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?

Introduction: Argument and Experience (iii)

I like this:

There is no lack of related intentions throughout history. The French Enlightenment was endowed by its highest concept, that of reason, with something systematic under the formal aspect; however the constitutive entanglement of its idea of reason with that of an objectively reasonable arrangement of society deprives the system of the pathos, which it only regained when reason renounced the idea of its realization and absolutized itself into the Spirit. Thinking akin to the encyclopedia, as something rationally organized and nevertheless discontinuous, unsystematic and spontaneous, expressed the self-critical Spirit of reason. It represented what was erased from philosophy, as much through its increasing distance from praxis as through its incorporation into the academic bustle: worldly experience, that eye for reality, whose moment is also that of thought.

I was initially surprised by this, because precisely the kind of arbitrary list of facts you find in an encyclopedia is what I would have expected him to point to as evidence of the failure of Enlightenment reason. But on second thought, it makes perfect sense. The encyclopedia is rationally organized but its entries are not forced to fit a conceptual scheme of any kind, as they are in philosophical systems. There is an in-built priority of the object in an encyclopedia, and the non-identical, what is unique and irreducible in things, is able to show itself. The encyclopedia is a model of Adorno's dialectical tightrope between systematicity and a fragmented approach to particulars.

The freedom of the Spirit is nothing else. Thought can no more do without the element of the homme de lettres [French: person of education] which the petit bourgeois scientific ethos maligns, than without what the scientific philosophies misuse, the meditative drawing-together, the argument, which earned so much skepticism. Whenever philosophy was truly substantial, both moments appeared together. From a distance, dialectics could be characterized as the effort raised to self-consciousness of letting itself be permeated by such. Otherwise the specialized argument degenerates into the technics of non-conceptual experts in the midst of the concept, just as nowadays so-called analytic philosophy, memorizable and copyable by robots, is disseminated academically.

What is immanently argumentative is legitimate where it registers the integrated reality become system, in order to oppose it with its own strength. What is on the other hand free in thought represents the authority which is already aware of what is emphatically untrue of that context. Without this knowledge it would not have come to the breakout, without the appropriation of the power of the system it would have failed. That both moments do not seamlessly meld into one another is due to the real power of the system, which includes that which also potentially surpasses it.

This is a different angle on the dialectical interplay expressed above. The man of letters is the essayist who writes about anything that attracts his curiosity, with more cultural commentary and impressionistic insight than formal treatises or rigorous argument---and from a standpoint of wide learning rather than specialist training. But judged by the technical specialist, or the analytic philosopher, who has been trained above all in rigour, this man of letters is a dilettante and an amateur.

Adorno says philosophy needs both. The way I would put it is that it needs both the active engagement or love of the amateur (an amateur is etymologically a lover, someone who pursues an activity for the love of it) and also the rigour of argument under the compulsion of logic. Without the former, thought degenerates into scientism and analytic philosophy (unfair but we know what he means), lacking self-awareness and insight, specifically the insight into what is wrong with whatever logical system is being used. And without the latter ... well, he doesn't really say. Maybe it's obvious. Maybe it's similar to what he said about play and the irrational: too much and you just get ineffectual gestures. I'm tempted to think of the person of letters' engaged insights as primary motivation, and the argument of the logician as the force that carries this through (although this is no doubt too linear a picture for Adorno).

However the untruth of the context of immanence discloses itself in the overwhelming experience that the world, which is as systematically organized as if it were truly that realized reason Hegel so glorified, simultaneously perpetuates the powerlessness of the Spirit, apparently so all-powerful, in its old unreason. The immanent critique of idealism defends idealism, to the extent it shows how far it is defrauded by itself; how much that which is first, which is according to such always the Spirit, stands in complicity with the blind primacy of the merely existent [Seiendes]. The doctrine of the absolute Spirit immediately promotes this latter.

Here he pivots to experience. I'll use the alternative translation to make sense of it, since Redmond seems to have produced an ungrammatical sentence. Here is the Thorne and Menda version:

The untruth of the context disclosed by immanence, however, is also revealed to one’s overwhelming experience of a world that has organized itself so systematically that it might as well be rationality made real, Hegel’s very glory, even as that world, in its irrationality, perpetuates the powerlessness of the omnipotent-seeming mind. — Argument and Experience

He is saying that what is revealed by immanent critique, i.e., the system's untruth, is also revealed by one's overwhelming experience of the world. This is a critique of Hegel's system and idealist systems in general but I'm more interested in this idea of experience. Let's see where he takes it (back in the Redmond translation):

The scientific consensus would probably concede that even experience would imply theory. It is however a “standpoint”, at best hypothetical. Conciliatory representatives of scientivism demand what they call proper or clean science, which is supposed to account for these sorts of presuppositions. Exactly this demand is incompatible with intellectual experience. If a standpoint is demanded of the latter, then it would be that of the diner to the roast. It lives by ingesting such; only when the latter disappears into the former, would there be philosophy. Until this point theory embodies that discipline in intellectual experience which already embarrassed Goethe in relation to Kant. If experience relied solely on its dynamic and good fortune, there would be no stopping.

Ideology lurks in the Spirit which, dazzled with itself like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, irresistibly becomes well-nigh absolute. Theory prevents this. It corrects the naiveté of its self-confidence, without forcing it to sacrifice the spontaneity which theory for its part wishes to get at. By no means does the difference between the so-called subjective share of intellectual experience and its object vanish; the necessary and painful exertion of the cognizing subject testifies to it. In the unreconciled condition, non-identity is experienced as that which is negative. The subject shrinks away from this, back onto itself and the fullness of its modes of reaction. Only critical self-reflection protects it from the limitations of its fullness and from building a wall [Wand: interior wall] between itself and the object, indeed from presupposing its being-for-itself as the in-itself and for-itself. The less the identity between the subject and object can be ascertained, the more contradictory what is presumed to cognize such, the unfettered strength and open-minded self-consciousness. Theory and intellectual experience require their reciprocal effect. The former does not contain answers for everything, but reacts to a world which is false to its innermost core. Theory would have no jurisdiction over what would be free of the bane of such. The ability to move is essential to consciousness, not an accidental characteristic. It signifies a double procedure: that of the inside out, the immanent process, the authentically dialectical, and a free one, something unfettered which steps out of dialectics, as it were. Neither of them are however disparate. The unregimented thought has an elective affinity to dialectics, which as critique of the system recalls to mind what would be outside of the system; and the energy which dialectical movement in cognition unleashes is that which rebels against the system. Both positions of consciousness are connected to one another through each other’s critique, not through compromise.

Now I can respond to this:

Experience is what is gained from action, and intellectual experience appears to be sort of like knowledge in general. Theory appears to be something which is prior to intellectual experience, as necessary for action, but also a sort of response to it, as a corrective to the consequent self-confidence.

I would say that we could theoretically distinguish two types of theory, that which is prior to action and intellectual experience, and that which is posterior. But, since it's all a reciprocating process, all theory would in reality consist of both types, as prior to this experience, and posterior to that experience. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this is about right. The scientific consensus can or often does concede that there is no raw pre-conceptual experience, no uninterpreted givens: there is no pre-theoretical level as posited in empiricism. This is in line with Kant and a whole host of thinkers up to Sellars and beyond (and what I was talking about in this post in @Moliere's "What is a painting?" discussion).

So theory accompanies and shapes experience from the start, but perhaps what really makes it intellectual experience is when theory is re-applied, that is, knowingly---what you refer to as "posterior" theory. And yes to your last sentence: I don't think we ought to make too much of the prior/posterior binary.

But Adorno's further point is that the scientific consensus, though it concedes all that, reduces the insight to a mere checkbox to add to the methodology of scientific observation, a feature of the observing consciousness, such that the scientific method can, say, control for bias and neutralize it, and carry on behaving like it's perfectly neutral. Adorno offers a better image of intellectual experience, a transforming rather than a spectating one: the diner to the roast. It's about digging in, not merely observing from a distance. In eating, neither the diner nor the roast remain unchanged.

I find this metaphor a bit awkward, coming so soon after the passage in which he says that idealism is the belly turned mind, a rage against the prey projected into reason.

Well, the way out is to take the metaphors seriously. Adorno must have been aware of the tension. I think this means that there are two different modes of eating here: there is idealism's rage-filled and murderous devourment, in which a living victim is torn to pieces; then there is the relaxed and non-violent experience enjoyed by the diner to the roast. It's the difference between forced assimilation and transformative gustation.

And he says that philosophy only really happens when the object disappears into the thinker. He means that philosophy requires that one fully internalize the experience of the object rather than keeping it at arm's length, a specimen to be studied from afar or from the other end of the microscope. Or rather, this internalization of the object is what intellectual experience, and thus philosophy, actually is.

Then the experience-theory dialectic is brought out once again and at length. It turns out that experience lines up with the "man of letters" and theory lines up with logical rigour, and intellectual experience is that which combines experience and theory. And if what he said above about real philosophy requiring total absorption looked a bit too idealist and tyrranical, we needn't worry, because theory/argument/critique can set us right again and bring us back down to earth.

Although the section doesn't quite finish with this, I think it's the culmination:

Theory and intellectual experience require their reciprocal effect. The former does not contain answers for everything, but reacts to a world which is false to its innermost core. Theory would have no jurisdiction over what would be free of the bane of such.

Whether I was wrong to do so, I interpreted @T Clark to be referring to innate racial differences.

I’m not looking for an argument or even an explanation. I’m just curious. Is expressing the opinion that white people are more intelligent as a class than black people cause for immediate banning? — T Clark

Yes.

He wrote an OP expressing his belief that race and aesthetics are connected: Northern European people are better than others at producing beautiful works of art, and Northern European women have a greater range of facial expressions than sub-Saharan African women and are thus more aesthetically inspiring.

And without stating it explicitly he implied that this greater aesthetic ability of whites was connected with higher IQ.

Then he went on to speculate that the hostility to immigration in Northern Europe is partly attributable to these differences and that whites are responding to an aesthetic degradation caused by the influx of non-white people.

He presented all this dishonestly: bigotry masquerading as innocent intellectual enquiry.

@Eros1982 was banned for racism.

Yeah I've been meaning to say something about intellectual experience. The whole introduction is basically a "Theory of Intellectual Experience," as it's referred to in the appendix to the lectures and as ND was originally going to be called.

I'll reply more fully ... in the near future.

Yes, that's the gist of what I'm trying to get at with the idea of an aesthetic attitude -- looking at an artobject is to look at it as something aside from its presence, and aside from whatever role it may play within our own equipmentality. Something along those lines. — Moliere

Totally. And even though Adorno hated Heidegger, I see a lot of common ground between them (and you) on this score.

I don't know, but I betcha I know what color this building is painted: it's goluboy. This is Catherine's Palace in St. Petersburg. — frank

Right. When I asked Google in Russian what colour it was, the A.I. overview said, "Екатерининский дворец в Санкт-Петербурге имеет бело-голубой цвет фасадов," in which it says the facade is byelo-goluboy which means white and light blue (for want of an equivalent colour term).

Kant's pure intuitions of time and space and pure concepts of understanding (the Categories) are not linguistic. The article is about linguistic discrimination. — RussellA

Why did you say this? Because I quoted Kant on intuition and concepts? Then you have misunderstood.

Otherwise, you're failing to understand ... well, everything really. Have fun!

The article "Russian blues reveal effects of language on colour discrimination" is about how people discriminate colours, not about how people perceive colours. — RussellA

It's explicitly about both.

The article makes sense that categories in language do affect a person's performance, but this is not saying that categories in language affect a person's perceptions. — RussellA

That's explicitly what it's saying.

Goats too.

Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art" is very relevant:

In immediate perception, we never really perceive a throng of sensations, e.g. tones and noises. Rather, we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, the three-motored plane, the Mercedes which is immediately different from the Adler. Much closer to us than any sensation are the things themselves. In the house we hear the door slam – never acoustic sensations or mere noises. To hear a bare sound we must listen away from the things, direct our ears from them, listen abstractly.

The point he's leading to is that the perception and appreciation of art are not separate, that art is meaningful all the way down. What the eye does with light of varying wavelengths and intensities is none of our business—unless we're doing physiology or optics.

So the reason I brought up Russian blues was to cast doubt on this statement:

I don't approach seeing colours with any preconceptions — RussellA

We now know that how we conceptualize the spectrum does affect how we see colours. But the underlying point has been standard in philosophy for centuries. Intuitions (as in perceptions) without concepts are blind, as Kant said. All seeing is seeing as (see Sellars and the "Myth of the Given") and all perception is targeted, selective, and organized according to the state of the perceiver and its desires—all of which for humans includes preconceptions.

The idea of a pure, preconceptual and uninterpreted perception is widely rejected in philosophy. RussellA was arguing for a primary, universal innocence in the perception and appreciation of a work of art, based on the idea that colours are perceived in a basic way universally. The example of Russian blues is just one among many that show this to be naive.

Yeah, it didn't look like you were attacking him. I just took the opportunity to say something about agenda-driven philosophy, cos it's interesting.

And...far be it from me to defend @Wayfarer

Very interesting. I'm in danger of going down a rabbit hole now.

There's no doubt in my mind that @Wayfarer is driven fundamentally by an agenda, but I'm in two minds about whether that's a bad thing. On the one hand, it leads one to avoid proper engagement with any philosophy that cannot be weaponized; on the other hand, a completely neutral approach to philosophy is really boring.

Don't feel bad.

What is more remarkable is that this confusion is obstinately repeated ad nauseum, making me wonder what the point or motivation for such idiocy could be. — Janus

The urge to devour and assimilate what is not oneself.

In Russian it's only blue; the other colours correspond. But of all the colours I suspect the green-blue region is particularly variable across languages.