. To understand it, you have to go through it.

Also in the Fragility of Truth section there's another interesting bit:

It [the demolition of systems and the realization that truth isn't granted to thought in advance but has to be sought in the details] compels thinking to linger before the smallest of all things. Not about the concrete, but on the contrary out from this, is what needs to be philosophized.

He makes a distinction here between philosophy which is about the concrete, in which "the concrete" is a category, and philosophy which actually begins in the concrete and goes out from there. The latter method, that of negative dialectics, allows itself to be guided by concrete particulars.

Connecting this to the jettisoning already discussed: you cannot properly start with concrete particulars if you are still committed to a first principle, because you are not free to be guided wherever the particulars will take you.

Then there is a paragraph that I have difficulty to understand, which appears to be directed against the absolutism of Hegel. There is a jettisoning of that which is first to thought, but the jettisoning does not absolutize it. The jettisoning seems to be intended to remove the content of thought, from thought. But it's irrational to think that the content of thinking could be removed from thinking, because this would leave thinking as something other than thinking. — Metaphysician Undercover

I’ll have a go.

The jettisoning of that which is first and solidified from thought does not absolutize it as something free-floating. Exactly this jettisoning attaches it all the more to what it itself is not, and removes the illusion of its autarky. The falsity of the jettisoned rationality which runs away from itself, the recoil of Enlightenment into mythology, is itself rationally determinable. Thinking is according to its own meaning the thinking of something. Even in the logical abstraction-form of the Something, as something which is meant or judged, which for its part does not claim to constitute anything existent, indelibly survives that which thinking would like to cancel out, whose non-identity is that which is not thinking. The ratio becomes irrational where it forgets this, hypostasizing its own creations, the abstractions, contrary to the meaning of thinking. The commandment of its autarky condemns it to nullity, in the end to stupidity and primitivity. The objection of bottomlessness needs to be turned against the intellectual principle which preserves itself as the sphere of absolute origins; there however, where ontology, Heidegger first and foremost, hits bottomlessness, is the place of truth.

Negative dialectics, which jettisons the first principles and reified concepts characteristic of most philosophy—which, in other words, ditches the thinking that demands or proceeds from foundations—does not make the equally absolutist mistake of treating thought as arbitrary and free of contraints and connections. In rejecting foundationalism, we don't want to embrace the opposite view that thought is entirely unrooted.

Jettisoning foundationalism etc., allows us to see that the subject is not entirely independent and all-powerful: it depends on something outside itself. What actually roots thought is the non-conceptual, that which thought is directed towards. A critical question arises at this point: isn’t this just another kind of foundationalism? Isn’t the “priority of the object” yet another first principle? This is an important issue but I’ll tackle it later.

Next, he refers to the thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment: Enlightenment thinking, which set itself against mythology, tends to become myth again via the ossification of Enlightenment thought into instrumental reason. The new mythology is a basic form of ideology, so it includes any ideas meant to naturalize the status quo (e.g., one often sees conservative, liberal, or free-market libertarian people in casual conversation claiming that capitalism is as old as humanity or civilization itself). Enlightenment thinking tended to become intrumental reason and thereby forgot everything that didn't contribute to maintaining capitalism; what was left was repeated and idealized so much that it became the new mythology.

What I've sketched in the last paragraph is an example of the "rational determination" of the degeneration of Enlightenment reason into myth. Despite reason's tendencies, we can think things through and find the truth.

And this in turn is because thinking is inherently intentional, i.e., it is directed towards objects (and we can add: objects that are outside of thought). This is evident just in the logical form of propositions, even apart from the actuality of the objects that are assigned predicates.

Rationality becomes irrational when it forgets this and takes its creations to be the be-all and end-all (idealism being the culmination of this tendency in thought), i.e., forgetting about the real things that are its proper objects and instead taking its own philosophical constructs to be the real objects.

So far, so good. But then, a dialectical reversal:

The objection of bottomlessness needs to be turned against the intellectual principle which preserves itself as the sphere of absolute origins; there however, where ontology, Heidegger first and foremost, hits bottomlessness, is the place of truth.

I feel like Adorno is saying, "they say that negative dialectics (or critical theory in general) lacks all foundations, but really it's their ontologies that don't have a leg to stand on, so you could say that it's their thinking which is groundless." They are looking for something that isn't there. Heidegger comes up against groundlessness but doesn't acknowledge it or only acknowledges it as a problem to surpass; he tries to uncover the meaning of being and doesn't realize that the groundlessness he wants to get beyond is itself the truth the philosopher ought to be looking for.

It was the alternative translation that put me on the right track:

But Wherever ontology, and above all Heidegger, starts banging away at groundlessness—that is where truth dwells. — The Fragility of Truth

Thought-forms want to go beyond what is merely extant, “given”. The point which thinking directs against its material is not solely the domination of nature turned spiritual. While thinking does violence upon that which it exerts its syntheses, it follows at the same time a potential which waits in what it faces, and unconsciously obeys the idea of restituting to the pieces what it itself has done; in philosophy this unconsciousness becomes conscious. The hope of reconciliation is conjoined to irreconcilable thinking, because the resistance of thinking against the merely existent, the domineering freedom of the subject, also intends in the object what, through its preparation to the object, was lost to this latter. — from Portrayal

What is this "hope" about? Does the proper expression always hope to reconcile its violence to its object in order to restitute it? Is this what it would mean to reach the non-conceptual? — Moliere

I missed this before. Yes, I think so. it’s an example of what I've been calling his utopianism, where he holds up the ideal of a non-domineering understanding of the world in which the non-conceptual can shine through. But he’s also making the dialectical point that it is precisely the somewhat inherently violent and domineering subject that can—or can be motivated to—do this.

I'm back and looking forward to joining in again.

3 pieces for solo clarinet, by Stravinsky.

Apart from using the copious resources of the internet (SEP, IEP, Wikipedia, ChatGPT etc), you can just post a question as a new discussion, so long as there's some effort put into it. I'm not sure there's a need for a separate thread.

If people are genuinely interested they'll try to work things out by reading books and using the online resources. Since TPF is for philosophical discussion, people usually participate with some knowledge already gained elsewhere — and that seems right to me.

But nothing is stopping someone from starting a discussion such as "Are ontology and epistemology really distinct?" or whatever. Or just asking someone what they mean by something.

I don't know if it will help but it might be worthwhile to look at the alternative translation online, which is often easier to understand:

https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/theodor-adorno-negative-dialectics/16-the-fragility-of-truth/

Their translation is "groundlessness" rather than "bottomlessness".

I'm very sceptical of the approach outlined in the article. But...it's a thing.

They intersect in the field of social ontology, which SEP says can be considered as a branch of metaphysics and which is, I suppose, a philosophy of sociology.

A lot on my plate right now, so it might be a few weeks before I get back to the reading. Carry on without me and I'll catch up.

Thank you for your thoughtful response. I'll respond when I have fulfilled all of my personal and social duties.

Good stuff, particularly the last paragraph. I think the unfettered is what he has variously described as speculation, play, the irrational within the rational, the spirit of system, and just "experience".

My impression is that it's not unlike the third vertices of Davidson's triangulation, which for him is an unavoidable agreement between speaker and interpreter, as to how things are,.

But whereas Davidson uses charity to reach an understanding between speaker and interpreter, Adorno delights in the uncharitable, in the failure of translation, a difference such that the interpreter can never reach a coherent account of the utterance. And Adorno sees this as worthy.

The present discussion in the christian narrative might be a neat sandpit example of such failure to agree, and the resulting interminable dispute. That ceaseless taunting and counter play becomes the point of the exercise, rather than any resolution.

Is that Adorno? — Banno

The comforting Davidsonian view is that we can give an account that settles our differences. The uncomfortable Adorno view is that we not only can't, but ought not. — Banno

You're more than half-right. What is wrong is to say that he delights in conflict or sees it as the point of the exercise. He wants to avoid reconciliation because he thinks that any reconciliation under presently irrational conditions is fake and thereby delusive.

On the other hand, there is indeed some sense of delight, perhaps mainly in his style: his exaggerations, perverse reversals and paradoxes. He gets that from Nietzsche I suppose.

(It was me who, without Adorno's permission, brought in the concept of "manifest image," so that angle might not be very important)

Very good and difficult questions, and I don't know the answers yet. Adorno would say if you're asking how his philosophy can be used, as in a tool, then you're asking the wrong question. The life of the mind, especially the critical life of the mind, which is alive to suffering and deception, is valuable in itself.

That said, there are a few ways of answering. One nutshell is that Negative Dialectics, the book, contains the theoretical account and justification of his life's project, which is to help prevent human beings from becoming mere cogs in the machine of modern life, oppressed but also cold, heartless, and oppressive themselves. One way he does this is by standing up for things that have been swept under the carpet by philosophers: the uniqueness of individual things, suffering and pain, sensual pleasure, uncommodified creativity, and thinking which is free of the demands of power and money. He wants everyone to value or notice these things: that way, the human species will be worth saving.

Alternatively, it is a message in a bottle cast into the future, a future in which people who have a chance of making a better society are looking for philosophical resources to support their resistance to social coercion, bigotry, the tyrrany of work, and so on.

I think it might be possible to be fascinated by Adorno even if you are politically neutral or even conservative, but ultimately his philosophy is partisan. It takes sides. If you think, as you have implied, that capitalism is just fine and modernity---especially the US---is the culmination of the march of progress, Adorno is definitely not for you. His philosophy is a self-conscious response to a historical situation in which the Enlightenment had shown itself able to produce the greatest horrors ever unleashed, and in which the greatest hope of emancipation from oppression and misery, i.e., socialism, had failed.

I apologize if that's all too vague.

EDIT: I just realized that I contradicted myself. This can be resolved by replacing "Adorno is definitely not for you" with "Adorno might not be for you".

Yes, my interpretation was too reductive and it looks like you're right that the retreat is not just cancelled out as I kind of implied.

But "unregimented thought" is only a part of negative dialectics. It is the part where thought steps beyond the methodology of dialectics. But negative dialectics involves dialectics too, of course.

I recommend this podcast episode in which Peter E. Gordon talks about his recent book about Adorno, arguing against the common understanding that his thinking is unremmitingly bleak and hopeless, that he thinks everything is shit, and that he has no conception of the good life.

It's obvious to me, at least, that these are bad interpretations. But they are indeed very common. For example, I listened to the only Adorno episode on the "Partially Examined Life" podcast, which is usually quite good, and it was embarrassing and infuriating. They hated Adorno from the outset and proceeded to misinterpret everything, I think because he dared to criticize American pop culture, which they took to be evidence of an essentially dour intellect.

https://www.intellectualhistory.net/new-work/new-podcast-zeitgeist-und-geschichte

(It only properly gets going around 20 minutes in)

Lupine dialectics

In I used concepts from Wilfrid Sellars to describe geistige Erfahrung as consisting of, or emerging out of, the dialectic between the scientific and manifest images. Now I'm not so sure, because I thought of another example and it doesn't quite fit.

In 2023 I used the example of wolves in my "Magical powers" discussion, in which I was interested in Adorno's ideas before knowing very much about them:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/789898

I think it's an illuminating example to bring into the discussion now, and it has the great benefit of showing how we can avoid interpreting Adorno as simply anti-science, which some of his comments, like the one about Anglo-Saxon positivism, might suggest.

The example in a nutshell is that ethologists used to think about wolves in terms of dominance hierarchies, with alpha and beta males, etc., but this was based on observing captive animals and it turned out that wild animals don't behave like that and don't have such dominance hierarchies. The alpha model was bebunked.

[David] Mech, like many wildlife biologists, once used terms such as alpha and beta to describe the pecking order in wolf packs. But now they are decades out of date, he says. This terminology arose from research done on captive wolf packs in the mid-20th century—but captive packs are nothing like wild ones, Mech says. When keeping wolves in captivity, humans typically throw together adult animals with no shared kinship. In these cases, a dominance hierarchy arises, Mech adds, but it’s the animal equivalent of what might happen in a human prison, not the way wolves behave when they are left to their own devices.

In contrast, wild wolf packs are usually made up of a breeding male, a breeding female and their offspring from the past two or three years that have not yet set out on their own—perhaps six to 10 individuals. In the late 1980s and 1990s Mech observed a pack every year at Ellesmere Island in northeastern Canada. His study, published in 1999 in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, was among the first multiyear research on a single pack over time. It revealed that all members of the pack defer to the breeding male and that, regardless of sex or age, all pack members besides that male defer to the breeding female. The youngest pups also submit to their older siblings, though when food is scarce, parents feed the young first, much as human parents might tend to a fragile infant.

The same is true across gray wolf packs: Infighting for dominance is basically unheard of in a typical pack. When offspring are two to three years old, they leave the pack in search of mates, aiming to start their own pack. The alpha wolf notion of challenging dad for dominance of the existing pack just isn’t in the wolf playbook. — Is the Alpha Wolf Idea a Myth?

I went on to describe how the alpha model, despite being debunked, came to be extended, taken up in the popular conception of dog behaviour, not only by dog owners but also by dog trainers and associated dog behaviour specialists---to the detriment of the relationship between dogs and people. (The key text here is In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw, which I recommend even though I've become a total cat person in my middle age).

What I don't think I mentioned in 2023 was the way the alpha model and the concept of the dominance hierarchy entered ideology more widely. These days it's thriving in the culture, from dating advice to comparisons of world leaders.

The original model, based on observations of captive, artificially grouped wolves, projected a rigid dominance hierarchy onto animals whose wild sociality is fundamentally cooperative and familial. This is a paradigm of the violence of identity-thinking. The wolves were caged twice: first literally and then again by the concept of a dominance hierarchy, imported no doubt from ideology.

Maybe the most interesting thing to see is that when wolf ethologists got closer to the truth of wolves---and I do think we can come right out and say they got closer to the non-identical in wolves by rejecting the alpha model---when this happened, science did it itself. Adorno and other Frankfurt School writers complain endlessly about the spirit of positivism, but they are complaining about scientism, not science. Science can benefit from Adorno's intellectual experience just as philosophy itself can; micrology and the priority of the object are not confined to abstract theory. Indeed Adorno practiced what he preached in this regard, getting involved in empirical psychology and sociology.

Furthermore, ideology here is the bad guy, and ideology doesn't emerge out of the scientific image but from the manifest image. So my original attempt to make these concepts fit was not exactly right.

But not exactly wrong either. Adorno is defending the manifest image, but specifically the manifest image as it could or should be, free of reification and ideology. So in the end, intellectual experience might sometimes express the dialectic between manifest and scientific images, but might also sometimes criticize both: in this case, the scientific image was hubristic and tyrranical, and the manifest image was ideological.

@Banno I've noticed you're quite fond of using this example too.

We're both right. In that passage Adorno describes the retreat into the subject as a danger or temptation faced by thinking, one that can be resisted with critical self-reflection, which is characteristic of intellectual experience. Thus in the end intellectual experience is the avoidance of retreating into the subject, even if it has to go through it (or successfully resist the temptation) first.

But he also describes it as a stage that thinking has to go through. This is intellectual experience as a dialectical process, which has as one of its moments a retreat from the non-identical back into itself, step 1 below:

1. Negation: when confronted with the non-identical, the subject negates it by retreating into itself in its "fullness", i.e., its preformed, comprehensive, comfortable systems of concepts, ideologies, etc.
2. Negation of the negation: critical self-reflection says no to this, bringing the subject's thinking back out again.

Neat huh?

In I described the role of intellectual experience, and the motivation behind it, but I didn't define it. I'll attempt that now (with all the relevant caveats about definitions automatically applied as always).

Intellectual or spiritual experience is the mode of thinking which, by immersing itself in particulars with a micrological attention to detail, exposes the non-identical and reveals the affinities between objects and their relationships to the social whole. The purpose is to relate things to the whole without reducing them to specimens of categories, thus without systematizing them. An example of the difference that works for me is an analysis of Kafka's fiction: the reductive way of identity-thinking is to see everything in his fiction as Kafkaesque---and it's actually quite difficult to read Kafka openly and innocently today, such is the ubiquity of the universal we could call Kafkaesqueness---whereas if we follow Adorno we can see the wide variety of absurdity, humour, and satire in his stories. These will surely be seen to reveal things about modern life, alienation, the bourgeoisie, and so on, and yet they will not be reduced to mere signs for them. Kafka is kept alive in intellectual experience, and deadened with the category of Kafkaesque.

For example, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find he's metamorphosed into a giant cockroach or something. Identity-thinking reduces this to a symbol of alienation, a sub-category under the classification "Kafkaesque". But in intellectual experience, the details of the story are kept in play, always ready to be re-interpreted (this is a feature of great art, that it can accommodate and support this). We see how Gregor's situation is reduced to an economic problem and a cause of social embarrassment, and this reveals something of the true nature of the petit-bourgeois household: the family's and the society's inhumanity was there all along, not irrational but rational in a bad way---and Gregor's predicament, i.e., the inhumanity of his appearance, brings it out in specific ways.

Notice how the former, "Kafkaesque", interpretation has little power to shock or reveal, since through this category it has been pre-digested. But the latter can continue to support critique---precisely because it has not already been reduced to critique.

QUESTION: Is Adorno recommending a mode of thinking---he often says so---or is he just describing his way of thinking? Do all philosophers necessarily conflate these?

This I see as self-contradicting. "Correlates" implies a duality, so "the reduction of objects to correlates of thought", is inherently incompatible with "reality is mental". "Reality is mental" implies all objects are thoughts. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not self-contradictory; there's a spectrum in idealism from correlationism to full-blown subjective idealism. My short post was meant to cover all the bases (in modern thought).

problems of ambiguity — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think so. You show no sign of having read my interpretation of identity-thinking with any level of charity, so basically I can't see what your problem is. But never mind, I'm going to carry on working out what intellectual experience is all about...

Geistige Erfahrung and the Scientific Image of Man

Intellectual experience is the common translation of geistige Erfahrung, but occasionally it's rendered as spiritual experience. I'm going to mostly carry on using intellectual but it's worth keeping in mind the original, since both English terms (and even the third option, mental) are inadequate or misleading.

Here's a way to think about it. A deep motivation of Adorno's, going back earlier than the failures of socialism and the trauma of the Holocaust, was—as I see it—to defend the manifest image against the encroachments of the scientific image (see the SEP on Sellars).

Roger Foster quotes a note of Adorno's:

Since my earliest youth, I knew that everything that I stood for found itself in a hopeless struggle with what I perceived as the anti-spirit incarnate — the spirit of Anglo-Saxon natural-scientific positivism. — Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience

But phenomenology, vitalism, and existentialism did not appeal, since he had become a Marxian materialist. Thus we can see negative dialectics, and especially the idea of intellectual experience, as the philosophical elaboration of this instinct: resisting the reduction of experience to its empiricist concept, while insisting that such resistance is not a retreat into irrationalism, nor even a retreat into the subject, but rather a materialist critique of rationality itself.

So intellectual experience is something like the mode of thinking that attends to the dialectic between manifest and scientific image. And while Sellars probably argued for a synthesis of the two, Adorno wants to reveal how they conflict, and wants to keep the contradiction alive even in his own methodology. As he says, "Both positions of consciousness are connected to one another through each other’s critique, not through compromise." (Incidentally, recalling this line is a good way to expunge the thought of the "middle way" that often crops up when trying to understand Adorno.)

@Metaphysician Undercover

As to what identity-thinking is, I refer back to my post on page 2:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/984552

Identity-thinking is everywhere — indeed it's practically unavoidable — and idealism is its philosophical apotheosis.

Not really, Idealism involves a belief that concepts are objects, but not all objects are concepts. So that is not the identity relation referred to by Adorno. — Metaphysician Undercover

The relevant idealism is the view that reality is mental (in Hegel, rational-spiritual). It's the reduction of objects to correlates of thought.

If you don't mind I'm not going to follow you into the Platonic stuff, because I think it's a distraction. At least, it is for me.

I'm sure you know very well what so and so is. — Outlander

Yeah but I still struggle to get my head around such and such.

Cool video. Probably not very relevant. But then, MU's mention of Platonic objects was not very relevant either, so ... fair enough. In any case, I assume he was referring to the Forms and not just those solids.

where it may be perceived as consisting of Platonic objects — Metaphysician Undercover

What makes you say that?

I don't think anyone believes that objects are identical to concepts. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's idealism.

And didn't you, yourself, say that society was no more than a concept?