Thank you and others for the support.

If we are not allowed to question the sexual ethics of Western Europe, then we will not question the sexual ethics of Western Europe. But that sort of a rule should be made explicit. I don't see how those who question the sexual ethics of Western Europe can simply be threatened or banned for "abandoning reason." There are lots of people from other regions of the world on TPF. — Leontiskos

Questioning the sexual ethics of Western Europe is one thing; stating that gay people are degenerate and immoral (or that they behave immorally) is something else. Debating sex and gender is one thing; denying the identity or dignity of transgender people is another.

We won't tolerate intolerance. We want to ensure we have a shared foundation of mutual respect and the equal dignity of all participants regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.

Well, I say we don't tolerate intolerance, but in reality sometimes we do. I am inclined now to be more strict.

A comment I read about the distinction between the New Left and the conservative religious critique, was 'For Adorno and Horkheimer, myth and Enlightenment are dialectically intertwined: Enlightenment arises from myth but reproduces myth’s structure of domination in a new, “rationalized” form. Thus, the way out is neither regression to pre-rational faith nor blind progress through science, but a self-reflective form of reason — one that is conscious of its limits and its entanglement with power.' — Wayfarer

Well, it's a reasonable summary of DoE, sure.

But I still sense a lack in their spiritual anthropology, so to speak. I think, for the religious, humanity has a cosmic signficance with which it seeks reconciliation. — Wayfarer

Something akin to this is very strong in Adorno's works, though without the actual religion. However, that "lack," i.e., the impossibility under certain conditions of a spritual experience worthy of human beings is often precisely their point, since they do not exempt themselves.

If you think Harry was in the same league as The Great Whatever and StreetlightX, I can only assume you didn't interact with him much.

To some of us, this is much more than a website to waste time or "shoot the shit" on. More than a casual hobby or past time but an active part of one's life and between some of us almost like a club of distant pen pals (I'm trying to avoid saying "like a family" because that's simply not accurate for the majority of posters). My point is, participation on this site is important to some people more so than you might think. We're all real people with real lives and real feelings. Please remember that Jamal — Outlander

What do you think follows from this? That I should never ban anyone? On the contrary, it is because I want to maintain and improve the community that I have to get rid of members who make the experience of being here worse.

To exclude or demean others is to abandon reasoned inquiry for dogma or prejudice. You are lucky you are still here.

Part of Harry's last comment (now deleted).

The big mistake you make is not to catch that this is the trick that is going on. You are caught in the Cartesian representational understanding of what it is to be a mind... — apokrisis

Blah blah blah blah-blah bl-ba-blah blah. — Harry Hindu

I did. Low quality and obnoxious.

Stop posturing Leon.

Kavus Torabi, "The Sweetest Demon"

I banned @Harry Hindu, partly for low quality, and partly for obnoxiousness.

I want people to know there's no room here for that kind of crap any more.

I know this is the Lounge but I don't see why TPF should be hosting disputes like this. It's effectively a platform for culture warriors. I'm closing it.

It is also one of the themes in Max Horkheimer's book The Eclipse of Reason'. It doesn't age that well, written as it was in the aftermath of WWII, but his basic point stands. Horkheimer traces how the meaning of reason has shifted from a normative, world-guiding principle to an instrumental faculty directed to specific ends. In the classical and pre-modern worldview, reason was understood as objective—it reflected an intelligible order inherent in reality itself. To act rationally was to conform to this cosmic or moral order, in which reason provided not only the means for action but also the standards by which ends were judged. With the rise of modern science, empiricism, and the Enlightenment’s emphasis on human autonomy, this conception of reason eroded. Rationality came to be understood as subjective and instrumental, concerned not with what is true or good but with how to achieve whatever ends are already desired. Horkheimer argues that in this transformation, reason has been stripped of its substantive and ethical content; it has become a tool for calculation, efficiency, and control. This marks the “eclipse” of reason—the point at which rationality itself becomes irrational, serving domination rather than enlightenment, and leaving modern civilization powerful in its techniques but impoverished in meaning and purpose.

This later becomes one of the main themes of Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of the Enlightenment. — Wayfarer

Yes, but...

For Horkheimer, the "Enlightenment's emphasis on human autonomy" led to the erosion of objective reason only because it was not properly realized.

I've been wondering how we are supposed to tell the difference between Horkheimer's and Adorno's critique and the reactionary anti-Enlightenment critique, since the criticism of the Enlightenment looks similar in both cases. I'm trying to identify the central difference, since I don't think it's just the fact that H&A explicitly say that they are pro-Enlightenment, as they do in the preface to DoE:

We have no doubt—and herein lies our petitio principii—that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that the very concept of that thinking, no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today. If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate. — Preface to Dialectic of Enlightenment

So ok, they are open about it: they are not anti-Enlightenment. But there's more, and the key to unlock it is that they characterize their argument as a petitio principii. They set out to critique the Enlightenment's suitability in bringing about freedom while already assuming that Enlightenment and freedom are inseparable; and the very thing they rely on to be critical is what is in question.

There is, they believe, no way out of this circularity, no way of performing a critique from a privileged position outside the circle of Enlightenment. So for H&A this circularity is not actually fallacious, but is central to their self-aware method, known as immanent critique.

The reactionary anti-modern position pretends to a transcendent standpoint, perhaps appealing to a golden age of reason prior to its corruption by liberalism, or to natural law, to God or "higher knowledge" or the cosmic, etc. There is always an external authority claimed as support.

This is not H&A's strategy at all. From the inside, they push the modern concept of reason till it breaks, without external help.

So I think this is the central difference, and its significance lies in what it reveals about the motivations and aims of the respective arguments. H&A are motivated by the promise of freedom and an end to domination, aiming at a radicalization of the Enlightenment. Reactionaries would banish it and reinstate domination of a different type. And that's a big difference.

NOTE: I'm not saying conservatives and reactionaries can't legitimately make use of their criticisms, and I'm not calling into question your own use of Horkheimer (I'm not saying you're wrong, or anything so crude).

NOTE 2: I couldn't decide between conservative and reactionary so I went with a mix of both.

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

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

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

I roughly agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction: RHETORIC (ii)

The last paragraph of the introduction is about utopia. This doesn't mean a plan for a perfect society but rather the reconciliation of thought and reality that would exist in a world in which people can relate to each other and to things freely, without coercion and the cold logic of utility:

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

The final paragraph is difficult — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I get it. Following is my analytical schematic, which Adorno would have hated. It is not meant to substitute for the real thing, but to help unlock it for a re-read. The paragraph proceeeds like this:

1. Dialectics is well-suited to apprehending the content, the truth of things.

2. Thinking which seeks this is seeking utopia (since its own conceptual mechanism tends to obstruct the content, attaining knowledge of this content is a distant dream).

3. The consciousness of the possibility of utopia leads thinking to look for it in concrete particulars, assuming that if it is to be found anywhere it will be there, the relatively undistorted individual things (relatively undistorted because notionally independent of, or not entirely captured by, identity thinking)

4. The "immediately realized" is what presents itself as immediate, society as it seems to be , the existent as false appearance, false because it appears as unproblematic and exhaustive---the ideology of the market, individual liberty, of work vs. free time, means-ends rationality, and the whole mythology around all that. It might be expected that this is what blocks utopia, but in fact...

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

6. Utopia then appears abstract: free-floating above both the particulars and concepts that structure them in existing society.

7. It is what does not exist (and what is not possible, I suppose) that constitutes utopia.

8. As such, it has a unextinguishable quality, its "colour".

9. From inside the existent (or among the existents if you prefer), there is one thing that can reach out towards utopia: thought (philosophy). But it does this negatively: in showing how our concepts break down and how we are enmeshed by contradictory systems and ideologies, thought points towards a world where this is not the case.

10. Utopia is kept close, paradoxically, by keeping it at a distance. The promise and motivation of utopia, something close to the spirit of enquiry---and just close to the spirit per se---can be maintained only if it is not regarded as something that can be reached from where we are now.

11. Thus, like a prism, philosophy lets us see utopia's colours without bringing it close to what exists.

I think that fits with this:

the concept is not the thing (the prism is not the light) but that which operates upon the thing in order to render it perceptible. The light was there but only became a perceivable object by passing through the prism of concepts forged by philosophy. — Moliere

I do not think, as you seem to, that he has given up on the quest for the immediate. I think he is now considering the possibility of the activity of thinking as immediate. I — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I think it's like this: immediacy in circumstances of modernity is always fake, a result of reification. Those things that present themselves as this-and-just-so, like money or commodities---what's more immediate than a banknote or a smartphone in your hand?---are reifications of historical developments and social relations, so immediacy under these conditions is ideological. BUT Adorno hangs on to the utopian ideal of thinking, namely of the lack of separation between subject and object.

Significantly for our debate, I think the self itself is a fake immediacy, at least in the world we know---and I think this is an important position of Adorno's. The self is a reflection of, or is parasitic on, one's society. There is no pure self underneath all the contingent mediations. Immediacy, if possible, would itself be historical and contingent.

Things have changed since Adorno's day, but we can still recognize his analysis of the modern subject as a construction of the Enlightenment: the autonomous bourgeois individual in command of himself who unproblematically introspects and comes to rational decisions and then acts on them.

Anyway, I've been looking at his other works and there is a lot to recommend your view; he is often writing approvingly of immediacy, although at the same time he is warning us not to grasp for it. A particularly pessimistic instance is in the dedication to Minima Moralia:

What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewellery, and make people who are no more than component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity to act as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer. — Minima Moralia

In other words, immediacy is presently unreachable, and any claim to have reached it desecrates its utopian promise.

Immediacy in circumstances of the "bad mediation" cannot help but be a perversion, and at best turns into another kind of mediation:

Everywhere bourgeois society insists on the exertion of will; only love is supposed to be involuntary, pure immediacy of feeling. In its longing for this, which means a dispensation from work, the bourgeois idea of love transcends bourgeois society. But in erecting truth directly amid the general untruth, it perverts the former into the latter. It is not merely that pure feeling, so far as it is still possible within the determinate system of the economy, becomes precisely thereby society’s alibi for the domination of interests and bears witness to a humanity that does not exist. The very involuntariness of love, even where it has not found itself a practical accommodation beforehand, contributes to the whole as soon as it is established as a principle. If love in society is to represent a better one, it cannot do so as a peaceful enclave, but only by conscious opposition. This, however, demands precisely the element of voluntariness that the bourgeois, for whom love can never be natural enough, forbid it. Loving means not letting immediacy wither under the omnipresent weight of mediation and economics, and in such fidelity it becomes itself mediated, as a stubborn counter-pressure. — Minima Moralia

And yet, as you say, he retains immediacy as the utopian promise. In a sense, the movement of the concept towards understanding is a manifestation of the desire for immediacy.

George Duke, "Love".

George Duke, "Dawn".

Philosophy is a discipline unto itself, and ND is an attempt at sketching a method for philosophy in light of its various previous attempts such that it is not slap-dash, not arbitrary, but still up to the classic task of philosophy: truth of the world we find ourselves in -- the truth of the non-conceptual through concepts. — Moliere

Nice. I would add that the underlying problem the introduction sets out to solve is that this requisite method, conceptual and linguistic as it must be, has to overcome the withering of intellectual/spiritual experience characteristic of modernity with a deliberate use of language: "rhetorical" at the same time as rigorous; expressively extreme without abandoning logical consistency; and mimetic in the mode of art, magic, and play, without abandoning concepts.

There is much more to say, of course. I might try.

I think yours is a very conservative way of viewing philosophy, — Philosophim

Well I've never been called that before!

Since, as I pointed out, the study of the tradition is not the worship of texts but is part of an effort to take thinking in new directions, I don't see how it can be described as conservative. On the contrary, the conservative way of doing philosophy is to follow what seems obvious to you, such that you think you don't need to refer to the work that's been done on the topic (whatever it might be). In my opinion this lacks the engagement with the philosophical conversation and the self-critical attitude necessary to think original thoughts.

But you do you, as they say :up:

He criticized Stirner's points of view in "The German Ideology" — ProtagoranSocratist

Ah, that's how I know the name!

:cool:

Yeah I often find the text opening up once I find the key to it.

I keep seeing his name but I don't think I know anything about him.

However, like I was trying to explain with the Hegel example, there also can't be anything wrong with refusing to read unnecessarily impenetrable texts. Reading difficult texts can be challenging, as if you're uncovering something special and going on an adventure, yet I simply can't read everything. I like to buy paperback books if it's something I intend to spend a lot of time thinking about, but I will probably never buy anything that was written by Hegel. I'd prefer some reliable academic explanation of what he was getting at....i think Coplestone will probably cover it briefly when I get to that era... — ProtagoranSocratist

Fair enough. Totally understandable. I'm into Marx and Adorno, two significantly Hegelian philosophers, and I haven't even read Hegel either (not much of him anyway). I'm thinking of tackling the Phenomenology next year. Maybe with a reading group here on TPF.

Thank you Jamal. This is a fantastic post, and example of the types of conversations I think we all want here. — Philosophim

Thank you for the kind words, Philosophim.

Jamal is completely correct in my viewpoint of philosophy. A philosophical historian is of course going to disagree with my viewpoint, and I respect that. We need philosophical historian attitudes to keep the availability of these works alive. They are the reason the field is still propped up, and why a forum like this exists.

Jamal may fail to realize my attitude is also needed for a healthy field of philosophy, as people like me are who push the field forward. Not that I'm claiming I have, but you need people focused on present day problems and issues to write the great works that will be examined years from now. I am more of a writer of philosophy, and I view reading philosophy as a means to further the ideas of today. I also understand many who come to this forum aren't interested in making philosophy their new hobby, but seeking out a few answers to some of the timeless questions that have bothered humanity over the years. — Philosophim

This doesn't quite capture my view, and I think it belittles the study of the philosophical tradition. You are contrasting yourself, a pioneer at the cutting edge, with what you call the "philosophical historian". But I do not accept this division of labour, and I think it's self-serving, justifying your choice to leave the study of the philosophical tradition to specialist "historians".

My point is a bit deeper. It is that all philosophy is imbued with history, but some of it isn't conscious of it or, like you, would prefer not to think of it. The upshot of what I'm saying is that the most original, pioneering philosophy is supremely conscious of the tradition. You don't get to escape.

I gave you a great example in my big post: virtue ethics. It was one of the biggest revolutions in philosophy of the 20th century, an idea for the present day, and yet it was built on ancient philosophy. So maybe you can see that the interest in the tradition is not just dabbling in history but is part of a serious effort to take thought in new directions.

In a way, we're both right. But in another way, we're both wrong because we each move to exclude the other, when we're supposed to include the other, to understand the requirement of the two being in some form of unity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Hm, I quite like that.

snotty — T Clark

trolls — Philosophim

Fair. I am a snotty troll occasionally.



I may try to respond to the OP directly later---I have things to say---but first I'll address the three most objectionable points of @Philosophim's post. I think my responses to them will go some way to answering your questions.

3. Do not ever elevate the work because of the author. It does not matter that other people think this person deserves a spot light in philosophy. There are countless reasons for other people praising a work, and because we are human, it sometimes has nothing to do with the actual argument of the work itself. The argument is all that matters. Pretend its some guy on the street telling you the idea. If the argument is actually good on its merits and not merely because it hit a cultural niche at the time, you'll see how good it is yourself. — Philosophim

This is lacking in nuance. On the one hand, yes, it is supremely anti-philosophical to sanctify works of philosophy and expect their canonical status to confer persuasive power in argument; an argument from authority is indeed a fallacy. On the other hand, no, Kant, Plato, et al are not just "guys on the street". They are people who took part in a conversation spanning centuries and cannot be understood when removed from that context. And their work is not reducible to isolated arguments, because it relies on a conceptual framework made up of their own wider body of work and their engagement with the tradition and with their peers.

On first reading Plato we might think that Socrates is annoying and manipulative, and often just really bad at making arguments---and what's worse, his interlocutors hardly ever push back! It requires humility and patience for us to move past this, to realize that this initial reaction is due to ignorance, and to see that Plato and Socrates are not so obviously wrong as you think. When one makes the effort to study these works of philosophy, putting them in the right context so as to understand the arguments, then one is doing philosophy: opening oneself up to learning from others.

You have to understand an argument before passing judgment on it; its premises, terms, and motivations have a context that makes any simplified reconstruction of the argument controversial. There is no substitute for studying the text and, with the help of others, coming to your own view.

And we should avoid the contradiction of thinking simultaneously that (a) it's not worth studying Plato and Aristotle because we refuse the canonical authority of philosophical texts; and (b) relying on the authority of secondary literature to tell us what is in those texts!

But why read them at all? Why should we treat them with such respect just because people say they're "Great"? The reason is their fertility: for hundreds or thousands of years, ideas have grown from them. They have provoked reactions from the most philosphically minded people. They have been found to be endlessly interesting. This is not just because people say they're great, but also because of their own special qualities. On top of that, this all means that culture is built on them, so intervening intellectually in culture (having an intellectual debate) happens in terms of their ideas, whether you know it or not.

One thing that philosophers are remembered and continue to be studied for is the way they can redirect thought by transforming the terms of discussion. To reduce this series of dynamic interactive historical interventions to isolated arguments is to misunderstand what philosophy is.

Philosophy is an ongoing conversation and an experience. You do not understand what you are saying until you understand how the terms you are using have been used in the past, and you don't understand that until you read the philosophers and immerse yourself in the experience of others.

4. Understand that some philosophy is historical, but has been completely invalidated by modern day understanding. I advice you approach these as a fan or someone with historical curiosity only. Spending time on an old and outdated work is only for the biggest of fans, but is an entertainment exercise only.

This suggests a picture of philosophy as a series of refutations leading to the culmination of the 21st century, in which we are closer to the truth than ever. Nobody who has studied the history of philosophy could seriously maintain this view. Philosophy does not proceed by refutation, since whether a single philosopher's refutation actually works is itself a philosophical problem with no possibility of external verification. Idealism, materialism, and scepticism live on even after they have been "refuted" a thousand times. What changes are frameworks, motivations, interpretations, and interests.

Or else there's the idea that philosophy is like natural science, progressing through empirical discovery. It's true that some philosophy relied on incorrect explanations of empirical phenomena, but it doesn't follow that studying it is just an "entertainment exercise". There are many reasons to study Aristotle's Physics even though there's a lot in it that's wrong. For example, we understand ourselves and the ideas that have power in our society by understanding the precise way in which the Scientific Revolution overturned Aristotle and shaped the Enlightenment.

And who says a particular philosophy is outdated? And are you sure it's outdated? Might you be persuaded to question that view---you know, philosophically? It was once thought that the ethics of ancient Greece was completely superseded by utilitarianism and Kantian ethics, but then virtue ethics made a comeback in the late 20th century. This kind of thing happens all the time.

5. Do not waste time on philosophical reading that has poor language, definitions, or easily disproven premises. I am amazed at the amount of people who will spend hours analyzing a piece of work that is invalidated within the first opening chapter of the discussion.

Philosophers struggle to express, and they handle this in different ways. Wittgenstein is superficially plain, but his prose embodies painful mental struggle. Others, like Adorno (I may come to him in another post, because he has quite a lot to say about philosophical writing) believed that language had been corrupted by the modern age and that the only way to properly express philosophical experience in writing is creatively, with a density on the level of poetry.

The need for definitions is another problem. It's absurd to answer the question "What is justice?" with "Define justice." This is not only evasive but asks the first speaker to state what they think justice is, and that's supposed to be the very topic under discussion. The same goes for "Is time real?" Asking the questioner to define time first is to miss the point, since any relevant definition of time has its reality or unreality baked into it.

Definitions fix meaning, but philosophy is inquiry into meaning. Definitions are more akin to what philosophy aims towards. Clear and definite thoughts are not necessarily achieved through clear and definite writing, but towards the end of the struggle.

However, a definition certainly can be a useful starting point, precisely insofar as its inadequacy shows us something about the meaning of the concept. This is why Socrates begins in the Republic by extracting a definition of justice from Cephalus's casual chat.

As for errors, they can be reavealing. There are inconsistencies in the Critique of Pure Reason. But whether they really are inconsistencies and what they mean either way is up for debate. And this debate is not a waste of time as claimed by @Philosophim, but can reveal underlying insights struggling to break through.

Generally, @Philosophim's philosophical attitude is instrumental and biased in favour of the present. I don't think these are good attitudes for philosophy. Philosophy is interpretive, and consists of dialogue, whether this is direct or in the form of written works reacting to each other.

It is also meant to be reflective. The tempting attitude that you know better than the ancients is a distinctly unreflective one. To think of the philosophers of the past as merely less advanced stages on the road to the present unreflectively favours one's own contingent conceptual framework without trying to inhabit that of the past: what seems obvious to you now may only seem so because of transient ideologies and conceptual habits. For example, the idea that consciousness is located in the head may seem obvious, but it's built on a whole host of historically mediated metaphysical commitments which might be wrong. The presumption that present-day thinking supplies the standard of truth is a fallacy.

The result of all this is that the interpretation of significant thinkers becomes impoverished. You cannot expect to find much in philosophy if you feel yourself to be in a privileged position, surveying the intellectual landscape from the highest point yet achieved. This kind of interpretation is hardly interpretation at all; it is projection, not understanding.

As I said, another problem with this view is its instrumentalism, the idea that old philosophers are only good insofar as we can productively and efficiently and without much labour put them to good use. This is a philosophy of capitalism, plainly. Again, where is the reflection here?

Often times a philosopher's work is a journey in itself. — Philosophim

Yes indeed. I would go further and say that the philosophy is in that journey, not in its conclusions or theses.

Otherwise your post is mostly bad advice.

All you need to do now, to see my perspective, is to see that to get the best understanding of "the thing" we need to rid ourselves of the mediation. To produce the best understanding of the thing, we want to apprehend "the thing" as immediate. — Metaphysician Undercover

As you so lucidly explained, part of the practice of spiritual/intellectual experience which goes by the name of negative dialectics is the understanding of things' sedimented history, their temporal dimension. This is a kind (maybe the most important kind) of mediation:

In this section now, we see how the mediation of the existent is "the hyle [Greek: primary matter] of its implicit history". — Metaphysician Undercover

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

Philosophy which would have this stripped away to a purported immediacy, such as phenomenology, empiricism, Descartes' cogito, etc., are doing it wrong, according to Adorno.

I'm really not trying to be argumentative, and I really don't care who is right. As you can see, I really appreciate your insights. But Adorno's philosophy clicks with me more than any other philosophy I've encountered. I've been reading bits and pieces off and on for the past year or two and I feel like I'm getting a grip on it. It matters to me that nobody here goes down the wrong path, which is always a risk with the way he writes.

Adorno's perspective is the opposite of the perspective you express in the first quotation above. Or have I misunderstood you?

According to what I wrote above, "the thing" here is thought itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

Even though Adorno's writing in ND is singularly dense and difficult, and even though this is intentional, he is open and honest and says what he means. If he meant the thought he would say so. The thing is the object of thought, the thing we're thinking about.

However, there's a sense in which you're on to something. The thing is never the thing in itself; it's the thing mediated by thought.

Ultimately, I think liberalism and conservatism in America boil down to four concepts at play that are really influencing the differences between the two. That is, love, harm, freedom, and goodness. We are not using these concepts the same at all. — Bob Ross

First, I realize that your view is significantly American, but don't assimilate me to your parochial politics. I'm not American and I am highly sceptical of liberalism in all its senses and manifestations.

That aside, I think you're right. You're making MacIntyre's strong point that our frameworks are incommensurable.

Through the now apparent, now latent delimitation to texts, philosophy confesses to what it vainly denied under the ideal of the method, its linguistic essence. In its modern history, it is, analogous to tradition, denigrated as rhetoric. Tossed aside and degraded into a means of realizing effects, it was the bearer of lies in philosophy.

That is, it was regarded as the bearer of lies. — Jamal

I'd just like to correct this interpretation and say more about this passage. Adorno is saying that rhetoric was tossed aside and degraded until it became just "a means of realizing effects," in other words sophistry. As such, it really was the "bearer of lies".

So Adorno isn't defending sophistry, but rather making the claim that rhetoric need not be mere sophistry. It is only because rhetoric, the power of subjective expression, was increasingly marginalized that it became a bag of persuasive tricks.

But throughout this section Adorno conflates rhetoric with language as such. This is intentional, because he wants to normalize or rehabilitate language as rhetoric, and also wants to provoke, to directly challenge those who would turn language into formal logic.

Introduction: RHETORIC (i)

We've finally reached the end of the introduction. I really enjoyed this section and found it kind of mindblowing. I wasn't expecting a linguistic turn.

So first of all, reading the previous section I was surprised and disappointed when he seemed to say that philosophy now is just the interpretation of texts:

The methexis [participation] of philosophy in tradition would be however solely its determinate repudiation [Verneinung]. It is constructed by the texts which it criticizes. In them, which the tradition brings to it and which the texts themselves embody, its conduct becomes commensurable with tradition. This justifies the transition from philosophy to interpretation, which enshrines neither what is interpreted nor raises the symbol to the absolute, but seeks what might be really true there, where thought secularizes the irretrievable Ur model of holy texts.

Assuming he approves of this transition, this seems like a reversal. Aren't we supposed to be opening ourselves up to the things, adapting ourselves mimetically to objective reality while still thinking conceptually? And isn't Adorno one of the great defenders of philosophy against its assimilation or enfeeblement? And doesn't his masterpiece Minima Moralia contain hundreds of brilliant micrological analyses of the stuff of everyday life?

We can imagine a resolution along the lines of: philosophy is two-sided, with the interpretation of texts on one side and the interpretation of the world on the other (in "the reading of the existent as a text of its becoming"). But that doesn't seem to be what he is saying here. I'll leave that hanging for now.

When I read this section, by a stroke of luck I also happened to be reading the chapter about language in Roger Foster's book Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (which I am finding brilliant). The importance of Darstellung is becoming clearer. Redmond translates this as portrayal but most others have expression and/or presentation.

Things clicked for me when Foster explained that Adorno doesn't really accept the standard view in linguistics that signs are arbitrary. Arbitrary signification, insofar as it is real, is not just the way things are but is a historical result of modernity's depletion of language. Expressive Darstellung, that is, rhetoric, is what is needed for philosophy to resist this and to do justice to the objects.

It helped me to look back at my discussion with @Moliere, in which I said the following:

Darstellung or the moment of expression is the deliberate interpretation of the given facts, whereas Vorstellung, the representation, is the given fact itself. The latter may also be a product of interpretation, but this interpretation is unknowing and ideological, such that things that are the product of ideology are taken as given. Darstellung on the other hand is an interpretation of an interpretation; that is, a re-appraisal, by means of expression in concepts and language, of the given facts. Or better put, it is the construction of a space, by means of dialectical confrontations and movements, in which reality can reveal itself. — Jamal

---

The "Rhetoric" section begins like this:

Through the now apparent, now latent delimitation to texts, philosophy confesses to what it vainly denied under the ideal of the method, its linguistic essence. In its modern history, it is, analogous to tradition, denigrated as rhetoric. Tossed aside and degraded into a means of realizing effects, it was the bearer of lies in philosophy.

That is, it was regarded as the bearer of lies. An example of this attitude to language is Bertrand Russell, who was motivated by the promise of an ideal language:

The essence of Russellian Logical Atomism is that once we analyze language into its true logical form, we can simply read off from it the ultimate ontological structure of reality. The basic assumption at work here, which formed the foundation for the Ideal Language view, is that the essential and fundamental purpose of language is to represent the world. Therefore, the more ‘perfect’, that is ‘ideal’, the language, the more accurately it represents the world. A logically perfect language is, on this line of thought, a literal mirror of metaphysical reality. Russell’s work encouraged the view that language is meaningful in virtue of this underlying representational and truth-functional nature. — IEP

The expressiveness of language is precisely what these philosophers hate. And this goes back a lot further than Russell.

Incidentally, it's a shame that Adorno didn't get around to reading Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. He would have found a lot to dislike but at the very least I think he would have approved of (1) the rejection of the idea of an ideal language, (2) the primacy of practice, and probably (3) the private language argument.

Rhetoric represents in philosophy, what cannot otherwise be thought except in language. It maintains itself in the postulates of portrayal [Darstellung], by which philosophy differentiates itself from the communication of already cognized and solidified contents. It is in danger, like everything which represents, because it slides easily towards the usurpation of what thought cannot directly obtain from the portrayal. It is incessantly corrupted by convincing purposes, without which however the relation of thinking to praxis would once again disappear from the thought-act. The allergy against expression in the entire official philosophical tradition, from Plato to the semanticists, conforms to the tendency of all Enlightenment, to punish that which is undisciplined in the gesture, even deep into logic, as a defense mechanism of reified consciousness.

The bolded bit is important, because what's happening here is that Adorno is contrasting philosophical expression with the mere communication of facts. This connects back to the "Privilege of Experience" section, in which he addressed the charge of elitism, saying that ...

every step towards communication sells truth out and falsifies it

Back then I read this as justification for his tortured prose style. It is that, but it's important to see why that's fundamental. The disappearance of the subject, the flattening of experience, and the blindness to suffering of the modern world is baked right into language. We see it in the painstaking "clarity" of the analytic philosopher, the cold language of military strategy that hides a horrific reality ("collateral damage"), and the lifeless language of bureaucracy.

And this, I suppose, is why the turn to language is not a turn away from the world of things at all.

If the alliance of philosophy with science tends towards the virtual abolition of language, and therein of philosophy itself, then it cannot survive without its linguistic effort. Instead of splashing about in linguistic falls, it reflects on such. There is a reason why linguistic sloppiness – scientifically put: the inexact – is wont to ally itself with the scientific mien of incorruptibility through language.

Adorno is fun to read because he often throws in these provocations without any fanfare. He is associating linguistic sloppiness not with rhetoric, philosophical expression and Darstellung, which would be the normal thing to do, but with the other side, the scientism of instrumental communication. It is precisely when language is inexact that it clings to science or scientistism.

This makes me think of poetry. Forgive me for quoting myself again, from 3 years ago in a thread about definitions:

Poetry much more than prose aims for precision. Unlike prose, good poetry doesn’t settle for the handy phrase or for common imagery. Its metaphors are bespoke, not off the rack. Clichés are to be avoided because they do our thinking for us (and imagining, feeling, etc), or they shut out thinking; and the same could be said of some up-front definitions in philosophy. — Jamal

I suggest that this is exactly the sense in which philosophical expression can be precise. (Having said that, I wouldn't want to concede too much to the folks who say that continental philosophy is more poetry than philosophy.)

For the abolition of language in thought is not its demythologization. Thus deluded, philosophy sacrifices with language whatever might have related to its thing otherwise than as mere signification; only as language is that which is similar capable of cognizing the similar.

Philosophers, particularly those envious of science and mathematics like Descartes, Kant, and Russell, thought that by mimicking science and mathematics in their abolition of subjective expressiveness they could approach an objectivity free of myth, superstition, and religion. But they were wrong: without mimesis/expression/rhetoric, the thing cannot be adequately described or understood, thus (a) what appears as precision is nothing of the sort, and (b) a new mythology is introduced, that of the neutrally communicated fact and the exhaustive category/concept.

But as usual, we don't get to relax:

The permanent denunciation of rhetoric by nominalism, for which the name bears not the least similarity to what it says, is not meanwhile to be ignored, nor is an unbroken rhetorical moment to be summoned against such.

Language is not just rhetorical. We don't want to attach ourselves to some imagined expressive purity. There is some truth in the idea that signs are arbitrary.

So...

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

Now we have yet another version of the central task of philosophy, and this one has pride of place in what looks rather like the conclusion to the introduction. And it clarifies the importance of mimesis.

I'll look at the final paragraph in a later post.

What I see is a distinction being made between the traditional bourgeois timelessness, a sort of presentism which holds the Now of experience as the only reality, and a philosophy which recognizes the reality of the past, as history and memory. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, makes sense.

Adorno seems to believe that there is a real need to respect the reality of the past. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, definitely. But since one of the big questions for Adorno is "how thought, by having to relinquish tradition, might be able to preserve and transform it," we can see that, as ever, it's dialectical. As I noted, I think he has sublation in mind, and sublation negates, preserves, and lifts up.

In its opposition to the tradition, negative dialectics respects it.

It just occurred to me that Adorno is purposefully conflating philosophical tradition with the past as such.

I apologize if I misunderstood, but you have to be able to appreciate from my perspective why that still reads as you being messaged about it. People don't usually at people to thank them for 'bringing this to their attention' if those people didn't notify them of it. — Bob Ross

I can see how it was misunderstood, but I've said I wasn't messaged, so that's that. If you're going to apologize do it without backtracking.

It's perfectly natural to post a message in a discussion to say, e.g., "thanks for alerting me to the existence of that book," in response to a post that mentioned a book but which wasn't directed at anyone in particular. I meant it in that sense.

Reasoning employed in service of a prior commitment doesn't count as philosophical reasoning. — Banno

Good idea for a new topic?

(Religion could be kept out of it)

This is just false: Jamal told me that they were alerted to this from at least two people and the implication obviously was that it was not like they were alerting them because it was such a great, positive post: — Bob Ross

You misunderstood. Reading their posts, in which they quoted comments of yours I hadn't seen before, alerted me to your comments.

Thanks to Banno and Tom Storm for alerting me to this. — Jamal

They alerted me not intentionally but just by quoting things I hadn't seen in their posts.

If it makes sense at all, it requires a great deal of subtlety to "examine someone's personal motivations from a sociological, rather than psychological, viewpoint," given that personal motivations are intrinsically psychological. — Leontiskos

I'm all about the subtlety. Subtlety is my middle name. But I don't think it's all that hard. It just means I take my interlocutor to stand as representative of an ideology's appeal. In doing so I run the risk of obliterating their unique qualities in my rush to put them into my box of bigots. But I don't think this is devastating to the project. And if my interlocutor's argument is clearly off-the-shelf rather than bespoke, the ideology critique gets to take a short cut.

Once again I say I might go back at some point and reply to some of your interesting criticisms.

prescind — Leontiskos

Your favourite word of the week.

So, to be clear, you are partially arguing against a straw man of my position here. Nothing about the Aristotelian thought I gave necessitates that Chinese-style authoritarianism is the best political structure; or that we should force homosexuals not to have sex. In fact, I think that would be immoral to do. — Bob Ross

I didn't mean to imply that you wanted an authoritarian state. But now I'm wondering: would you like to see changes in the sexual behaviour of people? If so, how should that be achieved? When you state that certain sexual behaviours are immoral, do you propose to do anything about it or would you like anyone else to do something about it? I assume that all else being equal you would prefer to live in a society in which the sexual activities you think are immoral are at the very least stigmatized, no? This is enough to count as the "authorities" I mentioned, suitably reworded if you like. I could have written:

3. It leads to a more humane society: no loving couples are stigmatized (privation of goodness, mental illness, etc) because of their private consensual acts.

MacIntyre accepts the vast majority of my view. He’s an Aristotelian too and a Christian; so I don’t understand why you would think that he would think I am not following a tradition when I am using Aristo-Thomism. Aristo-thomism is a long-standing tradition in the Latin, Dominican Scholastics. — Bob Ross

To me, you don't seem very close to MacIntyre. As far as I know he didn't address homosexuality or transgenderism, so all we have to go on are his philosophy and his Catholicism. We have to extrapolate, but where is the warrant for extrapolating to "MacIntyre accepts the vast majority of my view"? I guess because you characterize the vast majority of your view as the Thomist Aristotelianism that you share with MacIntyre. But I'm interested in the particular views you're expressing here, like your views on homosexuality and the extremely controversial---among Thomist Aristotelians and Catholics as much as among others---view that oral sex between a married man and woman is immoral. Neither of us can be sure what MacIntyre thought about those issues.

I am not ad hoc rationalizing a feeling of disgust for homosexuals; I am not prejudiced towards homosexuals; — Bob Ross

I wonder if you can meet me half way and admit that the following comments might suggest otherwise?

Wouldn’t you agree that being homosexual or transgender is a result of socio-psychological disorders or/and biological developmental issues? Do you really believe that a perfectly healthy (psychologically and biologically) human that grows up on an environment perfectly conducive to human flourishing would end up with the desire to have sex with the same sex? Do you think a part of our biological programming is to insert a sex organ into an organ designed to defecate? — Bob Ross

Homosexuality is always defective because, at a minimum, it involves an unnatural attraction to the same sex which is a privation of their human nature (and usually of no real fault of their own) — Bob Ross

Because from my point of view, pathologizing a way of life or sexual identity that causes no demonstrable harm is a form of prejudice. Asserting a concept of naturalness so as to exclude a segment of the population for behaviour that causes no demonstrable harm is a form of prejudice, while there are other reasonable and intuitive concepts of naturalness (and telos and so on) which could accommodate those people. And disclaiming prejudice in this case is equivalent to someone in the early 20th century saying "I am not prejudiced against Africans; I just think that since they do not have the benefit of civilization they need to submit to British rule, for their own good." (I'm not saying you're racist or believe British colonialism was great)

You can reduce ethics to pyscho-sociological inquiry unless you are a moral anti-realist. — Bob Ross

I am not reducing ethics to psycho-sociological enquiry.

It could be simultaneously true that natural law theory is true and humans discovered it with evil motives. — Bob Ross

That's right. But you've misunderstood. I'm not saying that your motives, or those of earlier philosophers, are evil (although I'm not ruling it out). I'm saying that the concepts and arguments you use are not neutral philosophical tools, but are tools of power, formed by historical social conflict.

And if the discourse of natural law developed to legitimize certain ways of life and certain hierarchies, the very idea that it might be true is deeply suspicious. To me it's like saying "but what if racism is actually true?" Well, no: here is why we have racism [insert genealogical account here], and here is why the racists are making these arguments now. (I'm not saying you're a racist or resemble a racist).

Likewise, you are trying to give a genesis of conservatives as a group and then trying to lump me in that general depiction. You simply don't have any reasons to believe I am bigoted, prejudiced, etc. even IF you had good reasons to believe there are a lot of bigoted, prejudiced conservatives out there. You are conversing with me and my ideas here: not on a debate stage where you address the crowd and make general remarks. — Bob Ross

I characterized your ideas as conservative, but not so that I can accuse you of things you haven't expressed: we only have to look at your words to see evidence of bigotry, as several others have pointed out independently. And I hate to break it to you but we are effectively on a debate stage, and we are addressing the crowd, whether we know it or not.